I read about a woman who had lived out West somewhere, who looked out her window one day and saw a dead burro, on the sidewalk in front of her house. So she called the city sanitation department and they said they would come.
They sent some men out to dispose of this dead burro, but when they got there they found that the woman had changed her mind. She didn't want them to cart it off. Instead, she wanted them to take it upstairs and put it in her bathtub.
Well, they were mystified, but she said, "I''ll give you each $10 if you''ll put that burro in the bathtub." Ten dollars was ten dollars, and so they took the burro upstairs and put it in the bathtub. They came back downstairs and the foreman of the crew asked her, "Lady, you know I hate to intrude, but why in the world did you want us to carry this dead burro upstairs and put it in your bathtub?"
She said, "Well, I''ll tell you this. Every night for the last 35 years my husband has come home from work, he''s taken off his coat, he''s taken off his shoes, he''s sat down in his easy chair, he''s opened his paper and yelled out,
What''s new?'' Tonight I want to tell him something that''s new."
Well, I may not have anything that exotic to tell you that''s new today, but I hope that I can share with you the gospel, for as one great theologian and preacher said, the gospel is old news, and new news, and good news, and I trust that it will be all those things for us as we think about God''s plan of salvation, his provision for us in Jesus Christ and the way of life that he wants us to live.
In verse 24 we read, "After some days Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess; and he sent for Paul and heard him speak upon faith in Christ Jesus. And as he argued about justice and self-control and future judgment Felix was alarmed and said,Go away for the present; when I have an opportunity I will summon you.'' At the same time he hoped that money would be given him by Paul. So he sent for him often and conversed with him. But when two years had elapsed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus; and desiring to do the Jews a favor, Felix left Paul in prison."
Just a few short years ago, the sports world and the world at large was stunned by the announcement that one of the most renowned, most loved, and surely one of the most talented basketball players who ever lived, had contracted the HIV virus. Just as stunning was the fact that most people were not morally concerned about how he got it. "I can''t specify the time," he said, "the place or the woman. It''s all a matter of numbers." (1)
Now this athlete was regretful, not because of the wrong which he had done--which the Bible would call, if you are single, fornication, and if you are married, adultery--not for the wrong which he had done to cause this terrible virus to come upon him, but regretful that he had to pay the consequences for what he had done.
It was in that same period of time that another renowned basketball player and athlete who had retired from the game boasted that he had slept with 20,000 women.
The passage before us this evening has direct bearing on these two incidents as well as other events happening in our world today. Paul, under arrest, had been brought before Felix, the Roman governor, and his wife Drusilla. They wanted to hear more about the gospel and about Christianity. But it was only on an intellectual level that they wanted to hear the news, for they already knew something about it. As the scripture says, Felix had a rather accurate knowledge of The Way. And so, out of curiosity, they called Paul in, and he began to give his defense of faith.
Now Felix was a cruel and sensual man. Drusilla was no prize herself, and Felix was her third husband. Over a period of two years Felix heard Paul''s defense of the gospel, but would not release him. He kept putting him off and would not decide Paul''s case, because he hoped to get some money from him.
The Roman historian, Tacitus, who chronicled the life of Felix, offered this conclusion about him: he reveled in cruelty and lust. However, what Paul said to Felix and Drusilla that day caused them to shake in their boots.
Paul spoke three words that America needs to hear today:righteousness, self-control, and God''s judgment.
He spoke, first of all, about Christ and righteousness. When you turn to the dictionary and you look up the definition of "righteousness," you find something like this: it means justice, uprightness, rectitude, conforming your life to divine and moral law, virtue and integrity. The word righteous or righteousness is used some 650 times in the Bible, and there it means to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right. It means to tell the truth; it means to be a just and honest person, to be one who acts in responsible love toward others. It means sticking by those principles which God has given, those divine principles such as we find in the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and the other standards that God has laid out before us.
Righteousness always deals with morality. It reflects a sense of obligation to God and to humanity to do that which is right, that which is upright, that which is just and honest and pure. The Bible says righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.
I suggest to you that we are in a moral melt-down in our land today, a moral melt-down that is far more disastrous in its consequences than even a nuclear disaster would be. Bribes and deals, vendettas and violence, lies and greed, crime and injustice, sleaze and corruption, tax-cheating and stonewalling and a government that sponsors gambling--all of these things are going on today along with other things--adultery, unrestricted abortion and much more. Like a cancer, these sins are eating away at the soul of our land.
You can get on the Internet today, that huge computer communications network, and if you''re adept at all, you can find anything in the way of perversion that you want. There''s child prostitution, adult prostitution, homosexuality, pornography--anythingyou want--you can find and be connected with through that system called the Internet.
Richard Halverson was for many years pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., and Chaplain of the United States Senate. He retired from that position in the Senate and from his church just a few years ago, but he made this observation about American society. He said: "We demand freedom without restraint, rights without responsibility, choice without consequences, pleasure without pain. In our hedonistic, narcissistic, valueless preoccupation we are becoming a people dominated by lust, avarice and greed." (2)
If you listen to those who analyze the state of our nation today--historians, business leaders, ministers, people from all walks of life--they''re saying that this corruption, this unrighteousness, is eating away at the very fabric of our society, tearing down our institutions and destroying people''s lives.
National righteousness is sorely needed. I don''t think anyone would disagree with that. But national righteousness is built on individual righteousness. It''s built on those individuals who see what is right and who make a commitment to do what is right before God and before their fellow human beings. Individual righteousness is only produced in us when we enter into a state of communion and fellowship and obedience to God. A right relationship with God produces righteousness within us.
Paul surely must have said something to Felix and Drusilla about that righteousness as he described it in Romans 3. He must have used these same words as he made that defense of the faith. He says, "None is righteous, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. There is no fear of God before their eyes." And then he goes on to say, "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. They are justified, that is made acceptable to God, by his grace as a gift through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus whom God has put forth as an expiation for sin."
But what has he said in all that beautiful, descriptive language?He has said that (1) every person is unrighteous, that we are sinners, that we are unacceptable to God in that state and we are lost to salvation; (2) in our unrighteousness we do not seek God, we do not seek to be obedient to him or to conform our lives to his purposes and plans for us. We do not reverence him; and (3) God has made it possible for us to be put right with him through his son Jesus Christ, through the redemption which he provides because of his death on the cross. He has taken our place, taken our penalty, shed his blood that we might not have to go through the experience of tragedy, of sorrow, or of being cut off entirely from God. Jesus has done all this for us. He has paid the penalty, made the expiation for our sins, so we won''t have to do it.
Now God takes unrighteousness so seriously, it is such an abomination to him, that he deems it worthy of eternal punishment, of eternal separation from him in that place of misery, of sorrow, of abject trouble that we call hell. God takes it seriously, and we need to take it seriously. Jesus takes our punishment so we might not have to pay that penalty, makes us acceptable to God so that we might experience his righteousness.
So I suggest to you today that the word of righteousness is a word that America as a whole needs to face up to. It''s a word that you and I as individuals need to become familiar with, because again the righteousness of the nation depends upon the righteousness of the individuals in that nation; and unless and until we are in a right relationship with God, so that we have his righteousness within us, then we have no hope and the nation has no hope. Paul speaks the word of righteousness, Christ and righteousness.
And then he speaks to Felix and Drusilla and to us today of Christ and self-control. He knew his audience well, of course. Felix was Drusilla''s third husband; his lack of morals was notorious in those days. It is possible Paul quoted to that couple the words from Proverbs 25:28 which say: "A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls." Promiscuity and all manner of wrong take over when we relinquish self-control. Financial scandals and corruption of all kinds have rocked America and the world these last few years, and they''ve come out of that greed that flourishes when self-control and essential righteousness are tossed out, and no one cares about right and wrong any more.
Newspapers have reported that market analysts and financial traders and academic observers and historians are coming to the conclusion that the decade of excess that we knew in this country in the 1980s has bred temptations that are being reflected now in the corruptions and the scandals that we see all about us. The manager and director of a Wall Street firm said in the 1980s the prevailing mentality was that government and rules, and even ethics, were barriers to business. What is happening now is that the piper is being paid. We are paying the price for the lack of self-control, for the lack of adherence to righteousness in our personal, individual lives and the life of this nation as a whole.
A study was released just a short while ago about the increase in sexually transmitted diseases among people in the State of Virginia. The state official who made that announcement said his only concern was that people were not protecting themselves against disease. He did not seem concerned at all about the wrong, the sin which had brought them to the place where they caught the disease in the first place. We live in a time of political correctness, and when you''re politically correct you do not go to the source of wrong and evil, you do not point that out, you don''t embarrass anybody, you don''t point out the reality of life.
A basketball star with the HIV virus could have done our nation''s young people a great favorif he had stood up and said in the words of the Scripture: "Shun immorality, for every other sin which a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body." Instead of saying that, he is devoting his life now to telling young people that safe sex is the way to go.
But we are not helped by that kind of testimony from leading figures in the sports world, nor are we helped by the testimony we often hear from religious leaders in our world today. Just this week I clipped a little item from the newspaper titled, "The Bishop Says Adultery is in the Genes," and it goes on to report the comments of a bishop in another land who says, "God has given us our promiscuous genes, so I think it would be wrong for the churches to condemn people who have followed their instincts." He says churches should be more understanding when people commit adultery because humans have a God-given urge to procreate as widely as possible. (3)What a travesty upon the teaching of the Scripture! What a travesty upon the Christian faith to promote that message in the day and age in which we live, where there is a lack of self-control, not only in the sexual arena but in every arena of life.
A coach of a college in Virginia said that drugs and alcohol and money are not the solution to our problems. He told his hearers that we Americans spend 6-8 million dollars an hour on alcoholic beverages here in the United States! He says that alcohol kills three times as many people as all the other drugs combined. But such excess is not the real problem. That''s just the symptom of the problem. The problem is that lack of self-control.
One of the saddest stories of a lack of self-control and its tragic consequences ran in Ann Landers'' column, carried a while back. A teenage girl asked Ann to reprint a prose piece that a woman named Mary Curtis had written about the consequences a young woman faced when she gave up self-control in her life. The young inquirer who wrote for a reprint of that article said that it catalogued the life of her sister. And here''s what it says:
"The new morality and freedom [this is from the young woman who has lost that self-control and suffered its consequences] from class--what a drag, from homework--senseless hours, from discipline--useless, from church--a bore. I''m my own woman now, made so by one decision, one hour of love and pleasure; free now to look at my cheerleader sweater hanging in the closet, free to look at my baseball schedule and my books resting on the shelf, my material for my prom formal never made as it sits amid the remnants of the fabric left over from my maternity tops. My medals from band and choir forsaken now in the clutter of a jewelry box. My friends passing by my window laughing over the gossip column in the school newspaper and giggling over who will be next to experience the new morality and freedom, from cleaning--what a drag, from him--always arguing, from ironing--senseless hours, from dishes--useless, from cooking--a bore, from sex--a hangup. Oh God [she says], if you are there, please let someone come and take this crying baby off my hands and let my feet dance again, for I am so old and I was never young." (4) Tragic consequences, when we give up self-control in life.
Paul surely spoke to Felix and Drusilla of the salvation that Christ provides in situations where we lack self-control. He certainly pointed to that Gospel which is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. I''m sure he stressed the ways in which the weak are made strong in Jesus Christ. He probably quoted such scriptures as these: "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful and he will with that temptation help you to endure; he will with that temptation provide the means of escape that you may be able to endure it," and that truth, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," or that truth, "I say walk by the spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh for the fruit of the Spirit is self-control." That word of self-control is one that we in the United States desperately need to hear, that we as individual Americans need to hear and to heed.
We also need to hear the good news that there is a power, the power released through the living Christ, to help us exercise self-control, to resist those temptations that would take us down and bring those tragic consequences, the power to live on a higher plane, a plane of joy, a plane of freedom, a plane of satisfaction in our souls. The Holy Spirit brings that self-control to us when we, in repentance, bow our hearts before him and receive his life, his help, and his strength, that we might live the way he wants us to live. So Paul speaks to Felix and Drusilla of righteousness and of self-control. And he speaks those words to us today here in this place.
There''s a final word that Paul speaks, and that is of Christ and judgment. Just as Paul stood before the judgment seat of Felix, Felix one day would stand before the judgment seat of Christ, that great and eternal God, there to give an accounting of his life. Paul probably told Felix that message he had written in one of his books, the message that says we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil according to what he has done in the body. Felix was shaken and so was Drusilla. He may not have experienced God''s judgment that time, but within two short years historians tell us that he was swept from power, and he almost lost his life.
God''s judgment is visited upon us in various ways in broken hearts and broken homes, in the cruelty and the violence we see about us; it is visited upon us in pain, inward pain and outward pain; it is visited upon us in lack of peace and even sometimes in physical death. It''s not that God singles us out and presses home tragedy on us. No, it''s not that, but it''s that God has so shaped this world according to his moral nature that there are some things which are right and some things which are wrong; there are principles of right and wrong written into the very fabric of creation, into the very fabric of our being; and when we go against those principles we break our own lives and the lives of others on those principles. We don''t just break them, we break ourselves upon them.
Our sin will find us out; we do reap what we sow. We also reap what others sow, because the consequences of their sins have a way of spilling out into our lives and tainting and spoiling life for us. And there is that eternal judgment that will not go away; we cannot wish it away, we cannot think it away; it is there. God has ordained it, that eternal judgment. That''s what made Felix dry-mouthed and that''s what made the hair raise up on the back of his neck as Paul talked about the judgment to come for those who ignore the ways of God, for those who are libertine in their lives, for those who ignore righteousness and lack self-control, a judgment day was coming.
The fear of it all was too much for Felix and we read here that he told Paul to go away for the present. "When I have an opportunity I will summon you." And so he did what many people do to God. They say, "Go away, God." When their consciences begin to trouble them and the Spirit of God begins to work in their hearts, they become irritated. They want to get away, so they run every way they can into pleasure, into drugs, into so many things to get away from that voice of God, that call of God. They say to God, "God, you go away, I''ll call you some day," and they cut God off. We can keep on cutting God off and we can keep on running from Him, but one day we''ll come to the end and God will cut us off for all eternity.
Joel pictured life as the valley of decision. He said, "Multitudes in the valley of decision, for the day of the Lord is near." My dear friends, you and I are in the valley of decision every day that we live. America is in the valley of decision right now, and surely the day of the Lord is nearer to us now than ever it has been before. He calls you to give him your obedience, to make restitution for wrong which is done, to reconcile those relationships which are broken. He calls you to conform your life to his moral laws; he calls you to give yourself freely and fully to his service. And he calls the Christian church, this church and all the other churches in this community and across the world to proclaim his righteousness, his gospel, the absolute need for self-control and the inevitable approach of judgment day.
God is speaking to our hearts this evening. He''s speaking to America as through Paul he proclaims the words of righteousness and our need to find that righteousness in Jesus Christ as we surrender our lives to him; our need for self-control, that control which none of us can exercise on our own, but we must have the working of his powerful Holy Spirit within to achieve; that word of judgment which one day we will face, there to receive good or evil according to what we have done in our bodies.
Today I''ve spoken about the tragic consequences of the lack of righteousness, of the lack of self-control, of sin in life, but there is hope. In that beautiful passage in Isaiah we are reminded of God''s gracious care, when he says, "he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole and with his stripes we are healed."
The only way we can be acceptable to God is to come to him through faith in Christ. Each of us has to come to that place sometime, somewhere, when we are willing to say, "I and I alone am responsible for what I think and say and do, or fail to do. I am the one who cursed my neighbor in anger, I am the one who took advantage of my co-worker, I am the one who treated my maid or my child with such mean-spiritedness that it brought tears and hurt to their hearts, I am the one who cheated my customers, I am the one who gave the go-ahead to my passions."
The dead Christ on the cross accuses us, but the risen Christ, thank God, who took judgment for you and me, stands beside us to defend us. You don''t have to justify or alibi for yourself anymore; you don''t have to pass the buck any longer, for your debt has already been paid. The blame is shifted from your shoulders. The Lord Jesus Christ in his gracious love has done all this for you. All you have to do is receive his life, his presence, his power through faith, coming in repentance to him, letting him have control of your life, letting him remold and make you and help you to live the kind of life he ordained from the very beginning. Amen.
