Don't give in to man's praise

 By WAYNE STEWART

August 7, 2011

Classrooms are filled with students who know the answer, but refuse to answer when the teacher asks the question.

Nobody wants to be wrong. Nobody wants to go against the grain. They would rather be considered dumb and popular than a smart loner. The times never change.

Jesus performed miracles for everybody to see. Even the Pharisees marveled at what Jesus could do, but they could not shake themselves from their own little clique and flee the safety of the group for the life being offered through Jesus Christ.

“Yet at the same time, man even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they would not openly acknowledge their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved human praise more than praise from God.” — John 12:42-43

How true those words ring true today. Too many people seek what the world has to offer. Too many people desire acceptance from the world. Too many people look for love and significance from that which only seeks to devour them.

The human spirit has desires only Jesus Christ can fulfill; yet most people will look to anything but the cross. Anything but the cross.

“Today the revelation of God is treated with indifference, or talked of as if it deserved no reverence or credit,” Charles Spurgeon said in a sermon delivered in 1885. “Unbelief has sapped the foundations of the social fabric.”

The world derides believers as being stupid, backwards and bigoted. These barbs are flung from the medial and the so-called learned of modern society. Too many people are immersed in this heretical world and are too afraid of loosing its bonds and coming into the light of the truth.

The “enlightened ones” have so undermined the Christ-based foundation of our society that true believers are now pariahs. Still, Christ urges those who are called by his name to stand firm, and Jesus, still in John 12:44-46 gives us this encouragement.

“Whoever believes in me does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”

Truly, the world is a dark place. Over the past few years it seems the world has been brought to its knees. Drought grips the area, while torrential rains flood lands to our north. The financial world has been brought to its knees, yet people still hide from the truth.

Many people hear the truth of Christ, and believe the words are good and powerful and hold them warmly in their hearts, but they fail to confess Jesus as Lord of all — that is a faith lacking.

“What they feared: being put out of the synagogue, which they thought would be a disgrace and damage to them; as if it would do them any harm to be expelled from a synagogue that had made itself a synagogue of Satan, and from which God was departing,” Matthew Henry astutely noted of the Jewish leaders who had inclinations toward Christ. “What was at the bottom of this fear: They loved the praise of men, chose it as a more valuable good, and pursued it as a more desirable end, than the praise of God; which was an implicit idolatry, like that of ‘worshipping and serving the creature more than the Creator.’ They set these two in the scale one against the other, and, having weighed them, they proceeded accordingly.”

In these scales, do you, or do you see people weighing what the world has to offer against life. Yes, that is what is at stake, a couple minutes of pleasure versus eternity with the risen Savior.

This is what it boils down to — illusion versus reality. For those who don’t believe, at least do this — listen to the message of Christ with an open heart. If after hearing it, the Holy Spirit still doesn’t stir you then walk away.

If you read John 12:20-41, you will see God will eventually harden the hearts of those who continually reject the offers made by Jesus. This truth is inevitable, but that should not deter believers, in fact it should make us redouble our efforts to reach a people thirsting for the gospel.

Most will walk away, but what about the one who is willing to reject the world and come to Christ — that soul should be worth all of our effort.