EXCUSES

No sooner does anyone start to talk about Christian things but the hearers want to change the subject. The variety of excuses that are given by friends when they are invited to a Christian event are amazing. Sometimes the ‘I am afraid I am busy’ comes out even before the time of the event is mentioned. Others receive the invitation with apparent gratefulness, but just do not materialise at the meal or function. It is almost as if there is an embargo on anything to do with Jesus Christ.

Why are people so afraid of Jesus? It could be that it is us they object to, but it will soon be apparent that similar responses are made to other people’s invitations.

Where do these excuses originate from?

Jesus told a story about people who make such excuses. A great banquet was to be given by a king and invitations were delivered well ahead of time. When the banquet was ready, a servant was sent out to tell those invited to come. It was to be a glorious celebration and obviously it was an honour to be invited. Yet the amazing feature of this story is that people made ridiculous excuses as to why they didn’t want to go.

The first one said, “I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.” If you think about this, it is a ridiculous excuse. Who would buy a field without having seen it first? If he had bought it then the contracts had been exchanged. He could go and inspect it at any convenient time later. No, this was not a valid excuse; it was a snub to the king.

The second said, “I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.” Had he not tested them before he purchased them? Now they were his couldn’t he try them out at any other time? Do you see that this was not a valid excuse either? It was simply that he did not want to be involved with the king.

The third person’s excuse is even worse, “I have just got married, so I cannot come.” He could have taken his new bride with him. Surely she would surely have been pleased to go to such a royal feast. Alternatively she could have stayed at home whilst he went.

The obvious point of the story is that these people had no regard for the king whatsoever.

The parallel that Jesus intends us to make is that many of us have been invited to the great Royal feast by the King of Kings, the creator of the Universe. Although most of us would be thrilled to receive a personal invitation to a banquet by our Queen, why do we fail to be excited by a personal invitation from God himself? Furthermore God’s invitation is to much more that a banquet, it is to be part of God’s family forever.

It would be considered the greatest insult to reject an invitation from our earthly sovereign, and here Jesus suggests that it is an even greater insult to reject the invitation from our heavenly Lord.

Our English word ‘apology’ comes from the Greek ‘apologia’, which means defence or explanation. So when we apologise for being absent or late for an appointment we should give the reason and not just say ‘Sorry’. Similarly if we are determined to reject the invitation God has given us we should be able to give the reasons for doing so. What excuses do people give today?

Christians who are Bad Examples.

There is a story of an American who came down from his home in the mountains. He was all dressed up and was carrying his Bible. A friend saw him and asked,

“Elias, what is happening? Where are you going all dressed up like that?

Elias replied,

“I’ve been hearing about New Orleans. I hear that there is a lot of free-running liquor and a lot of gambling and a lot of real good naughty shows.”

The friend looked him over and said,

“But Elias, why are you carrying your Bible under your arm?”

Elias answered,

“Well, if it is as good as they say it is, I might stay over until Sunday.”

A Christian I knew was a hypocrite

Certainly a popular excuse for not investigating the claims of Jesus is:

“I was interested in Christianity at one stage but then I met a minister or a Christian who put me off.”

If you think about it this is a totally irrelevant response. What matters is the message, not the inadequacies of some messenger. Of course there are hypocrites and frauds in the church – we are all very imperfect people. What matters is whether Jesus is God’s Messiah, as he claims to be and whether he really has the status to make people right with God. The real question should be, ‘Is Jesus a hypocrite or a fraud?’ If he is then no one should follow him. He should be publicly denounced and his church exposed as being based on a lie. However if Jesus was a person of utmost integrity, if he fulfils all the criteria required to be the Messiah prophesied in the ancient Jewish Scriptures, if he did come back to life after being dead for three days, and if he did teach the world that he was ‘God’s Son’ and that ‘no-one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6), then surely anyone who refuses to investigate him is the fool. Obviously the behaviour of the messengers should reflect something of their Lord, but it is their Lord who is important.

Its Too Good to be True

Another excuse is that the Christian gospel is just too good to be true. How can we ever hope to be reckoned good enough for God? I have just received the following e-mail.

“Dear Friends,
Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

Regards.
Charles S. Bailey

The amazing thing is that people will believe messages such as this, and act without investigation, but not believe a message for which there is all the evidence ever needed. To be put right with God is something all of us need. But how can I be sure it is true? The only way to discover any truth is to investigate it and see if it stands. Jesus himself threw out the challenge,

“Seek and you will find.” Matthew 7:7

Why won’t people investigate the claims of Jesus when the prize is so great? Why don’t people probe to find the evidence that he really existed? Why don’t they study the old Jewish prophecies to see if they could be referring to anyone other than Jesus? Why not study the evidence to find out whether Jesus did die and whether the evidence for the resurrection is convincing. Read one of the gospels in the Bible and ponder whether Jesus’ actions and teaching have the ‘ring of truth’ about them. It is staggering how the vast majority who say they have rejected Jesus have no idea of the evidence they have sidestepped and seldom have they read the gospels. It is as if their arguments are just excuses.

Yet the God who came as Jesus still patiently waits for anyone who stops making excuses and faces up to the facts.

Others Seem All Right Without God

Another excuse that is frequently given is to query whether spiritual questions really matter.

“Others live their lives without reference to God, so why shouldn’t I do the same. They seem happy enough.”

Sir Ludovic Kennedy wrote an article in ‘The Times’ titled, ‘Goodbye God, we can get along just fine without you’ and he seems to be doing alright.

A medical colleague once asked me, “Why are you a Christian?” I replied,

“Because it is true. If it is not true that Jesus is ‘God in the flesh’, if he didn’t fulfil all those ancient prophecies given in the Jewish Scriptures, if he didn’t rise from the dead then not only should I not be a Christian, nobody should be one. It would be a fraudulent faith based on lies. If it is true, then everyone should be a Christian because eventually we will come up before our creator as our judge and unless we have found a way to be forgiven for the way we have lived we are in for dire trouble”.

Some today would answer,

“Is there such a thing as truth? Doesn’t everyone have to find their own truth, that is real for them?”

Just think what this would mean in practice. If a person is accused of driving at 50 mph in a 30 mph limit, his defence could be,

“I was following my own definition of what a mile is and how long an hour lasts.”

If someone took his or her car into a garage because the engine was misfiring and the mechanic simply polished the outside, the owner would not be pleased. For the mechanic to argue that the polishing might help may satisfy him but it would not solve the real problem. The research scientist spends his life looking for consistent explanations as to how things happen – he is looking for the truth. No, our society runs on the basis that there is real truth.

What is Truth?

a) Is it consensus? A group of doctors was asked the question, “What is truth?” and one replied, “Truth must be consensus”. He felt that we must take what the majority of people think as truth to be the truth. This would mean that truth is always changing just as public opinion changes. This would mean that the widespread view held 2000 years ago that the earth is flat and supported on the back of some giant elephants would be ‘true’. 500 years ago most people thought that our world was at the centre of the universe and that the sun and stars rotated around us. Was that true and were Copernicus and Galileo wrong because they were in the minority?

b) Is it an authority’s opinion? If consensus is too changeable then another option for defining ‘truth’ is to take the view of the leader, whether political or intellectual. The 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who later died at the age of 44 in an asylum from cerebral syphilis, recognised that society would kill off God. He realised that with the ‘death of God’, the old absolute ideas of truth would also disappear. This would leave society with no clear foundation. He recognised that science would never yield anything like ‘absolute knowledge’ and he tried to find a way around the lack of purpose that society would face, knowing that meaninglessness (nihilism) must lead to a chaos or at least a poorly coordinated, dysfunctional society. Consequently he stressed the importance of having ‘higher types’, men who would direct society, and the ‘herd’, those who would be led. In his book ‘Thus spake Zarathrustra’ he called the ‘higher type’ the ‘overman’ and it was the overman who gave meaning to the people. Hitler considered himself to be such an ‘overman’, and his views were to be considered as ‘the truth’. We all know what such a view led to.

c) Is God involved? The other option is that truth has an absolute value to it. Its terms of reference are with God himself. With this view truth is ‘a concept that is compatible with God’. Part of our quest as humans is to try to discover these truths and live by them. Science developed in the 17th and 18th centuries as people understood that God had made this world to run according to rational rules nearly all the time and that these rules were the ‘Laws of Science’. So in science we are trying to discover the complex rules that control how this world and living organisms work. This view of truth also allows us to understand how intangible values such as love, beauty, integrity and courage can have a rational basis.

Plato understood truth in these terms. Thus he taught that there could be no understanding of the word ‘red’ unless there is an absolute example of ‘red’. Similarly Plato deduced that such values as ‘justice’, ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’ are valid only if there is some unambiguous example in some other world. Science can never prove the reality of these virtues which all of us recognise to be essential. This is also the Christian concept. It is therefore no surprise that medieval theologians recognised the truth of Plato’s thinking.

Jesus taught that he himself was the embodiment of God and so he was ‘the ultimate truth’. At his trial, Pilate asked Jesus,

“You are a king, then?”

Jesus answered,

“You are right in saying I am a king. In fact for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth”, Pilate asked.

Although Pilate recognised that Jesus was innocent, saying, “I find no basis for a charge against him”, yet he condemned Jesus to be crucified. Pilate had descended from the absolute view of truth that Jesus held, to a pragmatic view based on both consensus and the ‘overman’ basis. Without the absolute view of truth there will be no justice.

Hidden Motives

All too often personal motives control how we behave. People may foolishly think that if they reject the concept of God then they can behave how they like. The personal morality of many leading atheists and agnostics is shocking. They feel that if they disown God, they can behave how they like.

The agnostic author, Aldous Huxley admitted, when he was an old man, that he had such biases when rejecting the claims of Jesus when he was young.

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning – consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. For myself the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”

Jeremy Rifkin, who has rejected a personal, moral, creator God, and wants to replace him with an impersonal science without any morality, wrote the following statement about our culture:

“This is evolution. We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behaviour conform to a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world and because we do, we no longer have to justify our behaviour. We are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible, nothing outside ourselves. We are the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever.”

Such people may obtain much to live with but have little to live for.

We all have a tendency to think in this way in order to try and justify our behaviour. This has been known for a long time. King David started one Psalm with these words,

“The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are evil . . . The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.” Psalm 14:1-2

The Hebrew word used here is not that used for a person with a low I.Q., but of a person who is morally depraved. He has decided that he wants to live his life his own way, with himself as his own very comfortable God. He has, as it were, eaten of the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, having made his own rules - rules that suit him. God says such people will pay a very high price for rejecting him.

Is anyone here doing this today? May I urge you, in the strongest way I can, to change direction and put God back on the throne of your life. Have the grace to climb down and allow the rightful ruler of the universe be your ruler. Stop making silly excuses and accept the offer of forgiveness that the Lord offers all of us who will come to his feast.

It is hard to be a Christian

How many excuses people have. Have you heard this one often, “I have tried to be a Christian but it didn’t work out, I found it too hard”. This is most strange because the Lord is certainly not a hard taskmaster. Are they saying that Satan is an easier taskmaster and it is easier to serve him than the Lord himself? The Bible is very clear about this, thus,

“. . .the way of the unfaithful is hard.” Proverbs 13:15

It may appear that in the short term the ungodly prosper and this may detract us from the Lord. Another Psalm reminds us to think in the longer term,

“Do not fret because of evil men or be jealous of those who do wrong; for like grass they will soon wither, and like green plants they will soon die away.” Psalm 37;1

The way of the world is not easy and gets harder as life goes on. What is the point of a Godless man’s life? What answer is there to a guilty conscience?

How can we come to a verdict on this one? Let us call up some witnesses who have served both masters into the witness stand. Do you remember the enemy of the church, who “breathed out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples”? After his conversion he said,

“I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.” Philippians 3;8

I would love to be there on the stand myself and would say without doubt that since I gave my life to the Lord Jesus there has been a sweet satisfaction. There have been tensions, but what Jesus said is true,

“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11;30

Christians, “Have you found Christ to be a hard master?” Of course not. I have never heard of someone living close to the Lord Jesus who regrets it. Oh yes, claiming to be a Christian but living a long way from the Lord Jesus is painful and stressful. You will then ‘be racked’, pulled in two directions at one time, and that is tough. The solution however is neither to remain half committed to each side nor to turn your back on our only hope, but to move closer to Him. Tell him that you will live as he wants, you will live to please him by obeying him. Only then you will know for sure that Jesus is the Lord of the Universe. Jesus himself promised,

“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” John 7;37

There is certainly a vast difference between the yoke of Satan and the yoke of the Lord Jesus.

A new beginning is possible

The Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, wrote his autobiography and called it Confessions’. He said that his whole life was ‘a search for meaning’.

“As a young man I thought it was in wine, women and song. So I pursued those things. It was good fun but there wasn’t meaning there. I then decided it was in wealth. I inherited my father’s estate. I became one of the wealthiest men in all Russia. It was great to have all that wealth. There was lots that I could do that was good but nevertheless there was still a hollowness, still a lack of meaning.

I then decided that there would be ultimate meaning in fame – in making my mark.

So I wrote ‘War and Peace’.

Wherever I went I was received as a great man but still there was a hollowness.

I decided it was in having a family and having a wife and children. In 1867 I married and had thirteen children. This for a period put me off finding a meaning of life.

Then at one point, when watching his children at play,

“What meaning has my life that the inevitability of death won’t destroy?

I saw that one day my children would be dust and that filled me with anguish”

He went on asking this question about the meaning of life until eventually, through a peasant on one of his farms, he saw the meaning of Matthew 11:28,

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”

Tolstoy concluded,

“At last I found rest in my relationship with Christ. After all that lifetime of achievement.”

May I urge all of us not to make excuses to Almighty God? He longs to satisfy us – as at a banquet. He longs that we should enter God’s family and his service. His yoke is easy. Please do not listen to Satan’s lies and think your excuses will satisfy God. If you have, up till now, been undecided, will you not decide for the Lord Jesus? Will you not accept his invitation to be present at the great banquet he has prepared and has invited you to be at?

When we are given an invitation to a wedding it is only right to reply. May I ask how you will respond to God’s invitation to the wedding banquet of his son? Will you respond,

“To Almighty God. Whilst sitting in - - - - Hall, on - - September 20- - , I received an urgent invitation from one of your servants for me to attend the marriage banquet of your only son. Please excuse me but I shall not be coming.”

Would you sign that? Would anyone in his or her right mind do that? The God who made the universe and made you and me has invited us, he is not to be mocked. There is another reply,

“To Almighty God. Whilst sitting in - - - - Hall, on - - September 20- - , I received an urgent invitation from one of your servants for me to attend the marriage banquet of your only son. If you will accept me I will be eternally grateful and would love to attend.”

The invitation is genuine. Will you come?

BVP