©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

05/25/03

The Stumbling Stone

Luke 20:18

5/25/03 The Stumbling Stone

We took a break last week from our study of Ephesians

to spend a little time with a passage in the book of Revelation

in which our Lord offered His strong exhortation to a church that had lost its way.

In that exhortation

we hear the Lord saying,

REV 3:18 I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

REV 3:19 'Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.

REV 3:20 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.

REV 3:21 'He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.

We are not going to return to that passage again this morning,

but neither are we going to return to our study of Ephesians.

I want to take one more week away from our Ephesians study

because I want us to spend just a little more time

with one of the concepts presented by our Lord in His invitation to that church at Laodicea.

Last week we spent just a few minutes on that phrase

in which our Lord said, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich...

About all I said about that phrase

is that it is our Lord’s offer to give us a kind of wealth,

a richness of the human spirit

that can only come through our being willing to take His hand

and walk with Him through pain.

There are changes that take place within ourselves,

and knowledge we gain about ourselves and about out Lord

that cannot come into our lives any other way.

After looking back at that calling given to us by our Lord,

I decided we needed to do a little more with it.

And to help us with this comment

we are going to look at another statement spoken by Christ,

this time something He said during His earthly ministry,

and then we’re going to get some additional help

from several passages in the book of Hebrews.

And before we move any farther into this study this morning

I want to first prepare our attitudes for what we are going to hear.

During the past few weeks the topic of “doctrine” has come up several times in our teaching.

Doctrine,

the beliefs we hold about our God,

are an important aspect of our walk with Him.

But there is something that I believe is even more important.

It is our basic attitude toward Him.

It is remarkable yet true that,

even with the great wealth of knowledge that we possess about our God,

with all the knowledge we have about Jesus Christ,

about His life,

His death on the cross for our sins,

His teachings,

still many, in fact I think very likely most Christians

still wrestle with a kind of uneasiness,

a distrust of this God we are joined to.

Our “doctrine” tells us He is GOOD,

our “doctrine” tells us He is LOVE and that He certainly does indeed love us.

But by the time that goodness and that love filters through our fears,

and our anxieties,

and our assumptions about Him,

we end up with the very real concern that His concept of goodness

and His idea of loving us

might very likely be so different from our own

that we won’t even be able to recognize it as goodness or love.

This is not an easy world in which to live.

After thousands of years of compounded corruption

and human evil saturating every aspect of human existence,

every human being who enters this world

will find him or herself confronting the consequences of that evil on a daily basis.

And I’m not just talking about bumping up against temptations to sin here and there.

I’m talking about having virtually every aspect of our lives

profoundly altered and impacted by that evil.

We face no end of physical struggles -

deformities and diseases of every kind.

We struggle with an endless spectrum of mental, emotional, and psychological turmoil,

some as a result of our own wrong choices,

but many others as the result of our being the victims of the sins of others.

All of this forms the backdrop,

or more correctly, the stage set upon which our relationship with our Creator is played out.

But the truth is

we simply don’t know how He views us,

how He LOVES us in the midst of all of this.

We know that there are countless places

where He would have the absolute right to point at some agonizing struggle in our lives

and say to us, “You know, of course, that you brought that upon yourself with your own wrong choices.”

We know there are countless places

where we have no right to expect Him to reach out in compassion,

or in forgiveness,

or in healing to us.

And I think we sometimes wonder, too,

if just maybe His concept of “love”

is a concept that motivates Him to knock us around,

to beat on us for as long as it takes to get us to shape up.

I want to share a rather remarkable statement with you this morning,

a statement made by our Lord

as a sort of self-portrait of Himself.

But I don’t want to share it with you

until we have first approached this attitude thing toward our God

because if we view the statement with the wrong attitude

we will very likely completely misunderstand what’s being said.

So let me first share with you

an illustration that helps me to better understand how our Lord relates to us as His people, His children.

It comes out of one of the film versions of the classic novel “Little Lord Fauntleroy”.

If you are familiar with the story,

you know that it tells the tale of a little boy living a life of poverty with his mother in America

who is the rightful heir to a great fortune in England.

The boy’s grandfather, a harsh, mean-spirited man,

seeks out the boy and brings him and his mother to England

to prepare him for the kingdom he will one day inherit.

The power of the story comes from the dramatic contrast between this kind, compassionate, generous, loving little boy who has known poverty for most of his life,

and his insensitive, demanding grandfather who has lived his life in pampered isolation from the people under his control.

The scene from that story I want to share with you

takes place shortly after little Lord Fauntleroy arrives in England.

His grandfather has provided him with a pony

and clothed him in the most magnificent clothes a child could have.

One morning the boy, under the supervision of one of the Grandfather’s servants,

takes the pony for a ride around the magnificent estate that will one day be his.

As he’s riding along

Little Lord Fauntleroy passes a crippled beggar child

who is hobbling along the road on a homemade crutch.

As soon as the beggar child sees Lord Fauntleroy approaching

he pulls his hat off in respect,

bows his little head,

and steps off the road that legally belongs to this grand young lord,

giving his young master the right to pass.

But when Lord Fauntleroy sees the boy

he stops his pony,

dismounts,

and tells the servant to lift the crippled child up onto the horse.

Then Lord Fauntleroy leads the pony along the muddy road with his new friend riding behind him.

Along the way he stops at a store and charges a new set of crutches to his grandfather’s account,

then leads the pony all the way to the boy’s home.

That scene is a great image

of the way in which our Lord Jesus Christ relates to us.

Though we do our best to hide the reality of it from the world around us,

in spirit we are all just like that little beggar boy

hobbling along on his homemade crutch.

We have wounds deep within our spirits

that have crippled us,

robbed us of the kind of life we might have known

had we not been scarred by evil.

When our King enters our life

we don’t know what to expect from Him.

It’s His world,

we are His creation,

and He has the right to do with us and to us anything He’s decides to do.

But what He chooses to do

is the last thing any of us would have expected.

He dismounts,

lifts us up on the pony,

and then walks beside us, leading the way.

And it has been both my experience

and my observation

that most of the time He doesn’t remove our deformity,

but He does walk with us through it.

He finds for us a new set of crutches,

ones just our size,

and when we need it most

He puts us back onto the pony and lets us ride for a while.

Little Lord Fauntleroy responded to the pain of that beggar child

because, just a matter of a few weeks earlier,

he himself had lived in poverty.

Listen to this from the book of Hebrews.

HEB 2:14 ¶ Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,

HEB 2:15 and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.

HEB 2:17 Therefore, He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

HEB 2:18 For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.

Do you know what the author of Hebrews is saying there?

He is talking with us about our Lord.

And He’s telling us

that, because He Himself lived on this earth in a human body,

and because He saw, and heard, and felt, and wrestled with all the things that come with this physical life,

because He has been where we are,

He understands...He really, truly understands and responds to our brokeness with compassion.

OK, now, with that as background to help us with the attitude thing,

let me share with you that statement of our Lord’s

that I want us to see.

I mentioned last week

that there is a kind of refining of the human spirit

offered to us by our Lord

that can only take place when we go with Him through pain.

But as I thought about it this past week

it has occurred to me that that is not a precisely accurate image of the offer our Lord makes to us.

As I presented it,

it may sound as if we can choose the gold He’s offering

and the pain that comes with it,

or we can choose to decline His offer,

letting Him know that we are well content with the way things are,

and we’d just like to continue living with Him in our current condition, thank you.

I do know we can certainly say NO to our God

and refuse to enter into the life-altering journey

His Spirit seeks to lead each of us through.

We do that most frequently, I think,

when we sense that His Spirit wants to move us into issues in our lives

that we simply don’t want to face -

moral issues,

relationship issues with our mate, our children, our parents, or others,

money, prestige, or career issues that we don’t want Him involved in,

and we know that if we let Him have His way,

it will cause tremendous upheaval in our lives.

And so we simply refuse to go there.

Sometimes those who refuse to go there

will pull way out to the fringes of the Christian community,

afraid to get too near for fear they will be forced into facing the issue,

or they will throw off all external Christian involvement

and return to whatever sin bondage they were refusing to face.

The Apostle Peter talks about such folks in his second letter

using words to describe their plight

that I’ve always felt were almost too vivid.

He says,

2PE 2:21 For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them.

2PE 2:22 It has happened to them according to the true proverb, "A dog returns to its own vomit," and, "A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire."

Peter’s words there

always bring back some of my most unpleasant Pepper memories,

none of which I will share with you.

But more often

those Christians who say NO to their Lord

when He places His finger on a growth issue they refuse to address

will find a far more effective hiding place.

They will hide behind their religion.

They will be among those who sing the loudest,

and publicly praise God the most,

and are the first to point out the need for this or that person to “get saved”.

They select whatever Christian facade they can most easily perpetuate in the flesh

and then clothe themselves in it.

In more than 30 years of Bible teaching

I have never found anything that has been effective

in helping those who are hiding from growth issues behind their religion

to return to faith in their King.

The only thing that seems to bring about the hope of change

is when the pain generated by the consequences of the unresolved issues

becomes so intense

that the individual finally decides it is worse

than the pain of facing the issues and working through them,

and that process often takes years rather than months.

But what I really wanted to talk about this morning

is not what to expect with those who hide from the growth God seeks to bring into our lives,

but rather what to expect with those who run TO Him,

with those who place their lives into His hands,

with those who cast themselves onto His love.

I don’t know precisely when it was,

but I know it was during one of my readings through the book of Luke

in the very early days of my Christian walk,

that I came across a statement made by our King that jolted me when I first read it.

It’s found in Luke 20:18.

In the context of the passage

Christ is describing Himself as the stone which the builders rejected,

the one cast aside by them as worthless,

the one they in no way wanted as part of their carefully constructed world,

the stone that God then took

and used as the chief cornerstone for all of creation.

But then the Lord takes this imagery one step farther in Luke 20:18

when He goes on to say,

LUK 20:18 “Everyone who falls on that stone...”

Now, before I finish reading that verse,

I want us to see the difference between what we would naturally expect Him to say

and what He actually said.

I think many of us would expect Him to say something like this.

“Everyone who falls on this stone

will find solid, secure footing under their feet.

Everyone who falls on this stone

will find themselves standing solid and unshakable throughout the storms of life.

Everyone who falls on this stone

will find under them a foundation that nothing and no one can ever destroy.”

Doesn’t that sound like what we’d expect?

And the truth is,

in the right context all of those things are true.

But that isn’t where our relationship with this stone begins.

Do you know what He really said?

LUK 20:18 "Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust."

Now there’s a great choice for you, isn’t it?

We can choose to fall upon the our Lord and be broken to pieces,

or we can have Him fall upon us and scatter us like dust.

And now do you see why we spent so much time before we reached this passage

talking about our attitude toward our Lord?

Unless we understand that His every action toward us

is motivated by His love for us,

and grows out of His eternal commitment to bring us into true health,

and strength,

and wholeness,

only in that context can we understand what He’s saying here and why.

He is drawing a contrast in this statement

between those who come to Him in faith and trust,

and those who declare war on Him and seek to destroy Him.

And He tells us that those who come in trust,

casting themselves on their Savior will be broken in pieces.

But those who declare war on Him

will ultimately be utterly destroyed, scattered like dust.

And the difference, of course,

is that pieces can be put back together,

but dust cannot.

Before we come to our Lord

we carefully construct our lives in the ways that we think will most successfully create the life that will make us happiest,

most fulfilled.

We take all the pieces of our lives

and arrange them in such a way

that we think will most effectively meet our needs,

that will most skillfully allow us to hide from the issues we’re afraid to face,

that give us the best chance

of the most success we can know here, now on this earth.

But the one piece onto which all of those other pieces were designed to fit was missing,

and what we created was nothing even remotely like the life we were designed by our God to live,

or the person we were designed by Him to be.

And when we come to our Rock,

our stone which the builders rejected,

and we cast ourselves onto Him,

there is only one option available

if we are to reach out to Him in faith

and discover the life He’s offering us -

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces...

He will disassemble our lives

if we are willing to enter into the journey with Him,

and then, piece by piece, He will reassemble them, but this time placing each piece centered around Himself.

And there will be some pieces

that simply don’t fit,

don’t belong

because they were never intended to be a part of His design for us in the first place.

And there will be other pieces we’ve never seen before,

pieces that at the time we may resist

because they’re all new to us.

And there will be times in that breaking and rebuilding process

when we will feel just like that little beggar boy

hobbling along on our homemade crutch,

wondering if we’ll ever find our way home.

It will be at those times

when we’ll find our Lord lifting us up onto His horse

and then leading us down the path He knows is right.

And just so that we keep this whole thing in its proper context,

I want to end this morning

with the same statement that brought us into this discussion.

It’s that invitation given to us by our Lord in Revelation.

I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich...

We’ve been talking about that refining process.

But that process will only be correctly understood

when we see why our Lord brings us into it.

...so that you may be rich...

You see, I know that, in a group this size, there are some of you here this morning

who have, in faith, cast yourselves onto our Lord Jesus Christ,

and then discovered that He has responded to that faith

by breaking your life into pieces.

I just want you to know

that you will one day look back upon this time

as one of the greatest expressions of the love of God that you will ever know.

When I was writing The Fisherman

and I reached that point in Peter’s story

when the Lord shattered his life into little pieces,

I allowed Peter to put into words

feelings that I have had as I’ve looked back at certain times in my own life.

I had him talk about that point in his life as a time he would not exchange for all the wealth in the world,

nor choose to live again for the same compensation.

If we have chosen to enter into the journey with our Lord,

there will be times when we will look back and say exactly the same thing.