Join us as we confront the false notion of escaping the consequences of wrongdoing, while we seek enlightenment from ancient wisdom to direct our paths. The episode walks us through the importance of having steadfast principles and goals and how these elements aid in making sound decisions. We touch upon the wisdom of Solomon and the profound warnings he left for those seeking to make sense of their actions when faced with moral dilemmas. Ultimately, our discussion leads us to emphasize the value of the Ten Commandments as pillars for structuring all of life’s choices.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Well, what kind of a day do you have tomorrow? Are there some decisions coming up that have got you worried? Maybe 10 o’clock tomorrow morning you’ve got to make a decision about your job? You surely have some decisions coming up. Of course, some of life’s toughest decisions come up with no warning at all. You don’t know it’s coming in at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning. All of a sudden, you’re faced with something, a life-changing decision, and you’ve got to make your decision right now. Do you have any kind of a framework within which you make those decisions, or do you just do what feels good at the moment? Or shall we just pull out a coin and flip a coin and heads I win, tails I lose, and off we go into the sunset? Is that the way it works? I remember when I was a boy, that’s the way I solved lots of very important questions like, did I really want a Hershey bar here or would a Baby Ruth be more in line with what I wanted? So I pulled a little coin out of my pocket, I flipped the coin, heads I took to Hershey’s, tails I took to Baby Ruth. It was easy. Well, sort of easy. What really made it easy about it was that if I didn’t get the one I wanted on the first flip of the coin, I could always go for two out of three. And I learned early on that that helped me understand what it was that I really wanted after all. But I’m afraid a lot of us make our decision on this kind of thing about what feels good at the moment or what will cause us the least amount of pain at the moment more likely. You know, everyone needs a framework in which they make their life decisions. And a framework for making decisions has two very important parts. I’ve already talked a great deal about goals. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t have a chance of getting there. And having some sort of a structure in your mind of life goals and objectives and things you’re trying to get done really helps you when decision time comes. You can say, is this going to help me toward my goals or is this not going to help me toward my goals? And it makes the decision a lot easier. But that’s not all you need. You also need for the decision-making process a sort or a set of moral and ethical standards a knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, some consistent guide to life that you follow, come what may. Now, there’s a hazard built into life that you don’t think about very often. And the hazard is this. When you do wrong, you usually get away with it. Right? Most people who commit crimes don’t go to jail. In fact, relatively few of them do. And you and I can complain a great deal about that. But if we want to tell the truth, get up and look yourself in the mirror and say, okay, there you are. Don’t you usually get away with it when you do wrong? Now, I know you don’t really get away with it, but it surely seems as though you do. And then there’s a perception that if no one ever finds out, then you really have gotten away with it. Because until somebody finds out, we think we have, we’re not sure we have, but maybe someone will find out, and then it will come home to roost. Now, we’re looking for wisdom here. We’re wanting to understand life here. We’re trying to make our lives work. And since we’re looking for wisdom, we might check with the man who has the greatest gift of wisdom God ever gave to man. His name was Solomon. He was a king. And Solomon said this. It’s a difficult sentence, so listen carefully. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. That’s a passage worth memorizing and remembering because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, and that is the way life works. There’s all kinds of bad stuff that happens out there. And even when you do kind of get caught, and they put the cuffs on you and take you to jail, you call your lawyer, your lawyer gets you out on the street, and it may be a year, it may be two, who knows when, if ever, you’ll actually do any time because of an evil work. And because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, so there’s a connection between the act and the punishment, hey, there’s no worry. Why should I worry? Why should I bereave my soul of something that I want? Why should I withhold from myself something I desire? I’ll just steal it. And the chances are I’ll get away with it. That’s the way a lot of people live their lives. I think Solomon was right that in this world one of the great hazards of life is that we do wrong and we seem to get away with it. Now he went on to say, though a sinner do evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, yet surely I know two things. One, it will be well with them that fear God. And two, it is not going to be well with the wicked and he’s not really going to prolong his days. He’s going to be like a shadow because he doesn’t fear God. You know, I’ll tell you the truth. I think a lot of Christians go astray because they don’t pay enough attention to the Old Testament. They’re not really that familiar with books like Ecclesiastes. And this passage I read is from Ecclesiastes 8, beginning in verse 11. And they don’t have these concepts in their mind for wisdom’s sake alone, to realize that here is something that God gave a man a gift of wisdom. The man wrote this down for us, and then here we go living our lives without the benefit of knowing what he said. We do things, and we get away with them, and we become emboldened. So it’s imperative that we have some level of discipline somewhere in our lives. Now, when we were children, we were under a form of discipline. Your daddy probably told you, don’t play in the street. Don’t even go into the street. Okay, I got it, Dad. Don’t play in the street. Don’t run into the street. So when you were playing ball in the yard and all excited and carried away with the excitement of the game and the ball rolled over the curb and into the street, what did you do? Well, shucks, if you’re like me, you ran after it. Little kids don’t think things over. We don’t sit and think about it. We don’t stop at the curb automatically and say, now I want to be a good little boy. I’m not going into the street because dad said don’t go there. I don’t know about you, but I was impulsive. I didn’t think about it. I was already out in the street, had the ball, and back over the curb, and the thought of my dad, what he said, had not even crossed my mind. Well, it hadn’t crossed my mind the first time I did it. Now, when you ran out after it and grabbed it and brought it back, what happened to you? Probably nothing. And in the young mind, a point was made. The point was, hey, there’s no real danger in the street. On the other hand, it is possible that your dad saw you run into the street. He happened to be looking up from his work in the flower beds and saw you go tearing out of the street, and he came wandering out and met you when you got back to the curb, grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, and disciplined you for it. Now, the next time something like this happened, you might have looked around for dad before you ran into the street. Because the message that has kind of subtly gotten home to all of us by the sequence of events is, it’s not exactly the street that is the danger. Dad is. And so, gently insinuated into the young mind is the idea, if I don’t get caught by Dad, I got away with it. There was no penalty. There was no punishment. Nothing, no chastisement. If Dad sees me, that’s bad. If Dad doesn’t see me, that’s good. And I have to be somewhat careful because Dad’s got eyes in the back of his head. Moms especially have eyes in the back of their head. And they have a way of knowing what we have done even when we don’t know how in the world they ever knew it. So a lot of us got in the habit of doing what Dad said even when Dad was nowhere around. But generally, discipline prevails, and most of us survive our childhood impulsiveness. Watchful parents, neighbors, and police protect us during these vulnerable years. But it’s surprising how, well, what shall we say, childish some of us are, even when we grow up and some of the old lessons we learned in childhood hang on to us. If nothing happened to me, we think, I got away with it. If nobody finds out, I got away with it. But the truth is, when you sin, when you do wrong, something does happen. I’ll be back in a moment, and we’ll talk about this.
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Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.
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As I was saying, when you commit a sin, something does happen, even though you don’t get caught, even though nobody knows but you, and even though nothing comes rolling down the mountainside on you right then. The best way I can help you understand this is when a framer comes in to build your house, You know, it’s several stages. You pour the foundation. You get all your plumbing roughed in before that. And then the framers come in. They put up the studs that form the wall of your house. The chances are the framers will put the studs in the wall of your house 18 inches apart. That’s sort of a standard for the old average American home. It takes a lot of studs to frame up a three-bedroom house. Now, if your builder happens to need a couple of studs at home while he’s doing all this stuff and you’re not around, he might just take one or two of them to his house and leave a couple of yours a little further apart. He’ll put the sheetrock and the coverings on the walls and you will never know the difference. Now, when you commit a sin and nothing happens, it is like taking one stud out of one wall. No one will know that it’s gone. The wall looks exactly the same, and there is no apparent difference in the house. But there’s a problem. Because nothing happened, you are almost certain to do it again and again. And another stud is gone, and then another. You know, you could probably take out every other stud in the wall of your house, and no one would tell the difference. At least, they couldn’t tell the difference as long as the wind is not blowing. But when the house comes under stress, the house can collapse around your ears. And you know, character in a man or a woman is a lot like the studs in the wall of a house. You can’t see character very well. You know, a person comes before you, they’re dressed, they’ve got their clothes on, they’ve got their hair cut, and they’re wearing whatever style of glasses they may have, and you look at them and you get an image of this person standing before you, and that’s really just about all you get. After a few minutes of conversation, you begin to develop a few more ideas about this person, but it’s really hard to know what the character of this person is like. Now, Jesus said a lot the same thing about character, and he even used a similar analogy to the one that I’ve used here about what happens when you commit a sin and nothing happens to you. He said in Matthew 7, 21, Not everyone that says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Now, a lot of the conversation about preachers when they get up before you to tell you all about God and what you ought to do and how you live your life have to do with whether or not you’re going to go to heaven or you’re going to go to hell. And they talk about salvation from that perspective. Well, now here’s Jesus who says, not everyone that says to me, Lord, Lord. In other words, just because you call him your Lord, you use the words, doesn’t mean you’re going to enter the kingdom of heaven. He goes on to say, it’s not just the person that names my name, but he that does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Now, I don’t believe in salvation by works. I believe we are saved by the grace of God through faith. But it’s awfully hard to let Jesus’ words slide by without taking notice of what he said here. What he said is the mere profession of faith in Christ with the lips is not good enough. Something has got to happen in the heart. And if something happens in the heart, it’s going to be manifested in the way we live our lives. Just before this, he has made this lengthy statement about by their fruits you shall know them. He says a good tree brings forth good fruit. An evil tree brings forth corrupt fruit. He said it’s just not possible for a corrupt tree to bring forth good fruit. And so you can actually tell by what a person is doing what kind of a person they really are. And so then he follows right on the heels of that and says, Not everybody that says, Lord, Lord, is going to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of my Father, which is in heaven. So, the Father in heaven has a will. And only those who seek and do that will are going into the kingdom of heaven. It’s what Jesus said. What can I tell you? Now, I’m not here to scare anyone. But if we’re going to call ourselves Christian, if we’re going to name the name of Jesus, don’t you think we should really take seriously what that carpenter from Galilee had to say? Now he went on to say, Many are going to say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, haven’t we prophesied in your name, and in your name have cast out devils, and in your name have done many wonderful works? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you. Depart from me, ye that work iniquity. Now if I have the Lord straight here, he is saying that preachers like me are not immune from this judgment. He seems to be saying there are religious people who work iniquity, and he also says that that’s not going to cut it. Then he goes on to make this analogy from a house. “‘Therefore, whosoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man that built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house.’ And it didn’t fall because it was founded upon a rock. What’s that? Well, it’s a man who hears what Jesus says and does it, lives it. He has a framework for the character-making decisions of his life. And he will hurt himself before he will go contrary to that framework for his decisions. And he goes on to say, Everyone that hears these sayings of mine and does them not shall be likened to a foolish man which built his house upon the sand, and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. Now, you’ve probably heard this illustration before. But did you notice that the collapse of this house was deferred? As long as the weather was good, as long as the framework of this house was not stressed in any way, well, it served just fine. It would keep the sun off your head. It would keep the dew off of you during the night. But if a storm comes, if water rises, if the winds blow hard, the thing is going to be down around your ears. Now, if you think you can live the rest of your life without ever encountering a storm, maybe you can afford to cut some corners. But you and I both know you can’t make it that way. But the truth is your life is going to face storms. The truth is you are going to have the winds blow it. The truth is things are going to go bad for you from time to time. And the question is, Do you have the strength of character to go through it? Are you going to collapse under the strain? So I ask about your decisions tomorrow. What’s the framework in which those decisions will be made? Is the frame solid? Are you committed to it? Or do you take a support out of the thing every once in a while just when it suits you? What I’m asking you about is your character and the basis, the foundation upon which that character is built. Now, I can offer you ten heavy-duty studs to start with. In fact, these studs are so heavy we can call them pillars. They’re the Ten Commandments. All of life’s decisions can be built on this framework. But the instant you start making exceptions to any one of them, they are no longer the authority you are. It’s true that when you break these commandments, it often seems that nothing happens. But in truth, something very important happens. You have removed a stud from the wall. You’ve removed a rib from your chest. You have made a break with your character. And pretty soon, you won’t have any chest at all. James made an interesting statement in his epistle, 2nd chapter, verse 9. But if you have respect to persons, you commit sin and are convicted of the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of it all. Now, I’ve heard people talk about that a long time as though, well, if I tell a lie, I am now a thief. I don’t think that’s exactly what James is saying. Listen further. For he that said, do not commit adultery, also said, do not kill. Now, if you commit no adultery, but if you kill, you will become a transgressor of the law. What’s he saying? He is saying the authority that gave you the one is the authority that gave you the other. And when you decide, when you start picking and choosing commandments, when you start making exceptions to that authority, you will become the authority. Christ is no longer the authority. God is no longer the authority. And when you’ve done that… well, then you’ve lost your way.
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Stay with me. I’ll be back in just a moment. For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled Making Life Work No.
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8.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791 or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So James ends it by saying, So speak you and so do as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. The law of liberty. In other words, what we’re dealing with now is a liberty to live our lives within the law. We’re going to be judged by it, but it’s our decision. We get to make the decision. We get to keep God’s law, or we get to break it, whichever way we want to go, but you’d better live your life as somebody that’s going to be judged by a set of standards that are higher than you are. Now, James does not mean to say that you are a killer when you have stolen. What he means to say is that when you have stolen, you have abandoned the law as a guide to life. You know, I don’t think very many Christians really understand the law. They know the law can’t save them. They know they’re justified by faith. And yet at the same time, they know it’s not right for a Christian to steal. They know it’s wrong for a Christian to commit adultery or fornication. They know it’s wrong to do these things. And yet, I think they have gotten lost in the technical arguments about some supposed conflict between law and grace. Can I give you a really simple explanation of that? The law exists to define right and wrong. Grace exists to redeem us from the wrong. Is that too hard? Law defines the difference between right and wrong. It tells us how a person ought to live his life. Well, we don’t do very well at that. We pile up a whole heap of wrong that has to be dealt with. And through His grace, God redeems us from the wrong things that we have done. As a result of the confusion over this, I think a lot of Christians make life-changing decisions without the guidance of the law. The law is given to us to help us understand this way of doing things will help you. This way of doing things is going to bollocks things up. You’re going to be really grievously sorry if you go down this road. I’m afraid many people think of sin in terms of penalties. instead of consequences. And there is a huge difference between these two concepts. Now, do you remember the earlier illustration about a child running into the street after his ball? Yeah, we got that. I remember that. Okay. When he comes back across the curb and dad grabs him by the scruff of the neck and turns him over his knee and paddles his behind, that’s a penalty. If, on the other hand, the child runs across the curb and into the street and a cement truck turns him into jam on the pavement, this is consequences. The consequences of the violation of your dad’s instructions is severe. The penalty, well, that’s a learning thing. The immature Christian concerns himself primarily with the penalties of life. Will I get found out? Will I be embarrassed? Will I get in trouble with God? Will I be shown up? You know, when I grew up, I came to the curb of the street prepared to make my own decisions. The street had not changed. The traffic had not abated. It was still there. The cement truck, if it came along at the wrong time, would turn me into a rather larger pool of jam, but the result would be the same. And the law had not changed. The red and green lights were still there, and they meant don’t cross when it’s red, and when it’s green, you can cross. Now, what had changed? Well, what had changed was me. I was able to deal with these things in terms of the consequences of stupid behavior, not merely the penalties. Before, I waited at the light holding my mother’s hand. She watched the traffic, and she kept us safe. Now I watch the light for myself. Along the way, I learned that what my mom and dad told me was right, that it was good for me, and that it was safe. I did what was right because it was right, not just because someone told me to do it that way. And, you know, what was right and wrong had not changed. What had changed was I had come to a kind of human faith. I believed my mom and dad, and therefore I did what they said. Faith. Faith that they were right. Faith that they knew. I trusted them. It was an obedience of faith. It was no longer an obedience that depended on penalties and enforcement and somebody hitting me over the head or banging me on the backside because I did something wrong. Now Paul, writing to the Romans, made an interesting statement in this regard. He said now to him that is of the power to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began but is now made manifest And by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, it is now made known to all nations for the obedience of faith. And in a way, that’s what I’ve been talking about ever since this broadcast began today. I’m talking about the obedience of faith. What I’m trying to tell you is that somehow, in some way in your life, you need to come to learn to trust God. that when he tells you, don’t lie, there’s a good reason behind it, and you’re not going to lie because you trust him. It’s not a question of whether you can get away with it. It’s not a question of whether you might not ever be found out. You’re not going to lie because it’s wrong. It’s wrong because God told you it’s wrong, and you trust him. That standard of conduct, which we call the law, It’s based on the Ten Commandments, but there’s much, much more to it than that. It has to do with the way we love our fellow man, and the way we love God, and the way we worship God. If we trust Him, we’ll learn to do it His way and not ours. I commend to you the study of the Bible, all of it. Because in the study of the Bible, you’re going to come to know God. And as you come to know God, you’ll learn to trust Him. And out of that will grow an obedience of faith that will provide a framework for making your life work. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win.
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The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net.
