Summer Stories - Week 1

0:01 Good morning, everybody. I hope you're not too warm. Apparently the summer has come, and so we get rain. It's great. We obviously need it. This is the start of the summer series here at Glen Abbey, looking at the parables of Jesus as related to us by Luke in his gospel. And we're starting with the first one, which you will find in Luke chapter 5. So if you'd like to hunt up Luke chapter 5, we're going down to verse 36.

0:43 When I was at school, which is a long time ago, I was told that a parable was an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Some of you of my vintage may well remember being told that. Parables really, they are stories that Jesus told. They're very associated with Jesus, although he's not the only one who's used them to illustrate moral and spiritual truth. They're not necessarily stories in the sense of having a storyline, identical characters. Some are like the Good Samaritan and so on. But they are imaginative, creative illustrations, drawing on the familiar world of the people that he was speaking to and things that folks could relate to and almost instinctively grasp what is being said. So let's read the first one in chapter 5, verse 36.

1:42 Luke tells us, Jesus told them this parable. So at least we know that this one is a parable. No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. otherwise the new wine will burst the skins. The wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.

2:15 And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say the old is better. So what we've got here is a parable in three parts. Old and new clothes, old and new wine skins, and old and new wine. The thing that connects them is the old and new. And it's the repetition, the old, new, old, new, old, new. We get the idea of what's being talked about here. And you can imagine people, as Jesus told this parable in three parts, that folks are going, ah, yeah, I tried that once. I tried patching the cloth.

2:55 You know, it just didn't work. He's right. And so on. They understood this. This is, in a sense, received wisdom. They're creative stories. But it left them with this question. What is it that is old?

3:15 And what is it that is new? That can't be patched into the old? That can't be contained by the old? and yet which is often resisted by those who are so used to the old that they prefer it. I suspect lots of folks still in our culture know the saying you can't put new wine into old wine skins although they may not know where it comes from. It tends to be understood like the familiar English saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Or as Mark Twain put it in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, you can't learn an old dog new tricks. The general idea is that change is often difficult.

4:11 And once we are set and comfortable in our ways, it can be hard, even impossible, to shift us. It's not because there's anything rational going on, it's because we just feel comfortable the way things are, and that can be a problem. You know the old joke, how many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is, who said anything about change? Or it could be Presbyterians, or it could be Glen Abbeyites, or whatever, I don't know what we're called here, or whatever, fill in the blank, and I have now alienated half of Northern Ireland. But the key thing is, what did Jesus mean by this? Why did he use this parable at this particular point? And then we come to, well, what then does it mean for us today?

5:08 So to understand that, We've got to read the parable in the context. So let's read the verses that come before this from verse 33 in chapter five. And we read this. They said to him, John's disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking. And Jesus answered, Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them. In those days, they will fast. In other words, the parable we read at the start is part two of an answer to a question that was raised with Jesus.

6:00 And the question had to do with the standards that Jesus was setting for his disciples in terms of their behavior as disciples, in terms of what we might call their spiritual disciplines, their spiritual exercises. And clearly those who were asking the question about it were not at all impressed with him. They said the disciples of John, well, they're always fasting and praying that all this set out. And the disciples of the sect of the Pharisees, the same. But the disciples of Jesus, and this is a bit of a caricature, but this is what they said. Well, they're just eating and drinking. So, in other words, Jesus is obviously far too lax. his standards are not rigorous enough.

7:02 Now, who are these people who are asking the question? How did it arise in the first place? Well, to answer that, we're going to have to go back a couple of verses. So let's go back to verse 27 in chapter 5. After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. Follow me, Jesus said to him. And Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house.

7:35 And a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belong to their sect complained to his disciples. Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And they said to him, So now we know who the they were that were raising the question. These were the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. In other words, these were the expert theologians, the academics, the theorists, and those who sought to put the theories and the theologies of the academic into real life practice.

8:30 And in a sense, championed it and even policed it. So that's who we're dealing with. And we also have Levi. or Matthew, as he was later known, he was a tax collector. And you probably know tax collectors at this point in history. It's an honorable profession, in case any of you are working for HMRC. I love you all. But at this particular point in history, tax collectors were not quite the same as we have them today.

9:03 And they were part of a very socially despised group. They weren't allowed near the temple, etc., etc. they were looked down on both socially and religiously. And Levi was one of them, and he met Jesus, or Jesus met him. Jesus walked into his life and called him, and Levi promptly got up, left the life he was in, and followed Jesus. As a follower, naturally, he wanted to introduce Jesus to others, so why not start with his former colleagues? So he organized a dinner party so that they could meet and hear Jesus. Because Jesus had set him free.

9:51 Free from the grip of money on his life. Free from an ultimately wasted and purposeless life that was just selfish and self-focused. And none of us is big enough to satisfy our lives. We weren't designed that way. And Jesus had walked into his life and expanded his horizon. And he left that whole way of life to follow Jesus. And for the first time in his life, he was using now his wealth for eternal purposes. Really fantastic story.

10:30 But the Jewish theologians were not impressed at all. Because all they could see was eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. What kind of standard of behavior was Jesus encouraging? Encouraging his followers to hang out with sinners. In their thinking, this was condoning and even encouraging. sinful behavior. But that wasn't the start of this conversation, nor was it the start of their discomfort and questions.

11:14 Notice what we read in verse 27 at the beginning, after this, well, the question is after what? So let me tell you what the what was. The thing that had just happened was that Jesus had been teaching, we're not told what he said, but we are told that these Pharisees and the teachers of the law were sitting there in the crowd assessing what he was saying when the teaching session was interrupted by a group of men who came carrying a man who was paralyzed he couldn't walk and he was lying on a mat and they brought him to Jesus except so many people they couldn't get into the house so they climbed up on the roof and they lowered him down don't know whether they removed the roof tiles or whether it was a courtyard kind they lowered him down. Anyway, they lowered down this man on his mat so that finally he was lying in front of Jesus, the lengths to which they went to bring someone to Christ. Fantastic story in its own right. When Jesus saw the faith of these men, he said to the man suffering from paralysis, Not you're healed, get up and walk.

12:26 But what he said was, friend, your sins are forgiven. Well, that sent the Pharisees and teachers of the law into a kind of a theological shock. Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Because in their eyes, Jesus was guilty of the crime of assuming the attributes of God because they reasoned who can forgive sins but God alone. And we notice that Jesus doesn't disagree with their reasoning. They were right. But then that raised the question of who was this person standing in front of them? So Jesus said to them, tell me this.

13:16 Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven or to say, get up and walk? Well, when you think about it, it's a lot easier to say to somebody, your sins are forgiven, because that's not tangible in that sense. You can't see it physically, some change happening in front of you. The change comes out later in the life. But to say to somebody, he's lying on a mat, paralyzed in front of a crowd, get up and walk and nothing happens. Well, that would be embarrassing. It's difficult to say that. So obviously the answer was to say, your sins are forgiven.

13:47 And then Jesus said, so that you know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he spoke to the man and told him to get up, to lift what he'd been lying on, and go home. and immediately Luke tells us the man stood up lifted what he'd been lying on and walked home praising God what phenomenal thing that was I mean the crowd were told were utterly amazed they'd never seen anything like this and of course they hadn't the priest couldn't do this kind of thing the Pharisees and teachers of the law couldn't do this kind of thing and so while the crowd were excited while the theologians and teachers of the law had a problem, several of them. One of them was the identity of the person who could do this. The second was The idea that a person can be released from the guilt of sin and set free to walk in an entirely new experience of life praising God, that idea was totally foreign to them. It was shocking.

15:20 And it still shocks people. That's why this is so important for us. Religious people, especially, have a very hard time getting their heads around this. And believe it or not, there are possibly aspects of this that you find really hard to get your head around. Now hang on a minute, Jesus. What are you saying? You're saying that in this life, on earth, In this life, I can know that I'm forgiven. And that that releases me to walk in a new experience of life.

16:06 And this is an illustration of it in the miracle that took place. That's mind-blowing. This is life-changing. And it is shocking, theologically speaking, for those who think that really in the end, it has to depend on what we bring, what we do, the laws we keep, the rituals we go through, the sacrifices we make. Yes, it's fine to talk about the grace of God, and that's lovely, and God loves us, and Christ died for our forgiveness, and that's really nice, but in the end, that's not enough. But it has to be enough. It has to be. We can add nothing to what Jesus has done on the cross.

17:00 And if we could, it would be a disaster, and we'd be left in fear and insecurity. This is the gospel. And yet those find it really difficult to think, well, if you tell people this, then, it means they're just going to live any way they like. Well, is that what happened with this guy? He walked home praising God, and you say, ah, but we don't know what happened later. Okay, well, let me try another one. What about a tax collector? Now, how effective had all that preaching and teaching be that the Pharisees and the teachers of the law had had on the tax collector?

17:37 Had it changed his life? Of course it hadn't. All it had done is isolated the man, make him feel even more condemned than he felt already. There was no hope in that. There was no gospel in that. It had no impact on his life. What effect had Jesus had on his life? Set the man free from his love of money to follow Jesus and spend his life introducing others to him.

18:02 Oh. So you mean to say that Levi, when he was converted, didn't rub his hands and think, oh, wonderful now. I'm forgiven, so it doesn't matter what I do. I'm going to fleece everybody in the country. I'm going to go into business. I'm going to clean up here because it doesn't matter. No, he didn't. He was so taken by Jesus and the salvation he brought that there was this response.

18:28 I want to follow him through my life. But let's not be too quick to criticize the Pharisees and teachers of the law over their protesting, at least at this very early stage as they tried to work out Jesus. These men, they weren't living in a morally careless culture own. This is a very morally advanced nation, very different from the nations around them. They had the law that God had given to Moses, vastly superior to any other moral system. There were far greater protections for the poor under it, for widows and orphans, for the sick, even for the foreigner and stranger in Judaism than in any other system on earth. And they had this group of serious-minded teachers and academics who concerned themselves with trying to work out what is right and wrong. They gave attention to these things, what you could do and what you couldn't do.

19:22 And most of them believed that the Old Testament was God's word, and that was their basis for their morality. At the same time, sadly, their interpretation had led to the establishing of all kinds of traditions that were added, the traditions of the elders, which many people in the end gave the same authority as scripture and that was a problem and all of that inevitably gave rise to arguments but listen rather have that rather have a world where people take seriously right and wrong than a society like ours that seems to be increasingly hell-bent on devaluing human life and promoting a culture of death. But something has now changed. Someone had come. Jesus, Messiah, the divine son of man, son of God, uniquely with the authority to forgive and to set people free from the guilt of their sin. And the theologians had no category for this because their system was based on law keeping, on ritual, on rigorous personal discipline, and sacrifices that could never deal with the problem of guilt and sin because they were a temporary measure designed by God as a preparation for the fulfillment that would come in the one complete and final sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for us. And that day was now here, but they were not ready to give up the old system.

20:58 having been brought up all their lives in it, with all the ritual and all the tradition they had added in. They just could not get their heads around this new thing that Jesus was bringing. It went against every fiber of their religious being. It didn't just upset their theology. It upset them. It was just wrong, pure and simple. You just can't have this eating and drinking with sinners. Into that mindset, Jesus graciously gave these gentle, creative, profound, brilliant illustrations.

21:41 The doctor and the sick, the wedding celebration of the bridegroom, and the parable. Jesus was not condoning anybody's sin by attending Matthew's dinner party. because he was a doctor going to be among the sick. And it would be a strange kind of doctor who never spent any time with sick people. Although I gather there are some maybe like that. But that would be a bit odd, wouldn't it? If you got the cure, you got to bring it to the people. But they had no cure.

22:21 The teachers of the law had no cure. They had no answer to spiritually sick people. No gospel for them. No power to change them. All they could do was put up barriers to try to prevent the contamination from spreading. But we will notice, won't we, that Jesus didn't meet the tax collectors and the sinners in the context of some pagan festival or a drunken orgy or some parade waving flags. It was in Matthew's home, a neutral, friendly space where real conversation, real listening, real encounter could take place. And then the thing about the bridegroom, all these disciplines.

23:07 Why are your disciples not fasting and praying? Well, Jesus said that would be a bit like, you know, you've organized a stag party. And then you've decided we're just going to sit here and think about life. And we're going to be miserable. We're not even allowed to play Uno. Nobody smile because life's a serious business and there's so many problems in the world. Well, if you do that at your wedding parties, please don't invite me. It's just incongruous.

23:41 It's out of place. And what Jesus was saying, look, the bridegroom is here. You don't fast when the bridegroom's present. You celebrate. There will come a time. There are times when fasting is appropriate, but not in this context. And then he told them our parable. And in the context, now we know that the new is not a change in the culture of how we do church.

24:08 The new is the gospel. The gospel of forgiveness and liberation that Jesus brought. The old was the religious system of Judaism. So this parable is not primarily about the challenges and difficulties of change. It is about the challenges and difficulties of a very specific change. The change from the religious system of Judaism to what we now call Christianity. And that was going to be a huge issue in the life of the early church. It occupies a very significant place in the book of Acts, for example, in New Testament letters, especially Hebrews and Galatians, as well as in the practical day-to-day life of the first churches.

25:00 Jesus was preparing them for that, providing them with thought models so that they instinctively could recognize the truth of what he was saying and then gradually, oh, so the implication, oh, right, So that means, oh, right, so what are we supposed to do here? No, we're not supposed to patch the new with the old or the old with the new. It doesn't work. We can't just take the disciplines and so on of that old system into the new because that doesn't work either because you end up destroying both. And it's helping people think through. And the key thing is to understand that this change was not the result of a human think tank, of some new church planting strategy. It was God on the move.

25:55 It was God changing, as Stephen pointed out to those who stoned him to death. God is moving on. And at every point when God has moved on, you've resisted him, and you're doing it again. And they did. And they resisted Jesus. They resisted his apostles and rejected the whole system. Why do we need to know this as I finish? Because this is now the summer officially and the talks are shorter.

26:23 What a joy. So why do we need to know this? Because the gospel is still a shock. Especially to the religiously minded, to the champions of ritual and discipline and self-control as the means of finding salvation and holiness. And individual believers and whole churches are frequently tempted to slip back into the old ways of thinking and acting. There has been a marked, complex, and spiritually dangerous tendency on the part of Christianity and the Christian church to ignore that God has moved on and to seek to reintroduce into the gospel and into the Christian church at least some of the rituals, structures, theology, and organization that were part of Judaism. The Christian church has always been tempted to move back, And it hasn't always resisted the temptation. And adding in rituals that Jesus never prescribed, in ceremonies, in the understanding of what is meant by priesthood and the high priest, in its interpretation of the Lord's Supper, even in its design of church buildings by building no-go areas, by putting literal altars in them, designation of holy spaces, and all of that.

27:55 And the result always is to confuse the gospel, to add to the gospel, to elevate human traditions and rituals and all the rest to the same level of scripture and cause confusion. And in the course of it, to deprive people, for example, of their assurance of salvation, to deprive people from their God-given privileges as members of a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. And it leads to what many of us have experienced here, to confusion between the gospel and law, and the preaching of law as a method of producing holiness, And it simply doesn't work. And yet, almost instinctively, we are drawn to it. But it isn't the gospel. It's the gospel plus works that we do, which of course feeds into the sense of achievement, the way society measures everything. We do that too.

29:20 I think men particularly like it, but it's not just men. We have our smart watches. We measure our steps. We get the sense of achievement. I get these little things that come up in my Apple Watch that say, Bravo, you've done 10,000 steps together. What a good boy you are. And we love to have all of these things. And we read books like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

29:39 And there are lots of practical, sensible wisdom. But it's not the gospel. It isn't the gospel. It is a message that is devoid of repentance in answer to guilt. and it is devoid of the Holy Spirit. The gospel is entirely different. Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to your cross I cling, naked come to thee for dress. There's nothing, thank God, that I can add to what Christ has done.

30:19 And yet, we are constantly being pulled back. And so it stands as a warning for us, I think, as I finish. I came across an article on the BBC website last month about the conversion of growing numbers, especially of men in the USA, to Russian orthodoxy, which is a religious system that brings together some elements of the Christian gospel with elements of Old Testament Judaism, an altar, a holy place, separate specialized priesthood with duties that ordinary believers, unquote, could not carry out, hierarchical structure, and then adds in traditions that developed in parts of the church which are not found in the New Testament, celebration of saints' days, veneration of icons, special fasts, etc. And I understand the appeal of that, especially to men. Because of the spiritual emptiness in our culture, the lack of meaning and purpose created by the new atheism and secularism, and also contributed to by the church in its shallowness in so many places, the erosion of genuine biblical spiritual authority, the reduction of worship to the worship experience, which is really at bottom about how we feel, the reduction of discipleship to five steps to this and that, and the almost whole-scale adoption of cultural values which offend no one. Don't talk about sin, repentance, a new birth, the work of the Spirit, the return of Christ, and the ultimate accountability of all to Jesus as judge. That kind of Christianity, light isn't Christianity at all, and I can understand why droves of people are rejecting it.

31:58 But what they're accepting isn't the gospel either. And this lunge and lurch from license, if you like, happy, clappy evangelicalism, to worship of veneration of icons and so on, it's not the gospel. Neither is the gospel. The gospel hinges on the central thing, and that is response to Jesus, the bridegroom. The secret of holiness is not a set of rules, whether they're from Jordan Peterson or wherever they come from. Those rules can be helpful in their place. But that's not the gospel. The secret of holiness is a personal response to the Lord Jesus.

32:54 It is what Levi discovered. He got up and followed Jesus and allowed him to guide him and direct him. It was a personal response. And anything that comes in, any form of rituals, of programs, of which there are many, very often have a little bit of practical wisdom and are helpful. But in the end, if they replace Jesus with a five-step or ten-step or 12-step program or this ritual or that sacrifice or this worship experience or whatever, It's not the gospel, and it isn't the way to holiness. That's what I think, and why I think this parable is critically important for us at this time. Let's pray together. Father, we pray that you take your word, you help us to reflect on it, to ask questions just like the Pharisees and the teachers of the law did, but to come to a different conclusion,

34:05 to accept that the one standing before them has the power on earth to forgive sins and to set a person free to walk in newness of life. And Lord, I pray that if there is anybody here who's never come unto Jesus as we sang earlier, they've come to the church, yes, They've come to Christianity, to rituals, to different other things, looking for help. Just to take that step of coming to Jesus. To reach out to him. Bringing nothing in their hand, no works that they have done. But just coming and knowing that they will find with him welcome, acceptance, forgiveness, release, and a life of following Jesus as Lord that has no end and has, even in this life, profound, eternal significance. We thank you for the gospel, for the new wine.

35:24 Don't let us make mistakes of trying to blend the new and the old because in the end we just destroy both. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.