May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer, Amen

Did you notice a theme running through all of our Scripture readings this mornings, especially the narrative ones about three great men: David, Paul and Jesus?

They all had to do with power, the power of men, specifically the power of self-confidence.

First, let’s look at David. At this point he’s still without any proven track record as a warrior. In fact, the things he has in his favor hardly inspire anyone else, least of all King Saul, to think of him as a potential giant-killer, certainly not a giant who was something like 9 feet, 10 inches tall when you add up cubits and toss in a hand’s-breadth. David’s salient attributes included youth, something most of us admire from a distance; good looks, beautiful eyes, and a ruddy complexion (apparently there was no Oil of Olay in his day). But he was brimming with self-confidence: look at verses 34, 35 and 37. David truly believed that he was up to the task.

Second, let’s look at Paul. We have a number of testimonies from Paul in his writings that reveal him as a very positive and confident chap, even though there are suggestions here and there that he was short, had really bad eyes, and was not particularly good-looking. Yet see what he writes in verses 3 and 4 about how he first came to the Corinthians.

Then, third, there’s Jesus. According to Isaiah, speaking prophetically in chapter 53, “there was no form nor comeliness about Him that we should look on Him.” Isaiah even adds that He was “like one from Whom men hide their face.” Yet this fascinating story in Mark’s Gospel portrays Him as a completely confident Person. After all, He’s the only one sleeping on this boat. Perhaps He’s trusting that His disciples, a group that includes veteran second-generation fishermen quite accustomed to navigating the unpredictable waters of the Sea of Galilee, will get on just fine. But He sleeps away while they’re fearing for their lives. They finally rouse Him and then, in the fewest possible words (only 2 in Greek), Jesus simply says, “Hush, be still,” and the winds immediately become calm. There’s self-confidence for you!

How am I doing so far? Do you think I’m on to something? Are all these stories truly about human self-confidence and the power of men? If you think I’m right, then we need to take another look at all 3 passages.

First, David. Let’s read from verses 45-47. Apparently David’s confidence had absolutely nothing to do with self-confidence, but with the greatest imaginable confidence in the power of God. Suddenly he sets aside his earlier exploits with lions and bears, and lays claim solely to the strength of the Lord, Whose battle this is and Who will deliver David and his people.

Second, we need to read Paul’s words from a different perspective. Yes, it’s true that Paul first enumerates all the trials and tribulations he went through in order to bring the Gospel to the church at Corinth. But then he turns on a dime in verses 6 and 7, where he explains how he really came to them. Earlier in his first epistle to the Corinthian believers, he had written these words: I Corinthians 1:23a & 24b; I Cor. 2:2, 4 & 5. Clearly Paul, like David, attributed all his successes to the power of God.

Third, we look once again at the Person of Jesus, the only human being Who ever lived with the right to claim power on His own. After He calmed the wind and the waves, His disciples marveled and asked among themselves what kind of Person this could be. But when we turn to the words of Jesus in the 5th chapter of John’s Gospel, here’s what we hear: “The Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. The works that the Father has given Me to accomplish – the very works that I do – testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me” (vss. 19, 36). Even the incarnate Son of God traced the source of His powerful acts directly back to the Father: to the power of an omnipotent, Almighty God.

What can we conclude from this for ourselves? What’s our takeaway? These great stories about 3 great men all share a common thread. It’s that no power in the purely human realm can begin to compare to the power that’s from God alone. David should have been “crushed like a bug” by the giant Goliath. Paul, on his own, should have been ridiculed and dismissed without anyone accepting his Gospel message. Jesus, apart from the power of God at work in His life, might have sunk to the bottom of the Sea of Galilee with the rest of His disciples. And we need to concede that our own best efforts, even the ones that seem successful in human terms, are feeble when compared to what we’re enabled to accomplish in the strength of God.
How do I know this? Just listen to these promises of Jesus:

Luke 24:49 – “I will send you the promise of My Father… (and) you will be clothed with power from on high.” This is the promise of the Holy Spirit, of Holy Spirit power.

Matthew 28:20 – After giving the Great Commission for us to be making disciples and baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Jesus promises, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” And earlier in the same chapter, Jesus prefaces His promise with this assurance: “All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth.”

This is not power that Jesus keeps to Himself. In Acts 1:8, immediately before He ascended to His Father’s right hand in heaven, Jesus said to the disciples gathered around Him, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be My witnesses to the ends of the earth.” This means that we’re to become part of that great power chain that originates with the Father, is manifested in the works of the Son, is given to the disciples and ultimately is passed on to us and to all who will come to faith through our witness. That’s a chain that we must keep going!
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Real power is decidedly not the power of human self-confidence. It’s the power of God. And that power is mediated to us in 3 ways:

1. First, it’s mediated through faith. John 1:12 – “As many as received Him (that is, Jesus), to them He gave the power (or the authority) to become the children of God, even to those who believe on His Name.”
2. Then it’s mediated through the Holy Spirit, as we saw in Luke 24:49 – “You will be clothed with power from on high;” and in Acts 1:8 - “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you.”
3. And third, that power continually is mediated to us through the message of the Gospel, in which we should be immersing ourselves daily. Why would we willingly neglect accessing this great power source? The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile” (1:16).

We read in today’s Psalm, “The Lord also will be a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble; and those who know Your Name will put their trust in You, for You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You” (Ps. 9:9, 10). That’s the key that unleashes the power of God for every one of us, from the weakest to the strongest, humanly speaking. In God’s power we all can be on equal footing. It’s power for those who trust in God, for those who receive the gift of salvation through His Son, to those who have accessed the power of the Holy Spirit and to those who live daily in the power of the Gospel. It’s that simple. It’s what every one of us needs. And God Himself has made it available to all of us.

[It was our amazing and unparalleled privilege this past week to witness the power of God at work among nearly 2,000 believers gathered from the 4 corners of the earth to worship, to sing praises, to raise their hands and hearts and voices, to pray together, to share together, to tell stories of God’s miraculous acts in places where persecution in the Name of Jesus remains rampant in our time. Together we prayed for the peace of Jerusalem. And together we recommitted ourselves to ”proclaiming Christ faithfully to the Nations.” That was the theme of GAFCON 2018 in Jerusalem, and we shouted it out together each day. Now it’s our prayer that the power of God we witnessed in this astonishing gathering of faithful believers will continue to show itself in our own lives and in the lives of all who experienced it with us. And, as we sang together in conclusion, “To God be the glory: great things He has done.”]

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer

Have you ever wondered what this passage (Mark 3:20-35) means when Jesus Himself told a whole crowd of people, “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin?” Or when in the same passage Jesus seems to dismiss His own family in favor of those who are doing the will of God? Here we have two of the most difficult sayings of Jesus almost back-to-back. What should we make of them?

I will confess that the first one has given me a great deal of trouble throughout my life. If there is such a thing as what we call the “unpardonable sin,” how will I know whether I’ve committed it? And is there truly no possibility of repentance from having committed this particular sin? On the other hand is it even a sin that is possible for us to commit, or was it limited to the time that Jesus was on this earth, as some believe? That would be encouraging. Yet there might be the nagging question, why would Matthew and Mark both include this statement of Jesus if it has no significance for our time?

How might I blaspheme the Holy Spirit? How is it that the Gospel, the good news of our forgiveness from sin, should include an admittedly ambiguous warning from Jesus about a sin for which there’s no forgiveness? Perhaps this never has worried you. But if we’re to dismiss it outright, does that leave us in even greater danger of committing it?

Have you ever heard a sermon on this before? If so, do you actually remember how it ended? Were you challenged or comforted? Or did you just forget about it? I think it’s fairly certain that I have heard at least one sermon sometime or other on this subject; yet I readily will confess that I have no recollection of how it ended or of how it affected me.

Let me give you one example of a time when I became concerned that the unpardonable sin had been committed by persons very close to me. It was when they claimed that certain persons of a charismatic persuasion, misled by the spirit of Satan, were in fact displaying counterfeit gifts of the Holy Spirit. I thought, “Could this be exactly the same thing as people accusing Jesus of casting out demons by the spirit of Beelzebul? And if so, what now can I think about their eternal fate?”

The first thing I want to say to you this morning is that we need to exercise the greatest possible caution not to dismiss what may be the authentic working of the Holy Spirit. Both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament epistles tell us that in the last day, the end times, there will be a revival of Holy Spirit power and a recurrence of those signs and wonders that we often think belonged only to Biblical times. When we see such things that are outside our normal experience, just as the casting out of demons by Jesus was outside the experience of His contemporaries, should we take a chance on dismissing them by attributing them to Satanic power? What if they’re authentic? What if they’re evidences or signs given to us by God so that we will be preparing ourselves better for the soon return of Jesus the Christ, our Messiah?

What is my responsibility as a priest in God’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church to say to you this morning? Should I say, “Be not afraid?” Or should I say, “I’m warning you to be quaking in your boots?” This does not seem to be unimportant stuff that we’re pondering from two out of the three Synoptic Gospels. We need to know what the Holy Scriptures are saying to us personally.

Some of you know the clever aphorism that “a text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.” And so the first thing we need to do this morning is to examine carefully the context in which Jesus made His statement about a person whose sin “never has forgiveness.” Mark tells us that those who were accusing Jesus of being in league with the devil were “scribes who came down from Jerusalem.” Matthew identifies them as Pharisees, doubtless the same persons who, in last week’s Gospel reading, had just attacked Jesus for healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath.

What is significant here is that these were persons who were the spiritual leaders of their day and teachers of the Scriptures. We’re inclined to say that they should have known better, but that now sounds like letting them off the hook too easily. We saw last week, that when they witnessed the healing ministry of Jesus, they went away plotting how they could destroy Him. Already they had moved far away from recognizing the power by which Jesus was able to do such things.

And now they take a further step by accusing Jesus of operating through the power of “Beelzebul, the prince of demons.” Jesus responds by saying that what He does is in the power of “the Spirit of God,” and that anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit is guilty of an eternal sin. Matthew has Jesus saying that the blasphemer will not be forgiven “in this age or in the age to come” (Matthew 12:32). There is no remediation or purgation for this sin.

There is one other passage in the New Testament that seems to suggest a similar sin that cannot be forgiven. The author of Hebrews writes, “It is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt” (6:4-6).

Have you known such a person? Have you ever tried to witness to such a person? If you have, then you know exactly what the author of Hebrews is saying. The fierce resistance of those who, having once responded to the Gospel, have then turned their backs on it, seemingly renders them impervious to being “restored to repentance.”

Is this the same thing Jesus was addressing in his encounter with the scribes and Pharisees? They were first-hand witnesses of the Person, the teaching and the acts of Jesus. They saw “the powers of the age to come,” Holy Spirit powers. They were persons immersed in the Scriptures. They had every opportunity to accept Jesus as their Messiah. Their refusal to do so was culpable enough, but there still was the possibility that they, like Nicodemus, might repent and confess Jesus as Lord and Christ.

But now, having been witnesses to the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the life of Jesus, they were writing Him off as One Whose actions were demonically inspired. Decades later the Apostle John wrote, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (3:8). Yet these persons were prepared to dismiss the works of Jesus as “Satan casting out Satan.”  

Listen to what one commentator wrote about this heinous exhibition of unbelief, applying it to his own time: Here we see a sufficient explanation of the widespread unbelief of the age in which we live. It is because the heart of this generation is so far estranged from God, so wedded to the earthly and material, so taken up with selfish aggrandizement and the multiplication of the luxuries of life. In many cases of unbelief the individual is not so much to blame as the spirit of the age of which he is the representative (J. Monro Gibson, The Expositor’s Bible).

Doesn’t that sound like a perceptively scathing indictment of our 21st-century society where faith in God has been replaced by the inflated sense of self-worth that drives our unbridled materialism and consumerism? But the author who wrote that commentary published it in 1898! Some things never change. And that is precisely why I think it’s spiritually dangerous for anyone to suggest that this unpardonable sin of which Jesus was speaking only could have been committed during His life on earth. In fact today it’s being committed every time the work of the Holy Spirit in the Person of Jesus Christ is dismissed as fake news, as overblown hagiography, as unverifiable religious mythology. This may be our modern-day version of what the contemporaries of Jesus were doing.

How can there be a sin for which there is no forgiveness? How can anyone crucify afresh the Lord of Glory? Simply because the person who steadfastly refuses to accept Jesus as the Son of God despite repeated opportunities to do so deliberately places himself beyond the reach of divine forgiveness. It is a choice. And as the great preacher Charles Spurgeon wrote well over 100 years ago, “He that perishes chooses to perish.”
Earlier this week in Morning Prayer I once again encountered a passage from the final chapter of the Book of Joshua. It records Joshua’s last words to the Israelites before his death at the age of 110. He had lived through the years of the wilderness wanderings and was one of only two persons from his generation that God had permitted to enter the Promised Land. He’d witnessed the repeated occasions on which the Israelites had turned away from God after He had led them out of bondage in Egypt, fed them daily with manna, the bread of heaven, and with quail, something only found today on the menus of gourmet restaurants.

Now, drawing from those experiences, here is what Joshua said to the people: “You cannot serve the Lord, for He is a holy God. He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good.” Joshua knew that there were some people in his hearing who once again would forsake their God and worship instead the false gods of their new neighbors. And he knew that God would judge them accordingly.

Does that sound harsh to us? Perhaps, but it’s borne out again and again. Think of someone to whom you may have witnessed faithfully with no observable result. Perhaps the unpardonable sin is indeed a person’s willfully removing himself or herself from the saving grace of God, refusing ever to stop spurning every witness to the truth of the Gospel message. That’s clearly what the scribes and Pharisees were doing when they saw the power of God at work first-hand and attributed it to the prince of demons. That’s what a person does today when, confronted repeatedly with the Holy Spirit’s conviction regarding salvation in Christ Jesus, turns away unbelieving and unrepenting. The choice is made, and the consequences are eternal.

There is some comfort in this understanding of the unpardonable sin. It’s that one cannot commit it unwillingly, unwittingly or casually. It amounts to a conscious decision to reject Jesus Christ and to refuse to accept the evidence of His work in the power of the Holy Spirit. This is precisely why Jesus told some of those persons gathered around Him that “The works that I do in My Father’s name testify on My behalf.  But you refuse to believe because you are not of My sheep.” (John 10:25, 26). 

It’s one thing to be somewhat skeptical, or to confess that there are things about the life and work and Person of Jesus that we cannot fully understand. It’s quite another thing to refuse to accept Him as the God/Man, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior of the world, as our personal Savior. Those who hold steadfastly to their rejection of Jesus the Christ and fail to acknowledge Him for all that He is are committing a sin that is unpardonable, for which there is no forgiveness, not “in this age or in the age to come.” It’s blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, Who continually bears witness to Who Jesus is.

But if this morning you are prepared to say, “Jesus, I’ve been like those scribes and Pharisees of old, refusing to recognize all that You are and have ever been and ever will be as my own Savior and Redeemer,” please know that He’s ready and waiting to accept you now if you come to Him in repentance and faith. Just say in your heart, “Jesus, I come. I surrender my doubts and my challenges to You. I accept You as the One sent by the Father to do His will in the power of the Holy Spirit so that I might have eternal life in Him. I repent of my stubborn refusal to take this step until now. But this morning I understand that to escape that which never can be forgiven, I must come to You while there still is time. Jesus, I yield the rest of my life to You.”

Do that this morning, and you will discover a peace, joy and confident assurance you never have known before. It’s God’s promise to you. Claim it today.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen