If you would turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 17, you can find that on page 876 in the Bibles located in the pew in front of you. Luke chapter 17.
Don’t you hate it when you’re having a conversation with someone and you think of the perfect joke or a witty response, but too late? It may come while you’re in the car later on. It may come when you’re brushing your teeth and you think, “That’s what I should have said!” Well apparently, other languages have terms for that, and in French, it’s “L’esprit de l’escalier” – it means, “the wit of the staircase” or literally, “the spirit of the staircase.” It’s the joke that you should have told but you didn’t think of it until it was too late.
Well last week, we looked at Jesus teaching His disciples to be shrewd, He taught His disciples to be streetwise in how they handled themselves in this world, and I explained some of the synonyms for that Greek word, “phronimōs” and how it relates to wisdom. I gave a few synonyms like “practical wisdom” or “savviness.” And I had someone come up to me after the sermon and he said, “You do realize that Jesus is saying He wants us all to be wiley!” And he was right, and I totally missed that opportunity! And even if I didn’t think of it, I think that’s a case of “L’esprit de l’escalier” – wit that arrived too late! But reason that I say all that and that I bring that up again tonight is because this chapter of Luke, Luke chapter 17, continues the theme that we saw in chapter 16 – the theme of being shrewd, savvy, streetwise, wiley – because in Luke chapter 17, what we will see in verse 3 is that Jesus says, “Pay attention! Watch out! Be on guard! There are difficult days that are coming!” And to be one of Jesus’ disciples means to be on alert. And it means to be engaged in carrying out the task that Jesus gives us to do. It means not getting too comfortable because we can all be lulled to sleep. We can be tempted to think that the way things are right now are the way that things will always be and we get too settled. But Jesus doesn’t want us to do that. Jesus wants us to be aware of the days and the events that are to come so that we will be faithful and fruitful in the days that are right now.
And so we’ll read Luke chapter 17, and for our outline we’ll use these three points. One, to err is human. Two, to see is to believe. And three, to lose is to keep. And before we read God’s Word, let’s pray and ask Him for His help.
Our Father, we give You thanks for Your Word that You have given to us and for this occasion for us to stop and to listen and to hear what You have to say to us. We thank You that You call us to attention, that You do not leave us in our slumber, that You do not leave us in our own ways, but You come to us and You speak to us. And not only that, but You give us Your Spirit to help us to understand, to help us apply Your Word to our lives. And so we pray that You would, by Your Spirit tonight, teach us and show us Jesus. Help us to see Him, to see His beauty and His goodness and His glory, and help us to live for His glory and praise. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Luke chapter 17:
“And he said to his disciples, ‘Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.’
The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ And the Lord said, ‘If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’’
On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.’ When he saw them he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, ‘Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ And he said to him, ‘Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.’
Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’
And he said to the disciples, ‘The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Look, there!’ or ‘Look, here!’ Do not go out or follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot – they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all – so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left.’ And they said to him, ‘Where, Lord?’ He said to them, ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.’”
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.
To Err is Human
To err is human. The full saying is, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” and it comes from Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, “An Essay on Criticism.” Now I know the whole thing about how technically to err is not really human, but rather it is to be fallen humanity. It is to be human living in a fallen world. But we live in a fallen world. And verse 1, “Temptations to sin are sure to come.” Now I think any of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know this well enough. We know how easy it is for us to be dishonest or to hide the truth. We know how easy it is for us to hurt someone with our words or to tear them down behind their back. We probably know how easy it is for us to fall into addictive behaviors with money or food or drink or lust or technology or whatever it may be. Have you ever messed up and you thought to yourself, almost in a self- defense kind of way, “Well I could be a lot worse.” Neither have I. But if you did, it’s not exactly a compliment, is it? We hardly need to be told that temptations to sin are sure to come.
But, what may be more important for us to recognize is that for Jesus’ disciples, for us, our sin is other people’s business. Now for polite, well-mannered, Southern folk, that sounds like our worst nightmare, doesn’t it, because we would much rather deal in euphemisms and passive aggressiveness. Why talk about how someone has upset you when you could just not talk to them for the rest of your life? That’s oftentimes how we want to deal with conflict and trouble, isn’t it? But when Jesus says in verse 3, “Pay attention to yourselves,” this is not an individualistic matter. He is speaking, you notice, to His disciples – plural. And when He says, “Pay attention,” it is in the second person plural imperative. He’s saying, “Pay attention to y’alls selves,” if we could put it that way.
And that means at least three things. It means three things for our relationships in Christ. And the first is this. It means being careful that we not cause someone else to stumble into sin. We have a responsibility. We have a responsibility in the things that we do, in the decisions that we make, in the habits that we keep, that we are not leading someone else astray. You see, Christian freedom, Christian liberty, it’s not such a personal thing that we operate independently of others. On the other hand, it’s actually liberty or freedom to give up our own rights for the sake of our brother and sister in Christ, for their benefit we give up our rights. Jesus says in verse 1, “Woe to the one through whom temptations to sin come.” He says in verse 2, “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.” Someone else’s sin is our business, and it’s our problem if we are the ones who lead them astray.
But then Jesus also says that someone else’s sin is our business because they need to be corrected. Verse 3, “Your brother’s sins rebuke him.” Now rebuke not in a judgmental way, but out of love for that person as a brother or sister. There have been dozens of books that are written, there are seminars and conferences that are held to focus on teaching what it means to deal with Biblical confrontation or conflict resolution. And it’s not an easy thing to do, is it? I’m sure we could all use help in knowing how to do that better in our relationships. But isn’t it amazing to read Jesus’ words here in just a sentence, in just a few short words, Jesus can say so much about what it means to confront someone biblically and to resolve conflict between one another. And it’s this. He says that it’s out of a concern for His followers as a whole and a concern for the church and with a love for the sinning person as a brother, as a sister, to correct, to correct him or her with a goal towards restoration, looking for forgiveness and restoration.
Because you see, the third way that Jesus calls us to be involved in other people’s sin is through forgiveness. He says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.” How much? “If he sins against you seven times in the day and seven times he turns to you saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” You see, any kind of rebuke that comes from us, any sort of correction, must come from a posture of forgiveness. And yes, relationships can be damaged both by patterns of sin that are left unchecked but also by a refusal to forgive each other when that sin happens. Being watchful, being watchful means being aware of the temptation to sin that exists all around us all the time, and recognizing the effect of that sin on other people. But it also means being ready to deal with that sin, being ready to deal with that sin in our own lives and in the lives of others through loving confrontation, repentance, and forgiveness. Now by the way, isn’t there an encouragement there in these verses for loving, church discipline as Jesus instructs us here in this passage? And why does He say these things? Because to err is human and temptations to sin are sure to come.
To See is to Believe
But then we also see, secondly, that to see is to believe. Now again, technically that’s not true, because what is the biblical definition of faith that we see in Hebrews chapter 11? It’s that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for; it’s the conviction of things not seen.” In fact, we saw this last week when Jesus was teaching His disciples. He says if someone does not believe the Bible, if someone does not believe the law and the prophets, they will not believe even if they see someone come back from the dead. But isn’t there a way of seeing with the eyes of faith? Remember what God told Isaiah when He commissioned him as a prophet. He said, “Go. Go and say to the people, ‘Keep on hearing but do not understand. Keep on seeing but do not perceive.’” It was a sort of a sorry, not sorry kind of a thing. It’s like they were hearing, not hearing, and seeing, not seeing. And Jesus said the same thing about the people in His own day. And that’s why He taught in parables, because they did not have ears to hear. They were hearing but they weren’t hearing it. He said that back in Luke chapter 8.
And what we can see here in this passage is that if you don’t have the eyes of faith, if you don’t have eyes to see, then you’re going to miss both what Jesus has already done but also what He will do in days to come. Now I couldn’t have planned it any better when we started this series on Luke. Back in January, in all these sermons later that we come to this passage on the week of Thanksgiving. Because verses 11 to 19 may be some of the first verses that come to our mind in the Bible when we think about Thanksgiving. And it shows us that Thanksgiving is about seeing. Thanksgiving is seeing. It’s noticing. Thanksgiving is recognizing the goodness of the hand of God. So when the apostles in verse 5 ask Jesus to increase their faith, Jesus says, “If you had faith like the grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you.”
And then we’re given an example just a few verses later of what such faith looks like because when Jesus was making His way to Jerusalem, and He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, He was met with a Samaritan leper. Here is a man who was an outcast among outcasts, and he was the only one of the ten lepers who, when they were healed by Jesus, who turned around and praised God with a loud voice. And we’re told that he came to Jesus and he fell down at Jesus’ feet and he was giving Him thanks. And what did Jesus say? He says, “Were not the ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was not one found to return and give praise except this foreigner?” You see, it was the foreigner. That’s the surprise of the whole event. It was the foreigner who had the eyes of thanksgiving. It was the foreigner who had the eyes of faith. And Jesus says to him in verse 19, “Rise, go your way, your faith has made you well.”
One of my favorite Dr. Baird stories is one that he told about when he was pastoring at another church before coming here. And he said that the owner of the Coca-Cola bottling facility was a member of that church. And one day he gave the Bairds a crate of Cokes. They brought them home and they made it a special occasion in their house because they would set aside Sunday afternoons and each person in the family would get their own whole bottle of Coke to enjoy around the table on Sunday afternoon. And this went on for a while, and one day they saw the man who had given them the Cokes and Dr. Baird said to one of his boys, “This is the man who gave us those Cokes. What do you say?” And he said what any good son would say to make his father proud. “We’re out of Cokes!” It makes a difference how you see, doesn’t it? And it was only the Samaritan who had the eyes to see and to respond to Jesus with thanksgiving. The rest, the rest of the lepers, they represent those who witnessed and even enjoyed the blessing of Jesus. They enjoyed Jesus’ healing power, but they missed Jesus.
They were like the Pharisees. And the Pharisees in this passage, they saw what Jesus had done and they had heard, they had been exposed to Jesus’ preaching and teaching and yet what do they ask Jesus in verse 20? They say, “When will the kingdom of God come?” and what does Jesus say? Jesus says the kingdom of God is not coming in ways that they expected. In fact, the kingdom of God “is in the midst of you,” He says to them. The kingdom of God, it was right there among them in the person and work of Jesus, but they could not see it. They needed to pay attention. They needed to pay attention to what Jesus had been saying and doing in their presence. And then we see that Jesus turns to His disciples and He tells them that they need to pay attention to what Jesus would do in a time that was yet to be revealed. He says, “The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man and you will not see it.” In other words, there would come a day when they desired to see the blessings that Jesus had displayed in their midst throughout His ministry, but that time would be passed.
And when Jesus comes again, He will come in judgment. And it will not be as the people are looking for it. It won’t be as they were expecting it. He says in verse 24, “As the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in His day.” Just like it was in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot, the people were eating and drinking and buying and selling and planting and building and marrying and giving in marriage and then came judgment, so it will be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. Jesus is calling for His disciples to be on the lookout. He’s calling for His disciples to be on the lookout for a day that they cannot see. But with the eyes of faith, they can see it. They can be ready and they can live in light of what Jesus will do in that day because to see is to believe. Or maybe we should put it the other way around – to believe is to see. It is to see who Jesus is. It is to see what He has done and what He will do one day and then to respond in gratitude and vigilance.
Remember what Peter says in 2 Peter chapter 3. He says there will be scoffers that come in the last day. And what will the scoffers say? They’ll say, “Everything keeps on going just as it has since the beginning of creation.” But what are they forgetting? They’re forgetting that just like God came in judgment in the days of Noah, the day of the Lord will come like a thief and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. So what sort of people should we be? What sort of people should we be as we wait for and hasten the coming of the day of God? We ought to be people with lives of holiness and godliness. We ought to be people who do not grow weary in doing good.
To Lose is to Keep
And that leads us to the third thing to see from this passage and it is, to lose is to keep. John Bunyan has a conversation in The Pilgrim’s Progress between Mr. Buy-Ins and Mr. Hold-the-World. And Mr. Buy-Ins is all about himself. He says he never strives against wind and tide. He never goes against the flow. He’s all for taking all of the advantages that are available to him to secure his life and his estate. And he says that he is for religion, “but he is only for religion when it’s golden slippers in the sunshine with the applause of other people, but not when it would cause trouble to come to him.” And Mr. Hold-the-World, he agrees with Mr. Buy-Ins and he says to him, “Aye, for my part I count him but a fool that having the liberty to keep what he has, shall be so unwise as to lose it.” “I count him a fool that having the liberty to keep what he has, to be so unwise as to lose it.”
Now doesn’t that sound like the reverse of what Jim Elliot wrote in his journal before he gave his life on the missionary field in Ecuador? He wrote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Remember Lot’s wife. She looked back. She looked back to all that Sodom had provided for her. She looked back to all that she was leaving behind. And she lost her life. Jesus says in verse 33, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.” To lose it means to give up our own interests. To lose it means to humble ourselves and to resist living like what this world has to offer is all that there is. Things like popularity and wealth and pleasure. To give up those things in order to do the will of God and to enjoy His favor forever. That’s basically what Jesus was saying back in verse 7 of this chapter when he asked if servants do their work in order to receive their own praise and honor or if they do it because it is their duty. And He says to His disciples, “So also when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty.’”
Jesus is calling for His disciples, He’s calling for us to be careful to do what God calls us to do because Jesus did the very same thing. And listen to Alexander Whyte. He says, “The thought of what He should eat or what He should drink or wherewithal He should be clothed, never troubled His head. The thought of success as His poor spirited disciples counted success, the thought of honor and power and praise never once rose in His heart. All these things and all things like them had no attraction for Him. They awoke nothing but indifference and contempt in Him. But to please His Father and to hear His Father’s voice saying that He was well-pleased with His beloved Son, that was better than life to our Lord. To find out and to follow every new day His Father’s mind and will and to finish every night another part of His Father’s appointed work, that was more than His necessary food to our Lord.”
The question for us is, “Are we paying attention to our lives?” The comfortable thing to do is to do what feels good and to let sin go unchecked. It’s to be carried along by the currents of our culture, to be carried along by the temptations of sex and sports and social media. The comfortable Christian life lives like this world is all that there is and it’s always looking for something better. It’s always looking for something more to enjoy, but there’s never any sense that all of this perishes or that one day we will all be held accountable before God. Comfortable Christianity doesn’t include much of sacrifice or duty or obedience. But what Jesus calls for in this chapter is for us to be on the alert and for us to have our minds and our hearts actively engaged as His disciples against temptation. And in faith and gratitude and expectation, because of all that Jesus has done and all that He will do in the Gospel. And it calls for us to be ready in humble obedience to do God’s will, no matter how challenging, no matter how unpopular it may be.
Back in 1662, there were 2,000 Puritan preachers who were cast out of their pulpits for not agreeing to submit their ministries to the requirements of the English government. Some of them were fined. Some of them were thrown in prison. They were slandered and mocked for their convictions. And some of their farewell sermons are collected in a Puritan paperback called “Sermons of the Great Ejection.” And in each of those sermons, there is an urgency to their message. There is a solemnity to what they had to say. And in one of those, Thomas Watson says to his congregation, he says, “Keep up your spiritual watch. What I say to you I say to all – Watch. Mark 13:37.” And he said to them, he said, “If it’s the last thing that I would say to you, if this were the last word I should speak, it should be this word – Watch.” Watch. Don’t be lulled to sleep. Don’t go mindlessly through the motions of this life: waking up, eating, going to work, eating, going to sleep, and doing it all over again the next day. Don’t give into indifference and ingratitude and complacency. Don’t get too comfortable. But watch yourselves and live for the One who gave Himself for you and who lives again so that you might live and that you might live for His glory and honor, both now and forever.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we give You thanks that we have one who watches over us, who never sleeps or slumbers, who keeps us and protects us and gives us life. So we pray in that confidence of who You are and Your faithfulness and goodness to us and what You have done for us in Christ by His death and resurrection, securing for us eternal blessing. Would You help us to watch. Help us to pay attention to our lives, to pay attention to the sin that exists, to turn from it, to turn to You. Help us to pay attention to what You have done for us in gratitude and praise. Help us to be ready for what You will do one day in judgment in making all things right. And help us to be watchful in how we serve and do our obedience to You. And we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.