Welcome to Faith for Living. First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga brings you today's teaching designed to apply God's Word to the struggles and challenges of our day that we might have Faith for Living. Well joining us today is Joel Trek. He grew up in California and heard his calling to ministry while working as a press representative for entertainment clients in New York City. While there, Joel realized that his greatest fulfillment came from teaching a weekly Bible study in Manhattan. Joel is a graduate of Westminster Seminary in Escondito, California. He's now the Minister of Outreach and Church Planning at First Presbyterian Church. Joel and his wife Kate have one daughter. And today Joel brings to us a message entitled, No You Turn. Our text for today is from Luke 12-13-15. Here now is Joel Trek. If you would turn with me in your Bibles, our text this morning comes from Luke 12 and we'll be reading verses 13-15. If you're following along in the Bible that's in your pew, you'll find that reading on page 871. Luke 12-13-15. Here now the reading of God's Word. Someone in the crowd said to him, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he said to him, Man, who made me a judge or arbiter over you? And he said to them, Take care. And beyond your guard against all covetousness for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. A couple of weeks ago, Russ Hightower, who is one of our ministers in the youth pastor at this church, a couple of weeks ago, Russ and I took a trip out to St. Louis. We were in the car together for 14 hours, 14 hours, and that's a long time. Even for two preachers sitting in a car together, eventually you're going to run out as things to talk about. We had listened to Russ's 80s mixtape all the way from the beginning to the end. There was nothing left to do, so we decided we'd play a little game. And it's the game is this. It's the how much would you pay for game. Here's how it works. I throw something out there and you tell me how much you'd be willing to pay for it. We started off slowly. Now you have to understand, one of the bains of my existence is leaky Starbucks coffee cups. For some reason, I always get a cup that leaks all over my hand, all over the car seat, everywhere. I would think that some of the three dollars that I'm spending on this 25 cent cup of coffee could go to research and development and some scientists somewhere could find the perfect cup lid combo that would never leak anywhere on me. Okay, so here's the question. How much would you pay for a magical cup of coffee from Starbucks that never leaked? My answer, $500. We kept going. How much would you pay? How much would you pay to have a national championship in basketball? No cheating involved. How much would I pay? From my men's basketball team, my alma mater, the Pepper9 University waves, to win the national championship of college basketball. $700. A little bit more than the coffee cup. They said $725. I'm walking away. $700. I'd go for it. Okay, we started to ratchet up the intensity a little bit. How much would you pay for all the powers of Superman? How much would you pay? Now assuming that you didn't have to have the cash on hand and assuming that you couldn't make the money back really easily through endorsements or a semi-unethical professional sports career, I thought about it. We dismissed it. That was unethical. How much would you pay for the powers of Superman? $100,000. That's how much I would pay for the powers of Superman. Now we started to get a little bit more intense, a little bit more serious. How much would you pay to be the greatest orator in the history of mankind? How much would you pay to speak with such power and clarity and force that you'd make Sir Moritz Olivier sound like mushmouth from Fat Albert and the Cosby kids? An orator so powerful a man whose wordsmith abilities were so strong that you would literally on Sunday afternoon have people calling your house and saying, I heard about what you did. Man, great work. We never set a dollar amount on that last one. In fact I think it got really quiet and the two of us went to God and repented of our sin. You see what we were really asking was, what is it that you value most in life? What is that one thing that you want to define you as a person? Is it fame? Is it professional success? Is it the pride of knowing that you went to the top school? Is it pleasure? Even the simple pleasure of never again having to endure the indignity and pain of spilling hot coffee all over your pants and car seats. We all have idols. You see it's not a coincidence that God made the very first commandment, the very first one. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. We all have the idols. How is it that we identify them? Now you may never be ever in your life in a car ride with me and Russ driving to St. Louis for 14 hours where you can actually assign monetary amounts to your idols. Now how is it that you know what they are? The answer is conflict. God uses conflict to reveal our idols. That was the case with this young man in Luke chapter 12. He was in a conflict with his brother and his idol was revealed. That thing that met the most to him, that thing that he was willing to go to war over to fight about. That idol was his inheritance. And when conflicts erupt, when our idols are exposed, there's two ways that we can handle it. We can do one of two things. First, we can make a U-turn, confess our sins, and get right with God that way, or we can say to our brother, we can say to our friend with whom we're in a conflict with, no, U-turn, U, and start looking for the sin in his life and blame others instead of looking at our own sin. So one of these ways is the right way. The way that God has ordained and the other is a way of falling. One is the way of peace. The other is the way of war. One is the way of confession and the cross. The other is the way of self-righteousness and escalation of conflict. So what will it be? The man who questioned Jesus was in a conflict with his brother, which path did he choose? Did he say, I'm going to make a U-turn? Or did he say to his brother, no, U-turn? What were the consequences of his actions? And if Jesus is right, when he says, that a man's life is more than the abundance of his possessions, well, then what is life all about? Let's go to the text and see. And by looking at this passage here in Luke 12 and some other key texts, we'll see how God would have us act, how God would have us be and respond when the gloves come off, and we find ourselves in the midst of a conflict. Okay, verse 13. It opens by us meeting a new character who is simply known as someone in the crowd. He says to Jesus, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. The conflict that this man had with his brother revealed his idol, his inheritance, and it led to a conflict. How would he respond? What do you say to his brother, what do you make a U-turn or what do you say to his brother? No, U-turn. Well, we see immediately that he puts all of the attention right on his brother. He says, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Here's the source of the problem for the man who came to see Jesus. It's his brother. What he's saying is, Lord, if my brother could just get straightened out, if he would stop being so greedy and fighting over this inheritance, get that straightened out, I'm fine. It's him. If you can get that straightened out, everything will be okay. Now before we drop the rhetorical hammer on our young, unnamed friend from the story and it's so easy to do. It's so easy to do. He doesn't even have a name. This is like arguing with someone on an internet chat board or something, you know. He's anonymous. You can really lower the boom. Let me tell you what you should have done. Crowd man, 721. Before we do that, before we look at his sin, before we point out this sin in his life, we need to be aware that we are all blame shifters. He's part of what it means to be a sinful human being. It goes back all the way to the Garden of Eden. If you remember that story from Genesis 3, you'll find what happened. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. God came, he confronted them, he pointed out their sin, and what do they do? What was the first thing that happened? Well, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent. If God hadn't stepped in and said enough already, the serpent probably would have been pointing his tail at a yak somewhere in the Garden, or blaming some that kind of vast anti-surpentine conspiracy that caused this sin to take place, we're all blame shifters. But if you want a more recent example, even in the life of Jesus, if you go back to Luke 10, he had witnessed blame shifting firsthand. In Luke chapter 10 is the story of Mary and Martha. If you remember that story, Jesus went to dinner with Mary and Martha, these two women who would go on to become two of his best friends in the whole world. He went to have dinner with them and what happened. Martha went off to the kitchen perhaps, she got the busy serving, the text tells us that she was involved in much serving while Mary, her sister, went to the feet of Jesus and listened to him teach. Needless to say, this was very irritating for Martha and she went to Jesus and she said, teacher, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone, tell her then to help me? You see what she did? All of her focus goes on her sister, she had envisioned in her mind this perfect scenario of what the dinner with Jesus should have looked like and Mary didn't live up to her expectations and so she said, Jesus, tell her to knock it off, tell her to stop it, tell her to fix what she's doing. She didn't look at her own sin, she didn't examine her own heart and say, maybe, maybe just maybe Mary's doing something that's worthwhile, maybe even though I've envisioned this scene in my head and it went one way, maybe Mary's doing the right thing. Now before I get too personal, I have to say this story of Mary and Martha always gets me because it hits me right between the idols and nails right between the eyes, that was a slip. It does hit me right between the idols, exactly, that's the point. It hits me right between the eyes, it points out one of the biggest idols that I have. Before I became a minister many years ago, I was a director in New York City and so what I'm constantly doing is I'm envisioning these scenes in my mind of how my life should play out, right? I don't tell other people the scene that I have envisioned in my head and yet I get very angry at them if they fail to play their part in the scene that I've constructed in my head and I start blaming other people, I wake up in the morning and I think to myself I have this short movie in my head, a perfect day at the park, a short film by Joel Treik. And what happens? It's cold outside and my baby daughter is irritable. We drive to the park and we argue on the way over to the park about what's the shortest route to get to the park. Once we get to the park, we discover that my daughter is afraid of grass and so she can't walk around at the park. So we just turn around and go back home and what started out is this Oscar winning masterpiece is devolved into some kind of hybrid of battlefield, earth meets Ishtar meets Gile and it's all a disaster and I start to blame other people instead of going to God, confessing my sins, my sins of unrealistic expectations. My sins of selfishness, my sins of taking the good gifts that God has given me, a beautiful wife, a beautiful daughter, the ability to live in such a lush, beautiful place and I say God it's not good enough for me. It doesn't meet my standards. How much better if I would confess my own sins before immediately blaming others? Now the problem is when we focus our blame on other people, it only makes our conflicts worse. That was the case for this young man. He's conflict had driven him from a relationship with his brother. He'll notice that in the text he goes to Jesus and he's alone. His brother isn't with him. It's not as if he brought his brother with him and said Jesus, please we're having this disagreement. Let us get over it together. No, not at all. He's alone. He's estranged from his brother. He wants Jesus to join him in an attack against his brother and not only that when we focus first on the sins of others before focusing on our own sin. It also separates us from God. Notice what this young man did. He went to Jesus Christ, not as his God, not as his Savior. But he went to Jesus Christ to use him as a hammer against his brother, denying our own sin while focusing on the sins of others will always, always drive us away from God. This is the message of 1 John 1, 8 through 10. Listen to what John writes. He says, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him, God, a liar, and his word is not in us. And away from God, driven away from the prince of peace, all that's left is war. All that's left is survival of the fittest. All that's left is a life that's a will to power and nothing else. One of my favorite plays is a play called No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre, who was a French existentialist writer. There won't be a quiz later, you don't have to worry about that. He envisions this scene. He writes a play about these three characters who are trapped in a room together, the room is locked from the outside and they're there together in this room for all eternity. And they can't escape. It's his vision of hell. And there's no exit. God is completely absent from this scene. Not only that, he does something really remarkable. He takes great pains to note that there are no mirrors in this room. There's no way that people in this room separated from God can see their own sin. There's no introspection, there's no confession. And so all that's left are three would-be gods in a room, denying the one true God, fighting and battling and tearing into each other for all eternity. And the final line of the play is, one of the characters says, hell is other people. To which the other responds, well, let's get on with it then. A life of confession, a life without confession, a life separated from God is a life of hopelessness. So what's the alternative? Rather than focus on the sins of others in a conflict, we can acknowledge our sin and make a U-turn. Jesus told the assembled crowd in verse 15, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness. What he's saying is, examine your own heart. Don't immediately look at the sins of your brother, which is, I think is why Jesus was so indignant in verse 14. This man had said, well, I want to use Jesus to get after my brother, and Jesus says, who made me a judge in Arbiter over you? What he's saying is, make a U-turn, confess your sins, go to God and see where you are at fault in this situation. And Jesus fleshed out this teaching a little bit in Matthew 7, one through five, where we read, judge not, lest you be judged, for with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the spec that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, let me take the spec out of your eye, when there is a log in your own eye? You hypocrite first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the spec out of your brother's eye. Doing a U-turn in the midst of conflict, recognizing the log that is in each and every one of us, each and every one of our own eyes, confessing our sin, going to the cross, this is the only way, the only way that we will ever have lasting peace. Why? Because when we confess our sins, we are driven to the cross, where there is forgiveness, where there is restoration, where we receive a new heart. You see the problem is conflicts and idolatries, these things arise from within us. If we simply try to change our outward behavior without dealing with our hearts, if we don't receive the new heart that only Jesus can give us, well, we are just treating the symptoms and not really addressing the root cause, the disease, the sickness of sin, James puts it this way in James 4. He says, what causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have and so you murder. You covet and cannot attain, obtain and so you fight and quarrel. But when we cling to the cross, we receive the new heart that God promised that he would give us, in Ezekiel 36, 25 through 27, listen to what God says, to you, his people, to you who will confess your sin and cling to the cross. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness and from all your idols, I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. At the cross, we begin to see that our life is more than the abundance of our possessions. At the cross, we see that our life is more than our relationships with other people. We don't have to struggle and fight to get over on other people, to have our will be done because at the cross, we see that our identity has been redefined. We have been given a new heart and so now our identity, who we are at our core, is defined by this, our relationship to Jesus Christ. You who were far off have been brought near. You who were enemies are now sons and daughters of the living God, so it's not about winning. You don't need to marshal your armies against another person in a conflict because you've already won, and you didn't get there by judging other people. You got there by receiving the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ as a gift. So my challenge to you this week is as you find yourself engaged in conflicts with other people, be quick to make a U-turn and slow to say to your brother, to your friend, your husband, your wife, no, U-turn, confess your sins, cling to the cross. There you will find forgiveness which will allow you to forgive others. There you will find mercy which will allow you to be merciful to others. At the cross you will find the true God and the foolishness of clinging to power that you never really had. Let's pray that God would give us the ability to be peacemakers. And if you're here this morning and you're hearing this and you're saying to yourself, I'm tired of all the fighting, I'm tired of all the conflict in my life, I'm tired of the struggle, I'm sick and tired of always having to be right. The words of Jesus are yours today. Jesus Christ our Lord says come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Let go of your sins, confess them, cling to the cross of Jesus Christ and be restored. And then the blessing that Jesus pronounces, the blessing for the peacemakers will be yours. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. Amen. Faith for living is brought to you by your friends at the historic first Presbyterian Church in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, through expository Bible preaching, living worship, loving fellowship, and compassionate outreach. We want to be a ministry of God's grace with lives transformed through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have programs and opportunities for every age level, from the youngest to teens to thirty something to retirees. Join us for Sunday morning worship at 8.30 and 11. We're located at 554 McCullough Avenue across from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus. Visit us in person or on the web at faithforliving.net or call 423-648-7914. A copy of today's program on audio CD, cassette tape, or DVD is also available. When requesting today's faith-forliving television broadcast, simply reference today's sermon title on your screen or mention today's date. Then we invite you back again next week at the same time for another edition of Faith for Living.