The Problem of Hopelessness

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called

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Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in. Good morning and welcome to Recast Church.

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I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And I recognize that when we come together on Sunday morning, we're coming from a variety of different places, right?

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And that's not just geographical, despite the fact that some of us have come from north, south, east, and west this morning.

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But we're all over the emotional map this morning, right? Like, some of you would say, you know, this was a great week.

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This was an up week. You walked away from this week pretty fulfilled and feeling like things are going really well.

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There's joy in your heart. It doesn't take much to move you to praise God. This morning, others are really just glad that this last week is over and done.

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You know what I'm talking about. You have those kinds of weeks, right, where sometimes that's the case. Some of you are here and you have high intensity pressure at your work site right now.

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Your job, your employment is tough and it seems like there's a lot of pressure there. Well, some of you are here and you're literally enjoying retirement, right?

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Like things are a little bit chill and you're trying to figure out what next steps are. Some of you are in the throes of raising young children, like toddlers, and you're just trying to hold on.

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And I just give you a word of encouragement. Those days are short, despite the fact that they seem really long right now.

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And then some of you are raising teens. Some of you are in an empty nest stage of life. Some of you are students here.

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Some of you are single here. And some of you are just trying to reignite a spark of faith that was there when you were younger and it just feels like you're going through the motions.

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And then there are some here who literally are just checking things out and trying to figure out Jesus Christ for the first time. They don't really know who he is.

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And I confess that it would be daunting, that would be a daunting reality to me, week in and week out, of getting up and trying to craft a service and a message that meets everybody right where you're at.

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If it was up to me, I would probably not sleep well during the week if I thought, man, it's up to me to craft a message that's going to meet every single heart that gathers on Sunday morning.

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And that's where confidence that God has given us his holy word, and I have a confidence in that holy word that keeps me sane.

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I don't have to write a novel message to try to meet every single need in this room.

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My task each Sunday is merely to deliver the mail. It's to deliver the message that God has for us from the next text of scripture as we're marching through the book of Matthew.

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And I trust that what God has for us from his word this morning is going to be used by the Holy Spirit to meet each and every one of you where you're at today.

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That's where my trust rests, not my ability to craft a message that's going to get to every single human heart.

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No, it's that his spirit has the power to do that. And so I hope that you lean into that listening and asking

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God to meet you this morning, whatever kind of week you've had, whatever stage of life you're at, wherever you're at in terms of your relationship with Jesus Christ that you're moved forward as a result of hearing from his word, of singing together in the gathering of his people, of participating in communion together.

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Now our text this week, that's a big caveat to lead into, this is a dark passage.

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Now I say that, I've said that a lot recently, and part of it is that we're in the season of Lent. And I don't know if you know that Lent is a time in the church calendar that was set forward by the ancient church, and it was intended to be a relatively dark time.

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Intended to be a time of leading up to the crucifixion of Christ, and so we've been taking the gospel of Matthew and walking through those passages that are about the final hours of Jesus Christ.

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Our passage this week contains judgment, it contains death by suicide, it contains guilt regarding the blood of Jesus Christ, and at the center of it all is a sinister plot by religious authoritarians to remove

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Jesus Christ. Now I confess that there are some passages that we would never get to if I only preached my favorites.

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If I wanted to preach topically to you, we would probably never get to this passage, and yet I find that it's often in those very difficult passages, sometimes the darker ones, that we wouldn't necessarily turn to in a moment of crisis, but it's often in those darkest places that we find the hope and the help that our culture needs.

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By the end of our text, Judas is going to be dead, and on his death certificate it could read, cause of death, hopeless despair.

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Cause of death, hopeless despair. Now, hopelessness is a current theme in our culture.

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Ironically, and I can't make this stuff up, I'm sitting at the coffee shop over in Pawpaw writing this message this past Wednesday, kind of getting my thoughts, my first draft together, and the song

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Hopeless Wanderer by Mumford & Sons is playing at the coffee shop where I'm writing these very words this past Wednesday.

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Despair is increasing in the next generation, even as it's always been present in humanity in every generation.

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And so my hope is that somewhere in this contrast between the sins and failures of Peter that we saw last week, and then talking about his subsequent restoration in John chapter 21, somewhere between Peter and Judas and his demise, that somewhere in that contrast we receive both joy and encouragement in our relationship with Jesus Christ.

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Our hope in our Savior who gives us forgiveness, and hope, and purpose, and love, and joy, and usefulness as long as we have breath.

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And further, I hope that this passage shows a glimpse of what's at stake in the call that he has placed on each and every one of us to spread the good news.

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Each one of us to shine out the light to the world around us that there is hope.

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There's hope, church. For some, I would suggest to you that for a few, their very life is in the balance of hearing hope from us.

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For some, their very life is in the balance of hearing hope from us. But what's more chilling is that that might be a small percentage, but for all, eternal life is in the balance for them hearing the hope.

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I hope that we recognize that more than ever, church, this is not a season and a time in our current culture, in our climate, to remain silent while so many around us are sliding into deep darkness of despair and hopelessness.

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So let's turn in our Bibles, or your devices, or your apps, to Matthew chapter 27, verses three through 10. It's a shorter passage this morning, but God has recorded for us a glimpse of the tragic plight of so many who spend their existence outside of the hope and purpose available in Christ.

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Again, the passage is Matthew 27, we'll be reading verses three through 10. Church, this is

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God's holy word, what he desires for us to take in together in this gathering this morning.

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Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying,

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I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. They said, what's that to us?

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See to it yourself. And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed and went and hanged himself.

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But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, it's not lawful to put them in the treasury, since it's blood money.

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So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers.

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Therefore that field has been called the field of blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet

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Jeremiah, saying, and they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter's field, as the

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Lord directed me. Let's pray. Father, so often we find that our joy in this gathering is in the contrast to what we deserve, the contrast of the darkness around us, the contrast of what is reasonable for humanity without you to suffer and endure in the darkness and the hopelessness and the separation and the brokenness that our sin brings down on our own heads as well as on the heads of others.

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We are both victims and victimizers simultaneously. And so we see in the darkness of this passage, hopelessness and despair accentuated all the way to the end of life.

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Father, I pray that you would, in this gathering, contrast that with the glorious gospel of what we have received in Jesus Christ, that we have hope and purpose and joy and gladness.

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We have a future to where we can say to our own souls, why are you downcast,

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O soul, and why are you at turmoil within me? Hope in God, for we shall again praise him.

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In our darkest moments, we know that there is praise and worship of the Almighty in eternity for us, that this world, though it brings death and destruction and decay all around us,

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Father, we know that there is hope for eternity because of what

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Jesus Christ has done to rescue us. So Father, I pray that we would worship you from that place.

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Certainly this passage leads us to understand a little bit of that despair, a little bit of that hopelessness, but it is ours no longer because of what

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Christ has done for us. So I pray that you would receive our praise as worship, that we would see you high and exalted, we would reflect rightly on you, how gracious and kind you have been to us, even seeing in this passage what we deserve in recognizing your hand of rescue.

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Father, I pray that Jesus would be lifted high in this gathering this morning, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. All right.

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Yeah, you can go ahead and get comfortable, and if you do me a favor, do yourself a favor, keep your, reopen your

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Bibles or your apps to Matthew 27, verses 3 -10, if you don't have that in front of you. It would be helpful to have it in front of you so you could see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.

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We're going to follow through, verse by verse, through this section of scripture. And if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or donut holes, you can take advantage of that back there, and then restrooms are out the double doors down the hallway on the left -hand side, if you need that.

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I set up the stage a little bit to rehearse where we've been in the gospel of Matthew and kind of get us caught up to speed again.

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Jesus has been arrested. He was tried by the Jewish religious leaders in the middle of the night, kind of early hours of the morning.

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They have found him guilty of blasphemy, of declaring that he is both Messiah and Son of God.

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And so they have informally, as much authority as the Jews had under Roman occupation, they have found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

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So Jesus currently, as of this passage that we're reading here, is under arrest and is in transit to be brought before the

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Roman procurator to be sentenced to death. We saw last week that Peter denied even knowing

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Jesus three times, and he has run off into the night weeping bitterly. I did not leave that story, the sermon last week with him.

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In that position though, we talked about his restoration in John chapter 21. Hopefully you got a chance to read that a little bit this week and kind of find encouraging conclusion to that story between Jesus and Peter.

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But right off the bat in our text this week, in verse three, we are told that Judas is aware of the outcome of the

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Jewish trial. He knows where it's gone. Now he may very well have been welcomed into the trial since he had a role in arresting

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Jesus. Was there in that mob, obviously betraying Jesus with a kiss, pointing out, this is the one that you're to arrest.

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And so it's quite possible that he likely came back with that mob and was brought right into the house of the high priest where the trial was taking place.

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So he's there present when Jesus is falsely accused and then tried and found guilty and sentenced to death.

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So look with me at verse three where we find that Judas is a bit jolted into reality about what he has done.

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When Judas is there and he becomes aware that the high priest, the priests have condemned Jesus, the

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Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership, have condemned Jesus to death, it says in the text, he has a change of heart.

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How many of you have that experience where you've done something wrong and then suddenly it comes to light what you've done and the cost that it is on others and go ahead and raise your hand if you can say, there's been a time in my life where I've had a change of heart.

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I was like, I can't believe I did that, oh my goodness. And you've had some kind of sense. So you can relate to Judas on that front to some degree.

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But the ESV has that he changed his mind which is often the way that we define the word repentance and further we see that by the end of verse four he has confessed what he did as sin and he has even sought to make restitution by giving the money back.

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Now I point those things out to say that it's quite likely that it's possible that some in this room have some confusion over what's wrong with Judas after doing these things.

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At first glance when I was studying this this week and kind of looking at the words and the terms in English of what he has done in verses three and four, it left me with the question, what more would we ask

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Judas to do in this situation to get right with God? Ask yourself that.

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If Judas came to you for counsel this night and said, what do I need to do to get right? I have a hunch that some of the things that he does here would be in your prescription.

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If you come to my office with a confession of sin and ask me what you need to do and you tell me you've confessed sin and you need to get right with God and you tell me, here's an important caveat, you tell me you have asked

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Jesus Christ to save you, that you have a relationship with Jesus Christ, then I would likely tell you this.

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How do you deal with your sins? Step one, repent, which means change your behavior. Step two, confess it to sin as God.

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Step three, make any restitution, apologize to those you've offended or give back what was stolen or whatever that restitution might be.

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At first glance, did Judas do all these things? What do you think? Yeah, he did.

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It was not a trick question. You guys are looking at me like you're used to trick questions from up front. I don't want to answer that because he's probably got his own.

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No, yeah, he did. It looks like he did all those things. But upon further observation, we have some very solid evidence that these three steps are not genuinely flowing, here's what's key, from a relationship with God or with Jesus.

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I have some pretty strong reasons to believe that Judas is not in with Jesus when he takes these steps.

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How many of you know that it's possible to go through the motions, do the right things for the wrong reasons, without your heart really engaged, but is there a sense of worldly grief?

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Is there a sense of worldly remorse? Is there a sense of worldly regret? You better believe there is such a thing as out there in the world a sense of,

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I feel terrible for what I've done. Do you know what I'm talking about? That's a real category for people, but none of this here in this text is flowing out of a relationship between God or between Jesus and Judas.

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Judas doesn't begin from a place of trusting in Jesus for salvation. Now, I'd like to spend the first chunk of our time together describing the evidence that Judas serves as an example of a false disciple.

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He certainly was numbered among the 12, selected by Jesus intentionally, and yet he was always a wolf.

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He was never saved. His heart was never fully with Jesus. And when he realized he wasn't going to get what he wanted out of the relationship, trying to use

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Jesus for some kind of gain, he sought to cut his losses, and he squeezed, just tried to recover whatever he could get out of this for personal benefit, and it took the form of a money bag with 30 pieces of silver, but at least

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I can cut my losses and maybe salvage something from this whole mess, at least 30 pieces of silver for myself.

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So here's our movement, our first movement in this text. The first big picture movement in the text is the tragedy of hopeless regret.

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The tragedy of hopeless regret. I call this section the tragedy of hopeless regret because I will be using

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Judas as a model for those in the world around us who live in a state of despair and hopelessness.

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I think he serves as kind of the patron saint of hopelessness, the patron saint of despair, so to speak, if you could call it that, though he's not a saint, but we'll get there.

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Using Judas in this way runs up against the risk of an annoyingly hypothetical scenario that might very well play through your mind even as I'm reading it, and I want to just address it at the get -go and kind of expose it and get it out there so that we can deal with it at the front end, and that's just simply this.

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Some of you are questioning, could Judas have been saved? How many of you have that ever crossed your mind? Could Judas have been saved?

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It's a reasonable question to some degree, but it's annoyingly specific and hypothetical. I'm going to refuse to answer that question for you this morning because I don't think it really matters to you.

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That's presumptuous on my part, but I don't think you've got a really strong love for Judas. I don't think that that question flows out of some personal like, boy,

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I really want Judas to be okay in this. I think what you really want to know is if your sister that seems to have walked away from the faith of her youth can be saved, if your child that seems to have walked away from the faith of their youth can be saved, or how about the guy who performed the wedding service for Linda and I that was once a mentor and a pastor and is now a self -professed atheist who spends time on radio shows and on podcasts as the ex -Baptist pastor turned atheist.

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I'm not making this up. This is true to our history, true to our story, and has caused pain and hardship for us.

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Let's not keep the point theoretical about some Old Testament guy that you've never met because I think that probably all of us could give this question names and faces in our lives.

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Let's get personal with it. Even if maybe you can't, maybe it's a bit more of a stretch, but maybe it's a real name like Joshua Harris, the author, or maybe a musical artist like Michael Gungor or some other semi -famous person who has deconstructed their faith.

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How many of you just would raise your hand and say, I know somebody who has deconstructed their faith, who once seemed to have some vibrancy in their relationship with God and now is no longer walking with Him?

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What is that all about? Is there any hope? Can they be rescued is a reasonable question.

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Let me start off by answering it emphatically and clearly. The answer is yes, they can be saved.

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Our hope must be in the God who rescues sinners, real sinners, all kinds of sinners, sinners who go through deconstruction, sinners who go through all kinds of doubt.

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I would suggest to you that my only hope is that Jesus rescues repentant sinners who run to Him.

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Now, that's an important caveat, who run to Him. That's possible so long as they have breath, is it not?

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As long as despair has not planted them in the tomb awaiting the resurrection, a final judgment as it does here in this text for Judas.

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So long as they exist in this glorious place of tension between faithlessness and faith, they are only one expression of faith away from salvation through Jesus Christ, one moment away from new life.

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If they would only bow the knee to the Lord, run to Him with their mess that they've created and say, please have mercy and forgive and He is faithful to do so.

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But Judas here in our text, by the way that things flow in his life and throughout this very short text, stands as an example of a son of condemnation.

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He stands as an example of one who has tasted the goodness of Jesus. He has sampled, and emphasis on the word sampled, sampled the goodness while refusing to sit down and participate in the feast.

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He has been privy to glorious things. He's been in the inner workings of miracles, but never giving his heart to the miracle worker.

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There are three reasons that I'm confident that Judas exists as a model of those who are close to spiritual things, but never really all in.

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The first reason I believe Judas was never saved is the evidence of Scripture. How many of you think that matters? Because Scripture testifies as true about Judas.

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In a quite stark and direct passage, we are told very early on in the Gospel of John, as a matter of fact, John chapter six, we are told that Jesus knew those who didn't believe in Him, and He even knew the betrayer who was not given to Him by the

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Heavenly Father. In John six, verse 64 and 65, this is written, but there are some of you who do not believe.

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Words of Jesus. There are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray

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Him. And then verse 65, and He said, this is why I told you that no one can come to the Father unless it is granted, come to me rather, unless it is granted to Him by the

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Father. This passage lumps Judas in with those who do not believe in Jesus. It also strongly implies that Judas was not among those granted to the

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Son by the Heavenly Father. Further, Scripture tells us clearly that Judas was condemned. Jesus, while praying to the

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Father about the disciples, said in John 17, verse 12, while I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me.

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I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the Son of Destruction, so that the

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Scriptures might be fulfilled. It's clear from Scripture that it was prophesied that Judas would not believe in Jesus, that there would be a betrayer, and this does not imply, by the way, hear me carefully, church, it doesn't imply that Judas wanted to believe, wanted to follow

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Jesus, wanted to honor Him, wanted to be okay with Him, but was prevented by God, not at all. Judas did not want to have a relationship with Jesus on his terms.

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We find out in John 12, 6, that Judas was a thief. Having charge of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it,

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John records. Judas is called the Son of Destruction. And Jesus pronounced doom on the one who would betray

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Him, even saying it would be better for Judas if he had never been born, than to act out this will on his part to betray the very

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Son of God. Now Judas was never in a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, our Lord. Judas didn't lose his salvation.

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The testimony of Jesus Himself is that Judas was not numbered among those who were given to Him by His Heavenly Father.

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He was not among those who believed in Him. And Judas betrays this, by the way, in the way he acts towards our Lord. Judas always only ever called

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Jesus Rabbi. He only ever called Him Teacher. He never calls

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Him Lord or Master, as the other disciples all call Him. After an extensive biblical study on the character of Judas, from the passages about him in the

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New Testament, a New Testament scholar, Ralph Martin, he's a

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British dude who did a lot of study, particularly on the life of Judas, kind of focusing in on that for a season, and really kind of just grinding out the

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Greek and the texts, and all the texts pertaining to Judas, and did kind of like an in -depth dive, so that you know that I'm not out on a limb, and it's just Don's opinion that he wasn't a believer.

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Listen to this British New Testament scholar, Ralph Martin, after an extensive study, longer than I've got in a week to study it, he says this,

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Judas was never really Christ's man. He fell from apostleship, but never, so far as we can tell, had a genuine relationship to the

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Lord Jesus. So he remained the son of perdition, who was lost because he was never saved.

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His highest title for Christ was Rabbi, but never Lord. He lives on the stage of scripture as an awful warning to the uncommitted follower of Jesus, who is in his company, but does not share in his spirit.

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He leaves the gospel story a doomed and damned man, because he chose it so, and God confirmed him in that dreadful choice.

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That's Ralph Martin. No, scripture testifies, and if you were to dive deep, like Ralph Martin, into the text of scripture, you would come away with the conclusion, he was never

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Christ's man. The second reason I believe that Judas was never saved is his self -focused response to his sin.

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Despite the fact that it looks like his response to his sin in verses three and four are the common steps of repentance, there's an issue with each step that he takes that's clarified throughout the pages of scripture.

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Step one, that I would kind of lean into and say, hey, here's a good step to take.

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If you've sinned, repent. Turn from it. Walk away from it. A very biblical word, and yet the Greek word for changed his mind in verse three is not the routine word that we see throughout scripture for repent, the word that involves a change of will, a change of action, a change towards sin, but this is a word for remorse or regret.

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It is a straight -up feeling word. It's different and less common in Greek, and it's strictly in the realm of feelings, not in the realm of will, so that he's not turning away from his sin, he's feeling bad about it.

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You know the difference? Do you know the difference? Feeling bad about your sin? How many of you just beat yourself up over your sin, and that's the end of it?

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I'll get you back at it the next day, but I feel really bad when I do it. Can an unbeliever feel bad for doing something evil?

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You better believe they can. Of course. They can feel quite deeply about their brokenness, about their inability to keep their own standards.

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They can even be moved to feelings of hopelessness and despair at their own failures, right? Judas has some deep feelings here.

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I don't dismiss that at all. He's got all the feelings. They just are not directed Godward.

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We express these same kinds of feelings when we think something like, I can't believe I did something so stupid, or how could

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I do something like that? In this line of thinking, we betray that we think our sin is primarily against ourselves, and we become our own judge, saying, wow,

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I just acted like a fool there for a minute. I'll get my act together. Rather than running to God, we beat up ourselves, showing our own pride and arrogance in it.

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Often in our own guilt, we are sitting at the center of our own little universes. We are the guest of honor, are we not, at our own little pity parties?

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This is a dangerous way, by the way, and I emphasize the word dangerous. This is such a dangerous way to process the deep darkness of the human heart.

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This is a terrifying way to try to process it, on your own, with remorse, with regret.

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Here's why it's bad, dangerous, imminently dangerous, for your soul.

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Take this on as a severe caution tape over the areas of remorse and regret, because remorse and regret are not good toys to play with.

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We do not know if the pity party will turn to darker thoughts of self -loathing, leading to despair, leading to hopelessness, leading to the edge of the cliff, at the end of verse five.

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Don't play with remorse and regret. Don't toy with those things. They're more powerful than you think they are.

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Often it starts as just kind of like, oh, I just feel bad about myself, just feel generally bad about myself. What's that about, especially as a believer?

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Is that about faith? Probably not. Probably not giving our regret and our remorse over to God, but clinging to it, holding to it, letting it be a toy that we play with.

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No, no, no. Give that up. At this point, let me say there's only one place to go that I have found to put my self -pity and remorse and guilt and regret to rest.

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There's only one place you can go. Jesus can put all that down through his sacrifice for us.

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I can admit to you that I'm a terrible person, and that is true. The evil thoughts that this mind has produced, the evil words that this mouth has spoken, but the regret and the remorse do not own me.

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Why? Because my sins are nailed to the cross and I bear them no more.

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Do I have to remind myself of that? Oh, yeah, often. But it is good to be able to remind yourself of that, is it not?

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They are no longer our plague to carry, but we have been healed by the cross of Christ, forgiven and washed by the blood of our

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Savior. And through undeserved justification, I have received the righteousness of Christ over my life.

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Mind -bending? Yes. True? Absolutely. I live in the freedom of the glory of sonship.

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Regret and remorse can kill the one who doesn't understand the healing that's available in Christ.

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But, man, oh, man, do we have an armor against remorse and regret? Putting on the armor of God, remembering the righteousness that's been given to us, remembering the salvation that is ours, taking up the faith that He has made it okay, remembering the gospel that sends us out with a message to the world.

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The armor is the gospel. The armor is the gospel. The second step of getting right with God is confessing our sins to Him.

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And that's a routine thing. Hopefully you see that in Scripture. Confession is a good thing, generally speaking.

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But in verse 4, Judas does well to acknowledge his sin, but he does so from a place of regret.

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He's not running toward God in repentance, but instead he's seeking to distance himself from his sin.

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The fact that the common word for repentance is not used in this passage defines the entire movement in the wrong direction.

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Can a person without a relationship with Christ confess sin? Of course. And Oprah was glad when she was at her heyday to book people to let them confess their sins to her, right?

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Confession was a big part of her show. The third step of getting right with God is to make it right.

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And Judas does indeed seem to seek to give the money back to the chief priest. Does he not in the text? It seems like he's trying to make some retribution, but it's interesting that he demonstrates something more of a superstitious nature than the desire for restitution.

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You see, the one holding the blood money was guilty of the blood, and the chief priests know this. They don't want it back.

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And one particular scholar did a lot of work tracing the ancient concept of blood guilt through the twists and turns of these final hours of Jesus Christ, and he found something that's eerie and quite simple when you think about it.

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The guilt is with Judas here at the start of our text, and like a tennis match, he bats it back in this passage to the chief priests.

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They will pass the blood guilt off to the Romans, seeking them to declare the death penalty over Jesus, so that they are guilty.

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But Pilate, what does he do? Washes his hands of the blood. Why is he washing his hands of the blood?

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There's no blood on his hands, a symbolic saying this guilt doesn't rest with me, guys. This isn't on me.

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And so Pilate actually, in Matthew 27, we're going to see it here in a couple of weeks, he's going to literally bat it back to the crowds.

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And the crowds verbally receive it in one of the most eerie passages in all of Scripture.

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The crowds there at the foot of his dais where he is making judgment and washing his hands says this blood is not on me, and they take it.

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And the people answered in Matthew 27, 25, his blood be on us and our children.

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We'll take the guilt, but let him die. No, I don't think

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Judas was truly repentant at all. He shows us how terrible a person can feel about their sins, for sure.

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Despite not even being in with Jesus, people can feel terrible. Deep sorrow and deep regret are not unique to the

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Christian life, are they? Of course not. And as a matter of fact, I believe Satan loves to utilize worldly guilt to lead to hopelessness and despair out there.

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And that leads to the third and final reason I believe that Judas was not a true disciple, and that is that Judas seeks to get as far as he can from Jesus, as far as he knows how.

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According to verse 5, he makes his final run away from God by hanging himself. It's not to say that everybody who dies by suicide has tried to run from God.

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It's certainly what Judas is doing here. He threw back the money to the temple and departed and went and hanged himself, the text says.

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The testimony of his own actions demonstrate that he left no more room for relationship with Jesus Christ physically, like Jesus is there and no room for any reconciliation.

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His final act is just as much about showing that he was done with Jesus as his betrayal was about showing that he was done with Jesus.

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The staccato of the verbs in verse 5 show succinct and complete and swift action.

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His response is not to leave any room to be reconciled to God. He doesn't await Jesus. Think about it this way.

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We see others in their sin running from God, do we not? Like Adam, our original father, who ran and hid from God after he sinned and covered himself up and wanted to hide among the trees.

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Sin has a way of making us avoid God, does it not? Isn't that real? So that I would suggest to you that a major sign of regeneration, a major sign that you have been granted new life and you're a new creation in Christ is that you run to God with your sin.

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That's only regeneration. That only comes from a new heart. Everybody runs from God except the one who has a new heart that knows he loves you.

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And if you know he loves you and you know that he's a loving father and you know that he paid the price for you, then you're going to gladly come to him and say,

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I messed up again. I feel stupid, but here I am again and I got nowhere else to go, no place else to turn.

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So I'm here at the foot of the cross again reminding myself and asking for that heart remembrance that I'm okay with you.

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Please forgive me. Please establish my feet on a better pathway. I hate my sin. I repent of it.

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I turn from it. I don't want it anymore and I only want you, Jesus. Think of it like Peter.

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If you read John 21, hopefully you read all of it. Where's Peter at the start of that passage?

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He's in a boat. They've been fishing all night. Back to his old job, doesn't really know where to turn, doesn't really know what to do, so let's go fishing.

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Big goose egg. How many of you have ever been fishing and got a goose egg? Nothing. Nothing on the line? At least you got to be out in the sunshine and the wind.

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That's about it. They hear a voice from shore. A man's walking there.

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He says, cast the net to the other side. They recognize the voice. They obey him and recast the nets.

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Recast the nets to the other side. The haul starts to come in and what does

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Peter do? Peter who has betrayed his Lord three times, Peter who has every reason to go, oh no, it's

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Jesus. Oh my goodness, what am I going to do? What does Peter do? He jumps in, doesn't take his iPhone out of his pocket.

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He dives in the water and just beating the water trying to get where? Trying to get to Jesus.

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Who's going to restore him? Who's going to fix it? Peter, I know you messed up, but I want you to feed my sheep.

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I love you and I know you love me. I'm going to ask you three times, I'm going to walk through it with you.

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He knows that only God can fix it. Only God can forgive. Only Jesus can forgive him and heal him.

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Do you see how different that is from Judas' fix? Where does Judas go? Oh, the other direction.

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He tries to hide in the finality of death, hoping to never see Jesus again.

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Now Judas is certainly a complex figure that represents those who dabble in the spiritual and find that it only leads to deep remorse.

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How many of you know that the best that religiosity can offer you without Christ is remorse and regret?

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That's the only place it leads. I suck and I just keep sucking. That's it.

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End of story. How many of you know that's a bad end of the story? That's not where you want to go. He represents that side that never comes to Christ.

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It only leads to remorse and despair and eventual hopelessness. I can't seem to get my act together.

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I can't seem to obey enough. I can't seem to get ahead of someone in here. Someone in here is doing better than me and I'm trying in a competition against all of you guys to be the best so that God pays attention to me, but I can't seem to get there.

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Religion without a cross will lead that way or it leads in another direction. Religion without the cross, religion without Jesus.

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The other side of this passage reveals one other way our hearts can break. The cold, eerily calculating religious leaders are so hard -hearted and callous that Judas himself, we probably think of him as one of the quintessential betrayers, one of the quintessential evils in the world, and he is merely their puppet.

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He's merely their puppet. The second major movement in the text is the tragedy of religious authoritarianism.

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Not religious authority, religious authoritarianism where that's the whole thing.

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Many who dabble in man -made religiosity will take to themselves power and authority and become evil monsters of selfish gain with calluses so thick that remorse and regret, quite the opposite of Judas' problem, that remorse and regret have no more room in their souls.

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They've pushed that, they've killed that side of themselves. They've got not even a feeling here.

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The religious leaders in our text can't even pity Judas who just wants to go back to, and I really believe this with all sincerity,

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I think Judas wants to go back to being a wealthy good religious man. Could I just get back to that place that I was before Jesus called me?

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Could I get back to just kind of being an upstanding good part of society and just a good religious man? You're the priest, fix it for me.

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What's a priest supposed to be? The mediator between a relationship with God and man.

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And here they say, what is their response to him? What's your guilt to us?

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You're on your own, buddy. You made your bed, now you sleep in it. These guys are so blinded by religious power that they can't see the deep hypocrisy in which they are living and moving and breathing.

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They're concerned for the way to dispose, think about it in the text, it's just crazy. They are concerned for the way to dispose of the blood money that they themselves paid out.

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And so they bought the plot of ground in the Valley of Hinnom, which is where we get the word Gehinnom, which is literally the valley that Jesus often used to represent hell itself.

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And they buy the ground in the Valley of Hinnom where Judas hanged himself, and this fulfilled a mosaic, a patchwork of prophecy from Jeremiah and Zechariah.

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It's kind of a hodgepodge of various verses kind of smashed together and about the payment for the shepherd of Israel being used to buy a potter's field for 30 pieces of silver.

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By the way, when it says this in Matthew, Matthew is, it seems like a bit of a stretch. Like really, that was prophesied in the

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Old Testament? Like that's a prophecy is that there's going to be 30 pieces of silver? That was prophesied that they were going to buy a field?

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But these prophecies are recorded so that we see a tie between what God was doing in the Old Testament and the

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New Testament. So this isn't something new. This isn't brand spanking new. This is consistent with the

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Old Testament. What's happening in the life of Jesus is all part of the big plan that God has been doing since creation, and here it flows.

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The church, let's catch these applications on the way by. First and foremost, there is only hope in Jesus.

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It's the only place to take your regret, the only place to take your sins, the only place for hope.

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For the religiously cold and lifeless leaders who cannot see their own hypocrisy and complicity in the death of the Messiah, the only hope is to repent from sin and run to God.

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To admit their sin and ask Him to save them based on the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Only hope.

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But I think that's the, I think we see that side in some places and in some pockets of our culture, but it's somewhat my opinion, but I think we've got a much bigger problem in our culture today.

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I think we have a borderline, if not real pandemic on our hands here.

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It's a pandemic of despair, a pandemic of hopelessness in our culture. And by any metric, it seems that suicide is on the rise as people are living under fear.

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They're living under regret and a whole host of mental struggles regarding despair. Guess who has the answer?

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Guess who has the answer? Guess who knows what to do with regret and remorse and despair and hopelessness?

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Guess who's got the key to unlocking the solution for that? Our Lord, Jesus Christ Himself, our

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King. Our King, the only one who grants real, lasting and meaningful forgiveness.

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Our King, the only one who has access to give you new life. Our King swallows down despair and comes up out of the grave three days later.

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Our King eats hopelessness for lunch and turns it into a promise of eternal life through an empty tomb.

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I think I'm going to ask us all to do something new, and for many of us, it might be just something that's renewed.

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It is for me. I'm going to speak now as one that has come under conviction of this very text, because I'm convinced that the church in America needs a particular brand of revival.

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We need a particular brand of revival. Not merely like singing with a lot of enthusiasm.

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That's not to criticize what happened there. I hope that there's a lot of good things that come out of that, but I want you to raise your hand and say,

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I need more than that. I need more than just vibrancy in my worship and enthusiasm and excitement and kind of jumping around.

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I need more than that. We need a particular brand of revival. I'm going to be presumptuous enough to say that I think

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I know what it is. Can we agree as the church of our

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King to get back to declaring the gospel? Or get to declaring the gospel if you haven't?

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That's what our world needs, church. That's what our world needs from us, church.

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They're desperate for it. They are living in despair. Hopelessness is on the rise. And we have the answer.

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We have the answer. I guess the alternative is, of course, to remain comfortable, hoarding all the purpose and hope to ourselves while the world is virtually going to hell in a handbasket.

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So church, there is a real hopelessness. There is a real despair.

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And you have the answer. You have the answer. You have hope to give.

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So let's march, church. Let's roll. Let's allow our communion time this morning to catch us on fire for the gospel.

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We're going to take communion here in just a moment to remember what He has done to save us, right? We do this every week.

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And this is to give us hope, to give us peace, to give us purpose. At the end of our service, and how dare we let that rest with us as the world around us is desperate for hope and purpose.

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Now I say this regularly. Only those who belong to Jesus should get out of their seats and go to those tables and take that cracker to remind yourselves of His body broken for you.

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Take that cup of juice to remember His blood shed for us. But there's something else that's going on when we come to those tables.

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I encourage you to look around and consider this. By getting out of your seat and going to those tables, you mark yourself in this assembly as a person called to declare

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His greatness to the world outside of these four walls. You mark yourself as a missionary.

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You mark yourself as on mission for Christ. You mark yourself as belonging to Him and possessing the life -giving hope that matches and meets the need of the despair and hopelessness in the world around you.

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That meets and matches the hopelessness of despair of your coworker, of your family member, of your neighbor, of the parents of the other kid on your kid's baseball or basketball or whatever team your kids are participating in.

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And give it a name this morning, church. Give them a name. Who is it? Who is it that you know is living in despair around you?

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I had a conversation with somebody this week who said that somebody came up to them at their workplace and just like literally just kind of, I've been having a terrible time and I don't know where my life is going.

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I don't even know what to say in that moment. If you don't know what to say, come and meet with me. Maybe we need to have a class on that.

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Because that's kind of like, that's entry level. Like that's the kiddie pool, like zero entry, right?

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Like, I don't know what my life is about. I don't know. I just partied all weekend and I feel empty inside and I just got drunk and I don't even know who

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I slept with and I don't know what I did. But man, wow, it was a bender and it was crazy and it was wild and I feel so empty inside.

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Well, there might be another way to live. There might be somebody who came to give you hope and a purpose.

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Would you like to sit down and talk about that sometime? Now, maybe your workplace doesn't allow that conversation to happen on the clock, but how many of you know that you're not limited to interacting with your coworkers on the clock?

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You're allowed to say, let's get together sometime and like really talk about this thing. You guys getting what

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I'm saying in this? I'm getting a lot of blank stares and I don't know if it's from intensity or if it's like literally like, I don't know what to do with this right now.

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I hope it's conviction. I'm way, way, way off my notes by the way right now.

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So those guys up there, sorry, they're trying to follow along and they're just completely lost.

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They don't know where I'm at. That's so fun. So we're going to get up in a moment and we're going to mark ourselves.

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We're going to mark ourselves as those who stand up and go to this table because we are those who knew hopelessness and knew despair and have been brought up out of that by the salvation of Jesus Christ and we are going to mark ourselves as those who should be going out and sharing.

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Think about that while you're standing in line. Think about that while you participate and take that cup and take that, that cracker that you're saying,

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I know the answer, I'm holding the answer in my hand. Christ died for us, shed his blood for us to give us hope, to give us purpose, to give us eternal life, to give us forgiveness and to call us into his mission field to share with others.

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Your arrival at the table identifies you as part of the answer to a world that is dying in despair and so we have our marching orders to bring hope to a world full of hopelessness and despair.

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Let's pray. Father, looking at this text, at face value, it's a very dark text.

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We kind of go down the rabbit hole of despair, down the rabbit hole of self -service, down the rabbit hole of running from you.

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We recognize that it is by the power of Christ, it is by your spirit that drew us in and regenerated us, gave us new hearts that desire to run to you in our brokenness, run to you for forgiveness, run to you in our sin.

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Father, I pray that even now, maybe there's some that that's a really big, important next step. I didn't even say it in the application, but there are some in this room whom

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I'm convinced have been hiding from you and they need to turn and they need to run to you and they needed this fresh reminder.

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So Father, I pray that you would meet people at that place too, that you would meet people in that place of where, yeah,

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I'm not sharing my faith with others because I'm barely clinging to it myself. So Father, I pray that you would meet those there, but then

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Father, for those of us that are kind of battling it out against sin and continuing to run to you, I pray that you would move us to share, to lift up our faces beyond the things of our daily lives, the things of our week, to allow there to be some margin for conversation, allow there to be some margin for declaring and proclaiming the good news that you sent your

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Son to die for us. And that anyone, regardless of what they've done, who would turn and repent and run to you and ask for Jesus Christ to rescue them and begin that relationship, that they would be saved.

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Set us on fire for the gospel in this dark, dark time, that we would shine brightly.

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I know you would start that here, you would start that around the world, and you would allow the gospel to have its way in the hearts and lives of men and women, children, old people in all generations who would see your work in this world, in Jesus' name, amen.