Be 'Christmas People' All Year Long

BE ‘CHRISTMAS PEOPLE’ ALL YEAR LONG

Following Jesus in Light of Mark 1:40–3:6

By Pastor Brian Wilbur

Date:   December 8, 2019

Series: Mark: Knowing and Following God’s Son

Note:   Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard   Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

I have titled this sermon: “Be ‘Christmas People’ All Year Long.” It is part of The Gospel of Mark sermon series, but instead of taking a close look at a single passage, I want to step back, turn on the wide-angle lens, and get a bigger picture look at what it means to follow Jesus in light of Mark 1:40–3:6.

When I say, “Be ‘Christmas People’ All Year Long,” you might think of a well-known quote from The Chronicles of Narnia. Father Christmas says, “Why, it is she [the White Witch] that has got all Narnia under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter, and never Christmas; think of that!”[1] By contrast, I would propose that the quality of our spiritual lives ought to be always Christmas, and never winter.

As we saw in last week’s message from Mark 2:18-22, Jesus is the divine bridegroom who has come to claim His people. “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.” (Mark 2:19) When we discern our Lord’s saving presence, we rejoice and celebrate.

During the first three-and-a-half weeks of December, leading up to Christmas Day, we can certainly be tempted by excessive busyness, financial pressures, materialistic ambitions, and the perceived expectations of other people. At its best, however, Christmastime calls for heartfelt warmth and generosity of spirit, for sharing what we have and showing hospitality to others, and doing all this with a true sense of festivity and merriment.

For us as Christians, however, it is not Christmastime that calls us into these good things, but the Lord Jesus Christ who calls us. He is the One who says, “Follow me.” He is the One who shows us what largeness of heart looks like in action.

The aim of this sermon is to call us to have a large heart of love and warm generosity of spirit, which flows out of a close relationship with Jesus.

THE NECESSARY AND DANGEROUS PURSUIT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

I want to set up this lesson by reflecting on the necessary and dangerous pursuit of righteousness. It may strike you as odd to so quickly transition from generosity of spirit to the pursuit of righteousness, but please bear with me – they are closely related.

We need to be clear on the fact that God calls us to pursue holiness and righteousness. The apostle Paul said so: “Pursue righteousness” (1 Timothy 6:11). The apostle Peter said so: “be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 2:15). The apostle John said so: “everyone who… hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” (1 John 3:3) Scripture clearly calls us to purity, holiness, and righteousness in our attitudes and actions.

Error #1: Indifference

Now when you’re dealing with the straight highway of truth, you always have to be aware of the two ditches, one grave error on each side of the road. We can call Error #1 ‘Indifference’. If you have the attitude of indifference, then you really don’t care about the pursuit of righteousness. When churchgoers or professing Christians have this attitude, they sometimes justify it by misusing the concept of grace: Since God is gracious and forgiving, it doesn’t really matter how we live, does it? This is very wrongheaded. In Romans 6, Paul says: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:1-2) The truth of the matter is that God’s grace both forgives and transforms – both pardons and purifies. Which means that healthy Christians cannot be indifferent to holiness. Jesus “was eating with sinners and tax collectors” (Mark 2:16), but not in order to leave them comfortable in their sin. Jesus recognizes that these sinners and tax collectors were spiritually sick and that they needed the healing hand of the Great Physician (Mark 2:17). Jesus came “to call… sinners” (Mark 2:17) into His grace – that they might follow after Him and live for God’s kingdom and glory.

Error #1 is a serious error, but I want to direct most of my attention to the error on the other side of the road. 

Error #2: Legalism

We can call Error #2 ‘Legalism’. Being legalistic should not be defined as ‘being serious about obedience’. Scripture tells us to be serious about obedience and not to be legalistic, so they are two different things. If you have a legalistic attitude, then you pursue righteousness in your own wisdom and strength.[2] Legalism means that you pursue righteousness apart from God’s grace. When the pursuit of righteousness is healthy, it is God’s grace that is anchoring, energizing, and flavoring that pursuit and growth. But when you pursue righteousness on your own, apart from God’s grace, what you end up with is a stinky and stuffy form of righteousness that doesn’t please God. When you pursue holiness according to your own wisdom, apart from the transforming power of God’s Spirit, what you end up with is a religious system that looks impressive on the outside, but inside is empty and hollow. “Always winter, and never Christmas” is a good description of graceless religion.

Are You Following Jesus or a Religious System?

As professing Christians who attend church on a regular basis, it is good for us to ask ourselves about our pursuit of righteousness: what kind of pursuit is it? Are we truly following Jesus? Or are we only following a religious system?

It is not always easy to distinguish between these two things if you just look at things outwardly. When we think of a religious system, we think of rules and regulations, customs and traditions, protocol and programs. But following Jesus shares some of these features, because following Jesus isn’t just a vague personal relationship. There is definition to it: we have biblical instruction that gives us doctrinal and moral standards; we have the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; we have some measure of organization in terms of the local congregation with elders and deacons; and Jesus expects His people to obey Him – “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) So following Jesus and following a religious system do share some outward similarities.

But at the deepest level, following Jesus is worlds apart from following a religious system. Following Jesus puts the emphasis on our relationship to a Person: He loves us, and we love Him in return. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5), which means that our pursuit of righteousness is full of grace, life, and peace. There are outward things that we do and must do, but we aren’t simply going through the motions. We are the temple of the living God, and God dwells among His people. Following Jesus means that the Lord Jesus Christ is nourishing us through His Spirit, and that His Spirit is shaping us to be Christ-like and holy in our everyday lives.

By contrast, following a religious system is full of activity, but God’s blessing and power is absent. There are buildings, services, and programs; and there are teachings, duties, and prayers – but none of these are beautified by the grace of God. Religionists are serious about righteousness, but they think that they can ‘pull it off’ in their own strength.

THE PHARISEES AND OTHER GRACELESS HOLINESS MOVEMENTS

Now how does all this relate to Mark 1:40–3:6? Well, ask yourself: who are the serious, but graceless pursuers of righteousness in these chapters? The Pharisees. It is fashionable for us to be critical of the Pharisees, and in one sense we must be critical, because our Lord Jesus was critical of the Pharisees’ graceless religiosity. So if we follow Jesus, then we must submit to His critique of the Pharisees. However, it would be healthy for us to show a little bit of sympathy to the Pharisees, for the simple reason that we are fellow sinners who can easily fall into their trap of pursuing righteousness in our own wisdom and strength.

So let’s think about the Pharisees for a moment. We could think of the Pharisees as a kind of holiness movement. The phrase ‘Holiness Movement’ is typically associated with movements within multiple denominations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, but I’m not using the phrase in this specific sense. I’m using it a general sense to describe any group of people who covenant together to get serious about holiness, righteousness, purity, spiritual disciplines, and moral renewal.

And why shouldn’t we be serious about such things, right? Just look around! The Pharisees could have looked around in their own day, and we can look around in our day – and what do we see? Ungodliness. Immorality. Greed. Lack of doctrinal knowledge. No zeal for obedience to God’s law. All kinds of cowardice and compromise. The spiritual temperature of the world is so pathetically low, surely God must not be pleased. Surely our lackluster lives are not going to usher in God’s kingdom. What shall we do? This: We will be different, better, holy! We will set ourselves apart for God’s service! We will live righteously in every detail of our lives! We will devote ourselves to the study and practice of God’s commandments! Though others be lax, we will pray, we will fast, we will tithe, and we will make ourselves presentable to God! We will raise the spiritual temperature of our society!

Do you understand? So much of it sounds so right. In fact, if God’s grace were underneath it, inspiring it and empowering it, it would basically be on the right track. The problem, though, is that so often religious holiness movements are mere human attempts to set things right, and the transforming presence of God’s Spirit is sadly absent.

Three Characteristics of Graceless Holiness Movements

I want you to notice three things that often characterize holiness movements that are not rooted in God’s grace. Mark 2-3, along with other passages, show us that these three things characterized the Pharisaical movement. It is important for us to understand that we ourselves can fall into one or more of these traps. And if we do, we will not be ‘Christmas people’ but instead we will only be ‘cold people’ who don’t share in the fullness of Christ’s love.

Characteristic #1: Ungracious Separation

Number One: Graceless holiness movements often insist on ungracious separation from unholy or less holy people. You avoid the broken, the riffraff, the outsiders, the obvious sinners. You only keep good company. Why? Because if you keep the wrong company, you will be contaminated or compromised or criticized – and who wants that? So you keep your distance, and limit yourself to ‘the acceptable people’.

Of course, separation is really a complex issue that requires a lot of discernment. There is a time and place for gracious separation. Scripture says things like: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1); “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33); “have nothing more to do with [a divisive person]” (Titus 3:10). However, graceless holiness movements draw the line in the wrong place, and for the wrong reason. Graceless holiness movements assume that righteousness is a matter of external social interactions, when it is actually a matter of internal heart attitudes.

Recall that “the scribes of the Pharisees” were critical of Jesus because “he was eating with sinners and tax collectors” (Mark 2:16). He was keeping company with the wrong crowd. In a beautiful passage over in The Gospel of Luke, Jesus was eating in a Pharisee’s house. A woman with a sinful reputation crashed the dinner, wept at Jesus’ feet, and anointed Jesus’ feet with alabaster ointment. The Pharisee thought, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” (Luke 7:39) The Pharisee assumes that a prophet and holy man would not allow physical contact with an overt sinner. Why? Because sinfulness is contaminating. Touch a sinner, become unclean. Touch a leper, become unclean.

And yet, to go back to Mark 1:41, there we see Jesus touching and cleansing a leper. What was contagious? The leper’s uncleanness? No, it was Jesus’ holiness that was contagious: the Holy One conferred His beauty and grace upon the leper, and the leper “was made clean” (Mark 1:42).

Jesus calls us to bring the health of the gospel to sin-sick sinners (Mark 1:17), but if we adopt a graceless holiness movement, we will separate from the very sinners that we have been called to reach.

Further, a graceless approach to holiness often leads to division inside the church. In her wonderful book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Rosaria Butterfield describes people who are so concerned about their chosen purity issue that they cannot enter into joyful fellowship with other believers. Such people feel that they

“[need] to be in a church made up of people just like they, who raise their children using the same childrearing methods, who take the same stance on birth control, schooling, voting, breastfeeding, dress codes, white flour, white sugar, gluten, childhood immunizations, the observance of secular and religious holidays. We encountered families who feared diversity with a primal fear. They often told us that they didn’t want to “confuse” their children by exposing them to differences in parenting standards among Christians. I suspect that they feared that deviation from their rules might provide a window for children to see how truly diverse the world is and that temptation might lead them astray. Over and over and over again I have heard this line of thinking from the fearful and the faith-struggling. We in the church tend to be more fearful of the (perceived) sin in the world than of the sin in our own hearts.”[3]

Your heart will be “two sizes too small”[4] – and actually, far worse! – if you have a laser-like focus on other people’s shortcomings, but are blinded to your own. In Matthew’s report of Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisees after He was “[eating] with tax collectors and sinners” (Matthew 9:11), Jesus said to them, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13)

Do you want to see a true holiness movement? Then understand this: such a movement would be full of mercy.

Characteristic #2: Strict Discipline, Little Joy

Number Two: Graceless holiness movements often major on strict disciplines but leave little room for joy. “[The] Pharisees were fasting” (Mark 2:18). In fact, they were apt to fast two days a week – on Monday and Thursday. They were careful to tithe on everything, including their herbs and spices (Matthew 23:23). But where was the joy? In Mark 7 we will learn that they observed all kinds of special, ceremonial washings for their hands and for their “cups and pots and copper vessels” (Mark 7:4).

Their problem, of course, was not in the desire to obey. Obedience is a good thing. True obedience and deep joy grow on the same tree, out of a heart that is rooted in God’s grace. “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”[3] Amen! Their problem, rather, was that their hearts were far from God (Mark 7:6). Their righteousness was external, not internal. They kept their duties, but didn’t have the capacity for joy. They should have entered into the joy that the Lord had drawn near in order to bring salvation (Mark 2:19; Luke 15:1-32). But instead of rejoicing in the presence of the Lord, they were enraged at how little He cared about their religious system. Imagine that: their religious system kept them from God; their religious system kept them from the joy of the Lord. What about you? Could it be that your religious system is standing between you and the heart of God?

The Lord calls us to enter into the joy of His salvation – and the joy of His salvation is the freeness of His grace. Religious systems are man-made efforts to earn God’s favor or achieve spiritual perfection. Religious systems require you to give everything. Religious systems call for your best performance. But religious systems are not bridegrooms that woo their blemished bride, and religious systems never lay down their lives for their followers. You must carry the burden of your religious system, and if you carry it long enough and far enough, then your religious system will turn you into a proud and accomplished doer. By contrast, following Jesus means that He carries you, He sets you free, He reworks you from the inside out, and ultimately He turns you into a humble and joyful worshiper whose fullness of heart overflows in love for other people.

Speaking of love for other people, we now come to the third characteristic.

Characteristic #3: Compliance to Inflexible Rules

Number Three: Graceless holiness movements often exalt compliance to inflexible rules over compassion for needy people. At this point I’m looking ahead to Mark 2:23–3:6, which I haven’t preached yet. Both Mark 2:23-28 and Mark 3:1-6 deal with Jesus’ perspective on the Sabbath in contrast to the Pharisees’ perspective on the Sabbath. While Jesus and the Pharisees would have agreed on the importance of keeping the Sabbath, they had radically different conceptions of what faithful Sabbath-keeping looks like.

God did indeed command His people to rest on the seventh day. The seventh day was to be a day of rest in which you cease from ordinary work and productivity, a day in which you enjoy the goodness of God’s creation and provision, a day in which you remember God’s gracious work of salvation, a day in which you allow yourself and others the time to be refreshed and restored. The Sabbath Day was a beautiful gift from God, but graceless holiness movements leave no stone unturned in their project of turning gracious gifts into heavy burdens.

In Mark 2:23-28, Jesus’ disciples are “[plucking] heads of grain” (Mark 2:23) on the Sabbath Day. In other words, they are gathering food – and generally speaking, this would have been regarded as a form of work that violated the Sabbath. So the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) When Jesus answered their question, He didn’t dispute the Pharisees’ basic assessment of the situation. Remarkably, however, Jesus said that there is a law beneath the law – there is a deeper law. And there are times, Jesus teaches, when the spirit of the law requires you to temporarily set aside the letter of the law.

In Mark 3:1-6, there is “a man… with a withered hand” (Mark 3:1) in the synagogue on a Sabbath Day, and Jesus was there. Some Pharisees were also there, like eager religious code enforcement officers who were ready to level accusations against Jesus if He violated their understanding of Sabbath-keeping. In the Pharisaical mind, the act of healing someone was also regarded as a form of work that violated the Sabbath. So you can anticipate the problem: Jesus invites “the man with the withered hand” into His presence (Mark 3:3), and then – before He performs the act of healing – Jesus confronts the Pharisees: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4) Surely it is always lawful “to do good” and “to save life”, whether on the Sabbath or on any other day! But the Pharisees were stuck in “their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5), and they were incapable of loving “the man with a withered hand”; they were incapable of rejoicing when Jesus healed this handicapped man; they were incapable of participating in the true spirit of Sabbath rest and restoration. Instead they were enraged and they began to plot “how to destroy [Jesus]” (Mark 3:6).

Do you see their problem? They exalted compliance to inflexible rules over compassion for hungry or broken people. In fact, sometimes they added their own regulations and traditions on top of God’s commandments (such as fasting twice a week, or washing their hands before they eat), and their life turned into rigid compliance instead of joyful obedience. But even when it came to their understanding of God’s commandments, which we truly ought to obey, they were so fixated on the letter of the law that they failed to see that the law itself promotes the law of love. The law itself teaches us that the whole point of the law is what? Love.

Jesus said that the entirety of the law and the prophets hang on two foundational commandments: love the Lord with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34-40, which refers back to Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18). Someone has rightly said that if you don’t understand how a particular commandment promotes love for the Lord and love for other people, then you don’t yet have an adequate understanding of that commandment.

The Pharisees had turned the Sabbath into cruel taskmaster with all kinds of restrictions, and they failed to see that the Sabbath was a gift from God for their good. And Jesus calls them out: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) The Sabbath itself is part of the law that hangs on the two love commands. The Sabbath was given for man’s replenishment and well-being. If you turn it into a strict heartless code that doesn’t allow a hungry man to get the nourishment of food and that doesn’t allow a handicapped man to get healed, then you simply do not understand Sabbath law.

I hope that you are earnest about obeying the Lord. But beware of the very common tendency to exalt rules but dismiss people, to glorify policies but treat people like they are expendable, to choose strict compliance over compassion. Here’s the irony: true compliance with God’s Word is impossible without compassion! If I excel in all kinds of religious activity “but have not love,” then the Bible says that “I am nothing” and “I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3) You may or may not care about your IQ (intelligence quotient), but be sure that God cares a great deal about your LQ (love quotient).

Sometimes I take a page out of the Pharisaical playbook in my home life: I am quick to exalt the proper rule, but slow to show compassion – and the result is stressed hearts and stiff relationships.

WE NEED LARGE HEARTS

Friends, we are called to follow Jesus on His mission to a broken world. It is a messy mission – but how else would we expect to bring salvation to a society wrecked by sin? It is a mission that brings us face to face with the outcasts, the despised, and the obvious failures. It is a mission that draws criticism from both sides of the road: those who are indifferent to righteousness don’t like our God-given standards; and the legalists who pursue religiosity in their own strength don’t like our God-given grace. So we get it from both sides. Navigating the mess and the criticism will require us to have large, warm, generous, and Christlike hearts.

So what we need is for Jesus’ compassion and generosity to fill us up! We follow Him! He is not afraid to touch a leper (Mark 1:41). He is not put out by a paralytic who is lowered to Him through the roof (Mark 2:1-12). He invites a despised tax collector into His small band of disciples (Mark 2:14). He eats with people who have a reputation for sinning (Mark 2:15). He brings the promise of forgiveness to people (like us) who desperately need it (Mark 2:5, 17). He bucks the system and heals a handicapped man on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1-6). He won’t let the coldhearted critics quench His Spirit, dampen His love, or undermine His joy.

Is there someone on the fringe that you need to touch, draw in, bless, and include?

Is there someone you need to make room for, however inconvenient or unpopular it may be to do so?

Are there some external purity issues that you simply need to let go of, so that you can become a conduit of grace, mercy, and peace?

Jesus tells us to forgive our brothers and sisters in the same way that He has forgiven us (Ephesians 4:32). Is there someone you need to forgive?

Do you need to be less concerned about keeping all the rules, and much more concerned about sharing Christ’s mercy with an impoverished world?

GETTING A LARGE HEART

There is one final question though: how do you get this large, Christlike heart? One answer is simply to say: it’s a miracle. It really is a miracle – that old wineskin being converted into a fresh wineskin that can hold and be transformed by the new wine of the gospel (Mark 2:22). That’s a miracle, that’s the Holy Spirit working in our lives as we trust in Jesus. And then after that, there’s this renewing process in which we have to be continually transformed by the grace of God (Romans 12:1-2).

But there’s a key in all this, that you need to understand. And that’s what I want to share with you for just a moment.

Here’s the key: you’ve got to be broken.

Think about those groups who were involved in Levi’s dinner party, and the Pharisees critique of it (Mark 2:15-16). You had the tax collectors and sinners, you had the disciples, and you had the Pharisees.

Here’s my question in light of this sermon: How do Pharisees become compassionate disciples? How do Pharisees become compassionate followers of Jesus?

Answer: they have to be broken. They actually have to realize that they are as sinful as the tax collectors and sinners – in fact, even more so.

I experienced this in a rather profound way in the late 1990s. I graduated from high school in 1995. I was a decent athlete. Socially, I was middle of the road. I wasn’t part of the in-crowd, I wasn’t part of a fringe group, I was just part of that quiet, respected group in the middle. I was well provided for, but not wealthy.

But one thing I was really good at was my studies. I was smart – I was one of the smartest kids in my class, and graduated co-salutatorian. Then I became a Christian when I was 18, during my freshman year of college. And do you know what God did in my early years as a Christian? He ruined my mind!

Here I was, I was a careful and orderly thinker. And I had a strong willpower. I could have been a very good Pharisee. But God loved me by ruining my mind. I went through a three or four year season of incredible darkness, where I lost the ability to think straight. I had dark and overbearing and anxious and disturbing and racing thoughts virtually all the time, for about three or four years. I was miserable. I hated being awake and I hated thinking. I’m not exaggerating – I hated it.

What was going on there? This: God was loving me by showing me that I was a complete and utter mess without Jesus. He was opening up my heart for me to see how corrupt I was, and how I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t think myself out of this. And I realized that I’m just as sinful as anybody else.

And through that process, God kept showing me: ‘Your only hope is the death and resurrection of my Son. You can’t fix this. Your only hope is the death and resurrection of my Son.’ And slowly but surely, God rebuilt my heart and mind. And that is a big reason why I’m not a Pharisee – or at least as much of one as I otherwise would have been.

So here’s the deal: a large heart comes from brokenness. Jesus meets us in our brokenness over our sin, and He pours His grace upon us. This is where we develop that large heart: first we are grateful for the mercy that we have received, and then we become equipped to be a conduit of that mercy to others. 

If you’re in a difficult place right now – it could be mental distress like mine was, or it could be something else, whether physical or financial or relational – remember that God loves you! If you belong to Him, God loves you and He is teaching you in all these things that you are nothing without Him. But if He shows up, He will fill you up.

ENDNOTES

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia).

[2] For example, see what Paul says about the unsaved Israelites in Romans 10:1-3. Notice especially that they sought “to establish their own [righteousness]” (Romans 10:3), and yet they remained strangers to God’s righteousness.

[3] Rosaria Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: Expanded Edition. Pittsburgh: Crown & Covenant Publications, 2014: p. 115.

[4] Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!