Do We Need to Sell All Our Possessions? | Theocast Clips

All right, how do we often hear that communicated? Surrender all for Christ, and if you're not at least willing to surrender all for Christ, you're not legit.

This is so important, but what happens in modern -day, I would say, revivalistic slash evangelical preaching is that we get up and we call people's salvation to question.

If you're speaking to believers and you're doing that with the first use and you're not backing it with the gospel, that is shameful.

But sadly, what happens so often in our context, like you said, is there's the first use of the law minus the gospel.

Let me just crush you with law, but I don't really give you hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. I just cause you to despair of yourself, and then it's just like, no, you need to do better and you need to try harder, is sort of the conclusion.

It's a gross application of the first use of the law, and it's masquerading as the third use of the law, supposedly to guide us in our living, but instead we're condemning everyone and we're calling everybody's salvation into question.

We're telling people that, hey, you may very well not have any reason to think that you're amongst the redeemed.

I just want to say, go back to our critique of John Piper's Sermon on Holiness as a great example of confusing the first and the third use.

He approaches the congregation using the first, and he doesn't give them the gospel as the means of doing the third.

He's preaching the first use of the law, but not then giving gospel. He's preaching the law as a threat, supposedly, to guide our living, and there's just all kinds of category confusion going on, not just in that one message, but we would humbly suggest a lot of preaching in our land.

Good examples of this and how these passages are taught, and we've expounded on these before, so I don't need to do this at length, but if you don't understand these uses of the law, you're going to butcher passages like the

Good Samaritan and like the Rich Young Man. Here's how we do this. We collapse law and gospel, and we confuse the way the law is supposed to be used rightly.

We don't do it. We'll go to the Good Samaritan, and we will acknowledge the context in some sort of cursory way.

There's this guy asking what he needs to do in order to inherit the kingdom of God. Jesus says, well, what's in the law?

How do you read it? He says, love God and love neighbor, and Jesus says, exactly, do that, and you'll live, and then the man doubles down, well, okay, who's my neighbor, because I want to make sure

I'm doing this kind of thing, but then here's what we end up doing with the Good Samaritan. We effectively just unsettle everyone and condemn everyone for not loving neighbor well enough.

We don't then give them the good news, and we tell them to go and try harder if they're going to legitimately be a

Christian. I'm just like, man, that's so bad on so many levels, because the first use of the law there, which is

I think Jesus's main point, is that nobody has loved neighbor this way. Nobody's kept God's law, and thereby you need to look somewhere else than your own righteousness.

One. Then third use, kindly, secondary takeaway, in the

Lord Jesus Christ, hey, beloved, we have been given everything in Christ, ought we not seek by grace in the

Spirit to sacrificially love each other? Philippians 2. I mean, there it is. Rich young man, same thing, category confusion.

This young man thinks he's kept the law. He says, I've kept the commandments, and then Jesus turns the temperature up, says, okay, if you effectively, paraphrase, all right, then prove it.

Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, follow me. Young man can't do it. How do we often hear that communicated?

Surrender all for Christ, and if you're not at least willing to surrender all for Christ, you're not legit.

Terrible, terrible exegesis, right? The point of all that is, to the young man, first use of the law, hey, homie, you think you've kept the law?

You have not. You have not loved God and neighbor. If you had kept the law, you could do this, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and follow me with no difficulty whatsoever.

The reason you can't do this is because you have not kept the law, nor are you able to.

And so then, gospel, we should say, look unto Christ. The one who is standing right in front of the man is his salvation.

This is gospel. So then third use takeaway, if we're going to think this through, we can then talk about how we want to live lives of faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, and how we don't want to store up treasures on earth or something. I mean, that's entirely legitimate to say, but to tell people to go have a yard sale and get rid of everything they own and be willing to do this, that, or the other in order to be a legitimate

Christian is not a right application of that passage. And just a brief observation, the word willing is nowhere to be found there.

I mean, it's all just Jesus says, do this, you know, but yet we introduced this willingness category because we collapse law and gospel and we collapse the law and its uses in order to make it work.

I tell my wife that every day. I'm willing to sacrificially love you, even though I don't. I'm willing to do it.