Access for Sinners

This transcript has been automatically generated

Just for a moment, I would crave your attention while I describe what we’re talking about, because I may have given the impression that access had to do simply with finding my way into God’s presence and a real, and a real experience of that today. Nothing vague or mystical, but prayer getting through and God speaking to me. Somebody has called that the greatest friendship that a man can know, and that’s absolutely right, and I’ve been talking about that on the last 2 Tuesdays. But access through Christ brings us not only into the Father’s presence now, but I want simply to add as we begin, it brings us into the presence of all God’s people. And that’s not necessarily so by going to church, of course.

God’s people are spread about throughout the world and this real fellowship of God’s people belongs to those who know Jesus Christ as Saviour and it’s the best brotherhood in the world. And every true believer in Jesus Christ will find his deepest friendships amongst those sort of people. And so that access into God’s presence also brings us access into that presence. And if you haven’t discovered the real living church yet, then I’m sorry because you’ve missed something tremendous, not dreary and not off-putting. And then thirdly, of course, access brings us into the kingdom of heaven, not only here but hereafter, and that leaves all these other experiences in the shade.

So this little word access, I said it was a very small word, but it opens up into many very great things. The greatest things in the experience of human beings, to know God now, to know his people in a real way, and of course to know him and enjoy him forever. On the first Tuesday I spent my time giving the bad news. I said that by nature we were excluded from all these things, from the lot. We didn’t know God in that living way, it was all far away and secondhand.

We didn’t know what it meant to belong to the real fellowship of the believers. And we certainly had no hope of heaven. Then last Tuesday I went on to the most wonderful storey in the history of the world, the storey of the cross of Christ, his death for sinners, that great act of bearing our sins in his own body on the tree by which he won the way into the presence of God for all who believe in him and gave that experience of God which has been enjoyed by millions ever since, an innumerable company. Now I was going to go on from that today, but I’m going to stop there, if I may, because of something that happened to me after the service last week. It was something that in a sense was a little sobering, even possibly chilling.

I was talking to a number of people and amongst them at least 2 very fine senior men from the city whose visit I think to us was their first visit. And one of them, I can’t remember anything more from our conversation except that he was genuinely very courteous to me. He thanked me for the talk. He said one or two complimentary things about it. He was very friendly.

And yet, as we talked together, I got an uneasy feeling which I found rather sobering as I thought about it afterwards, that none of the things that I talked about really rang any bells with him.

That though he accepted the truth of what was said, there was no question of his being in that sense an unbeliever, yet it it didn’t really touch him.

Now I think it is true to say that the storey of the death of Christ, as I tried to tell it last week, will meet with a reverent and respectful attention from many people like that. There are many in the city. They are certainly not unbelievers. They are decent, what we sometimes call God-fearing people. And yet it doesn’t seem really to excite them or to reach them so that they want to pass it on to others.

And I was reminded as I was mulling over that of an illustration by that very great Scottish churchman and evangelist, if one may put it like that, and theologian, James Dernie. I think he’s my favourite Scottish theologian at the turn of the century. And one of the reasons why people could understand him when they can’t understand many theologians is that he larded his sermons and lectures with good illustrations. And on one occasion he said this: If I was sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and someone came along and jumped into the water and got drowned, quote, to prove his love for me, I should find it quite unintelligible. I should find it quite unintelligible.

I might be much in need of love, but an act in no rational relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning and someone sprang into the water at the cost of his life, saved me from death, death, then I should say, greater love hath no man than this.

Now that’s an extraordinarily shrewd illustration. He spent a great deal of his life as a lecturer and theologian speaking about the death of Christ. And those were days in Scotland when everybody knew that storey. Every child was taught that storey at their mother’s knee. But they were taught it and appreciated it so often, rather like the man sitting at the end of the pier with his hat on covering himself from the sun and a paper up, and somebody suddenly runs along and to prove his love dives into the water.

It’s all very wonderful but it doesn’t mean anything. The minister gets up every Sunday and he says, you see the cross of Christ, it proves God’s love for you. So what? So what? So what?

So what? Why is it unintelligible? Well, because you see that person doesn’t see himself as he really is in the water unable to swim. Then indeed if he sees a figure suddenly diving off the pier, and clutching him by the neck and dragging him to the beach, then he’s certainly going to understand why he came. You see the difference?

What we’ve got— what have we got to do then to try to bring this home to these very nice people that we so often meet in London who don’t seem to understand, in the city, and don’t seem to understand what we’re getting at on Tuesdays? Well, I’ve been thinking about it, as I say, and I’ve been studying the early chapters of Mark, and it seems to me that one of the things that Jesus did was to apply what I can only call shock treatment. And I want you to turn, if you have your Bible near you, to Mark chapter 2. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t because it’s a well-known storey and I can summarise it in a couple of sentences.

While you’re finding it, I don’t know if any of you enjoy the short storeys of Saki, but if you do, you may remember the delightful storey of J.P. Huddle, a complacent middle-aged man in a railway carriage talking to his friend and saying that life seemed to have nothing in it for him. You know, it was all exactly the same every day. And his friend said to him, you know, what you need is the opposite of a rest cure. He said, you want an unrest cure. And Clovis, who was sitting in the corner of the railway carriage, then decided that he’d get him an unrest cure.

And well, you must read the storey to find out what Clovis did, which was as usual scandalous.

Now the more I think of Jesus in the early parts of the Gospels, the more I think that he was setting out to give the Pharisees and people like that an unrest cure.

Here. Don’t misunderstand me. You see, I think we often label the Pharisees just as beyond the pale, but in fact amongst them, of course, there were many very fine men. Think of Gamaliel in the Acts of the Apostles. What a fine man he was as he stood up there to give justice to the early apostles when they seemed to be in the soup.

There must have been many Gamaliels. And yet the fact of the matter is that fine as many as these leaders of the religion of the day must have been, Basically, by and large, they all seemed to miss what Jesus was getting at, and somehow the reality of it all was far from them. Now I think that Jesus pinpoints the reason for that in this little storey in Mark 2, where verse 15, we’re told that after the conversion of Levi the tax collector, and by the way, of course, by tax collector there we don’t mean the, the inland revenue man or the man who lives in customs house down the road, we mean the man to whom Herod has farmed out the job of getting taxes and is exploiting his fellow men and therefore is decidedly unpopular. He’s an outcast socially. His wife never gets invited to anybody’s home.

And we find that after Levi is converted, he invites many tax collectors and sinners— outcasts, as one modern translation puts it— to come to his house. And he invites Jesus there, and Jesus seems to be completely at home with them. Now you’ve got to get the point of this. You see, this really was rather shocking. Mark actually, and I haven’t time to prove this to you, Mark is trying to give you a microcosm of the church of Jesus Christ.

He’s trying to show you what is the fellowship in which Jesus seems to be at home. And to the shock of all these upright, respectable, decent people, God-fearing people as they would say, Jesus is at home amongst people like this and they seem to be at home with him. And they come to the disciples and they say, we can’t make this out. What is your Master doing? He says he’s a religious teacher.

What on earth is he doing with these people? To get the memorable reply, verse 17, which is one of the great sentences surely of the Gospels when Jesus focuses the whole purpose of the incarnation in a sentence. Here it is. Jesus said, those who are well and healthy have no need of a doctor, but those who are sick. I came not to call the respectable, but the outcasts.

Now what does that storey mean if Mark is really telling us something rather more deep than just telling us of what Jesus did one morning? Well, what he is saying is that Jesus is a doctor. Where do you find a doctor? You don’t find him in the pub, do you? And you don’t find him in insurance.

And you don’t find him standing in a pulpit. Where is the doctor to be found at the moment? The doctor is to be found in his surgery. Or in the hospital. That’s where you find him, amongst the sick.

And who are the people who are clustering around the doctor? Well, it’s not me, I’ll tell you that. I don’t want to go to hospital. I’ve only been once in my life. I went when I was a boy with tonsils.

I hated every minute of it and got out as soon as I could and I never want to go back again. So I don’t go willingly to hospital except to visit the sick. Even then I can’t bear the smell of it all and what’s going on there and I get out as soon as possible. So you see, if you come up to me afterwards and say, oh, I’m always at home in a hospital, well, I’ll think you’re either very odd or I’ll think that your health is very poor.

Well now, get the picture then. Mark is giving us a microcosm of the church of Jesus Christ and he’s saying that the church is like, in a sense, a hospital. The doctor’s in the middle of it and if you’re going to be in that great catholic fellowship, that great universal church, then to some extent you’ve got to be sick.

And if you don’t feel you’re sick, well, you’ll never feel at home there.

The respectable, that is the healthy, won’t go. I look back to the church where I was brought up as a boy, St. John’s, Sub Castro, Lewes. Now if you say to me, what was the mark of St. John’s, Sub Castro, Lewes in the ’30s? I have to tell you that it was the mark of respectability.

These kind of people were never seen through the door. I got the impression that the church was for the respectable.

So you see, I was getting the same vibes as these people were getting.

Now what does that mean for us? Well, of course it doesn’t mean that Jesus Christ is saying that the more sinful we are, the more likely we are to suit his book. Of course it doesn’t mean that. What it means is that he can only exercise his saving mission to those who know that they are in a very real sense sick within and that that is a mark not only of those who have been convicted of their sin who are yet unbelievers but it is a very real mark of every true believer. For 300 years since the Reformation the Church of England has a prayer at the beginning of morning prayer which says: Everybody has to say it out loud: We have no health in us.

We have no health in us. Can you say that? Well, obviously most people can’t because in the new alternative services that’s been quietly shuffled under the carpet.

Seems that the revisers think that that’s exaggerated language. Is it exaggerated language? If you’re a regenerate Christian, you will recognise that language. You will say, yes, I have to say That though I am a Christian, I’ve been a Christian, you say, for 30 years, yet I have to say there is very little health in me and I need Christ just as much today as ever I did. And without him I’d sink immediately.

Now turn over to Luke 15. I rather wish in fact I’d spent the whole of my time on this passage of Luke 15 because exactly the same theme is here. It’s a theme I don’t think I had thought until this week how this theme crops up again and again in the gospels. Verses 1 and 2 of Luke 15, the tax collectors and everybody are listening to him, they are the audience. And the Pharisees naturally say, I don’t want you to think that this was an unnatural thing to say, they say, this man receives sinners and eats with them.

Why, if he’d received sinners and read them a lecture, if he’d received sinners and said, now come on, down to the Scriptures with you, if he’d received sinners and said, come on, off to church straight away, that’s what you need. He actually received them and ate with them. The thing is abominable, isn’t it? It is abominable in a sense. Does Jesus have favourites?

Does he really rather like, you know, the tough sinner? It’s rather like the headmaster of a very expensive boys’ prep school in Ascot. I think I once told you about this, who read the storey of the publicans and sinners and said to the boys, you know, I’ve always rather liked the people in a pub, and hadn’t even understood what the word publican means in the New Testament. You know, when you have a headmaster as totally ignorant as that, you imagine there’s fairly good darkness in the school. School.

You know, a lot of people think that Jesus should be there, shouldn’t he, in the pub mixing it, you know, drawing the pint. Is that what Jesus is like? No, of course he’s not. If you met Jesus, you’d soon put away your sins. You know, that’s caricaturing it, isn’t it?

Why is Jesus with these people and why are they listening to him? Well, because he is telling them the amazing news that if they recognise their plight, They are welcome back in the Father’s presence. And then he tells the wonderful storey of the prodigal who at the end of it all said, I’m fed up with this kind of life. All I get is hunger. I thought I was going to get satisfaction.

I’ve been reading, I’ve been having a good life for 2 years and it hasn’t worked. I’m going back. And when he goes back he says, Father, I’ve got a carefully prepared speech. I needn’t tell you. I realise that I can’t have any access into your presence but make me a boot boy and I’ll be willing to sit out there in the sheds.

And the father opens his arms to him and says, you have access because you’ve acknowledged your sinfulness. Come in, come in, I want you. You’re my son again. But you see, the interesting part is the storey of the elder brother who represents the Pharisee, doesn’t he? Now again, may I underline, the Pharisee is not here scorned.

Look at verse 31. What does the father representing God say to the Pharisee?

He said to him, Son, you are always with me. All that is mine is yours. That’s literally true, isn’t it? All that great heritage of the Jewish faith, 2,000 years of God’s revelation to men, Moses, the law, the prophets, the temple, the worship, all these wonderful privileges, all that is mine is yours. I haven’t neglected you.

And yet you see, you look at verse 28 and what does it say?

The elder brother was angry and refused to go in. And does his father wash his hands of him? No, his father, that represents God, came out and entreated him. The father comes out to the Pharisee and he begs him to come in and the man will not come in.

Now why won’t he come in? Well, there are 2 reasons. Let me put it to you like this. First of all, he has no sympathy with the younger brother. I think this is a familiar truth and I won’t spend long on it.

He actually calls him, as someone reminded me this morning in verse 30, not this brother of mine but this son of yours.

He doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. He doesn’t understand that. Now if we see people going into the far country and behaving in an utterly sinful and wretched way, Of course we have to say that it is wrong. We mustn’t condone it. The minister must get up in the pulpit and say that that is wrong and sinful.

But I dare to say that if you are a real Christian, you will never be able to say that those things are wrong and sinful without saying deep down in your heart at the same time, there but for the grace of God go I.

And therefore there is always a certain humility When you speak in condemnation of evil, the thing that is missing in the world, isn’t it? The world finds it easy to condemn what it doesn’t like. The church can never do that without saying, well, I know that the seeds of that same thing are here and I’m just thankful that I wasn’t there.

You see, so the elder brother shows himself a stranger to this. He doesn’t realise it.

I remember I was preaching in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the City Clergy have a rota and preach there once every 4 or 5 years and I preached on the elder brother and in the vestry afterwards. The old Bishop Wand was still alive then and he was looking very doubtful about my sermon. He said to me, Mr. Lucas, you know, I’ve always had a great deal of sympathy with the elder brother.

And as I walked home I thought to myself, well, there was a very real sense in which that man was an elder brother. See, he was a man brought up within the bosom of the church. I don’t think he’d ever known what it was to go into a far country.

And this is a very dangerous position to be in, isn’t it? If you’ve never known redemption in a personal way, where are you?

But it’s more than that. He not only has no sympathy with the younger brother, but— and listen to this very carefully as I finish— he has no sympathy with the father’s evangelistic zeal.

You see, the father seems always to be making an idiot of himself, doesn’t he? All he seems to worry about is this young man in the far country. It’s as though the elder brother said, why ever can’t you look after your garden and me and all of us? You see, that’s like many people in church. Whatever’s the vicar getting all excited about, about these people over there?

Can’t he just look after us? That’s what we’re paying him to do.

So you hear that an evangelical church is often spoken of rather disparagingly. Well, you know, in that church there, there Well, they’re very evangelical, you know.

Or as a man who’s in the common room of one of our most distinguished girls’ schools in London said about his headmistress, who is herself a most distinguished person, he said, um, Miss So-and-so doesn’t want to have a Christian Union amongst the girls. You see, she’s very frightened of emotion. Well, yes, just what the elder brother felt. He said, I know what’s going to happen. This young man’s going to come back and there’s going to be an awful lot of blubbing going on.

You know, everyone’s going to get into each other’s arms and there’s going to be a lot of weeping. That’s exactly what there was because there was reality.

But you see, the elder brother didn’t like that. But aren’t there thousands of our fellow churchmen like that? People who’ve been brought up to believe the storey, they don’t want to go to a church like that that’s always worried about the man out there. They don’t want to go to a church where there might possibly be some emotion. They don’t want to be caught up in the Father.

He’s incessantly evangelistic. He’s such a tiresome, tiresome person. Apparently that’s what God is like. He is very tiresome. He’s always thinking about those people out there.

So you see, you get this extraordinary contrast about excess, don’t you? You get the man who really is, in the language of the Boys’ End paper when I was young, a rotter.

And when he comes back to God he finds that there’s access. Come in. That’s the glorious gospel. But he was far away. He never dreamt for a moment that if he came back there would be access.

Never dreamt that for a moment. Then you have the other man who’s never gone astray, who is a genuinely decent bloke. And the door is literally 3 yards away and he can go in anytime he wants and the father actually comes out and begs him to come in. And he would not.

I think that’s very, very telling. I just think of so many decent people who come once or twice to St. Helen’s and then they say, well, this isn’t for me. And if you went up and begged them to come into the kingdom of heaven, they would feel embarrassed. It isn’t that they are obviously sinful.

So near. So far. That’s the tragedy of their lives, isn’t it?

And if you’re any like that, you may never have realised that you were a Pharisee, but you are one, my friend. You’ve been so very near to the kingdom of God all your life. You’ve been brought up to know all these truths, but you’ve never come in. It’s about time you realised that the Father wants you and that to do so you must humble your pride. Stop criticising the church for being evangelistic and the Father for worrying about all these things.

Let’s pray that you’ll do it.

I think we’ll have a moment of silence rather than me praying and you in your heart can pray. Maybe that you’re a prodigal, there’s probably a prodigal in church this morning. Well, you have a long way to come back so you better start quickly.

But it may be that you’re an elder brother, you’ve got very little distance to go back but you’ve got to start quickly too because those 3 yards are an infinity of distance unless He will pocket your pride.

Let’s pray that we’ll all find access that is ready for anybody who turns to the Father through Christ.

Now let’s say the grace together. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.