Mark 9: 43-50

I’ve been impressed by several books by Erwin McManus, the pastor of a great church in Los Angeles called Mosaic. The church is called Mosaic because they wanted to say the church is made up of broken people, whom God shapes into a beautiful picture, especially when His light shines through them. I love that image, and I have really appreciated his books. One is called Uprising, and the other is called the Barbarian Way. In The Barbarian Way, he describes the way we should be sold out to Christ, and the myriad of ways we have accommodated ourselves to our culture. We have sold out to culture, and received trinkets in return. We could have an exciting life of purpose and passion; instead we settle for a safe life in front of the television. I count myself as part of the segment of America that loves to be entertained more than living an exciting life for God. But I want that to change. I do not want to be the person I was; I want to be the person God calls me to be.

The reason I bring this up is that there is a passion in Jesus words; there is an urgency that we tend to downplay because it can seem to be too much. Come lay your life down at the cross, boy is that hard. We want to stick around with the Scriptures that tell us how much God loves us, despite our many failings. And that is certainly true. God does love us, more than we can imagine. But we cannot dwell in the greatness of God’s love while doing nothing to further His purposes on earth while we are able. There should be always a response to God’s love, not just the basking in it, but an active response. And from what Jesus says on many occasions, I think the appropriate response is a life of passion for God. A life lived for Jesus, because of Jesus love for us. Because of the cross, we pick up our crosses and follow. Because of the blood, we avoid sin the best we can and seek to make God smile with our lives.

Today’s passage is about passion for God, passion for His ways of living, passion for the God who is passionately in love with us. Mark 9:43ff Please stand.

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. IT is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other.”

Let’s pray.

Today we finish up chapter 9 in Mark. We’ve been going through Mark for quite some time and we’re really making progress. Jesus has done many healings, He has traveled all over Northern Israel and to points beyond. He has walked on water and created 12 baskets of leftovers of bread and fish out of just a couple loaves and fish. He has expelled demons, been transfigured and has argued with the Pharisees the entire time. Just one more chapter, chapter 10, before Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last week of His life. But the section between now and the triumphal entry is a section on teaching, a section on serving Jesus with our lives. This is a crucial aspect of faith, because we do what we believe. We’ve talked about this before, so I won’t belabor the point. But to remind you, if you think the pew will hold your weight, you will sit on it. If you think the building is on fire and about to collapse, you will exit the building. If you think stocks will go up, you will buy, if you think the bottom will drop out of the market, you will sell. We all act on our beliefs, whether it is a conscious action or not. If I believe the plane will go down, then I won’t get on. We act on our belief.

If we believe Jesus is Lord and Savior, then we will listen to His words, and as best we can, put them into practice in our lives. The words of Jesus we have are not easy to listen to, and are sometimes weird to put into practice. So we need to talk about that. I would appreciate people refraining from yanking out their eyes or cutting off their hands until we’re done with the sermon. Hold off on the axes and the knives until we get to completely think through Jesus’ words. Jesus does use hyperbole from time to time, an exaggeration used to emphasize His points.

This entire section is very closely related to Jesus words that we looked at from last week, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” Today’s passage is a continuance of the crucial-ness of right living in Christ.

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.

You can hopefully see how the passages flow one into the other, in fact, I may have artificially cut the complete passage into parts. If I did, I apologize. The relatedness can be seen in the words ‘it would be better for you…’. These are not idle threats. Hell is a real place, a really awful place. Jesus is talking about the seriousness of living as a Christian. Hey, if you are going to lead someone away from faith, it would be better for you in the end to give up your life. So don’t do it. In the same way, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. So don’t do anything that would make it better for your hand to be cut off. Jesus is using illustrative language. Your hand cannot sin by itself. That’s silly. It is our minds that need to be captured and controlled, because our hands do what our minds tell them. You know the story of the Crusaders, I hope. During the Middle Ages the crusaders were told by the pope that if they died recapturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, they would go straight to heaven, no purgatory. The catch was that they were baptized by full immersion, with their sword arm out of the water. It wasn’t them hacking the Muslims into pieces, it was their arms. Their bad, bad arm. That was a silly thing to believe, and so would the thought of cutting off our hand if it causes us to sin.

But the underlying message is not silly. Sin separates us from God, sin ultimately can kill us. Sin, in any form, is not to be taken lightly. Even for the Christian, sin can prevent us from accomplishing the mission God has for each of us. Maybe you’ve seen how people become the sin they enjoy. People who commit adultery become adulterers. People who lie become liars. Jesus furthers this idea.

And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell.

Jesus reiterates the seriousness of avoiding sin. Being crippled, or not having both hands in Jesus society was a horrible drawback. It is also in our modern society, but back then a person was nearly worthless if they couldn’t walk, if they couldn’t work with both hands. In an agrarian society there is only so much a person could do with just one hand. And a cripple could really only beg. But it would be better to be completely worthless, a beggar by the side of the road than to have a foot that causes us to sin. It would be better to have just one hand and enter the kingdom of heaven, than to be walking around, with two hands, and getting readied for eternal exile in Hell.

Jesus is talking metaphorically, but not about the seriousness of sin. When Jesus talks about the seriousness of sin, we should listen. Sin can cause us to lose our faith, sin can lead us away from the kingdom of God. Paul wrote to the Romans in 6:23 For the wages, the result of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” I don’t think we should be afraid of sin, because we sin all the time. But when we think sin is fine, or if we rationalize sin in our minds as something that is okay; a little white lie isn’t that big a deal. Cheating on my taxes gives me money that I need, and the government already has tons of money, and they’re just wasting it. Cheating on my spouse is fine because everyone else is doing it…the truth is all those things are sins, none of them is okay, and all have the potential to kill off any faith in us. We have to live in the confidence that Christ has covered our sins with His blood on the cross, but at the same time avoid sin because it can entangle us, because we don’t want to become sinners, rather we want to live for Christ.

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.”

Jesus continues his parallel line of thought. We all know having two eyes is better than one because of depth perception. But in this last thought, Jesus expands on the consequences of having two perfect eyes. The one eye causes someone to lose their souls to maintain their perfection in this life, but makes them lost in the next life. Handling tools and farm implements, walking, seeing, all important parts of surviving life well in the first century. But if the outcome is exclusion from the kingdom of God, then all those aspects of life are of no consequence. The most important thing is to be included in the kingdom of God. If anything is holding you back from that, says Jesus, then it must be left behind. If we want to continue making sinful decisions contrary to God’s will that will eventually exclude us from the kingdom of God, we’ve got to stop doing those things.

Are we willing to take a serious look at purity before the Lord? Are we willing to not do some of the things our baser instincts would have us do, in order to please God, in order to be an active member of the kingdom of God? Christians aren’t perfect, but neither are we indistinguishable from our culture. We strive to please God in all we do and all we avoid. That is a high calling, destined for failures. But a temporary failure is not permanent. The decision to sin, effectively telling God we know more than He does about how to best run our lives, that attitude can certainly be fatal. We need to strive for purity in our lives; not because God will love us more, not to earn our way to Heaven which is only by God’s grace, but because we are called to be pure and holy and Christ was pure and holy. To think what we do doesn’t matter because God has to love us no matter what we do is degrading to ourselves and to God. So let’s put that nonsense behind us and live, best as we possibly can, to God’s glory, in His ways and not our own.

Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other.”

Salt, as you might know, was a preservative in the ancient world. Beef would be salted and shipped, as would fish. If you had high cholesterol and trouble with salt, the ancient world would not have agreed with you. In fact, salt was so important to the ancient peoples that on occasion Roman soldiers were paid their wages in salt. And, of course, salt was used in cooking and to make food tastier. I think it is this sprinkling with salt over food that Jesus is getting at when he says everyone will be salted with fire. What I think Jesus is trying to convey is that all Christians will be refined with fire, we will all be tested and tempted. All of us will have to think about whether our hands, feet and eyes are causing us to sin. All of us will need to consider whether our actions are taking us closer to God or further away. There will be a time of testing for all of us; the testing comes in big ways sometimes, and in little ways sometimes. But the testing always comes. The key is to allow the fire in this world pass over us so that we won’t have to deal with the eternal fire, that will never go out. We Christians will be preserved from the consequences of the eternal flames, because we have Christ in us.

In the end this passage is absolutely about what we do as Christians, whether we live to expand the kingdom of God or whether we are working in the opposite direction. What we do, how we live, how we treat other people matters to the kingdom of God. How we follow God determines our maturity in Christ and our usefulness to the Kingdom of Heaven. Let me again that Jesus is exaggerating in order to help us remember the point He is making. Hopefully when you are tempted to sin, to head in the opposite direction from the one God has for you, to ignore God’s laws because of selfishness or pride, I want you to think of this image of people without hands, without feet, without an eye. That is how serious the issue of sin is. And sin effects more than just us. Whether we want to believe it or not, our sin effects other people. We are more than just ourselves; we are part of families, we are part of a church family, we are part of the Christian family on Long Island. What we chose to do with our lives effects other people. We have seen in this church how people’s sinful decisions effect more than just themselves.

But in a larger sense, this passage should make us more grateful disciples of Jesus than scared. Jesus has saved us from the fire that doesn’t go out. When we accept His death on the cross as having been on our behalf, when we invite Jesus into our hearts to change us, over time, into His image, to His glory, we no longer have to worry about Hell. It isn’t an option for those who Jesus accepts and loves. But if we truly love Jesus, if He truly is our highest priority, then we will avoid sin not because of the flames, but because we don’t want to offend someone we love. I don’t want to hear of any of you cutting of major body parts because in the end it isn’t about us. It is about Jesus, it is about the grace God provides through His atoning, righting death on the cross. Sin is serious, but Jesus death is even more so. Right behavior defines us, it is who we strive to be, though not necessarily completely who we are.

For the wages of sin is death, it is to but thrown into the sea with a millstone around our necks, into the fire that will not be quenched, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Our end is not in jeopardy. We rest safe and secure in God’s arms. But don’t lose the passion for right living. Don’t throw up your arms in defeat and say no one can be perfect, I’ll live however I want to and God will forgive me because He has to. I never want to be around people who would seek to use God like that. If we love and respectfully fear God, then we won’t be testing Him constantly, we won’t be doing whatever we want, but we will be seeking His will for our lives. There is a healthy balance between desiring to be holy as Christ is holy, to be pure and right living, but holding onto that loosely and at the same time holding onto Jesus fiercely. None of us are perfect, and none of us ever will be. We depend on Jesus to make a place for us with Him in eternity. But on earth, if there is something in our lives that causes us to sin, get it out. Get out of that situation, get away from that person, and seek the things and ways of God. The consequences are eternal.

Let’s pray.