Let me invite you to open the Bible to Matthew chapter 18. We're going to be looking this morning at verses 7 to 9. You'll find it in Pew Bible on page 823 or in the bulletin, I think, on page 8. Please stand. A reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, verses 7 to 9. Jesus said, woe to the world for temptations to sin. For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Gracious Heavenly Father, these are sober words from your son. We pray that you'd please send your Holy Spirit upon us, that you would put away from us the distractions that would keep us from hearing what he has to say, that that same spirit would open our ears and our hearts and give us grace, Father, that we would hear what your son says. Believe it, obey it, Father, and truly rejoice in it for Jesus' sake, amen. Amen, please be seated. Many years ago, I lived and worked in Anchorage, Alaska in my previous career, which was in politics. And I remember going to lunch with a very good friend of mine who was in the same line of work. And we went to a little restaurant across the street from the state capitol in Juneau. And we were having a wonderful lunch. And his background was sort of former Christian. been involved in a large charismatic church in Los Angeles. And for whatever reason, and I'm not really clear on how this happened for him, but he kind of drifted very far away from his initial Christian discipleship. And when I knew him, he was a very, very worldly guy. He was a good friend. He was very funny, very nice guy. We did a lot of stuff together in the political world. and we were having a nice lunch, but our conversation drifted into theology. It was very early in my Christian life. I'd been walking with the Lord for, at that time, just a few years, and so we were there as two politician types having a nice lunch, and in our theological ramblings, my friend said, you know, Bill, I don't believe there's such a thing as sin. And it was one of those kinds of existential moments where my brain stopped for a second. It felt like it lasted a very long time, but I was really struck by his words for a couple reasons. It was kind of a jarring thing for him to say. And secondly, I thought, you know, I live as though I agree with him. The political world is a world that is very difficult to remain a Christian in. And in that moment that felt like an eternity, I just very, like in an instant, processed my life and my career in politics specifically, but also just the way I live my life as a young person at that stage in my life. And somehow or other, I managed to get through that eternal moment and I said to him, you know, I do believe in sin. I told him not only do I believe in it, I know a bit about it and I've experienced it. And so I have to say I disagree with you. And we very quickly changed the subject. But I kept thinking about it. I kept dwelling on this idea of the reality of sin and also its impact on me personally. And it was actually in this process of thinking through sin and thinking through my own relationship to the sinful world including politics, that at that point for me, that led me to leave my political career and make the crazy decision to go to seminary. And so I'm standing here today in part because of this conversation 35 years ago, 40 years ago now about sin. It's been on my mind very much this week as we've turned in our sermon series on Matthew to this chapter, which is about this whole chapter, actually, and this particular section, which is about the reality of sin. It's a very important topic for Christians to think through, partly because we've all had personal experience of it. In fact, my experience is the longer you're a Christian, the more you are conscious of your struggle with sin. I was a little bit aware of it, and today, a few years later, very conscious of it. It is a reality, and I think it's a reality until we go to glory with God in the fullness of time. That struggle is something that will be a part of our life, our whole life. And it's certainly something we as Christians need to think through and think about, which makes it very sad that in the church today you can, in some circles, not all circles, some circles are obsessed with it in an unhealthy way and will teach very, very unhelpful things. But more and more I think we live in a time when the church doesn't want to talk about sin. I've been told that what we did this morning, Confess Our Sins, I'm told regularly by people they'd never been at a church service where they did that. It is possible to go to a church. It's possible to go to an evangelical church. without actually thinking seriously through the reality of sin. So, what we're going to do this morning is very counter-cultural. We're going to take a whole Sunday morning to think through the reality of sin and its significance. I've called this morning's sermon, Temptation, Sin, and the King. I'm picking up the king because Matthew's gospel focuses on the kingship of Christ. And I want to show, by looking at this particular passage as well as the wider context, what Jesus has to do with our reality of sin. So I hope you'll join me as we look together at these three verses, just three verses. But I'd like for us to take it pretty seriously and think seriously about a very serious topic. So I've got three headings for you. You'll see them in the bulletin. The Seriousness of Temptation, that's verse seven. The Seriousness of Sin, that's verses eight and nine. And the Seriousness of the King. And I'm gonna make a case from the context in which this passage comes to us. So let's think first of all about verse seven. The Seriousness of Temptation. Look at what the Lord Jesus says to his disciples. Woe to the world for temptations to sin. For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. Just think for a moment about this one verse that introduces this important, serious topic. If you Look on page 8, you'll actually see the Greek translation of this, the Greek text of this passage. Of course, Matthew's Gospel comes to us originally in the Greek. And if you look at verse 7, you'll see one Greek word showing up three times. And it doesn't actually necessarily line up with the way it appears in English. The Greek word is skandalon. It's where we get the word scandal, scandalone. Three times that word or an immediate cognate of that word, that is a word that's related to that word, shows up. Three times in this one verse. It shows up in verse 7, the first reference to temptations to sin. Woe to the world for temptations to sin. Temptations to sin is scandalone. It's plural, and it's a noun. If you look at the second sentence in that one verse, for it is necessary that temptations, scandalon, are cognate of that. Again, a noun, plural. But woe to the one by whom the temptation, scandalon, single noun. How temptation comes. Jesus starts this section on sin by talking about the reality of temptation. And he uses, as it's translated in Greek, this idea of scandal. Greek word, which Matthew here writes in to summarize what Jesus says, skandalon, is here translated temptation, and it often is translated temptation. But it's also often translated stumbling block. Temptation actually sounds sort of neutral in a way, but stumbling block. It's actually something that causes harm. The word literally means the trap spring in a trap. That's the way Jesus describes this reality of temptation, which is part of the world we live in, this reality of temptation. Jesus actually says it's necessary or inevitable. It's part of the world in which we live. It's part of the world in which we live because people are not robots and people behave in a way and do certain things and have certain interactions that are stumbling blocks. They are inevitable in a world where sinners like us live because we're always interacting with each other. So it's not a morally neutral, not just something that could be tempting to us. It's something that could cause us to stumble and fall and be trapped. That's what Jesus is talking about. It is not something morally neutral. It's something loaded with significance for our moral lives and our spiritual lives. Well, I want us to think about the seriousness of that. Do we actually take that to heart? I don't think we do. Let me put it this way. I don't think I do enough. I don't know that I am sufficiently conscious of all the potential places for me to stumble and to be trapped. And I think that's probably true for most of us. We actually live in a place where the world is throwing that at us constantly. The world as in all of us dealing with all of us. That's the sense of the world here. The whole of humanity. The world is throwing temptation at us. Sometimes we think the devil does it, and I imagine the devil delights in it, may have a role in it. But actually, Jesus emphasizes that it's us who throw the temptations, the stumbling blocks, the trip springs. It's us. We do this among ourselves and to ourselves. And it's very, very serious, says Jesus. This couple of years ago, the PCA did a study on human sexuality. And specifically, we're dealing with the very touchy subject of sexual sin. We live in a world that's preoccupied and semi-obsessed, not semi, totally obsessed with sexuality. And of course the PCA, like every church, is wrestling with how do we respond to what's going on in the world? What the world is throwing at us, how do we respond to it? And there's a brilliant paper. It took a couple of years. It took several editions. It took the hard work of many deeply committed Presbyterians working together, praying together, listening together to the Bible, this text included, trying to think through what do we say to the reality of sexual sin in our society and in the world where we live? And they made the point with an exclamation point that this is a very serious topic. It's not something that's a sidebar issue. Some people say, is it a gospel issue? Yes, it's a gospel issue because it has to do with a stumbling block to the gospel. It has to do with a trap that people fall into. It's a gospel issue because Jesus deals with it. at this very significant place in his life and ministry. He's on his way to the cross, he's just left the Mount of Transfiguration, and he pauses as he makes his way to talk about the reality and the seriousness of sin. And brothers and sisters, we're complete knuckleheads if we don't pay attention to him. He loves us enough to warn us and to tell us the truth. And so that's what he's doing here. Out of love, he's telling us the truth about the seriousness of temptation, which bombards us. Of course, it's not merely sexual sin. We are surrounded by every imaginable kind of sin, every imaginable kind of temptation. And so this passage warns us, well, woe to the world. Whoa, that's that's a strong sort of old fashioned Bible word. It was it was the word used in the Old Testament frequently for wrath and judgment. This this is that serious to the Lord. There are instances in in the Old Testament where that word precedes a word of judgment on kingdoms. So Jesus is telling us this this temptation business, these stumbling blocks, and it's serious, take it seriously as he speaks to his disciples in love. So let's take it seriously, let's take temptation seriously. There's another word which doesn't actually show up in this passage, but it's a word that is mentioned in this study document I mentioned to you, and it's a word that St. Augustine, I love Augustine, And Augustine wrestled with the reality of sin. He wrestled with it in his own life. He's not writing abstractly. He also knew about the reality of sin. And so St. Augustine used a word called concupiscence. Concupiscence. It's not a word you hear all that often today because our world doesn't think much about sin, but Augustine did. Concupiscence. Well, it's usually taken to be a tendency to sexual sins. But actually, the way Augustine used the word is a tendency to sin at all. It's the propensity to sin which forms the reaction to the stumbling blocks and the trip springs and the temptations around us. Augustine pointed out that that openness, that tendency, is part of our inheritance in original sin. That proneness, that concupiscence, he said, is the fruit of that initial sin which has infected our entire culture, our entire species. We're all infected by it, and we live it out day by day by day. this ongoing tendency to sin, whether it's sexual or something else. Augustine actually taught that that tendency is part of the sin reality. There's a very narrow line between temptation and sin. We're susceptible to the inevitable reality of temptation in our world. We're susceptible to it. There's an external dimension and an internal dimension. The external dimension is how bad does culture get What constraints are there in our society, in our cities, in our nations? What constraints are there that externally make it more difficult to have these stumbling blocks in front of us? And I have to say, we live in an age where there are virtually, well, there are almost no external constraints. I mean, it's actually gotten all caught up in this idea of freedom. Well, you're making it really plain. We're free to mess up our lives in every conceivable way. There are very few constraints, and the few that remain seem to be falling daily. So that narrow division between temptation and sin externally is getting more and more complicated. There's a pornography crisis. I have in my pocket here the world's largest pornography store. We all, almost all of us, have one that we carry around with us. We live in a crisis. That external constraint which was a gift to us in many ways. It was abused. We got to acknowledge that. There were all kinds of weird things that came along with it, but there were these constraints culturally that we as individuals had constructed around and within our society, but those external constraints are disappearing. The exclamation point at the end of verse 7, just end of the verse sentence of verse 7, that exclamation point gets bigger and bigger and there are more and more exclamation points. Woe to the world for temptations to sin. Woe to the world in which we live as these external constraints disappear. There are also internal realities. There's the external realities. There are internal realities. Personal realities. The world is involved, and I am involved. In fact, when Jesus turns to addressing this reality, he starts talking about hands and feet and eyes. Because I am a contributor to this crisis. I am a contributor to this reality. In lots of different ways, I'm a contributor, you're a contributor. It's very personal. There's an internal dimension to this ongoing struggle that Jesus wants us to know about. He's already told us this. It's not the outside part that poisons us, it's what's inside, right? It's hands and feet and eyes. It's us. We're a dimension of this ongoing serious struggle with temptation in our world. And that personal contribution to this problem is deeply personal. We all have our own unique formula. It is literally as unique as your DNA. You know how your DNA is billions of, how many in a DNA, James? A lot. James knowingly says a lot. There are a lot of dimensions in every human being's DNA. And the same is true for our engagement with sin, our concupiscence. Our vulnerabilities are deeply personal. They're shaped by a whole lifetime, especially our early years. But all of our life is involved in this struggle. In fact, one of Augustine's favorite ways of describing it was wounds. We all have our own unique set of wounds. My wounds are different from your wounds. Your wounds are different from mine. We all have our own unique set of vulnerabilities that are the result of a lifetime of sinful interaction with people, the world just throwing stuff at us over a lifetime in a fallen world. So Jesus sets the stage for what he's going to say about sin by talking about the seriousness of temptation and how we are on our own vulnerable to it. And we need to know that. If we don't know that, we'll just be sitting ducks. The seriousness of temptation is very, very important, and Jesus loves us enough to tell us that. And I think it's my responsibility to remind all of us of that reality, both the external and the internal sense of temptation, stumbling blocks. He actually says, Woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. Jesus has used similar language. If you look back up at the previous verse, verse six, whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, by the way, Scandalon shows up again. It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Jesus cares deeply. And he says, woe to the one by whom scandalon comes. Woe to the one by whom a stumbling block is thrust into my path and your path. So the seriousness of temptation. Verses eight and nine, Jesus turns to talk about the seriousness of sin, and he does it by emphasizing a certain aspect of this sinful reality. Look at verse 8. If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. Now, the noun form of scandalone shows up three times in verse seven. The verbal form shows up twice in these two verses, verses eight and nine, where if you look at the passage, if your hand or foot causes you to sin. That is the noun scandaline, a cognate, as a verb. That's the same Greek word set, if it causes you to sin, if you look a little bit further down in verse nine, if your eye causes you to sin, that's again, a cognate of that same Greek word, a verb, scandalon. It appears to be like this in, in the context of this passage, the way to understand this is the temptation, that scandalon is as a noun, a potential reality. It is something that can cause us to stumble. As a verb, it appears to mean, I've stumbled. So the temptation is the potential to stumble. The verb is, I'm doing it. I'm stumbling now. I have stumbled. And Jesus wants us to know how extremely important that stumbling is. It is not a little thing. It is not a little thing, and that's very important for us to get straight. Let me just say this. It's very important for us who preach grace to get this straight. To preach grace does not mean we don't deal with sin. It may affect the way we deal with sin. the way we teach and preach about sin. It does not dismiss us from this serious issue. As Christians who believe in the doctrines of grace, this passage lovingly reminds us of the seriousness of this reality. Sin is serious for us. We know it's serious because of the punishment, the way Jesus deals with it. The punishment is woe to those who cause it, and the way of treating it is to cut off your hand or feet, your hands or feet, or pluck out your eye. Now, something very important to be very clear on when we come across passages like this one, which use extremely strong language. There's a grammatical term called hyperbole. I want to be plain. hyperbolic language, you don't dismiss it, but you need to understand it. Jesus, just a couple Sundays ago, we read, said, move a mountain with your prayers. To my knowledge, there are no instances of anybody ever moving a mountain. Jesus didn't move a mountain. The point of that metaphor, that illustration, was to underscore the awesome power of prayer. the extent to which you and I can impact the world around us through our prayers. There's not really a particular reason to move a mountain. But Jesus uses this very strong language to teach us the power, the extent of prayerfulness as a Christian value. Well here, Jesus uses this strong hyperbolic language to talk about how serious sin is. If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off, throw it away. If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. Now, again, I'll stress this is hyperbolic language. It was the way people spoke in the time in which Jesus lived. People still use hyperbole today. It does not mean that if you have a sin struggle with something you see with your eyes that you should go home this afternoon and pluck your eye out. I know that because there are, to my knowledge, virtually no recorded instances of anybody ever doing that and the ones that did it were mentally unwell. Jesus is not telling us to chop off a hand or a foot or to pluck out our eye. We know that because the disciples didn't do it. That was not something the early church experienced. It actually came about only later with unhealthy fixations on asceticism and all kinds of misunderstandings. That was not the apostolic church and that should not be our reaction to these words. What is Jesus saying? He's saying take sin seriously. Put it to death. Struggle with it. Serious stuff, sin is very, very, very serious. Our interaction with the stumbling blocks and temptations around us is very, very serious. Theology has traditionally spoken of seven deadly sins, pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. I've been guilty of all of those because it's virtually the universal human experience to wrestle with these seven deadly sins. They're not just for the particularly weak among us. They're virtually, as I say, universal. We all wrestle with these in one way or another at one time or another. So Jesus is saying that those universal experiences are serious They're serious. Being a grace-conscious Christian must not distract us from the seriousness of sin. So Jesus here underscores the serious response that is called for, taking it seriously and doing something serious to address that reality in life. I've said before in this section, the punishment fits the crime and the treatment fits the disease. Treatment fits the disease. You can tell how serious a condition is by the seriousness of the treatment. If the doctor tells you take an aspirin and get a little extra sleep, you'll know it's, well, it's probably not the most enjoyable experience, but I'm probably not going to die with it. If the doctor says, as doctors sometimes do, that extreme things are called for, the treatment is serious, then you know what it's treating is serious. And that's the way it is with sin. Jesus intentionally uses very, very strong language to describe how we deal with this reality. So the seriousness of temptation, the seriousness of sin. I want to deal with the seriousness of the king. And may I just say this is the most important part, really. It's the most important part. And it's actually, I've said it's coming from context. Will and I were talking this morning about the importance of context. If you take a single verse or if you take a single passage or you take a single chapter, in fact, if you take a single book and isolate it completely from everything else, you're going to almost certainly wind up misunderstanding it. Because the Bible, like all human relationships, is contextual. There's a context. There's a context of a paragraph, there's a context of a chapter, there's a context of a book, there's a context of a testament, there's a context of the whole Bible. And in this particular passage, the context is essential to understanding what Jesus is saying. Let's back up, let's try to figure out the context of this important warning about the seriousness of sin and what we do about it. It begins with the transfiguration, of course it begins in the gospel, the life, the birth, life, ministry of Jesus. But the immediate context begins in chapter 17, the transfiguration. Jesus has shown himself not only to be a man who walked with the disciples through the world in Palestine in his day, a wonder worker, a great teacher who gave little glimpses, little bits of evidence, sometimes really, really significant bits of evidence. But at the Transfiguration, Jesus is revealed for a moment in his glory. This man that they've been fishing with and teaching with and ministering with, it turns out, we learn in the story of the Transfiguration, he's shown in his divinity, just for a glimpse, a moment. That's what the Transfiguration amounts to. He's shown superior to Moses and Elijah. He's shown over the Old and the New Testaments. He's shown as Lord over everything. And as we've seen from the Mount of Transfiguration, he immediately went down the mountain and interacted with an epileptic child and healed a little boy on his way. I've always been struck by that. That's how Jesus deals with us as individuals. He comes to us as individuals and he heals us in love. So that's part of the context. It's also in the context of verse 22, chapter 17, verse 22. The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men and they will kill him and he will be raised on the third day. Jesus is pointing ahead this short time from that point to Good Friday. Jesus is actually in the process of making his way to the cross. So we're within a short period of time to Jesus being dead on a cross. That's part of the context. He's pointing ahead to that. We see it also in this interaction about what Jesus says in chapter 18, verse five about, or sorry, verse four, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And in verse, Five, Jesus uses the picture of a child and a little one in verse six. Jesus is focusing on his little ones. He cares deeply about his little ones. Those, whether they're chronologically young or whether they are adults who have responded to the gospel, who have believed in him, they are to him his little ones. He loves them. He is committed to them. He is deeply committed to them. He is committed to their healing. He's committed to helping them to be whole. So the Jesus who talks to us about the seriousness of temptation and the seriousness of sin is not a disinterested moral lawgiver who simply passes down rules and instructions and says, I hope you do these things. This would be really good if you did these things. See you later. That is not the Jesus of Matthew. That is not the Jesus of the gospel. The Jesus who warns us about the seriousness of temptation and sin is the Jesus who dies on the cross for sinners. So the context is absolutely essential. And the immediate context is worth noting. All of chapter 18 is like this. It's never really struck me before how chapter 18 is put together. Chapter 18 verse 5 uses this picture of little ones, the ones who come to Jesus. Chapter 18 verse 14 again uses this idea of little ones, the parable of the lost sheep. We'll be looking at this next Sunday. Jesus uses here the expression of little ones. And actually he says the father in heaven is not willing for any of these little ones to perish. We'll be looking at this next Sunday as part of the immediate context of what Jesus says about sinfulness. If you look a little further down, chapter 18, verse 15, it has to do when your brother sins against you. He's talking about the church, and he actually is casting his eyes beyond the cross, beyond the resurrection, beyond the ascension, beyond Pentecost, right down to 2024. If your brother sins against you, guess what, Jesus says, it is going to be a part of your life and your most intimate fellowship until I come again. And he actually gives some instructions, some loving instructions. This is what you do. He's already said we should forgive 77 times, which is another way of saying, duh, as many times as it happens. You don't get out your calculator and start counting out 77. Seven. Seven means as many as it happens. That's how Jesus tells you and me to deal with people sinning against us. And He actually says, if you don't do that, again speaking hyperbolically, if you don't do that, God's not going to do it for you. The idea is God's going to do it for you. Now you do it for others. You do it for those who sin against you. And church life is meant to be characterized by this, the reality of taking sin seriously, dealing with it seriously, but always with an eye towards reconciliation and forgiveness. It doesn't always work out that way, but that is always the intention. Reconciliation and forgiveness, that is the purpose of discipline and This whole process Jesus lays out in chapter 18, verses 15 to 20. And then finally, verses 21 to 35 is called what? The unforgiving servant. There's a king going away. We'll look at this in a few weeks. The king's going away and he's dealing with his servant. He forgives his servant everything. And then his servant turns around and doesn't forgive other people. And that did not make the king happy. So all this context is pointing towards who this teacher is. Who is this king who's teaching us about temptation and sin? Is he a king who's looking for an excuse to blast us with his thunderbolt? Or is he a loving king committed to his people committed to their godliness, committed to their growth in Christ-likeness, committed to Him, loving them enough to give them words of warning in the strongest language, all within the context of love. You will not understand this passage unless you understand it comes to us from a Savior who dies for us as sinners. He dies for us as sinners. I want to give another little commercial for a book that I very, very highly recommend. I read it years ago. I've been reading it off and on as we've been doing this series on Matthew's Gospel. I couldn't put it down this week, reading it for this morning. It's called The Mortification of Sin, and it's 150 pages. It's one of the best little books I think you could get on this topic, in which a great Puritan theologian named John Owen in the 1600s, wrote an exposition. It's actually an exposition. It's a summary of sermons on Romans 8, verse 13, where Paul says we should mortify the sin in our life. In fact, he says the spirit, he says, if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live. And he writes this 150-page book an exposition, sort of an unpacking of that, pulling out other Bible passages. And it's a really, really helpful book. I commend it to you. It speaks specifically to this passage, by the way. John Owen has a lot to say about what Jesus says here, as well as back in Chapter 5. If you remember back in Chapter 5, we've already looked at this language. Jesus says, if your eye causes you to lust, pluck out your eye. He's already said that. Right? It's nothing brand new. He's already said sin is serious. Here he's saying it again in this context of moving towards the cross. He wants us to know that dealing with sin is going to require a lot. It is not something that can be dealt with easily. And the disciples only have the vaguest idea of what he's talking about. We really have to grit our teeth hard on this one, I guess, Jesus. You're saying, right? Is that what you're saying? No, that's not what he's saying. He is not saying that it's up to us. He's actually underscoring the seriousness of what the healing for sin, dealing with sin, it's going to take a lot. You know what it's going to take? It's going to take the sinless one taking our place on the cross giving us his righteousness and giving us his spirit over time to take his word and apply it to our sinful, broken, resistant, rebellious hearts. It does not happen like that. And I feel like I've made a tiny baby step this week in engaging this passage. What is Jesus telling us? He's telling us it's serious, so serious that I am going to the cross to die for you. Now, I've got to read one of the other things about this particular copy. This is The Mortification of Sin by John Owen with an introduction by J.I. Packer. And if you know me, you know I'm a big fan of J.I. Packer. He wrote a brilliant introduction. The introduction's worth the book. I mean, get the book, read the introduction. The introductions are very precious. Dr. Packer, who I actually had the privilege of knowing, Dr. Packer, this was years ago, wrote, he lays out what Owen was doing. He said, what to do? Here was Owen's answer. He's laid out the dark backdrop of sin and temptation, right? What to do? Here was Owen's answer in essence. Have the holiness of God clear in your mind. Remember that sin desensitizes you to itself. Watch, that is, prepare to recognize it and search it out within you by disciplined, Bible-based, spirit-led self-examination. And then, get this, focus on the living Christ and his love for you on the cross. Pray, asking for strength to say no to sin's suggestions and to fortify yourself against bad habits by forming good ones contrary to them. And ask Christ to kill the sinful urge you are fighting. as the theophanic angel in C.S. Lewis's great divorce tells the man with the lizard to do. More about that briefly in a second. Does it work? Yes, said J.I. Packer. Nearly 70 years on, I can testify to that. Now, context is important. He is not saying. There's a paragraph-long magic formula that we invoke in this magic incantation of a couple of things we do tonight when we get ready to say our bedtime prayers. It's not like that. He's saying 70 years on, I'm still learning this. I'm still living this out. I've seen it help me, change me over my entire life. And I think that's part of the context for that particular comment. And then looking at the biblical context, that's what the disciples are learning about Jesus. He came to save the lost sheep. He came to save the wayward prodigal son. He loves us in spite of our brokenness. He does not turn his back on us. We are his little ones. He loves us. He protects us. He warns us. I want to finish by this story about the red lizard. Anybody read The Great Divorce? I know Will's read it probably last weekend. Have you read it? Yeah. Will's probably read it. I don't know how many times you've read The Great Divorce. It's a great book. It's about a visit to heaven and this heavenly vision. And there's a man in this vision that C.S. Lewis describes. He was shrunken and he had a red lizard with him. And the observer sees this man with his red lizard, and the red lizard is whispering in his ear, constantly whispering in his ear. And the observer notes this, and the man's constantly distracted by the red lizard, who's whispering in his ear. And an angel appears, this theophanic vision, which Lewis talks about, an angel appears. And the angel says, do you want me to deal with this red lizard? And the man said, well, I've been thinking about it, maybe. And the angel said, now's the time. Do you want me to deal with this red lizard that's whispering in your ear and distracting you? The man said, well, maybe not today. And the lizard's whispering in his ear, maybe not today. I've got some other things to take care of. The angel says, now's the day. He said, well, maybe not today. He said, this is all days. This existential moment. Is there such a thing as sin? This is all days wrapped into one. Do you want me to deal with this lizard? And the angel reaches out. The man says, well, maybe, but I'm not sure. The angel touches the man. And the man says, well, maybe not. I've changed my mind. Maybe not at this very moment. The angel says, this is all moments. This is all moments. This moment is all moments. Do you want me to deal with the lizard? The man said, it's starting to hurt. It doesn't feel good. It's unpleasant. Stop. The angel said, do you want me to deal with the lizard? Well, I'm not sure. I feel like it's going to hurt me really bad. I don't know what I'll do. It'll be different. The angel says, do you want me to deal with the lizard? And the man mutters a yes. And the angel takes the lizard and destroys it, or appears to destroy it. He removes it. And the lizard responds. He shrinks. He's changed. But the man is set free, he's changed by the work of the angel who comes in the name of the Lord, who comes in the name of Jesus. And the lizard represented for this man the whispering temptations, the stumbling blocks, the trip springs in our life that we carry around with us, our own unique set of them that we carry around with us. And Lewis's point, again, it was a dream, it's not the Bible, it's a dream, but his point was that deliverance from these ongoing temptations, deliverance from this ongoing lifestyle of sin, sin, sin, the way we tackle it is not by our gritting our teeth with our set of rules or some formula we're gonna use. I've read all those books. No, the way that Lewis says you deal with it, and I believe far more importantly, the way this passage is teaching us to deal with it, is we turn to Jesus. We call out to Jesus. We focus on Jesus. We pray to Jesus. We remember what Jesus has done for us on the cross. In other words, we remind ourselves of this relationship that we have with Jesus because he has set his love on us. Because he has brought us to himself and he's called us to himself. And we're seeking to follow along behind him imperfectly. And when we stumble, as we will, we run back to Jesus. We get up, we run back to Jesus as he gives us the power to do. And throughout this entire process, it's the work of God, the Son, the Spirit, the Father, working in our lives to draw us towards Christ and a transformed life, which will impact the way I live my life and you live your life and the way we witness to Jesus. It's all a oneness. It's this picture that Jesus presents of dealing with the seriousness of temptation and sin, remembering that we're the lost sheep, remembering that we're the little ones, remembering that we have a responsibility to take care of other people, remembering the transfigured Christ. You can't pull out one verse and that's all it's about. You've got to look at the entire message of the gospel. And it's when we look at the entire message of the gospel, As we take it seriously, as we take the King seriously, that over time, by the power of the Spirit, you and I are delivered from those behaviors and attitudes of action and thought and heart and mind that are destructive, that would pull us away. We repent of those things and turn from those things as we seek to follow along the one who has died for us. So, that's what Jesus has to say about the seriousness of temptation and sin, I believe, in the context of this little passage. He wants us to know how serious they are and how serious he is to heal us, restore us, forgive us, and keep us as his own.