Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
- Luke 9:23–26: What Profit If He Gains the Whole World?
- The Immeasurable Value of the Soul
- The Soul May Be Lost
- Pascal’s Wager and Your Soul
Luke 9:23–26: What Profit If He Gains the Whole World?
Good morning. How are you? Somebody’s doing good over here. Who said they’re doing good? Who said they’re doing good? All right, we got two people doing good. Am I doing good over here? Anybody doing good in the middle? All right. All right. Let’s have a contest. No, I’m just kidding. Just kidding. What’s that? I don’t have any t-shirts to give away. You throw a bottle of water if everybody’s thirsty. No, sorry it’s used. You don’t want it now, right? We have kids going to class. So if you’re a kid going to class, you’re dismissed. No, Amy, you’re too old. You can’t go. For the rest of us, let’s open your Bible, if you will, to Luke chapter 9. Luke 9. You know, I spoke at a different church a few weeks ago, and I think it was on a Tuesday night I got a text and I said, what [audio unclear] they like to text in their bulletin so people have the text I guess, you know. We have Bibles, right? We don’t… But, um, you’re thinking about bulletins and bulletin bloopers. Do you want to hear some? How about this one? The fasting and prayer conference includes meals. [audio unclear] The peacemaking meeting that was scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict. The pastor will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing, “Break Forth into Joy.” I like this one. You married couples like this one. It says, Irving Benson and Jesse Carter were married on October 24th in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days. Ha ha. That’s a good one. I bet if some of these are just, no, I better not. At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be, “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice. Oh my gosh. The ladies Bible study [audio unclear] will be held Thursday morning at 10 a.m. Does that sound like ours? What time is ours? Uh-oh. Well here’s what the blooper says. This isn’t our blooper. Ladies Bible study will be held Thursday morning at 10 a.m. All ladies are invited to lunch in the fellowship hall after the B.S. is done. The low self-esteem group, we don’t have one of those because we’re all in that group, the low self-esteem support group will meet Thursday at 7 p.m. Please use the back door. This is my favorite. Weight Watchers will meet at 7 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use the large double doors at the side entrance. Oh! Did you get it? Weight Watchers, large. Okay, one more. Since you didn’t like that one, I got to end on a good note. No, I won’t do that one. The Associate Minister unveiled the church’s new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: I upped my pledge. Up yours. I didn’t say it. I just read it. I just read it. I didn’t say it. Not my slogan. All right, where are we? Where are we? Luke 9. Okay, Luke 9:23. Jesus, by the way, has just given His disciples bad news. I wanted to give you a little good news for them. That He was going to be crucified, although the good news was He says I’m going to die, but then I’m going to be resurrected. And they didn’t quite get the resurrection part yet, so they’re thinking, well, we don’t want You to die, we love You. And Matthew says that Peter confronts Jesus and says, what are You, You’re not going to die, You can’t die. And Jesus reproves him, rebukes him, says, “Get behind Me, Satan,” because Peter was thinking about the things of man and not the things of God. So here we have the account as Luke gives it. And then after He tells them He’s going to be killed by the leaders, He says this. Then He said to them, verse 23 of Luke 9, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.” You know the more I meditated on this Scripture I was, it struck me just how radical what Jesus is saying here, just, it’s almost crazy. I was thinking maybe I should do a sermon, a series of sermons called crazy things that Jesus said, you know what I mean? I mean when you think about how crazy this is that He says here in verse 25, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost.” Whole world. You know what Jesus is saying there? He’s saying that the human soul is of more value than all the wealth in the entire world. Now you talk about twisting the brain. You talk about twisting the way we look at things, right? This is radical, revolutionary, crazy. The human soul is of more value than all the wealth in the world.
The Immeasurable Value of the Soul
As I meditated on that, I thought, well, what does that really mean? So I did a little research. I was thinking, what’s valuable? Art’s valuable, right? Last year, there was between $12.45 and $22.1 billion of art auctions. Billions of dollars of art auctions. Well diamonds are valuable, right? And you ladies like diamonds? Well supposedly there are 4.5 billion carats of diamonds in the world which equals $300 billion. $300, that’s only what’s been mined and reported, $300 billion. Jesus is saying the soul is worth more than $300 billion, or it’s of more value than all the diamonds in the world. So that made me think about what’s called the GNP. You know what that stands for? God’s not present. No, I’m kidding. Gross national product. Well, the US is wealthy, right? What’s the gross national product? Gross national product of the US is $18.14 trillion. So Jesus is saying that the human soul is of more value than the US GNP. China’s GNP is higher, I learned. Their GNP is $19.42 trillion. India’s the third with $7.89 trillion. So Jesus is saying the human soul is of more value than the US GNP, the China GNP, the Indian GNP, in fact all the GNPs of the world combined, which is in the trillions of dollars. It’s a lot of money, isn’t it? Then I thought about the rich people in America and their wealth. How much wealth is in the US? Well according to a report which is only through 2009, the [audio unclear] wealth of the world, $241 trillion. Jesus says that a man’s soul, a person’s soul is of more value than $241 trillion. That’s amazing, isn’t it? I thought, well, what about precious matter? What about silver and gold? Well, supposedly, and the experts disagree on these things because experts like to disagree on things. So they can write more, write more books. That’s what they do. They disagree on things. But they say there’s between 3 and 3.5 billion ounces of silver in the world, which means that there are 2.5, it’s valued at $2.5 trillion. That’s just silver. Gold, again, the experts disagree. There’s between 173,000 and 187,500 metric tons of gold, which is currently valued at $6,264,516,256,877.70. Now that’s a lot of money, isn’t it? We just added up the numbers, the art, the diamonds, the GNPs, the personal wealth, the silver, the gold, all of this value combined. Jesus says the human soul is of more value than all of these things combined. He is crazy. How could He say such a thing? I haven’t even calculated the other things that are valuable, but the non-tangible, valuable things, right? Like the things we pursue like peace and comfort and fame, that’s a big one. Power. People love power. You know Donald Trump, he was wealthy. He was pretty famous, but now he has power. Didn’t have power. He had influence, but now he’s got power. People will pursue power. They don’t care about money. They want power. There’s all sorts of things that are valuable, both tangible and intangible in the world, and Jesus says add up all of those things, whether it’s diamonds, art, silver, gold, power, fame, all of these things, all the pleasures in the world, add them all up into a bundle, and the human soul is of more value than all of that. It’s crazy. Why would He say such a thing? How could He say such a thing? Because Jesus believed, as we ought, that the soul was or is created in God’s image. In God’s image. What does this mean? [audio unclear] The human soul is able to communicate and have fellowship, enter into a relationship with God. That’s what makes the human soul so unique. As a matter of fact, in that very creation of the human soul, the very creation of the first man and the first woman, God designed them for the purpose that they would enter into relationship with Him. Now can you imagine if you were Adam in the garden? Okay, can you imagine? Here’s what Adam experienced. The Bible tells us that God breathed life into his nostrils. Now, usually I think, who does CPR here? We got some EMTs here, rescue people here, nurses here. Don’t you hold the nose and breathe into the mouth? And then how do you do it? No, how do you do it? If you give CPR, how do you do it? How do you do it? Okay, [audio unclear] or the first man was just basically a lump of clay. That’s all he was. And then God breathes life into him. Okay, so here, imagine me a lump of clay and I know you’re thinking that’s easy to imagine. So I’m just a lump of clay. I’m not alive. Do I look dead? Should I lay down? Would that help? No. God breathes life and I open my eyes and there’s the face of God breathing life into me. My first experience, my first reality, my first sensation is the face of God. Why is that important? Because that’s the reality of [audio unclear] God’s purpose for the human soul. God’s purpose for the very creation of the soul was that those who came into being would experience the reality of relationship with Him. That’s why we were all made. Not for the art, not for the gold, not for the silver, not for the personal wealth. We were made for communion with God. And that is what gives the human soul such precious value. So valuable it outweighs all that the world can offer. So Jesus says here in Luke, verse 25, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world,” all of the art, all of the personal wealth, the diamonds, the gold, the silver, all that we’ve mentioned, and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, he gains all of that “and is himself destroyed or lost.” Lost. So the first observation here is that the soul is of immeasurable value.
The Soul May Be Lost
It may be lost. We Christians often use the word lost in different ways, but when the Bible speaks of this concept, when Jesus talks about lost, He means two things. One, there’s a sense in which we can be lost even now. If you read Luke 15, well let’s go to Luke 15 but hold your place we’ll come right back. In Luke 15 we have a parable that Jesus gave. It’s called the parable of the prodigal son. And in verse 11 it says this, a man had two sons, Jesus is speaking by the way, “and the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood.” Now can you imagine this really happening? Okay, so this man apparently had enough wealth to pass a good inheritance on to his children. And so his son comes to him and basically says, dad, I’d really like you to die so I can get my money, but since you’re alive, can I have it now. That’s really what’s happening here. This is an utter rejection of his father in favor of what his father could give him. It was an utter rejection of the relationship in favor of things. If I was the father, I probably would have said, no, you can leave now. But it says the father gave him his inheritance early. I mean, you give an inheritance when you die, right? So he gave it early. And the son, we won’t read the whole thing, but he leaves, ends up squandering it all, and then realizes he had it better when he was home with his father. So he returns back to his father. And while he’s coming back to his father, it says, verse 20, “And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.” Well he wasn’t dead and the father knew he wasn’t dead but he says he was dead. He was dead to the relationship. Right? He says he was lost but now he’s found. Well he wasn’t lost, not really, but he had broken relationship. And so there’s a sense in which we can be lost now because we are not in fellowship with God, we don’t know God in a personal way. And so this is unfortunately the common fate of all of us. We’re born into the world, by the Bible, sinful or fallen, alienated from the life of God. We don’t know God by nature, although we can know God through nature. In other words, we can know of Him, but we don’t know Him in that personal way unless His Holy Spirit comes into our hearts through what is called the new birth. So we need God to come and restore us to relationship with Him. He does this through Jesus Christ, His Son. You know, I grew up in a church hearing about Jesus and hearing about Jesus dying on the cross and hearing He rose from the dead, hearing all of those things. But it was never really connected to what did that really do with me as a person? Okay, Jesus died on the cross a long time ago. What does that have to do with me? Well, what it had to do with me is that when He died on the cross, He was actually dying for me in a very real way. In other words, the death of Christ wasn’t just a random act of Roman brutality. It was actually designed by God so that whatever sins I had committed, which were barriers to my relationship to God, those sins would be placed on Jesus Christ and that He would pay the penalty for those sins. He would suffer for those sins, what my sins really deserved, so that I could not or would not have to suffer the payment of those sins and then therefore I could enter into a relationship with God freely. It’s called by grace. The Bible talks about we are saved by grace. So God freely invites me into a relationship with Him. And what ought to be the barrier of my sins, well, that barrier has been dealt with in Jesus Christ. But if we don’t know that, even though Christ has died for us, if we don’t know that, then we are lost in the sense that we really don’t have a personal relationship with God. We’re like the cell phone that’s looking for the Wi-Fi signal and when all the, you know, your phone pulls up the different Wi-Fis that are in range, can you see that little lock code there? It’s a secure network, you can’t get on it, right? Now, your little smartphone, which is your soul, is searching for a Wi-Fi signal to God. And when God’s Wi-Fi pops up, it has a little lock on it. What’s the password? You need a password. You know what the password is? J-E-S-U-S. All caps. All caps. Right? If you want to unlock the signal, Christ is the security [audio unclear] code. It’s through faith in Christ as the one who died for our sins and rose from the dead that we enter into relationship with Him. And when you truly believe, it unlocks and your soul connects with God. Ever experienced that? Raise your hand. It’s called the new birth. The new birth. And I’ll never forget when my Wi-Fi soul connected with God. Never forget it.
Pascal’s Wager and Your Soul
Now Jesus says it’s a terrible thing that if a man gains everything but loses his soul, and I think he’s talking about losing his soul in this world, I think he’s talking about losing his soul later. Because if you read the other accounts of this passage in the other Gospels, it’s clear that Jesus is talking about lostness in an eternal sense. So we can be lost in the sense of not connected to God in this life. And many people are not connected to God and they’re okay with that. They’re okay with it. They’ll use LTE. They’ll use 4G. They don’t, they’re not on God’s Wi-Fi, that’s okay. They’re doing fine. Because they got some of the world’s goods. They got a nice house, they got a couple cars, they got a couple kids, they’re in suburbia, they got a good job, all is well on the home front. And so now, the lostness is not that much of an issue. But what about later? What about later? What if there really is a later and later is a long time? You know what I mean? Like forever? Like eternity? Did you ever hear of the philosopher Blaise Pascal? Raise your hand. He wrote a book, actually he was working on a book of apologetics to defend Christianity. And he died before he could really finish it. So it’s kind of random paragraphs and parts of chapters that have now been gathered into a work called Pensées, which in French is thoughts, his thoughts. And in his thoughts, we have what’s been called now Pascal’s wager. And Pascal’s wager very simply, I mean he lays it out more in detail, but very simply is if God, if you think about God existing or not existing, if you believe God exists and you end up being wrong, think about this, versus believing God doesn’t exist and being wrong, what’s the better wager? Because you see, if you believe God exists and live accordingly, what have you really lost? Okay, maybe you’ve lost some indulgences of, okay, maybe you may restrain yourself from more gross forms of sin and other things, but what have you really lost? But if God does exist and you deny Him and live without Him as if He doesn’t exist, and He does, and there’s a thing called eternity, and it lasts forever, and you die and enter into a godless eternity, what have you lost then? Your soul. See Jesus here in our text is really giving us the first version of Pascal’s wager. What’s more valuable? The soul or all the world? Well you have to place a wager on it. Now some of you have already placed the bet. Some of you are suspending a decision about whether you want to place the bet. But my caution to you is if you’re not betting, then you’re really gambling. In other words, you’ve really placed the bet you’re not aware of. Because living and dying are not things that we can opt out of. We’re confronted with the reality that either God is or God isn’t. Either the claims of Jesus are true, either Jesus died for our sins so that when we go into the other world, eternity, we can be with God, or His claims are not true, and it doesn’t matter how I live now. But Jesus says that if we gain the whole world but end up being wrong on the wager, that what we lose in the end, meaning what we lose forever, is our soul. Now the thing that’s really amazing about that is that everything that we amass in this world we’re going to lose anyway. Your loved ones can fill your casket full of gold, silver, and diamonds, and guess what? It doesn’t do you any good because it doesn’t enter eternity. It stays in the ground. What we have amassed in this world, we will lose anyway. That’s why Jesus says in Luke 12, since you’re already in Luke, if you want to turn to Luke 12, He tells a parable of a rich man. This is called the parable of the rich fool. He says in verse 16, “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’” In other words he has so much he’s got to do something, he’s got so much. “So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years””—this is many, many, many, many, many, many—“take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” In other words, no matter how much we amass in this life, you may die a millionaire. You may die a billionaire. You may die a trillionaire. You can take none of it with you. The only thing that goes from this life into the next is your soul. And so we know from the teaching of Jesus that if we die and enter the eternal realm apart from Him, if our Wi-Fi is not connected, we enter a godless and a Christless eternity, where the soul suffers forever. What a wager. What a wager. Are we willing to wager our soul, which is more valuable than anything? Are we willing to take the risk? So Pascal’s wager was very simple. He appealed to man’s natural reason and man’s sense of self-preservation. In other words, he’s saying, this is reasonable, this is common sense. Because if you lose a little now, what’s that compared to losing everything later? But we’re not always rational creatures, are we? The problem we have is being able to envision the reality of eternity, to appreciate what it really means while the things of the world press upon our senses and engross us. That’s what’s so difficult. But that’s the choice. That’s the choice. Let me conclude with two observations. The first is this. All throughout the sermon, if you’ve been paying attention, you will notice I referred to the soul. You’ve heard me say, the soul. I’ve said the soul many times, and I’ve said it intentionally. But the real point of the message is that Jesus is talking about your soul. Your soul. He’s saying your soul, you as an individual are more valuable than the art, the silver, the gold, the diamonds, the GNP, the personal wealth. You as an individual are more valuable in His eyes than all of that. You, you. That’s amazing, now that’s crazy because I know it’s crazy but Jesus was the kind of man who not only believed what He said but He backed it up by what He did and the proof that Jesus really believed this was that Jesus was willing of His own accord to go to Calvary to go to the cross and to die in your place, your place, so that you could have a relationship with God, so that whatever barriers of sin and guilt might be there, those could be removed, so that you, your soul, could come into communion with God. Jesus thought your soul was so valuable, He would suffer the ridicule and shame and humiliation and pain of the cross. So He wasn’t just blowing smoke. Jesus meant what He said and He proved that He believed it. Because when He died on the cross, He did it for you. And when you believe that, if you truly believe that, if you truly believe that Christ died, you must believe. You must believe. Final conclusion. The soul I’ve been talking about is also the soul of all of those that you know. Your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends, whether they profess Christ or not, their soul is of more value than all the wealth of the world. Which is why we, professing Christians, need to straighten out our vision of what’s really important in our Christian life, what’s really important in our communal life, and begin to value the people around us and begin to share with them the good news of Jesus Christ, amen. Because if we believe their souls will live forever, either with Christ or without, how we ought to be praying for them and to be sharing the love of Jesus with them, amen. So let’s stand and pray as we close. Bow our heads and close our eyes. As we conclude this morning. We have a few guests here and we thank you for [audio unclear] guilt-free. Jesus said, “He who believes in Me has passed from death to eternal life.” And that happens now when you believe, not later. Eternal life for you doesn’t begin later, it begins right now, if you will put your trust in Christ. So we invite you, I invite you in the name of Christ to accept the offer, the gift of everlasting life that God wants to give you by simple faith in Jesus Christ. Not by your works, not by your efforts, but simply by saying yes to Christ. Jesus Christ, be my Savior. Save me from my sins, and He will do that for you because He values your soul so much. To the church, let us value the things that Jesus values. Let us value the things that Jesus has done. And like Jesus, let us back up what we say with what we do. Dear Lord, we thank You for our opportunity to gather today, to worship You, to pray, to hear Your Word. We thank You, Lord, for Your presence here. We pray that You bless our time of fellowship. We pray that our guests would feel loved and welcomed. We pray, God, as a community, we continue to open the door of our hearts, our homes and our church to those who do not know You. We pray this, Jesus, for Your glory alone. All God’s people said, amen.