Important or Vital?

In regards, I guess I could use the sermonette as a segue into the sermon because the sermonette hinged on a couple of words. The face, and then, of course, the appearance of the face and the countenance on the face. I enjoy words. I've enjoyed the study of words, etymology, ever since I was a freshman in high school. Dr. Floyd Lochner exposed us to etymology. I still have out in the garage the textbook that we used when I was a freshman, and I have enjoyed word studies ever since. Just coming to grasp the difference between words that are similar can have a significant impact on our lives. Let me give you a personal example. We're all aware of the fact that somewhere in the early 90s, Stephen Covey put out his landmark book on the seven habits. I read through that particular book, and in reading through it, it crystallized something in my mind, the place that from the reading of it ever onward, it has changed my conduct. But he had a section where he talked about the difference between urgent and important. I thought, okay, words that I'm familiar with, I would take them in stride if somebody were using them. I'd never stop and park long enough to ask, is there any difference? He said, let me illustrate the difference. He said, you're a manager in an office, and somebody wants to see you, and they make an appointment and drive a considerable distance to keep that appointment. They're on time, they sit down in your office, they've got a limited amount of time, the phone rings, and you say, excuse me, and you pick up the phone. Now, what you've demonstrated was the ringing of the phone strikes the mind as urgent. But the fact that this person may have driven considerable miles, you had both made time in your schedule for that person to be there, and it was a significant event, that was important. And he said, we have a tendency to allow things that are urgent to override things that are important. You know what, after I digested what he said from that time forward, when somebody comes to my home for a counseling and the phone rings and they do a start, I said, don't let that bother you. I don't answer the phone when I'm counseling. You took the time out of your schedule to come to my home to talk about something that is important. The phone will wait. That simple point in time where Covey defined a difference between the two and how they war with each other, and how the lesser important is given priority over the more important, made such an impact that, as I said, from that time forward, the phone has to wait its turn.

If you were in my home, you have taken your time to get there. You deserve my undivided attention. You don't deserve to have me get up, go talk on a phone, come back, sit down. If it rings again, excuse myself again, and break the continuity of something that is important to you.

What that man said as I said, has left an impact.

I'd like to go from that particular point to what I guess we could say is a similar but different point.

What he was saying, if I can put it in different words, is that some things are important, other things are vital, and there is a difference.

Do you understand the difference between vital and important?

I'm going to spend the sermon today discussing those because it is probably far more important than we realize or take the time to consider.

Vital is an interesting word. There are words in our vocabulary that when we use them, we by nature have an instinctive response. It may not be visual. In other words, somebody may not see the evidence of its impact. It may even be subconscious so that we're not even consciously aware of it. But vital is one of those words that has an impact on people. The word itself sounds important. In fact, it imparts a certain sense of urgency when we hear the word. Now, on television, there are a fair number of medical and police drama programs. In fact, it seems television over the last, I don't know how many decades, has simply been inundated by either medical or police medical kinds of programs. And when someone has been traumatized in some way or another, those people who are responsible to respond come up, what do you think? They check for vital signs. They want to know whether the person is alive and we need to do something for them, whether the person is dead and we're past the place of doing anything for them. And so they check for vital signs. Vital is simply the Latin word for life.

You and I are looked at at times. Somebody said to me not too terribly long ago that I hadn't seen for any, for quite a few years, we were talking about changes in our lives and how we appeared to one another. And you know, when somebody says to you, you haven't changed a bit. You have the same liveliness, the same energy that you had when I knew you back in whatever it happens to be. How do we describe that? We describe it as vitality. If you see an older person that doesn't act like an older person, you attribute that to vitality.

Now, I won't go into this particular area and ask any questions. I'll use the same discretion as the sermonette man did in regards to facial products. But I would imagine if I asked how many in the congregation take a vitamin supplement of some sort, there would be a reasonable number of hands that would go up. All the word vitamin means is we have isolated an element that is critical to life. If this element was completely absent from your diet, there would be the likelihood that you would die. You certainly would experience poor health. But that poor health may go beyond poor health to the fact that the complete absence of this vitamin, A, D, some of the Bs, those are the vitamins that everybody hears about and knows about, if there was a complete and total absence of some of these, you may die as a consequence. So the word vitamin simply means substance necessary for life. When you look at business, you see in mergers and acquisitions, somebody looks around for a business that they can buy because they believe that that fits into the products that their company makes and they present to their board of directors the fact that they believe they can revitalize this dying business. I was driving to a visit a couple of weeks ago and I was just early enough that I thought, oh, I need to kill about five to ten minutes so I don't arrive early. And I pulled into a parking lot that I was familiar with and in that parking lot had been a Kmart and a Sears and Roebuck outlet. Probably only about six months ago last time I drove by there. I pulled in there, there is no Kmart and there is no Sears outlet. A couple of companies that America is wondering whether they are beyond, in fact, America probably believes they are beyond, revitalization. So much life is drained out of them that they cannot be brought back to life. So when we hear the word vital, it's got several tentacles that reach into our lives at a level that tells us when something is vital it is a life or death matter. So the minute you hear the word vital, you're hearing a word that's life and death. Life or death. Now, let's take it beyond an etymology lesson down to Christian living.

What is vital in your religion and what is important?

Have you ever stopped to consider the difference between those things that are vital and those things that are important? That's not an easy question to answer. I have pondered that question for the last 20 years. And as you ponder it, as you go through the years and your view broadens, there are times where the focus sharpens and other times the focus just the opposite. And it says, there are some things that are very difficult to tell the difference between what is important and vital. You know, what's harder is when something important is the same as something that is vital. And I'll explain that to you in a moment.

The first ministerial conference of the New Testament church was convened for what purpose?

Now many of you know, so let me ask the question again. The first ministerial conference that was convened in the New Testament was convened for what purpose related to today's sermon. It's the same question, just a tighter, sharper focus. That conference was convened because everyone there had been taught that something was vital to salvation. And they had been taught it for almost two millennia.

And now somebody came along and was telling them it wasn't.

And they were understandably having an extremely difficult time wrapping their minds around the fact that something that had been vital for in the neighborhood of 1800 years now had people coming to them and saying, it's not vital. Go back to Acts chapter 15. We go back to Acts 15 and the very purpose for the convening of the meeting.

Acts chapter 15 and verse 1, And certain men came down from Judea and taught brethren, quote, Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.

That has moved the discussion into the realm of vital, hasn't it? See, important is important, but vital is life and death. So when you're segregating between the two, important will always be important, but vital is, this could kill me.

And as it says, certain who came down from Judea said, Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. Brethren, we all know if we can't be saved, then we're dead.

Therefore, when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and dispute with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to Jerusalem, to the apostles and elders about this question.

You know, God had to haul Peter kicking and screaming into a new understanding. Peter, as he's taking a pretty good walk from one city to another, is digesting a series of miracles that he's smart enough to know are not just serendipity. They're not time and chance. They're not accident. And somebody knowing exactly where he is, saying, My master had an angel tell him, come to this address and get you. And he's up on the roof scratching his head, asking about these sheets coming down with animals, trying to figure out what's going on. By the time he got finished with all of that, and he got to Cornelius's house, he understood a doctrinal change that just taken place, and something vital had now become something else. It took the Church of God a little longer. In fact, it could be argued that of all the doctrinal changes in the New Testament Church, there were possibly none more difficult for the Jewish portion of the Church to wrap their mind around than the changing of circumcision from vital to no longer being, as a physical act, vital to their salvation.

So, as I said earlier, there are some things that can be vital at one point in time and important at another point in time. There can be things that are vital in one's circumstance and not in another. Let me give you a difficult case for us. We're two millennia past the New Testament Church, so the issue of circumcision necessary for salvation is so old and moldy, it's not even a discussion item. It simply is a non-issue when it comes to salvation. Let's talk about one that is still relevant today. You and I live in a world that was shaped and formed by the teachings that sprang from the Protestant Reformation. So, when we take religion in America, we have to say the climate, the general beliefs, the way of viewing, the way of thinking, the way of writing were formed by the teachings that came out of the Protestant Reformation. The dominant denominations of our day preached that the law is done away and we have been saved by grace. In fact, it has been interesting, the last two weeks or three weeks, Mr. Scott Ashley has been running sidebars back and forth before the Council of Elders for final review before he finally begins to do the layout on a new booklet on the subject of grace. And so, we've been reading sidebars, sending comments in, dialoguing back and forth, and he's given us a deadline saying, get it all done by here because I need to start doing the actual layout. We object, as a church, as a body, we object to the way this topic is taught. So, we're not in step with the product that came out of the Protestant Reformation. When we see the teaching, when we hear the teaching, we say, no, that isn't what we believe and it isn't what the Bible teaches. As we talk about this, it comes down to a question of whether or not the law is vital.

Now, I'm going to cut some very, very, very fine lines in the next few minutes, so you need to listen carefully because much of the brouhaha and much of the brouhaha are very, very, very because much of the brouhaha and much of the contention and the headbanging about what Paul taught is because the reader does not cut the same fine line that Paul does. Paul is not confused over the issue. As Peter said, our brother Paul has written many things hard to be understood, which unlearned and unstable men will rest and twist. But Paul was not confused by what he wrote, but he wrote some things with great technical precision.

Now, Paul's position on the matter is argued endlessly without any agreement being reached.

Let's go back to Galatians chapter 3.

The question on the table is whether or not the law is vital.

That's the question I have put on the table for you, okay? You're not going to Galatians 3 to find that question. I'm posing the question to you. Is the law vital? That's the question. Galatians chapter 3, verse 21, it says, is the law then against the promises of God? And he says, certainly not.

For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. Can the law give life? No. So, if the discussion is taking place from that direction, can the law give you life? The answer is no. If that is the discussion on the table, the law is not vital.

Now, you need to understand there's more than one discussion, and Paul understood both discussions.

We were unfairly accused back in the early 90s of being legalists.

And I take offense of being called a legalist, because I have never in my entire life believed in a merit system. I didn't come out of a religion. I came out of a religion that was guilty of teaching what the Protestant Reformation taught. I didn't come out of a legalistic body. I didn't come out of, if you'll do this and you'll do this, that'll absolve you of sin. If you do this and you do that, then you can earn. I didn't come out of a merit system.

And so, the belief that on merit, on keeping, on observing the law, that I could gain eternal life was never a part of my upbringing before I came into the church. It's never been a part of the teaching of the church.

Now, there's a totally completely different conversation, and Paul entertained both discussions. The other discussion is, if you are a converted individual, if you have surrendered your life to God, if you have repented and been forgiven by the blood of Christ for your sins, is it vital that you keep the law?

And the answer is absolutely. We're not libertine. We're not libertine. We have never believed that by keeping the law, we could earn salvation. And we have equally never believed that after God has offered us the unmerited part of our sins, that we could flaunt the law. They are completely different conversations. The law is not vital in one situation, and it is completely vital in the other.

It's a matter of who you are. If you believe in a merit system and that you can earn salvation, you've missed the point. And I'm using vital in the pure sense, imparting life.

And as Paul said, it cannot impart life. You and I know it can take life away. I look around at a room full of people, many of whom have been baptized 30, 40, 50 years and more.

Spending all those years respecting the law of God, obeying the law of God, and asking God for forgiveness when we break the law of God. Because we understand once we are converted that we are to respect, honor, and obey the laws of God.

When I was in Sunday school as a kid, when you would have scripture memory bees and looking forward to winning a New Testament in Psalms, which was the common gift of that particular time, Romans 3.23 and 6.23 were just a step behind John 3.16 in terms of rote memorization. The realization that sin is the transgression of the law, which John tells us in 1 John.

Then coming to Paul, where he tells us the wages of sin is death, and all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

We're in a simple situation that we understand sin is breaking the law. All have broken the law. The wages of that is that all will die. And so we understand once we are converted that we have a tremendous obligation to respect, honor, and live according to the laws of God.

There's a phrase I don't know where it came from. I don't know how far back in time it goes. I don't know if we invented it in our church culture or whether somebody borrowed it within our church culture from some other source. But the phrase is majoring in the minors. And like I said, it's been around for so long, I don't even know where it originated.

Majoring in the minors is equivalent in our Christian living to not understanding the meaning of vital. Let me explain. One of the learning challenges for every individual who becomes a converted part of the church of God is coming to understand the difference between what we feel is of the first order and, on the other hand, what God has placed in the first order.

Or another way of putting it is, a part of our Christian journey, especially on the front end, is coming to the place where we come to understand God's priorities and our priorities become His priorities. So we say, well, what are God's priorities? Because if He has priorities, I need to identify them, and they need to be my priorities. That's a search for what is vital.

You know, from the time God calls us, from the time He taps on the side of His head, He says, hello, anybody home? And there is somebody home. And we start to respond. We start to say, yes, Lord, I'm here. And it may be a broadcast, or a telecast, or literature, or a friend or a relative, but somebody then becomes the conduit. And we begin to learn, and we begin to grow. We begin to ask questions, and we seek from the Bible to find the answers. You know, from that time, until you stop breathing, your entire life is an exercise in restructuring values. Of coming more and more to the place where you look like and think like Christ.

I was very sensitive to religion as a small boy, and it gave me tremendous grief in my understanding as a boy of religion as I understood it. My father was not a swearer, meaning it wasn't a common part of his vocabulary. But if you startled him, you're going to hear some four-letter words.

Now, he spoke low German, and even though I didn't understand the words, I understood the words. You know, you can understand, even though you don't know what that word means, you know what it is. And there would come out a string of German curse words, and I knew enough that cursing was wrong. It's funny, you know, as a boy, the two biggest sins that I could think of were smoking and cursing. My grandfather smoked. My father, when he was startled or shocked, swore. And I was afraid, again, this is the context I grew up in, I was afraid my dad's going to go to hell. And the biggest concerns in my life at that particular time, in regards to my father, was that God would help him reach the place where he no longer swore.

When Dad was called, came into the church, that disappeared totally and completely. It evaporated out of his life. But so did all of our understanding of what were important and what were lesser important. At that time, I was a child, and limited grasp was understandable.

But as we move into adulthood, then we have to ask ourselves, do we still live at the address labeled, majoring in the minors?

Now, if you're not familiar with the term, and I'm assuming most of you are, it simply describes a person who spends time worrying about lesser issues while ignoring issues that are far, far more important. Being oblivious to things that are vital, while being totally obsessed by things that are probably no more than important.

Go back to Matthew 23.

Take you to a scripture that every single one of you knows.

In fact, you can't have Dr. Ward as your pastor and not know Matthew 23, 23, and 24. Matthew 23, 23, This is a classical biblical illustration of majoring in the minors. You are fastidious in weighing out spices that are almost impossible to divide accurately.

I teased one of the home office staff many, many years ago. My wife and I lived in Seattle, and we moved into a house that had been owned by a master gardener, and there was a beautiful herb bed, and in it was a luxurious stand of bronze fennel. One of the staff members enjoyed cooking and found out that I had some bronze fennel, and I said, oh, I will bring my tithes to you. We didn't use any, so I didn't bring 10 percent. I brought 90 percent, and I kept 10 percent. I would hate to have been responsible for measuring what constituted a tenth of those little bitty tiny seeds. Those of you who are cooks, cumin seeds, mint leaves are like air. I've got mint in my yard, and I pick it every once in a while and dry it outside and bring it in in a jar for my wife. But once it's dried, all you have to do is go, and off it floats. Well, I have no idea what it weighs. But he said, you will obsess over tithing extremely difficult herbs to weigh and measure. But you won't pay any attention to justice and mercy and faith.

And he says, these are the weightier matters.

So he said to the Pharisees, you major in the minors when you ought to be majoring in the majors. Over the decades, as we watch young people grow up, reach maturity, and we watch some of them who decide for whatever reason to no longer stay in the church, but to go off to whatever life they want to go off to, it's not uncommon for us with the years of experience that we have in that area to find it interesting that if a young man or a young woman departs the church, and leaves, and goes somewhere else, and you watch them begin to lose piece by piece by piece what they were taught, what they lived, what they practiced. Some of the last things that seem to disappear are clean and unclean meats and pagan holidays. And you think on a scale of what's important. If you walk away from the church, really what is important are things that are far away here than whether or not you eat shrimp or you don't eat shrimp, whether or not you keep Halloween or you don't keep Halloween. They will hang on to the miners and abandon the majors. And it's a curious thing. So it seems to be somewhat built into human beings what Christ scolded this Pharisee over because we have seen even in our own culture a parallel to it, that people have a tendency to hang on to the miners as the majors simply drift away. Annually, every spring in the days of 11 bread, I think we get probably the best example that we have all year long of how we process the difference between important and vital. I don't know of anything I can think of in the course of the routine of the year that is quite as stark an illustration as the observance of the days of 11 bread.

Let's go back to Micah chapter 6. I'll leave you dangling for a moment.

We're not going to leave the days of 11 bread, but I want to add Micah chapter 6 to the discussion.

Bear with me. I'll get there eventually.

Scripture that all of us know, Micah chapter 6, beginning in verse 6.

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, 10,000 rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body, for the sin of my soul?

He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with your God?

We're right back to the conversation with the Pharisees, aren't we?

We're right back to Matthew 23 in Christ's discussion with the Pharisees. I don't want all your sheep. I don't want your whole year's vintage of wine from your vineyard. I don't need lamb chops. I've got plenty of those. I need mercy and justice, and I need someone who walks humbly before me. Every year, when we come to the days of Unleavened Bread, there are two things that we can focus on.

One is vital, the other is important. I played down for many years the past of a congregation, the physical deleavening process. When I say played it down, I never treated it with disrespect. Simply placed it lower than the spiritual part of the deleavening process. If I had a member that I perceived thinking that I was getting liberal in this regard, I would simply say, look, every single solitary year, I go out before the days of Unleavened Bread, and I get the shop back out, and I dismantle my wife's minivan and my car all the way down to the spare tire well, and I vacuum out every single solitary thing that is there.

And then I empty the central vac, and then I empty the handy vac, and then I empty the shop vac. But I said, those aren't the vital parts. Those are the important parts because God says, do it. But the vital part is whether or not I come to the place described predominantly by the Apostle Paul, where I look at what puffs me up, and I look at those things that he describes as spiritual leaven, malice, lack of sincerity, you know, duplicity, dishonesty.

Those are leaven. Malice is leaven. Hypocrisy. That is leaven. When he said, beware of the leaven of the pharisees, which is hypocrisy, he was describing a leaven. A leaven that is a whole lot more important than that last piece of soda cracker that you may find sometime in the days of 11 bread and say, oh, I missed that one. We used to laugh, I believe it was when I was in Columbus, Ohio, at one individual who bought a new car and drove it for, I don't know how many years, and one day he had to do some repair on the car, and it required, probably just by assumption, it probably an electric window switch because it required taking off the door panel on the front door.

And inside the front door was a full sandwich. Then one of the auto workers had left a sandwich in the door, and so he had been delavening for all those years, and inside was a full sandwich sitting inside the door panel down in the bottom of it. Of course, thoroughly and completely dried out by that time in life.

And we always chuckled at his expense, majoring in the minors, focusing so totally on getting the physical leavening out of life that the admonitions of Paul to the Corinthians and the observations of Christ to his disciples about the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians take a back seat. Important gets the front seat, vital gets the back seat. Let's talk about some vital issues. I don't think anybody gets more senior moments with the term I want. Evaluation, commentary, assessment, none of those are exactly the word I wanted, but they will tell you the field that I'm in.

Nobody gets more analysis, I believe, in the Bible as a character than David. Maybe Job, but I think David probably gets more evaluation and assessment than even Job. The number of sermons on David, David's sins, David a man after God's own heart, why God loved David, he didn't love Saul, the sermons are endless. The kingdom period in Israel begins with God rejecting Saul, and God loving David as a man after his own heart. David's sins were far more egregious than Saul's. They were right out there in front. They were on display for everybody to see.

Murder, adultery, some of the most flagrant and conspicuous of sins in our human vocabulary. Saul, the way it's written up, looked like he goofed once, and it was one and done. And so people who do not stop to ask the question, what is vital and what is important and what is the difference, can have problems with Saul and David.

Go back to 1 Samuel chapter 15. 1 Samuel chapter 15, the place in time where God told Saul, I don't want to hear from you anymore. We're finished. No more conversations. For Samuel 15 verses 1 through 3 set the stage.

Samuel also said to Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint you, king, over his people, over Israel. Now therefore heed the voice of the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all they have and do not spare them. Kill both man, woman, infant, nursing child, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey.

Not difficult instructions to understand. He said all. A-L-L. Verse 7 Saul attacked the Amalekites from Havelah all the way to Shur, which is east of Egypt. He also took Agag, king of the Amalekites, alive and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the best of the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good and were unwilling to utterly destroy them. All the rubbish, everything despised and worthless, they destroyed totally.

So somebody decided he knew better than God. That is always a bad place to be.

Always a bad place to figure that you can edit and amend what God has to say. Verse 10 He went out and set himself up a monument for himself, and he has gone out around, passed by, and gone down to Gilgal. So he went out and set himself up a battle monument, praising him for his great victories, adoring and leaving it there so that everyone who passed by could honor and respect Saul for his great victory. Verse 13, then Samuel went to Saul, and Saul said to him, "'Blessed are you of the Lord! I have performed the commandment of the Lord.' But Samuel said, "'What then is this bleeding of the sheep in my ear, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?' And Saul said, "'They have brought them back from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have utterly destroyed.'" You know, Saul for a moment tried to evade the old saying that the buck stops here. When you're king, you're king. And there is nobody you can turn to and say, "'They did this,' because the buck stops at your throne." I'm going to be a little more blunt than the new King James. Then Samuel said to Saul, "'Shut up, and I'll tell you what the Lord God said to me last night.' And he said to him, "'Speak on.' So Samuel said, "'When you were little in your own eyes, were you not head of the tribes of Israel? And did not the Lord anoint you king over Israel? Now the Lord sent you on a mission, and said, "'Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.' Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil and do evil in the sight of the Lord?" And Saul said to Samuel, "'But I've evaded the voice of the Lord, and gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. And I brought back Agag, king of the Amalekites, and I've utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took the plunder, sheep and oxen, the best of things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.' And then comes the clincher. So Samuel said, "'As the Lord is great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord.'" You see, Saul majored in the miners to death. He said, "'Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams, for rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.

Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you from being king.' There we have the account of God's rejection of Saul.

So how did God divide between vital and important?

You know, if you read between the lines and what was said to Saul, and then you apply it to all of the cases of visible and obvious sins on David's part, you come down to a simple reality. An action versus a spirit. A conduct versus an attitude.

You know, often by itself, the act of breaking a law of God is always going to be important. The spirit, the spirit or attitude that motivates that breach of the law may be vital.

David is such an awesome example of an individual who, when confronted head-on with what he had done wrong, was tremendously remorseful. He was tremendously humbled. Psalm 51 is one of the greatest chapters in all the Bible. But we see David over and over again demonstrating in the worst of circumstances an absolutely beautiful attitude. For those of you that were here last week, the messages that were given that went back to Psalm 34 and what David was saying under conditions that most people would be sitting there lamenting and moaning and crying to God. He was thanking God and praising God at a time when he was in the worst of conditions. Speaks to a spirit. It speaks to an attitude. You can break the law of God, any law, and find you are in less danger of losing eternal life than if you lived a law-abiding life with certain spirits or attitudes. And that's difficult for we human beings to understand.

Very difficult. Matthew 12.

Well, you know what? For the length of time we would take to read that.

No, let's go ahead and go there. I was just weighing whether or not it was something we should read or whether I should simply quote it to you because, again, this is something that you're not unfamiliar with. Matthew 12. Verse 22. I don't know if you've looked at what we're going to read through the lens of a comparison between an action and an attitude, but I'm going to read it to you through that lens.

Matthew 12.22.

Then one was brought to him who was demon-possessed, blind and mute, and he healed him so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw, and all the multitudes were amazed, and said, could this be the son of David? And when the Pharisees heard it, they said, this fellow does not cast out demons except by Baal Zebub, the ruler of the demons. They were saying, look, you saw what he did. He removed a demon by the power of the arch demon. Now Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he's divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Baal Zebub by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house. He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters abroad. And therefore I say to you, every sin—and this is where the focus comes in, brethren, so bear with me here because this is where we get to the point. Christ brings it all down to this—therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit it will not be forgiven men. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him either in this age or in the age to come. That's a sobering statement, isn't it? It's a sobering statement.

You know what Christ did there? He contrasted an act with an attitude.

What he was saying to them is, if you knowingly, if you know who I am, and you don't like me, you think I'm competition, you're afraid of what might happen if too many people follow me, and I understand all of that. But if you know who I am, and then with that knowledge take the actions that I have done by the power of God and attribute those to Satan, it's unforgivable. It is unforgivable.

If you don't know who I am, and you see what I do, and you're jealous of me, you're afraid of me, you think I may jeopardize your position, you can say anything against me and about me that you want. And there will come a time where it will all, like water, flow off and be forgotten.

It is not the act, it is the knowing intent to go the wrong way.

And he says, if you know who I am, and you know by what power I did what I did, and you still plant your feet in stubbornness, and you attribute the works of God himself to Satan, there is no forgiveness. Not now, not later. This was a powerful, powerful contrast between the difference of an act that is wrong, and a spirit, a knowledge that is wrong.

You know, the most deadly spirit, because it is stealthy, and therefore, indiscernible many, many, many times, is self-righteousness.

I don't like the word righteousness. I don't like it because it adds too many us-nuses to it, and muddies the water. All self-righteousness means is self-right. I am the one who is right. I am the determiner of right. I am the one that does right. I am the one that evaluates what is right. I have set myself up as the superior authority on right, and everything has to conform to my assessment of right. That's what self-righteousness is. And it's stealing. It's stealing. Because God says, I am the only one who can define right. I am the one that is right. I am the one who has described right. I am the one who lives right. And you have taken a prerogative that belongs to me and me alone. That's why self-righteousness is so deadly. Because it is usurping from God what he and he alone has the right to own.

Again, a spirit.

Actions?

You know, when Christ said, all sins can be forgiven man except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Sin is always wrong. It's important not to sin. But when it comes to vitality, whether you live or die, a sin can be forgiven if the attitude can be changed. If the attitude is unchangeable, it's deadly.

Now, with these things said, brethren, let's in conclusion simply do a very small five or ten minute pump prime. Because I've given you a conceptual sermon today. Giving you something you can work with in your mind. You can process. You can evaluate. You can overlay it on top of your Bible study. And you can make assessments. I want to give you two or three examples of things that the Bible describes as vital. And then simply say, again, as a priming of the pump, here are some four instances of those things that Scripture says are vital. As you study, you can add to that particular list. And conversely, you may find that as you do so, there are some things that you may have placed as vital that are important. And something else has been sitting down here that needs to rise above it. I'm going to take the easy ones because those are the ones that are the easiest to imprint. If we're giving four instances, the clearer the four instances, the better it is. So let's go back to Hebrews 11. I'm only going to give you three.

I'll give you two that are in the duh category, and then I'll give you one that is in the hmm, yes, category. And I'll make a sandwich. I'll give you the duh's on the end and the hmm in the middle. So we all know this one from Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11 and verse 6 says, Without faith, it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that is, he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. You know, the word impossible says it all. If you can't please God, will you be in God's kingdom? As I said, we start with the duh.

So, vital, faith. Faith is in the vital category. If it's impossible to please God, we're not heading toward his kingdom. I know that many of us, and probably many times over, find ourselves mentally in the camp of one individual that Christ worked with regarding a heli. And he asked the man if he had faith, if he believed. And he said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. No, faith isn't something that on a meter always registers 100 percent, and it definitely doesn't register 100 percent in all cases. But we walk by faith. I think sometimes we even may discount faith that God looks at with appreciation. I look at every single act it takes for somebody to come into the Church of God, and it is an act of faith. If I go back to the time when counseling new people was virtually my whole week's occupation in years past, I look at every one of those people who was going to sit down with me or any pastor anywhere in the United States or overseas, look us in the eye and be told, you've got a job and you work on the Sabbath, you have to make a decision.

You have a job where your boss says, if you go to the feast, don't bother coming back to work because there won't be a job waiting for you. And you go on from there to take item after item after item after item, and nobody ever stopped working on the Sabbath or going to an employer and saying, I'm sorry, but I can't work on Friday nights or Saturdays anymore without exercising an act of faith.

It took a tremendous amount of faith for you to be in this room, faith that many times over in terms of numbers, people have been put in the same position and simply said, can't do it and walked away.

So I want you to understand that from God's perspective, faith is already embedded as an element in your life and has been there as long as you've been in this church. And I say that because I think probably every single one of us at times feels inadequate when it comes to how much faith we have. Well, stay that way. If you ever get to the place you think you have all the faith you need, you're probably in serious trouble.

But faith is vital. The second one is simply a rehash, and I won't even go back there. It was 1 Samuel chapter 15 verses 22 and 23. It's where Samuel read Saul the verdict, where he said, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. All of us know the first rebel. All we have to do is go back to Isaiah and Ezekiel, and it's laid out for us very clearly who the first rebel was, and rebellion is vital. It will take your life from you. Slip and fall, important. Get back up. Dust yourself off. Continue on. Rebellion, terminal. He linked rebellion with stubbornness, and it's hard to separate the two. I don't think he was giving Saul so much two different categories as he was saying, here are two facets of your personality, and I don't know how to separate them. Your stubbornness is what caused your rebellion.

You blame the people for what you had the authority to do.

You're not that stupid, Saul. You know who had the authority to say, stop. We're not crossing over this point with you bringing anything with you. If it comes, you don't, and it's not coming.

Vital. Life and death. As we contrasted, David, we saw an individual in whom there was no rebellion. Mistakes, some really big ones. Rebellion, it wasn't who he was. Stubborn.

You could wish that you were as free of stubbornness as David expresses himself in the Psalms.

The last of the three is another one of those, duh. So we put the one you have to spend some time thinking about in the middle.

Faith is on one side of the sandwich, so to speak, and 1 Corinthians chapter 13 gives us the other side, and that will give us our sampler. 1 Corinthians 13, we all know what it says, it's a very simple deduction. 2 Though I speak with tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 3 And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am zero. I'm nothing.

Vital. Nothing doesn't go anywhere. Nothing ends up in the end as nothing. And so if you're going to be something, you have to get past being nothing. And those first three verses explain that very plainly.

In fact, it even says if we're slicing the bread on this sandwich, that the first slice, faith, is a little bit smaller slice than this slice. Because if I have faith and I do not have charity, I'm still nothing. As I said from the time I was a freshman in high school and Dr. Lochner initiated the class on etymology, I have had a conscious delight in the power of words, the nuances that are there, and the importance. Study the Word of God carefully. And as you do so, I hope the priming of the pump allows you to discern more carefully what is vital, because those things that are vital are literally a key to eternal life.