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NOTHING ELSE BEING NECESSARY #5

A HUGE SUPER BOWL BET

There’s a beautiful anonymity in radio, where I can ask you a hypothetical question . . . and I can’t hear your answer. Neither can anybody else. So let me ask it: have you ever placed a big bet on something? I mean, a BIG wager, which made your stomach flip-flop? One where it would have really hurt to lose . . . or change your life if you won? I guess we’ve all seen some of that where friends of Regis Philbin can go from $250,000 to $500,000 if they win, which is a personal profit of a quarter million bucks. Or, if they lose, the $250,000 they’ve already got locked in goes back down to $32,000. And that’s a painful, life-altering 218,000 dollar bills you WON’T have if you answer Question #14 incorrectly. The biggest fallacy in gambling is where you say, “Oh well, I’m playing with the house’s money.” No, once you win it, it’s YOUR money. That’s a new house gone, new car gone, college education gone, nest egg gone. And it’s happened a lot of times, as we’ve all watched.

I understand that over in Vegas, around the time of the Super Bowl, there are casinos where you can wager upwards of half a million dollars on a single bet on that game. One fumble, one completed pass . . . and half a million dollars goes one direction or the other.

There’s a legendary story — I have no idea if it’s true — about an old silver miner who worked up in the hills of Northern Nevada his whole life. Mining silver out there in the dust and the dirt, spending as little money as possible. And finally, at the end of a long, back-breaking career, he walked down into Reno with a satchel full of money. He went into a hotel and announced his intention of betting the entire suitcase, his life savings, on one spin of the roulette wheel. In the suitcase was $750,000, which was somewhat over the limit at that hotel’s roulette tables. But the pit bosses, after a huddled discussion, knowing they had a 5.39% advantage, agreed to accept the bet.

And now this guy had a big decision. Red or black? Should he put forty years’ worth of work, his livelihood, his retirement future on red . . . or black? So the story goes, he picked a color — let’s say red — and put the whole suitcase on the red square. The croupier spun the wheel, and it went round and round and round . . . and neatly dropped into a red square. And the old guy calmly took his one-and-a-half million dollars and disappeared into the night. True story . . . maybe.

Well, whether true or apocryphal, that red-or-black adventure doesn’t come close to matching the stakes every person on this planet has to weigh in their own lives. Because the claim of the Christian faith — which we’ve been prayerfully studying for four days now — is that you and I can come up to the green-felt table of life, and place EVERYTHING in the square marked Jesus Christ. I mean, EVERYTHING. We put the whole stake on Jesus. We don’t save a single nickel in a back pocket, just in case the little ball drops into a black square instead, and we have to build up a new gambling bankroll.

We’ve borrowed from some great sources this week, and I’m continuing to appreciate the kind but informative tone of this book, Protestants & Catholics: Do They Now Agree? And here’s something I hope believers in both faith communions could accept. Notice:

“Faith is a committing of oneself to Christ TOTALLY and COMPLETELY — really trusting and RELYING on Christ for your ETERNAL destiny.”

And you know, friend, I think that right here is a daily battle for every single one of us as we try to keep good deeds and obedience — wonderful things that they are — in their proper place. So many of us have worried about some of the gospel writings in the book of James, because he takes obedience and puts it up pretty high on the pedestal. Have you heard these verses before, from chapter two?

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?”

He then takes us to a very practical example, where a person standing nearby you is lacking clothes or food. And you say to that person, “Hey, good luck. All the best to you, man. Keep warm; eat well. I’m a Christian, trusting in Jesus, so I’m going to pray for you.” And you do absolutely zip for that person yourself, even though you have money and food and blankets to spare. Is that real Christian faith, then, the kind of faith that FOLLOWS the example of Jesus?

Well, no, it’s not. And James very succinctly summarizes just two verses later:

“Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

And right here it gets so tricky. A preacher says to you: “Friend, just have faith. Trust in Calvary, and you will be saved. You can have assurance of it!” That sounds wonderful. But then he adds: “By the way, once you trust in Jesus for salvation, you need to copy everything He does. Where He feeds the hungry, you need to as well. Where He is kind and forgiving, you should be too. Where He keeps His Father’s law, you should ‘go thou and do likewise.’” And then the preacher adds, “And if you DON’T do all of those things, then you don’t have real faith, and everything I just said about assurance . . . you can forget. It’s canceled.”

And of course, the moment we look at “B” instead of at “A,” and begin to think that “B” – for o-BE-dience – is the BASIS of our salvation, or even a PART of our salvation, or even a SLIVER of our salvation, then we’re in trouble, aren’t we? Because if it’s even a sliver, then how big a sliver does it take? How sincere a sliver? How steady and ongoing a sliver?

It’s true that real faith leads to obedience. And we want to have real faith. We have to have real faith. But friend, we need to focus, every day of our life, ON the faith, and not on the obedience that subsequently follows. Because it’s the FAITH, the relationship, that is the basis of salvation.

I don’t want to promote a Las Vegas lifestyle here — and what I’m about to say will hopefully take you a million miles in the other direction from that. But it would probably be good, every single morning, to picture that green-felt roulette table. Except that this is a Calvary table. There’s a square marked Jesus, and it has a big cross on it. Maybe there’s another square as well, marked “SELF” or “WORLD.” And every single day, we have to say to our Savior, “Jesus, I’m putting EVERYTHING in the square marked with Your name on it. EVERYTHING. Not just every chip, every dollar, every THING I have . . . but ME. My LIFE is dependent on You. I’m betting it all, my life now and the promise of eternal life in Your kingdom, on YOU right now.”

I like an old line from our friend, John Stott, which is found in his incomparable book, The Contemporary Christian.

“The gospel strips us naked,” he writes, “(we have no clothing in which to appear before God), and declares us bankrupt (we have no currency with which to buy the favor of heaven.)”

I’ve mentioned before the testimony of Dr. Adrian Rogers, who was three times elected as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He pastors a HUGE, 24,000-member church in Memphis; he has a television-and-radio ministry entitled “Love Worth Finding.” And yes, he has the kind of faith relationship with Jesus which has led to faithful obedience and many good deeds. If Christ were to ask, “Who around here has fed a lot of My sheep?” Dr. Rogers could give a glowing report in his own defense.

But you see, all those THINGS are not Calvary money. They’re not currency! They’re good for what they’re good for . . . . but they’re not good for buying salvation. Not one of us, in ourselves, has a single nickel of Calvary money. And Rogers writes in his book, Believe in Miracles But Trust in Jesus:

“Our future is not secure because of our behavior but because of our new birth.” Now get this: “I would not trust the best fifteen minutes I EVER LIVED to get me to heaven.”

You talk about betting it all! He’s saying here that he wouldn’t bet five cents on his best 15 minutes ever! His entire salvation, and my entire salvation, and your entire salvation — no matter how many good deeds our faith leads us to bring to the altar — is bet on that square marked “Jesus Christ, slain Lamb of God.”

I say again:

“Justification through GRACE alone, by FAITH alone, in CHRIST alone, NOTHING ELSE BEING NECESSARY.”