In our last study we were thinking about
the difference between being religious and spiritual.
We'd like to think a little more about
that because this is such a vital area
to be a true Christian.
We all know the difference between a servant
or a worker working in a shop or
a factory and a son working for his
own father in the same shop or factory.
Their attitude towards their work will be fundamentally
different.
A servant or worker is working for wages.
He's working for certain fixed hours.
If he has to work longer than that,
he expects overtime pay.
He expects a bonus at the end of
the year and after maybe one or two
years he may expect a raise in salary.
But a son is so different.
He doesn't think in terms of the number
of hours he works.
There may be more work required in the
office or the shop or the factory and
the son would gladly stay on long after
the workers have gone away.
And if the factory is going through a
difficult time financially, the son will not expect
the father to give him any money.
What is the difference?
There's a lot of difference.
And in the difference between the attitude of
a worker and the attitude of a son,
we can see the difference between the Old
Testament way of life and the New Testament
way of life.
You know your Bible is divided into two
parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Or it's also called the Old Covenant and
the New Covenant.
Now these are not words that we use
so much nowadays.
Testament, Covenant, they sound more like legal words.
But in very simple language, it only means
an agreement.
We all know what an agreement is.
You know, when a person sells a property
or hires a worker, they sign an agreement.
Both the person who's buying and the person
who's selling or the person who's employing and
the person who's being employed.
And that agreement is a picture of this
Old Testament and the New Testament.
God made an agreement with man in the
Old Testament times with Israel.
But when Jesus came, he's called the mediator
of a New Covenant or a new agreement
that God has made with man.
And in very simple terms, we could say
that under the old agreement, man was like
a servant.
You know, a servant can't call his master
father.
And that's why in the Old Testament, the
Jews could never call God father, because they
were servants.
They could call him, Oh, Lord, God, mighty
master and all that, but they couldn't call
him father.
But when Jesus came and he gathered his
disciples around him, he said, I'm going to
teach you now how to pray under the
New Covenant.
When you pray, you say, our father, who
art in heaven, which meant what?
That this was a new agreement.
We were now going to be sons and
daughters of God.
And our relationship with God was not going
to be anymore like that of a master
and a servant.
It was not even going to be like
that of a friend to a friend, which
is higher than a master and servant.
It's going to be more than friendship.
Abraham was called a friend of God.
But you know the difference between a friend
and a son.
If a very rich man says, this is
my friend and points to another one and
says, this is my son.
You know who has the inheritance, who's going
to receive everything from his father, not the
friend, the son.
To be a son of God is greater
than to be a servant of God.
It's greater than to be a friend of
God.
Now, very often we use the expression that
so-and-so is the Lord's servant.
And subconsciously we think that that man is
greater than the other person who's only a
son of God.
But is that really true?
If you were to come to my house
and I introduced two people to you and
I said, this is my servant and this
is my son, who would you think is
more important in my house?
Is it greater to be a servant of
the Lord than to be a son of
God?
These are all wrong concepts that we've got
in our mind, which are not from scripture.
Of course, a son of God should also
be a servant if he's a responsible son.
But we need to recognize that Jesus came
to deliver us from being merely slaves and
wants us to become sons.
And there we see the difference between being
religious and being spiritual.
A religious person behaves exactly like a servant.
A spiritual person will behave like a son.
Let's put it in two different words.
A servant would think in terms of the
minimum that he has to do in order
to fulfill his duties.
Whereas a son, a responsible son, would think
in terms of the maximum that he can
do to please his father or to help
his father.
And in those two words, minimum and maximum,
you can see the difference between the old
covenant and the new covenant, between being a
slave and being a son.
And that's why when Jesus was preaching what
is known as the Sermon on the Commandments,
he said, for example, under the old dispensation
you were told you shall not commit murder.
That's good.
What's the minimum required?
You shall not commit murder.
But is that the maximum that God required?
Certainly not.
What would the maximum be in that realm,
in that area, to please the father?
Where does murder come from?
It comes from anger.
And so Jesus said, I say to you,
don't be angry.
What was he trying to say?
He was trying to say, if you meditate
on the commandment, thou shalt not commit murder,
you would discover that that's just the minimum.
But if you meditate on it, you'll discover
that the way to please the father, if
your attitude is, what is the maximum I
can do?
It will be, I should not even get
angry with my brother or with anyone.
Then I have pleased the father.
I have not pleased the father if I
have only refrained from committing murder.
Now a religious person is one who takes
the letter of the law and says, I
kept it.
Religious people become Pharisees, and Pharisees gradually drift
away from the truth.
In every denomination in Christianity you will find
Pharisees, people who are taken up with the
letter, with the traditions, and who are more
interested in keeping those external traditions of their
particular group than in life in Jesus Christ.
This is the form of godliness that we
are told in 2 Timothy 3.5 to
beware of.
See, if you keep your fellowship with people
who are arrogant and proud, gradually you'll get
a little bit of their spirit.
If you constantly keep companionship with murderers, you'll
get a little bit of their spirit.
And in the same way, if you keep
companionship with people who are pure and godly,
you'll get a little bit of their spirit.
So when it says in 2 Timothy 3
.5 that avoid people who have only a
form of godliness, it's to preserve us in
life, that the Holy Spirit warns us.
Don't spend a lot of time with people
who are just keeping the letter of the
law, who are righteous externally.
That type of religiosity does not please God
at all.
Be a son, be a responsible son.
In the same way, when Jesus spoke about
adultery, He said, according to the old dispensation,
the thing was to avoid adultery, the physical
act.
That was sin.
But is that the maximum that God required?
No, that was the minimum.
What was the maximum?
The son would look at that commandment of
God and meditate on it and say, well,
that's the minimum that God requires.
It's like the servant saying, well, I've got
to work from nine o'clock to five
o'clock.
Once my eight-hour shift is over, I'm
off home.
But a son may stay on till nine
o'clock at night or all through the
night, because there's work to be done.
So the nine-to-five attitude says, I
don't have to commit adultery, that's all.
But the son's attitude is, what's behind that?
I should not be impure in my attitude
or thoughts towards anyone.
There must be purity in my thoughts towards
the opposite sex.
And that's Jesus emphasized to such an extent
that he said, if your eye offends you,
it's better to pluck it out.
Now, who understands that?
Only a son who is desperate to please
his father, who is longing that his father
will be totally satisfied with his life.
Only such a person can be really spiritual,
who seeks to understand the spirit behind the
commandments in scripture and not just the letter
of the law.
The Bible says that our relationship with Jesus
Christ is like that of a bride to
a bridegroom.
This is true Christianity.
It's a marriage.
It's not a religion.
It's a relationship between two people.
It's not worshiping a book.
It's being united to a person.
It's not worshiping a book.
It's being united to a person, to the
person of Jesus Christ.
Religious people worship a book.
The Bible is the most important thing to
them.
Now, the Bible is very important to me,
but not more important than Jesus Christ.
If I did not have fellowship with Jesus
Christ, the Bible would become a dead book
to me.
It's living because Jesus can speak to me
through it.
And our relationship with Christ is to be
like that of an earthly bride who is
deeply in love with her bridegroom.
The Bible speaks of our relationship with Christ
like that and that one day Christ will
come back and we'll be married to him.
It's the exact picture of a bride who's
engaged, waiting for her wedding day and eager
to correspond with her bridegroom, to telephone her
bridegroom, to listen to her bridegroom and wanting
to spend time with him until the day
of the marriage.
And during that time, how does she live?
She's only interested in her bridegroom's opinion.
She's not bothered what anybody else in the
world thinks about her.
She wants to please her bridegroom and she
doesn't do the minimum.
You see a bride and a bridegroom, an
engaged couple that are deeply in love with
each other, when they get an opportunity to
spend time with each other, do they think
of the minimum time required?
Do they look at the watch and say,
okay, we've spent 10 minutes, that's enough?
No.
They feel even five hours is not enough.
When they write letters to each other, an
engaged couple that are deeply in love with
each other, how long are those letters going
to be?
Half a page?
Do they say, well, that's enough.
I just told you I'm okay and hope
you're okay.
No.
They may write 25 pages and next day
they may write 25 pages again.
This is due to love.
True spirituality is the result of a loving
relationship with Christ.
Religiosity, on the other hand, is a merely
formal relationship with Christ, like a servant to
a master.
Let's seek to be spiritual.