Submission and Supplication

Hebrews 13:7-8, 17-21

Turn your Bibles to the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews for our study tonight.

We're going to be finishing up our study of this book. It has been a very difficult book, it's not easy to understand, but it's been very instructional I know that I know that I am certainly richer for the days and weeks and months of study that I have done in this book, and I trust and pray that you are too.

We come to our final look at the thirteenth chapter. The title that I have given to the whole chapter is, "Christian Ethics and Example," and really we could throw in there energy. "Christian Ethics, Example, and Energy," for it's all here in the thirteenth chapter.

And we have covered much material in terms of what God expects out of believers in the matter of their behavior and we're going to kind of sum that up tonight, and then talk about the example and the energy.

Now there is a well known Episcopal professor by the name of John Fletcher. He has become well known because he is the principle advocate of a philosophy known as situation ethics. An article in the National Observer said, and I quote, "Doctor Fletcher has spelled out a controversial manifesto of individual freedom and responsibility, based on the ethic of brotherly love, which he says should free every man from rigid archaic rules and codes, like the Ten Commandments. Every man must decide for himself what is right."

It's interesting that a man would come up with a code based on love that would free somebody from the Ten Commandments, when the Ten Commandments are based on love too. The idea of not killing somebody certainly relates to love, the idea of not abusing somebody else physically in adultery relates to love, the idea of not having other gods relates to the love of God, the idea of not coveting your neighbors wife and goods certainly relates to love and to brotherly love. And so for somebody to say that the kind of ethic we want is one that is love but it eliminates all rules is foolish, for love binds itself by the most rigid kind of standards. And when you follow the pattern of situation ethics and situation ethics just says you do whatever you want to do in any given situation, whatever's right for you is right. Well, what happens is that kind of an ethic gives birth to an ethical monster, as every case is to be judged not by reference to some absolute standard but by an arbitrary inner feeling. Whatever feels good to you, you ought to do it. It's just the simplicity of do your own thing. There are no absolutes, there are no objective facts, there is no truth--everything is in a state of flux and you jump on wherever you happen to want to jump on. That's situation ethics.

And what it leads to is obvious: it leads to a wholesale moral landslide. Since people are so depraved to begin with, you give them the right to do what they want and that's exactly what they are going to do. And when they do what they want they'll degenerate fast. And you'll have crime and you'll have mental illness, and you'll have suicide, and you'll have all of these things, and that's exactly what we have in our world. People have been set adrift on a sea of relativity and there's no harbor of absolutes to tie up to. And we have a society of people doing their own thing and they end up in meaninglessness. If there are no absolutes then in honesty nothing means anything anyway and man can't live like that.

Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer, wrote in the classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov this great statement, he said this, "If there is no God then everything is permitted." And what he meant was if there are no standards and there are no rules, then it doesn't matter what you do. If there is no God, then everything is permitted. There can be no justice, there can be no laws, there can be no anything. And, The Brothers Karamazov, I don't know if you've read it, but the story is the story of murder in a small Russian town. The murder of a Russian landowner and the terrible results, when a man who tried to believe that everything was o.k. found out that he couldn't live like that. That he had to face the fact that murder was evil. It was vile, it was wrong, and guilt was heaped in upon him. And the conclusion of Dostoyevsky was you cannot eliminate God. You cannot eliminate ethical standards, you cannot eliminate morality. If you do, then you come up with a terrible fact that if there is no ethic, then there is no God, and if there is no God, then everything is permitted, and if everything is permitted, existence is a disaster. For that eliminates laws and justice and standards of every kind. And so Dostoyevsky's conclusion was there must be a God.

Then you had men come along like Camus and Sarte, who decided one step further than Dostoyevsky that there wasn't a God. But there still was a morality. And then people tried to pin them down and said, "If there is no God who sets the standards--how do you get a morality?" And they just said, don't ask me that. And they both wound up in a philosophy of abject despair. And Sarte relates the whole of his view of life in a book called Nausea, and he just winds up as a suicide. Life has no more meaning than that, makes him sick.

But there is a God of morality, there is a Cod who sets some standards. The God of the Old Testament had some very stringent standards, for life and conduct. And it is the same God in the New Testament who sets standards of behavior to govern the lives of individuals. And as we have looked at the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews we have found that God is a God of order. That God is a God of principle, that God is not a God who says, do your own thing. But God has some very strong and very rigid and very clearly defined standards of behavior.

And we have given you in the past several weeks at least three reasons for God giving the ethics at the end of the book of Hebrews--the standards for the Christian life. He has all the way through been presenting the New Covenant and now within the framework of a New Covenant, knowing Christ, living in the age of grace, there are some standards. He gives them for three reasons.

 Reason One: and these are not in any specific order, but reason one that we suggested to you is the fact, that He wanted the Jews to know that it's the same God in the New Testament, the same God of the New Covenant that was the God of the Old Covenant. It's the same God of laws; it's the same God of rules; the same God of ethical standards of morality that you knew in the Old Testament. This is not something new; this grace does not mean you now do what you want. The same God has the same standards, morally.

 Secondly: He gives these ethics because they bring joy to the Christian; to be obedient is to be joyous. And to be able to do what God wants you to do results in fruit in your life. It results in productivity and that results in joy.

 And the third reason: That God wanted us to live lives that fit his standards was that we might give a clear witness to