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June, 2021 (Vol.55-No.6) |
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on September 27, 1987 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? Romans 9:20-21 JESUS TOLD THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER in Mark 4, and when His disciples asked Him to explain it, He gave them an answer that few people really believe. He said, “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” Some people might object to the severity of Jesus’ words and say, “But I thought that Jesus came to this earth to save sinners. I thought that anyone could come to God whenever they wanted to. In fact, I’ve been keeping my options open because I know I can come to God in my own time!” It is true that Jesus came to save sinners. I agree with Paul, who said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” Jesus paid the price to save everyone, but He is not going to save everyone. He doesn’t want some people. I can imagine someone being shocked by that statement and saying, “Huh! Do you mean that God doesn’t want me? I’ve never heard a preacher say anything like that in my whole life!” I didn’t say it, friend; Jesus said it. There are some people He doesn’t want. Let’s read Romans 9, starting from verse 15: “he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. . .” Does someone want to argue with this statement? Someone who has never read the Bible might say, “But I’ve always heard that God is merciful!” He is merciful, and He has declared in His word, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.” Some people go to church expecting to be built up but end up disappointed when the church doesn’t “deliver” what they were expecting. They might even say, “I’m not used to going to church and not getting what I came for! I expect to be blessed in my church.” I would say to such a person, “That is the starting point of your error. It is not your church; it is the Lord’s church! And God has said, “I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” If you are the kind of person who has a hard time accepting that God will not have mercy on everyone, you might have an even harder time accepting that He is selective concerning those on whom He will have compassion. Let me be ludicrous and imagine some fool objecting to God’s word, saying, “I’m not sure I can allow God to be God if He is not compassionate with everyone. Why else should God exist? I will give Him this: He may exercise His compassion in different ways, but certainly everyone is entitled to at least a little compassion. Any fool knows that!” Well, since we all know that, then we must all be fools! When God said, “I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,” the necessary concomitant of that statement is: “I will not have compassion on those whom I will not have compassion.” You might think, “This message keeps getting worse!” I started out saying that some see but don’t perceive, and some hear but don’t understand, because God doesn’t want some people to be converted. Most people who were raised in the church have never heard of such a thing. Allow me to be ludicrous again and imagine someone thinking, “But I thought God was courting me. If he wants me to go out to dinner with Him, surely He can pick up the tab! Do you mean that God is not the ‘courter’ and He doesn’t want some people?” Right! He cannot stand some people. He probably feels bad enough about allowing certain people to live, but He certainly doesn’t have to spend eternity with them. Many people in the church think that being a Christian means that they are God’s favorite. They mistakenly think, “No matter what I do, God will still be on my side. He will work everything out for me. It makes no difference if I put my hand to the plow and then turn loose of it. And if I don’t like the field He has given me to plow, He will give me another field that is easier to plow.” Imagine God sitting on His throne and saying, “Quick! We have to rescue this fellow: he doesn’t like the church I sent him to. We have to create a new field for him to plow.” Someone might be tempted to think, “It really doesn’t matter where I plow. A compassionate God can always create a plow to fit the field of my choosing.” The more I think about it, I am starting to dislike this message myself! Read on in Romans 9, beginning at verse 16: “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.” In other words, God told Pharaoh, “I raised you up so I could destroy you, just to show My power!” It is no wonder that certain heretics in the history of the church decided that they did not like this God, so they discarded Him and created another one. Many people would like to remove things from the Bible that they don’t agree with. Even Thomas Jefferson made his own Bible by simply cutting out the parts he didn’t like. Paul goes on to say, “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.” Even preachers have trouble with the notion that God would harden someone’s heart. What crushes the spirit of a conscientious preacher? He judges the recipients of his message by his own response to God’s word. He cannot comprehend why someone would not respond to the truth, because he himself is overwhelmed in wonder and gratitude that he is one of the lucky ones in whom God’s transmitter has found a ready receiver. It was impossible for Elijah to comprehend that Jezebel would not repent after seeing all the things God had done. Elijah saw God’s power when the fire fell on Mount Carmel in response to his faith and when the rains fell in response to his prayer. The power of God was so abundantly demonstrated that even King Ahab was somewhat subdued. I believe that when Elijah ran to Jezreel, he was certain that Jezebel would finally want peace. But when God’s visible demonstrations made no impact on her, it crushed him. We will not begin to understand God’s ways until we understand this: why would God’s great works that He performed through Moses not result in Pharaoh’s conversion? Because God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Paul said in verse 17, “For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up.” God told Pharaoh that he was “raised up” to be a demonstration of His rejection. Most of the messages I preach inspire people. This is a message of hope to those who are called, but there is another side to God’s revelation which is the subject of today’s message. “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?” In other words, if God wills such things, why then would He find fault with someone being bad? Paul answered this objection, saying, “Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?” In other words, “Who are you to argue with God?” The message of God’s grace and peace can produce a congregation so self-indulgent in their freedom that they forget the other side of the coin. Paul was describing a presumptuous person demanding, “If God wills some people to be bad and some to be good, how can I be blamed for anything?” But Paul said that we are not even allowed to ask such a question. There are some people who would say, “I won’t serve a God like that!” To such a person, I would say, “See you later, hardhead. You have just demonstrated where you stand with God!” Your response to this message is a self-evident demonstration of which camp you are in. I have been a rebel all my life, but I am a tamed rebel under God’s control, and I am a rebel with a cause: I desire to teach God’s word to people who will recognize that they are not their own, they are bought with a price. The church is plagued with too many rebels without a cause other than their own damned self. We are bondslaves of Jesus Christ with eternity as our hope, and that breath of eternity conditions every step we take! If you feel a sense of resentment toward such an unfair, one-sided encroachment into your independence, you might be one of the damned. If you are thinking, “I like this kind of teaching,” then you are in a safe harbor. If your mind is in debate and you are saying, “I don’t understand,” you might be in trouble. But if you are able to hold your rebellious judgmental attitude in abeyance and say, “I want to understand,” there may be hope for you. Paul continues in verse 20, “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” Paul is quoting from Isaiah and asking, “Shall the clay say to the potter, What makest thou?” Our natural tendency is to question the Potter. We argue and say, “Have You any idea who You are working on? I have plans for me. I only presented myself to You to give You the privilege of helping me become what I always knew I could be. I’m not Your ordinary piece of clay! Thank God I’m free!” No, you are not “free,” you belong to a new Master! I will tell you who the called are: They hear the call, “Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage,” referring to the traditions of men. But they also hear the call, “Only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh.” “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” The word of God says that the same word brings life to some and death to others. Some people think that God’s word only builds up, redeems, and saves. This is not true, because if you turn on a light in a room, the same light that reveals a gold nugget also reveals a spider. The encounter with the light of God’s word is a revelation of man’s destiny and purpose. Some have the capacity to respond and some do not. We read in verses 22 and 23, “What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.” Paul said in Romans 11:29, “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” Literally, God’s gifts and calling are without recall; they are irrevocable. Paul also said in 1st Corinthians 9:17, “If I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.” The Greek word translated “dispensation” means “stewardship.” A stewardship of the gospel has been delivered to me, which means I am bound. I can create friction and pain by resisting God’s claim on my life, or I can finally stop fighting His calling, yield to the force of His will, and go with Him willingly rather than strugglingly. The message is the same to you, friend. If you have been called of God, can you remember the freshness of your enthusiasm and the joy you had when you first participated in God’s work? But when you discovered that your walk with God was not a constant honeymoon, you made the foolish judgment that you could escape. You began to complain about your calling. You got tired of being corrected, and you decided that you would do things your own way. So you quit going to church, all the while rationalizing in your mind, “I don’t have to be committed to the Lord’s work. There must be a happier way to be a Christian.” You will be amazed at how many thoughts and circumstances will present themselves to support your decision to go your own way. You might find yourself thinking, “Why wake up early for church? Why fight the traffic and contend with those demon-inspired construction crews that always find new ways to keep me from getting there on a Sunday morning? Besides, modern technology allows me to listen to a prerecorded church service whenever I want. Then at least I can plan on when and how I will receive God’s word. I can even choose which sermon topics I want to listen to!” Have you ever thought, “I can escape the pressure of responsibility?” Or maybe you have thought, “I don’t have to put up with this pressure anymore. I can just retreat for a month or two because I have come to the conclusion that things are not going to change. Following Jesus will constantly be a battle full of problems and trials of faith. It is worse than school because I can never graduate.” But every time you try to run from God, you find that He has to drive you back again. And I would guess that those who have come back after much pain and correction from God would readily admit that it would have been much better if they had just kept their hand on the plow and kept laboring. It happens all the time. People leave a Bible-centered church to go to a more socially-oriented church that caters to their personal needs, and they rationalize that they are serving God somewhere else. The truth is that some of them are going to hell. They have put themselves into a situation of their own choosing that does not require as much faith as the calling they abandoned. They have rationalized that they have graduated to a more “sensible” kind of Christianity that does not compete with their lifestyle. They have more time for Little League, or whatever they felt they had to give up to put God first. I know of some people who left the ministry because they wanted more time to spend with their children. Now they are trying to figure out why they had to bail out their child who was arrested in a drug bust. I have known people who sacrificed their place in the kingdom supposedly for the sake of their children but ended up losing their children as well. All I am saying is that God must be first in your life. In Romans 9:13, Paul quoted the Lord’s words from the book of Malachi, saying, “Jacob I love, but Esau I hated.” This is a difficult passage for us to understand because of our limited ability to reason. It sounds shocking to us: how could God hate a child in the womb who has not yet seen the light of day? The worst possible thing Esau could have done up to that point was kick his brother or his mother. Yet God hated him before he was even born. If you think you have some disagreements with God, wait until you get to hell, and you and Esau can have a caucus. It doesn’t pay to argue with God! When people lose their eternal focus, it always affects their giving. Paul said that you prove the genuineness of God’s Spirit in you by the way you give. If you leave a church to go to another church where you give less than you used to, that is proof of a diminished relationship with the indwelling Spirit. Without the Spirit, you are none of His. The indwelling Spirit is not quantifiable: a lesser performance of Spirit-expressed action does not represent a partial infilling of the Spirit; it means you have zero, because you either have God’s Spirit or you don’t. To use a common saying, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Maybe you have been dealing too casually with God’s call on your life. I preach that salvation is by grace. Grace is God’s gift; grace is unmerited favor. I preach that we have peace with God. Peace is “cessation of againstness.” God is not against you anymore. I preach that we are saved by faith. Faith is an action, based upon belief, and sustained by confidence in God’s word. The key word is sustained. You can have confidence that when God has promised to do something, He will do it. The act of faith opens the door to God’s unmerited favor and His unmerited peace. But something else happens when you act in faith: the life of God’s Spirit is deposited in you. You maintain your contact with God by acts of faith. I often make an analogy to the power of a rocket engine fighting against the drag of gravity. In this analogy, gravity represents the corruption of the natural man, which Paul said is “corrupt according to deceiving desires.” The life of God’s Spirit in you will overcome the drag of sin, like the power of a rocket engine can overcome the force of gravity. Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that man cannot continue to sin without convincing himself that his sin is really not sin after all. Man’s basic problem is not that he has corrupt desires; it is that his desires are deceiving desires. Man’s desires are corrupt in the sense that they aim in a direction other than toward man’s intended destiny, which is toward God and His will. God created man to fill the vacuum in heaven left when Satan and his angels were cast out. And God created man to rule and reign with Him throughout eternity, which makes our short life here on earth look like just a drop in the bucket. But it is possible to miss what God has intended for you if you focus your life-energies on some self-serving center instead of on God, whether that center is your wife, husband, children, career, ambition, or even your ministry or denomination. Man is prone to worship any center short of God, because sin means falling short of what God intended us to be. God had a purpose in mind when He created us. We are not saved so that we might manipulate God’s power for our own use; we are saved for a purpose. Even Catholics have this as part of their fundamental doctrine; we were created for God’s pleasure, for His purpose, and to demonstrate His worthiness. The problem is that we desire a more immediate center, one that can satisfy our desires here and now. We don’t like the wait. A.W. Tozer said that no man deserves success in this life until, like Jesus, he is willing if necessary to die and wait for the resurrection to realize his goal. Jesus attained His goal through His death and His Resurrection. We read in that marvelous passage in Philippians 2, “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. . .” Death comes first, and resurrection later. As Tozer said, most of us are not willing to wait until the resurrection for our desires to be fulfilled. Every argument and excuse made to evade the responsibility of God’s call stems from our corrupt, self-serving desires; but all our God-given desires will be realized in eternity. Everyone who has failed to keep their commitments to God has lost the breath of eternity from their life. They have taken their eyes off of eternity and turned them to some piddling little goal down here in time. The self bends to that corrupt little goal, falls short of God’s glory, and is thus in sin. That is bad enough, but our desires have the capacity to brainwash us into thinking that God will adjust His word to accommodate us. We imagine that God cares so much about our little self-defined center that He would change His word that is forever settled in heaven. We convince ourselves that He will compromise His standard and bend His will just to make us happy in our self-defined, limited, fall-short-of-the-kingdom goals. Paul calls this worshiping the creation instead of the Creator. The Bible says that God’s Spirit will not always strive with us. There comes a point when God will turn us over to a strong delusion; we will believe a lie and be damned. Over the years, I have periodically seen people follow that strong delusion, believe a lie, and be damned. And I have seen others who give my pastor’s heart joy. They may have tried to resist God’s call, but like a horse controlled by bit and bridle, they eventually returned to God because the calling of God is without recall. They may have lived for a time on the fringes of commitment, but they would not let go of God and they ultimately recommitted to the life of faith. The same word that brought death to some brought life to others. If that describes your relationship with God, how many times must you go through that experience for it to be enough? Remember, Paul said that if we do this thing willingly we have a reward; but if we are unwilling, nevertheless a stewardship of the gospel has been entrusted to us. There are times when I do what God has called me to do with exhilaration, and there are other times when I act like a fool and fight against my calling. But I continue to preach because – blessed be the God who called me – I am one of the called and that makes me one of the lucky ones! This message began with the sour note that God does not want some people. But the fact that you still desire to respond to God’s word proves something. You have endured many battles of faith and felt the pain associated with your calling. Maybe you have been unwilling too often and have thought, “Will this never end?” But when you finally took a stand and made a decision that you would not give up no matter what, a breakthrough came and you discovered that the joy of victory outweighed the pain of battle. This started out as a harsh message because I wanted to shake you up and get your attention, but I want to end on this note: Can you start to understand that God has called His church to a unique task in these last days? However long you have been fighting this battle of faith, can you remember your years of walking with God, and rise up to meet a new challenge? To borrow the Lord’s words to Paul when He called him on the road to Damascus, will you stop “kicking against the pricks” and start understanding how fortunate you are? Some people hear and never understand. If you have friends who do not understand your commitment, don’t let them drag you down. You are one of the lucky ones; you have eyes to see. That means God has chosen you. Pharaoh and Jezebel never did see. Wise up and get your priorities back. Live by faith in the grace and peace of God, with His life resident in you, without making any qualifications on His claim on your life. When will you stop making God have to work you over every few months because you become foolish and lose your dedication? Determine that you will accept His government over your life this coming year, and stop talking back to the Potter. Stop thinking that you are capable of shaping God into your image. Return to submission to the Scriptures, and understand that God gave some apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, to the work of the ministry. Find your place in the ministry willingly, and get back on the track of total commitment on the front lines of battling the prince of the power of the air. Find a preacher who is stemming the tide of legalism on the one side and liberalism on the other side, and sail the straight path of God-governed behavior. I am asking you to fight the devil every day for the sake of the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom is bigger than your family or your career. The essence of this message is this: you could be so lucky that God has called you, so start acting like it! Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | December, 2021 Wingspread | November, 2021 Wingspread | October, 2021 Wingspread | September, 2021 Wingspread | August, 2021 Wingspread | July, 2021 Wingspread | June, 2021 Wingspread | May, 2021 Wingspread | April, 2021 Wingspread | March, 2021 Wingspread | February, 2021 Wingspread | January, 2021 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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