So hard for us to break free, and we need your grace. We need the cross of Christ to set us free from the things of the world. To take our eyes and set them clearly upon the Lord Jesus, upon His nail-scarred hands, but it give us hearts that comprehend the majesty and the beauty and the power of the gospel. When we were dead in our trespasses and sins, you sent Christ into the world to save us. Now, when we stand accused by our own sin, we have one who intercedes for us and pleads our case, the one who has paid our penalty. The Lord Jesus Christ, help us to embrace Him today, to love Him, to desire Him above all things. Lord God, we thank You for this message of salvation. We thank You for the cross of Christ. We thank You that You have called us. We thank You that, wow, not many of us are wise by the world's standards that, wow, not many of us were influential, wow, many of us were not powerful. You used the weak in the foolish to confound the wise and the strong, and You made Your glory known through the cross of Christ. Help us to boast in Christ alone today. And we pray that our lives would become a reflection of the glorious message of the gospel, that as we live out our day-to-day lives in the world, whether it be at work, whether it be at home in our neighborhoods, in the marketplace, wherever it might be, cause us to shine for Your glory, cause us to be a light in the darkness, cause us to be messengers of the glorious message that we have embraced, the message of the cross, the message of free salvation that is ours, and the person of Your Son, our blessed Savior, the glorious Lord Jesus Christ, and His name we pray. Amen. Let's see, I went out to lunch last week with one of the men in the church, and he said, when are you going to start preaching through a book again? What are you going to get back to a series in a book? For a number of months I was doing the parables, we got in the Advent season, we did a number of sermons reflecting on the Advent of our Savior, and throughout the last month or so, I've been really wrestling with what I should preach on next. And I am embarrassed to say that I have felt very clearly from the Lord what I was supposed to do, but I have not wanted to do it. And I have wrestled and fought, and so I've continued to preach other things, sort of wrestling with God, but I have finally, I think, submitted, and I'm going to begin next week, not today, but next week, a series on the Book of Revelation. Now, I've hesitated to do that for a number of reasons. I'm a young man and a young pastor, and it's somewhat intimidating to me. I also have a scholar in our midst who has written a book on the Book of Revelation, and others who have talked volumes about that, and yet, I had the privilege of going through Alan's class a few months ago on the Book of Revelation, and as I did that, I was just drawn again into the glory and the majesty of Christ. Let me just say from even from the beginning today, I'll talk more about this next week. I'm not going to do a series on prophecy in the end time. Probably even we'll skip over things in the book. I'm going to use the Book of Revelation for us as an opportunity to once again, in a new way, focus our sights on the glory of Christ and the worship Him. And that's what the series will be about. Focusing on the Lord Jesus, and how John did that in the revelation of Jesus Christ. So pray for me. Please have your pastor and your prayers. As I study, I've been studying for a number of weeks now, and I'm just about ready to begin. So keep me in your prayers, as I study, and as I prepare for that, and I'm looking forward to beginning that with me next week. But today is of course, Super Bowl Sunday. Go over here.
It's interesting, I spent time yesterday reading the Baltimore Sun, and they had this to say about Super Bowl Sunday. This is from yesterday's edition of the Sun. Today is the All-American holiday. It has nothing to do with religion. Nothing to do with the founding fathers or war veterans. It's not a day for giving thanks or for reflecting solemnly or please not for fasting. It's about bigness, big couches, big screen TVs, and big vats of salsa. It's about beer, noise, and gambling. But above all, it's about self-indulgence. The Sun calls Super Bowl Sunday the perfect secular national holiday. Now let me begin again with a disclaimer. I'm not preaching against the Super Bowl today. I'm not standing in condemnation of the Super Bowl today. If you were to walk next door to the man's right now, you would see the living room designed in a new configuration with a big huge screen. I'm taking the church's box light, and I'm going to put the Super Bowl up on the wall so that we can big time see the big game. I'm not preaching against the Super Bowl, but as I have participated with the rest of our city, with the rest of Baltimore, in the excitement, the passion, and the joy of our city's participation in this big game, and it's caused me to reflect. And I want to use that this morning as an opportunity for each of us to examine our hearts. We've all seen it, every one of us in this room. Even if you've had your head in the sand, you cannot have helped, but notice the purple passion that has taken over our city. And the unbelievable expressions of passion, joy, fanaticism, love, and loyalty, et cetera, for our newly beloved Ravens. We're all in love with the Ravens. And it's led me to ask the question of myself, the question that our Lord Jesus asks Simon Peter. Do you love me? How does my life on a daily basis reflect a passion, a joy, a fanaticism, a love and a loyalty to Christ? I want us to look together at that story in John chapter 21, where Jesus asks Peter that question. John chapter 21 verses 15 to 17. When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you truly love me more than these? Yes, Lord, He said, you know that I love you. Jesus said, feed my lamb. Again, Jesus said, Simon, son of John, do you truly love me? He answered, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Jesus said, take care of my sheep. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I ask that you would help each of us this morning to direct the question of Christ, and ask the Peter that day to our own heart. That you would help us to consider how our lives reflect the response that we would give. And I pray this morning, Lord, that you would stir in each and every one of us, a new passion, a new love, a new loyalty, a new fanaticism for the cross of Christ, for the glory of Christ, for the Lord Jesus Himself. I pray in His name, amen. I want to briefly this morning consider three things. First of all, the very pointed question that Jesus asked Peter that day, and second of all, the very simple answer that Peter gave, and finally, the required demonstration that naturally follows. And I want to just begin by putting Jesus' question to Peter to each of us. Do we love Him? Jesus was standing here this morning and facing each of us and looking us in the eye, and he were to ask us, be it love me, what was the response of our heart? You see, Jesus wasn't asking Peter that question for his own sake, for Jesus' sake. Jesus was asking that question of Peter for Peter's sake. He was asking that question of Peter so that Peter would even see his own heart, examine his own heart, and think about his love for his Savior. And that's the purpose of our asking at this morning. It's not for the knowledge of Christ. Jesus knows our hearts. He knows each and every one of our thoughts, the things of our mind. He knows our actions. But we ask it in order for each of us to consider personally our love for Him. And at first glance, we would say now, what better group to ask in a people who have gathered together on Super Bowl Sunday? We're not out there with the crowd still mixing up the salsa and ranging to chairs. We've already taken care of that. We've set our priorities. We're here now, and we show by where we are, where our priorities are, where our love is. But again, we would think that Peter's love, even at that moment, would have been self-evident. If we go back and look at the context in John 21, what has just happened? Jesus is appearing to the disciples. They're out on the sea and a boat fishing. And Jesus calls out to them, and when Peter hears his voice, Peter is so full of love and passion for Christ. What does he do? He jumps out of the boat and swims for sure. He can hardly wait to be in the presence of Christ. You would think that that expression in and of itself would have answered the question that Peter's love would have been self-evident. And we think back over Peter's life, how passionate he was for Christ, how he passionately said, even though everyone else will deny you, I'll stand by you. I'm willing to take the sword and go to the death for you. Peter, the impetuous Peter, the one who loved Christ passionately, and yet Peter was also the one who, when the rubber hit the road, denied him. And this, again, is that very tense moment. Peter, having been there when Jesus looked at him in the eye. After he had denied Christ, now face to face with the Savior again. The emotions that Peter must have been going through and the things that he must have been feeling, and now Jesus asks him a question about his love. The question itself must have cut to the heart for Peter, knowing what he had been through. And the fact that Jesus went straight to the heart, from the matter. He didn't ask Peter a question about his belief. Peter, do you now believe that I am who I said I was? Peter, do you now really fear me? Now do you really admire me? Now do you really trust me? He didn't ask those questions. He went right to the heart of the matter, and he said, Peter, you love me. You see because love is the brightest of all the graces. Love is the thing that shows forth all of the other graces that are ours in Christ. We think of 1 Corinthians 13, the great chapter where Paul articulates love and its fullness, and he says that these remain faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love, and one of the reasons that Paul says that is because the best evidence of all these other things is love. Christ in his life and his ministry and the writers of the New Testament throughout talk over and over again about how love is the hallmark of those who believe. Not only love for Christ, but love for one another, but particularly the way that we love the Lord Jesus reflects our heart. Again, notice that Jesus didn't ask Peter about what he had been doing over the past few days and weeks. He didn't say, Peter, how much have you been doing in order to show that you're repentant? How much time have you spent weeping and crying? How much time have you spent on your knees? How many acts of penance have you done? What kind of things have you been involved in to show that you're truly sorry? Jesus didn't ask a question in reference to works, but in reference instead to the heart. The heart of the matter, Jesus goes right for the heart because while it's true that our works will follow after a sincere and a true love for Christ, the point is that love is greater than works. It works without love mean absolutely nothing. Jesus is going to go on to point out that those works naturally follow the love, but he begins with the matter of the heart, the primary place, the most important place, without which nothing else matters. So we need to examine ourselves this morning. We need to ask ourselves, even as Jesus put the question to Peter, do we love him? Again, when we look at Peter's response, Peter said, Lord, you know that I love you. Peter knew that Jesus knew his heart, but what if Jesus were an ordinary man like us? What if Jesus didn't know the secrets of our heart? If he were to come to each and every one of us and look at our lives and examine the way that we live, would he doubt our love for him, or would our love for him be self-evident in the way that we live out our lives on a daily basis? I'd ask each of you now to stop and consider your life over just the past week. Stop and think about your actions and do they cause you to doubt your love for Christ. Question I always ask myself, you hear me talk about it often, is how have I responded to my children late at night when I'm tired and trying to put them to bed? Have my responses to them have my attitudes toward them, have my reactions toward them been a reflection of the love of Christ to me and my love for him? How about your reactions, how about your attitudes throughout the week? How have I spent my time this week? How have I used the hours of my days? How have I invested the minutes that have been given to me? What have I spent them on? How about you this past week? How often has my heart run to Christ this past week? Have my thoughts been directed toward him when I've had quiet and still moments though few and far between? Has my heart run to Christ even as the psalmist said, is the dear pants for the water so might my soul thirst for you, oh God, how much time have I spent in God's word this week? How much time have you spent in God's word this week? If we were to stop and make a comparison of the amount of time we spent reading the sports section and the amount of time we spent reading the gospel, how would it bear out? Would it reflect the heart that would say, I love you, Jesus? How much time have I spent in prayer, particularly compared to the amount of time I've spent in front of the television? Has my heart run to Christ, professed that I love him, I proclaim his love with my lips, how has my life followed after that thing? Now perhaps this week it wasn't fair to ask that question, perhaps this week has been a little unusual, but how do we examine our lives over time in light of the claims of Christ on our heart? This week it has been easy and necessary, even I would say, to display your passion and your commitment to the Raven. We had a discussion earlier this week about car flags and my kids were in the car and we were counting the number of cars that had flags slapping in the wind. Our car almost felt naked because it didn't have a flag on it. It was a little embarrassed when it was around all the other cars in the neighborhood because it wasn't displaying the proper display of passion. Hacks, jerseys, purple everywhere, I even got chastised by my secretary because I didn't wear purple on Friday on Raven's fan day. I was quite embarrassed. It was easy to be a Raven fan this week. It was easy to show forth your passion, but what about our passion and our love for Christ? Now I'm not talking about putting a bumper sticker on your car, honk if you love Jesus or some other outward display wearing a t-shirt perhaps with what would Jesus do or some other outward display. Again, those things are quite easy to do. You can take a scarecrow and put them in the middle of a field and put a what would Jesus do shirt on them, but would it reflect a heart and a love and a passion for Christ? How do we in our lives show ourselves to be lovers of Christ? I ask all these questions of you this morning because I've been asking them of myself all week long. And unfortunately, I feel like quite often almost all the time, I have to answer almost everyone. Lord, there is great cause for me to ask myself that question, do I really love you? Does my life reflect that love and that passion? And if we're all honest with ourselves, we'll say the same thing. Unfortunately, there are probably some though who would say, I know I love Christ and I never have a doubt about it. I'm absolutely sure there is no doubt. I say that it's unfortunate because we should have every reason to doubt ourselves. The thing that we should not doubt, however, is the love of Christ for us. A believer's strong faith is not a strong faith in his own love for Christ, but in Christ's love for him or her. That's a strong faith that doesn't doubt, that doesn't waver in Christ's love for them. We all go through periods of doubting our love for Christ and we should examine our lives on a regular basis. We should take opportunities like this week to look at our lives and to look at our hearts and see if they do indeed proclaim a passionate love for the Savior. Strong faith has its conflict and true believers and true lovers of Christ will wrestle with doubts like the Father who came to Jesus, longing for His child to be healed. We said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. Our faith shouldn't be in our own love for Christ, but in Christ's love for us. Christ's love for us is the only thing that we can rest upon and be assured of. As we grow in that love and in the knowledge of that love, it should cause us to change even in our evaluation of ourself. If we think of Peter and how boldly he proclaimed that he would never deny Christ, how boldly he proclaimed his commitment to and passion for the Savior. We see now a very simple answer, not, oh yes, Jesus, I have been there with you all the way. Yes, Jesus, you know I love you because I've done this and that, Lord, you know that I would never turn my back on you again. Quite simply, Peter said, Lord, you know that I love you. There's some question about when Jesus asked him, do you love me more than these? What Jesus was referring to? What these were? If you're talking about the other disciples, if you're talking about Peter's occupation as a fisherman, if you're talking about these things of the world, whatever it was, Peter wasn't about to compare himself to these things. Peter knew that the simplicity of his answer had to be only, Lord, you know that I love you. You see, Peter had gone through a radical transformation, he had been humbled, he'd been broken and his heart and his life had been changed from one who, brashly and boldly, predicted his commitment to Christ. And I think in the life of Peter, we see lived out what we've often talked about, the Apostle Paul confessing in his letter, I've talked with you many times with his about Paul growing in his own self-awareness. We talked about the progression he made when he first began to write about, I am Paul the least of all the Apostles. And then later on in his ministry, as he wrote to the church, he said, I am Paul the least of all the saints. His category is broad and his own awareness has diminished. And finally at the end of his life, one of the last letters that he wrote, Paul described himself simply as the chief of sinners. When we grow in our knowledge of the love of Christ for us, when we grow in our own self-awareness of how unworthy we are of Christ's love, it humbles us and brings us to the point where we can only, like Peter say, simply, Lord, you know that I love you. Like Paul, Lord, I'm the chief of sinners and I need you to create in me and to work in me your love so that I might love you as I should. And that leads us to the final thing, a required demonstration. You know, it's interesting because you go back a few chapters to just before Jesus went to the cross in John chapter 14 when Jesus is comforting his disciples. He's preparing them for his death and his leaving the earth. And what did he say to them in John 14, 21? He says, he who has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my father and I too will love him and show myself to him. Many of you have heard me share my testimony before about how I grew up in a wonderful, godly home with parents who loved me, taught me God's word, who took me to church, who gave me every opportunity to know and love and follow after Christ. And I had it all in my head and I had it all worked out practically in my life. And yet when I was given some freedom, when I went off to college and I began to live life on my own, my life did everything but reflect a person who really loved Christ. And I found myself in the companionship of a couple of other guys who were on the same boat. You've heard me mention their names before. Steve Smallman and Arnie Arnold and how Steve went home one summer and was confronted by his dad. His dad couldn't even bear to talk to him about it but finally wrote him a letter and said son, I know that you know the gospel, I know that you know the message of grace and the message of salvation through faith alone but your life does not reflect what Jesus said to his disciples. And his father wrote out John 1421. It was one night when I was a student at Covenant College that Steve sat down with me and read me that letter. And my heart was cut to the quick. It was as if my own father was speaking to me and as if my Heavenly Father were speaking to me that my life did not reflect a love for Christ. And I've also told you before that at that moment I didn't become a straight A student. Still took me 13 years to graduate from college. I didn't become a perfectly ordered individual who always got it right from that point on but my heart was changed because of an awareness of my own sin. An awareness of the fact that I didn't really love Christ the way that he loved me. And that my heart had to be redirected to him, being gratitude and thankfulness for what he had done for me. And then with a new awareness of that love, a new understanding of the grace that had been given to me my life did begin to change and my love began to grow stronger for Christ and it's still imperfective, imperfect to this day. You know that every time I stand up here I have to confess my sins to you. I still struggle and I still wrestle with my flesh but my heart has been directed to Christ in a new way because of the love that I have for him. That's what Jesus was saying to Peter that day. Peter feed my sheep. Peter feed my sheep, respond in a way that leads others to love me as well. Let me just close by reading a quote from one of my favorites, Charles Spurgeon, and what he had to say about the love of Christ, the love we have for Christ. He says, love to Christ smooths the path of duty and wings the feet to travel it. It is the bow which impels the arrow of obedience. It is the mainspring moving the wheels of duty. It is the strong arm tugging the oar of diligence. Love is the marrow of the bones of fidelity, the blood and the veins of piety, the sinew of spiritual strength, ye the life of sincere devotion. He that hath love can no more be motionless than the aspen in the gale, the leaf in the hurricane or the spray in the tempest. As well may heart cease to beat as love to labor. Love is instinct with activity. It cannot be idle. It is full of energy. It cannot content itself with littles. It is the wellspring of heroism and great deeds are the gushing of its fountains. It is a giant. It heaps mountains upon mountains and thinks the pile but little. It is a mighty mystery for it changes bitter into sweet. It calls death, life and life death and it makes pain less painful than enjoyment. The kind of love for Christ that we are called to. That is the kind of love that compels us to obedience and we can only respond to obedience because we have been loved that way. When we think about the love that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, a love that is patient, a love that is kind that is never jealous or envious or boastful or proud, a love that is never haughty or selfish or rude, a love that does not demand its own way and love that doesn't keep a record of wrongs. We think of that and we say I can never love like that. The answer is you can't ever love like that until you have been loved like that. That kind of love is seen in the hands and feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. We went to the cross, paid for your sins in mind so that we could love him. We could have that same passion, excitement and fanaticism that we have for the things of the world. But even a greater way for the one who has given us life and salvation, let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we need you to love us today and we need our hearts to be so filled with that love that we overflow ourselves in the same manner. That our love for you would boil over and touch everyone around us, that our love for you would be a light in the darkness, that the reflection of Christ and our hearts would shine to our neighbors, to our family, to our friends, that when people look at us, they will have no doubt, not because of a t-shirt, a hat or a flag, but because of the love in our lives, the love of our hearts that we have for Christ may it shine to the world and proclaim the glorious message of the gospel. Salvation is ours through the one that we love, the Lord Jesus himself. Who's name we pray? Amen.