True Commitment, Part 2

Selected Scriptures

     Last Lord's Day we were teaching on the subject of commitment, and I just though, "Well, maybe we oughta just cover the basics."  So last Lord's Day morning we just talked about the basics of true commitment, of surrender to Jesus Christ.  And maybe the Lord has a very real purpose in...in just ministering to our hearts on some of these foundational things that are just kind of cornerstone to our Christian life.  In John chapter 13 is a jumping off point.  We have a very good illustration of this.  That surrender or dedication or commitment or loyalty or whatever you wanna call it to Christ is not just something that is verbalized.  It is something that must be actualized.  It isn't what we say.  It's what we are that is the real issue.  And, you know, we make those kind of commitments.  They come and go, I suppose, from time to time whenever you get under real stress and you're hurting.  You got a lotta guilt or something.  You say, "Lord, if You'll deliver me from this deal, I'll commit my life," you know.  Or you've all been to camp and you've gone through the camp commitment thing.  And we've all done that.  Maybe we get into terrible trouble, you know, and everything goes badly, and we say, "Lord, just deliver me from this and I'll commit everything to You."  The verbalizations come, and they come pretty freewheeling and...and fairly often to some of us.

     But I notice here an illustration in John 13:36 of a man who was real freewheeling with the verbalizations, but never could support 'em with his life.  He wanted, in a sense, to be everything that he should've been, but he just really never followed the needed patterns so that he could be.  And the desire, you know, without fulfilling the pattern doesn't mean anything.  I mean if a guy wants to be a great anything, the want is here.  The being is here.  In the middle is a tremendous amount of discipline, right?  I don't care what it is.  If a man wants to be a good doctor, he says, "I'd like to be a doctor."  Here's being a doctor.  There's a lotta things in between the want and the fulfillment.  Doesn't matter what it is, that's how it is.

     Well, there's a lotta Christians standing saying, "I want to be..."  And here's the objective and all the stuff in the middle is just really what stymies them, 'cause the discipline isn't there.  And that was Peter.  Notice 36, "Simon Peter said to Him...of course, Jesus is announcing here that He was going to leave, and He was referring to His death...Peter says to Him, 'Lord, where are You going?'  And Jesus answered him, 'Where I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shalt follow Me afterwards.  Peter, you can't go where I'm going.  You can't go through crucifixion and death now.  You will later on.'  Peter said unto Him, 'Lord, why can't I follow You now?  I will lay down my life for Thy sake.'"  Well, that sounds good, doesn't it?  I mean he's saying, "I will do anything for You, even if it means death." 

     "Jesus answered him, 'Will you lay down your life for My sake?  Truly, truly I say to you, the cock shall not crow till you have denied Me three times."...On the contrary, Peter, your commitment is strictly verbalizing.  Boasting in that commitment without any substantiation.  Peter, you won't cut it.  Oh, there are a lotta people who are making the boast, but they never fulfill the commitment. 

     You know, I like a verse in 1 Kings 20:11.  It's a little bit obscure; but, boy, it's one you really oughta mark down somewhere.  It's a tremendously helpful proverb, 1 Kings 20:11, listen to this.  "Let not him that puts on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off."  Did you get that?  In farm language, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."  In Notre Dame vernacular, "Don't celebrate the victory at halftime."  I mean that's the greatest illustration of 1 Kings 20:11 I ever saw in my life.  "Let not him that girds on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off."  Just don't count the victory till it's over.  And that's really a very important principle and commitment.  You know, it's easy, and it's cheap to be able to boast before you've gone through it.  Commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ is not some wishful thinking.  It's not some idle boast.  For Peter, the boasting came easy.  The commitment, just really tough.

     Lemme show you why.  Luke 22, and here in Luke 22 we have a parallel passage to John 13, which follows up his boast, and we get some insights into why he messed up.  Nobody could ever fault Peter's wants.  They just could fault his submission to the principles that would bring them about.  Luke 22 gives us three reasons why Peter failed to be able to carry out his commitment.  He made a verbal commitment.  He couldn't carry it out for three reasons.  Number one, number one is verse 39.  Follow as I read.  "After Peter had just made his boast...says...and He came out and went, as He was accustomed to the Mount of Olives; and His disciples followed Him."  Christ goes to the Mount of Olives after the time in the upper room there before His death.  "And He was at the place, He said to them, 'Pray that you enter not into temptation.'"  You know, He was saying that, "Things are going to be very difficult when I'm captured, and you better pray that you not fail to be able to handle the pressure that's gonna come through temptation.  You better spend some time praying."

     "And He went away about a stone's cast, kneeled down and prayed, saying, 'Father if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me, nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done.'  And there appeared an angel unto Him from Heaven, strengthening Him.  Being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground."  A beautiful thing to notice Jesus praying.  If He needed to pray, beloved, how do we need to pray?  "And when He rose up from prayer and was come to His disciples, He found them praying."  Is that what it said?  Found them what?  Sleeping.  Oh, that's bad news.  "And He said to them, 'Why are you sleeping?  Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation.'" 

     Now, you see, the first failure on the part of Peter in carrying out his commitment was the failure to pray.  He slept instead of praying.  Deadly to commitment.  You know, and it's very easy to be so smug and so boastful and so self-confident about your commitment because of what you know and because of the things that have...you've done in terms of maybe service to the Lord, that you just kind of feel your commitment is rock solid on the basis of your self-confidence.  And, boy, the props just get knocked out from under you unless you lean on divine strength.  That's what prayer is.

     There was another thing that made Peter fail.  Not only a lack of prayer, but he had a problem with self-will.  He just never really learned how to submit to the Lord's will.  He was pushy.  Verse 50, you know, the soldiers came, and the...the priests and the high priests and the scribes and everybody came to take Jesus there in the Garden, and Peter grabbed his sword, and one of them standing by, whose name was Malchus according to the Matthew account and others, was the term of the high priest.  It says, "Then Peter cut off his right ear, and Jesus said, 'Just let this happen as it is.  Peter, put that sword away.'"  Of course the other account tells us.  You live by the sword, you'll die by it.  "He touched his ear and healed him."

     Now, here you see stupid Peter, got a sword in his hand, and he's gonna chop up the people who are gonna capture Christ.  That wasn't the point.  Jesus says, "Will you put that thing away?"  You see, instead of submitting to the will of God, he was so confident, he was so strong in his own verbal commitment, that he was just gonna go sailing away in his own stupidity.  I mean if you look at your own life, I look at mine, and I wonder, "How many times, without really careful prayer and knowing God's will, have I bulldozed into some deal, and the Lord comes along and says, "Excuse him, folks."  It's a little out of order. 

     Well, that was part of Peter's problem.  You know, one thing about commitment, if you're gonna commit yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ, you better wait to see what He wants you to do.  Another problem that Peter had was he was a coward.  And cowardice and commitment don't go along very well.  Verse 54, "They took Him, led Him, brought Him to the high priest's house.  And Peter followed afar off."  Now, that's the first mistake that he made in terms of really revealing his cowardice.  He followed afar off.  He didn't have the courage, he didn't have the guts, if you will, to stand near Jesus.  All this verbal commitment, "I'll die for You," and he wouldn't even follow Him.  He wouldn't even walk with Him.  He wouldn't even claim to belong to Jesus Christ.  And right away, bang, bang, bang, he denies Christ on three occasions. 

     Yeah, commitment is great, but I'm telling you, if you're gonna drift far off from Jesus Christ, if you're afraid to be identified with Him, if you don't want anybody to know you're really a Christian, if you don't wanna stick out in the world and be somebody different, if you're not willing to count the cost and be what a Christian is, then, frankly, your commitment isn't worth anything.  You see, Peter failed because of a lack of prayer, because of the positive direction of his own self-will, and because of cowardice.  He wasn't willing to stand up and be counted for Jesus Christ, and so his commitment was ashes in his mouth. 

     Now, what is commitment?  I mean just making the verbal statement here, and then down the road seeing the fulfillment of it involves something in the middle.  There are some principles that get me from the statement to the actual commitment.  What are those principles?  Lemme give them to you.  I gave you three last time.  We'll just review 'em very quickly, and I'll give you a couple more.  And...and these are just very simple, basic milk-type concepts.  One, commitment begins with a commitment to love the Lord Jesus Christ.  Now, friends, you must remember that this does not mean a sentimental attachment.  Because Peter had that, didn't he?  Peter definitely felt sentimental toward Christ.  He definitely in his heart felt emotion toward Christ.  But the way the Bible defines this love is self-sacrificing obedience.  Remember from John 21?  "Do you love Me?  Do you love Me?  Do you love Me?  Feed My sheep.  Feed My sheep.  Feed My lambs." 

     "Do you love Me?  Then you're gonna get crucified for Me.  Do you love Me.  Follow Me."  All the way down the line, Jesus defined love as self-sacrificing obedience.  "If you love Me, keep...what?...My commandments."  And, you see, to begin with, commitment means to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is not loving Him in the sense of an emotion or a sentiment.  It is loving Him in the sense of obedience.  That's loving Him. 

     Now, I want you to look at Matthew 22.  I wanna give you a little insight here.  Matthew 22 is a very helpful portion, because it helps us to see the most important thing there is in the world for human beings.  Matthew 22:34.  Pharisees, of course, and the Sadducees are doing all they can to upset Jesus and try to trap Him.  And so the Pharisees followed the Sadducees, who had been flattened by His answers.  And one of them, verse 35, says, "A lawyer asked Jesus a question, testing Him...This is his question...'Master, which is the great commandment in the law?'  Jesus said unto him, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it:  Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.'"  The whole Old Testament is build on these two principles.  Love God and love each other. 

     Now notice this, the incident here is interesting because, you see, the Jews had a problem with this concept of the greatest commandment.  In the first place, there were some commandments in the Bible.  In the second place, the traditions of the rabbis kept stacking up more and more commandments.  Till the time of Christ, you got 600 commands, 600 little specific things that they had to do.  There was no human way to be able to crank out all 600 of those things all the time.  So, since they couldn't do that all the time, the rabbis had to accommodate.  I mean if...if the only way you could stay right with God was to keep the law...and there were so many rules that you couldn't keep 'em, you were really in a bad place.  So the rabbis came along and divided the laws into the light laws and the heavy laws.  And they said, "The heavy laws are, you know, just that.  They're heavy.  They're binding.  The lights, ahhhhh, you can give a little on those."  Some rabbis even went further than that, and some rabbis taught that if a man selected just one great precept to observe, he could disregard all the rest. 

     Now, you see, they did that because of the absolute hopelessness of the legal system.  God was trying to show them its hopelessness.  But instead of accepting its hopelessness and turning to faith in God as the only hope of salvation, they just eliminated all the necessity of the law down to any one that might wanna keep.  And, of course, that made an argument about which one they'd have to keep.  Which was the great one?  And if they kept the great one, they could let the rest flop.  Which was the one thing that, if God had a choice, He would want them to keep and not others?  And so the question comes in verse 36.  "Which is the great commandment?"  And Jesus said, "Here it is.  Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  The second is like it, Love thy neighbor as thyself."  You can imagine the reaction of the lawyer.  "Oooooh.  That's a small thing." 

     But, you see, the first great moral principle stated, not in the Ten Commandments, but implied, but stated here by our Lord Jesus Christ is to love God with all your faculties.  That's basic to commitment.  That's where it all begins.  And, friends, the loving here, it has a sentiment to it.  It is love with your heart.  There is feeling.  There is affection.  There is understanding.  But it is also loving with your soul.  Then there is love with the mind, the intellect.  Every dimension of man is called upon to love God.  Now, how is that love manifested?  We saw it before.  It's manifested in self-sacrificing obedience...Self-sacrificing obedience. 

     You know, in Revelation 2, when Ephesus left its first love, it wasn't just the loss of sentiment.  It was the loss of obedience.  They ceased obeying the principles they knew to be true, and it caused the dissolution of the great church at Ephesus, founded by Paul and pastured by Timothy.  Sad.  Basic to commitment is to love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.  And that's what Jesus wanted out of Peter, and He defined that love as sacrifice.  Service to God.  Obedience to God. 

     Second principle we mentioned last time is in the same passage.  Commitment to love the brothers.  The second principle of commitment is to love one another.  Over and over again, the New Testament.  Philippians, 1 Peter, over and over again, love each other, love each other, love each other.  It becomes a recurring theme in 1 John and as well as other books.  Even 1 Thessalonians says that we have been taught of God to love one another.  So he says in the next verse, 1 Thessalonians 4:10, "Increase in love toward one another."  Then in the 12th verse, he says, "That the outsiders may know the legitimacy of your Christianity."  Loving each other is so basic.  It has the purpose of evangelism.  It has the purpose of...of strengthening each other, of serving each other. 

     Now, mark this, the second commandment is, "To love thy neighbor as thyself."  Now, you remember what I told you last week?  John 13, you have the illustration of Jesus loved His dis