Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture is 1 Corinthians chapter 16, verses 13 and 14. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

1 Corinthians chapter 16, verses 13 and 14: “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith. Quit you like men. Be strong. Let all your things be done with charity.”

Please be seated. We thank God for his holy word and pray that he would open our understanding. Find the younger children may be dismissed to go to their Sabbath schools if their parents desire that for them.

1 Corinthians 16, verses 13 and 14 is familiar to us. We’ve been talking about this relative to the portions of the book of Acts we’ve dealt with over the last month or two. And we’ll also be speaking of verse 14, doing all things in charity, in a few weeks as we come to that section where the acts of Tabitha are recorded for us in the book of Acts—acts of kindness and charity. And she’ll be a model for us then of charity, the way that Saul was a model to us of resolve.

Remember we talked about the road to Damascus when the convicting power of the Lord Jesus Christ makes an appearance to Saul. And Saul’s response to the declaration that this is the Christ, the one that Saul is persecuting—Saul’s response is resolve to do the will of the Son. “What would you have me to do, Lord?” is his question, and that’s the question we should always be asking God: What would God have us resolve to do for him?

And so as we look to a new year, it is good to remind ourselves that resolutions, New Year’s resolutions, really come from the basic biblical thrust that our lives are to be lives of resolve to serve the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Stand fast in the faith.” The second phrase in 1 Corinthians 16:13 means to have resolve in the faith—resolve to do the will of the Father as the Son was resolved, and Saul was a model for us of that on the road to Damascus.

Additionally, the scriptures tell us in verse 13 to “quit you like men.” That is, to be courageous and to be bold. And Ananias was a model for us of courageousness as he was told to go and be part of the process whereby Saul be restored to strength after his three days of figurative death in the grave, mourning for his sins, contemplating them, being prepared by God for the task that he would call him to do.

Ananias knew that this was the great persecutor of the church. So it took courage. It took an assuring word from God to Ananias to give him the courage to go do what was right.

Additionally, Saul himself is another picture of courage because remember in that account, it was revealed to Saul and to Ananias that he will suffer much for the cause of Christ. He has caused Christians to suffer greatly. He has murdered them, and he’ll suffer much. And his resolve is an understanding of that as well. So he also is a picture of courage.

And then in verse 13, we also read “after watch ye, stand fast in the faith. Quit you like men, be strong.” And Saul again was a model for us of strength as he went from Damascus to Jerusalem, going from strength to strength, moving and maturing in strength. Being given strength—not happening somehow artificially or automatically with him, but rather the phrase in the Greek means that he was endued with strength increasingly, that of course coming from the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a mighty warrior preaching the gospel in Damascus and Jerusalem, and he’ll then of course take the gospel to the Gentiles as the apostle to the Gentiles. And he’s a picture for us of strength.

And in this same way, Tabitha will be a picture for us of charity.

Now, this is the start of a new year. And I thought it would be good, in terms of looking at this coming year, to emphasize the first phrase in verse 13: “Watch ye.”

These verses in 1 Corinthians 16 follow a series of doctrinal expressions and dogmatic assertions by Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians in the verses and chapters leading up to these verses. And in the words of George Grant, who I heard speak on this text—as you know, in July in Chicago—in the words of George Grant, after these dogmatic assertions, Paul arsenals, or rather, Paul marshals the truth with resolve, that is, with the resolve of godly Christian character.

And so we’ve looked at these verses as a picture for us of godly Christian character. And we talked about the relationship of practice to belief—orthopraxy to orthodoxy—that frequently the problems that we see in the church, and that as a result in the world around us, are problems that come from sin. Not first doctrinal errors usually, but first sin—a failure to do these things: to be watchful, to have resolve, to be strong, to have courage, and then to do all things in love.

As men fail to do that, then that leads them into errors of doctrine in which their own sin is memorialized for a period of time in the context of the world or in the church.

And so we’ve tried to stress in these things the importance. The book of Acts stresses the great importance, particularly in the last few chapters we’ve been dealing with, of the person of Jesus. You remember that the Ethiopian eunuch has Jesus preached to him, and it is Jesus who appears to himself and identifies himself as such to Saul. The person of the Lord Jesus Christ is before us in a very marked fashion in the book of Acts.

Now, there’s doctrine there, and doctrine is important. The Christian character is of utmost importance. And as we walk into this new year, we should do so with the resolve to try to build in and be obedient to these aspects of Christian character that are given to us in 1 Corinthians 16:13 and 14.

And so today we’re going to talk about watchfulness. The very first one actually in this series of descriptions of the Christian character in 1 Corinthians 16. Watchfulness is the beginning of the list. We didn’t take it that way because we were looking at the book of Acts as models for some of these other things. But today we’re going to talk about watchfulness.

Now, watchfulness—and you see on the first point of the outline—I may not say this is a good way to put it: the centrality of watchfulness in the life of faith. Maybe I should have said the great importance of it. I don’t want to make watchfulness the center of our being, but it is of great importance in the life of the Christian to be watchful.

This watchfulness is recorded for us in various places of scripture. And I, in the first section of the outline, just take us briefly through a couple of texts in the Pentateuch, then in the Gospels, and then the epistles.

You remember that those of you who are here might have listened to the tape several years ago, and we talked about the sermon in the context of worship. If you look at Jesus’s preaching as a model for sermon delivery and Paul’s as well, frequently what we see is we have the Pentateuch as the beginning word of God on a subject. That word is then explained in relationship to the prophets and the history of Israel. And then in the New Testament, we see that being fulfilled of course with the gospel accounts and then the epistles.

And so these major sections of the scriptures are used frequently in Paul’s addresses, for instance, or in our Savior’s sermons. He will go through the scriptures in this kind of manner, and the great men of the faith for the last 2,000 years in the Christian church have seen the importance of giving this overview of the scriptures to a particular topic.

Well, I’ve chosen the Pentateuch, the gospel, and epistle texts here to give us kind of an overview of the great importance of watchfulness in our lives. How important is it to watch, to be taking heed to ourselves or to certain things in our life? Well, it’s of great importance.

And the scriptures tell us that first in Deuteronomy 4:14 and following. We see the beginning of these texts that we deal with in a general way. “The Lord commanded me at that time,” we are told by Moses, “to teach you statutes and judgments that you might do them in the land whether you go over to possess it.”

You see there again the importance: doctrine is important, but the whole point of statutes and judgments is that you might do these things and build them into your life, into your Christian character.

Verse 15 of Deuteronomy 4: “Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves. Be watchful. Be diligent. Be vigilant about your life. Watch. Take heed. Take heed unto yourselves.”

And then he says, “You saw no manner of similitude in the day that the Lord spoke unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”

And in verse 16: “Take heed lest ye corrupt yourselves and make you a graven image.”

So we’re given the great importance of watchfulness in Deuteronomy 4 relative to, first of all, the covenant. We’re to be very watchful and diligent. We’re to take heed, to be vigilant, about our lives and relationship to the covenant that God has brought us into the context of. And that covenant is defined in verse 14 relating to the law of God, the statutes and judgments—the things that we’re supposed to do and the judgments that determine what penalties, blessings, and cursings ascribe to the laws that God gives us.

So watchfulness has, as its key element as we’re beginning our examination of an overall view of the scriptures on this topic in Deuteronomy 4, watchfulness is tied to the covenant and it’s tied to obedience to specifically the statutes and judgments of God. And then it has done this by way of warning us that a failure to be watchful and diligent about our covenant relationship to God and his laws, his statutes and judgments—a failure to do that means that we will likely slip off into idolatry.

There’s a warning against idolatry in the context of this portion of Deuteronomy 4. This is summed up in verse 23, after a section dealing with idolatry: “Take heed unto yourselves. Be watchful. Watch what you’re doing. Take heed lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image or the likeness of anything which the Lord thy God hath forbidden thee. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.”

So, as well as giving us the correct context for our watchfulness—the covenant, God’s law—it also gives us a great motivation here. And the motivation is that we have a God who is a jealous God and who is a consuming fire. God’s judgments, God punishes, God brings chastisements to his people who fail to be watchful and slip into any form of idolatry because of their failure of watchfulness.

So right away, in the very beginning of the scriptures, in the Pentateuch, we are told that watchfulness has a context and we’re told that watchfulness has a motivating factor: a personal God who is judging.

Now, this last fact is important. I was previewing some or reviewing some tapes I’ve been given—a series of tapes that are an introduction to the Eastern Orthodox Church. These were produced or filmed by Frank Schaeffer. He now refers to himself as Frank Schaeffer, out of a church in California. And you may know that there are some people that we know of—people as they examine, as they come out of baptistic theologies and come into reformed theology, reformation theologies—then some of them have moved beyond that and actually approached the Eastern Orthodox Church. That’s a mistake. The Eastern Orthodox Church has great error within it.

But in any event, one of the errors I want to speak of right now is that in this tape, it sounded so familiar to me of things that I’ve heard before we left baptistic theology. In this tape, it talked about the fact that, for instance, when God tells Adam in the garden, “The day you eat of it, you shall surely die”—relative to the punishment that would come upon him for his sin and disobedience as violation of covenant—the man teaching the tape took great pains to say that, well, God says that this is a result, Adam, of what will happen. God doesn’t say “I will make you to die,” but rather “you will die.” It’s a consequence of your action.

And this seemed to be being portrayed as a picture of what sin and punishment is all about in the scriptures—that it isn’t so much that God is punishing us or judging us, but rather there are consequences to our action, these natural, inbuilt consequences. And you’ve heard people—I’m sure people who are Arminian in persuasion normally speak this way—who would talk about the fact that we wouldn’t have a god judging here. It’s just, you know, AIDS or venereal disease is a natural consequence of sin, but it isn’t so much the personal judgments of God.

Well, right here, at the very beginning, it’s very important for understanding the need to be watchful in our lives. It’s very important to get the understanding here that God plainly tells us, very plainly tells us, to take heed, to be watchful, because God is a consuming fire and he is a jealous God. He is personally involved in bringing judgments upon those people that fail to be watchful and as a result move away from the living God and into idolatry—whether it’s serving the imaginations of our own heart, the sun and the moon, created things, whatever it is.

God says if you’re not watchful, you’ll slip off into apostasy, and I will judge you—not as a neutral consequence, but I will actively be involved in judging you. My hand will be upon you. The scriptures are replete with statements about that, of course.

And you know it, you understand that here. But it’s important that you don’t lose an understanding of that and somehow get sucked off into this thinking that’s espoused on the one hand by contemporary startings of churches that are Arminian in perspective, and on the other hand, an ancient church, the Eastern Orthodox Church.

People want to avoid the fact that God is a judging God. “No humanist, because you’re a human, means there’s no obligation by God on his part to treat you nicely just because you’re human.” No. You’re made in his image, for his purposes. And part of his purposes in life, part of his purposes for creation, is that there would be the demonstration of his justice and judgment, personally administered to people that fall away from obedience to the faith.

Well, enough of that.

Deuteronomy then tells us these basic things. A very important second text from the Pentateuch is Exodus 34:10 and following. In verse 12 in this section of Exodus 34, we read this verse: “Take heed to yourself. That’s what I’m keying off—this phrase. In other words, be watchful. In other words, take heed to yourself. Lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whether thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee. But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.”

Then verse 15: “Why must you be watchful? He tells us in verse 15: ‘Lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go awhoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice, and thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go awhoring after their gods, and they make thy sons go awhoring after their gods. Thou shalt make no molten gods.’”

Now, the point of that is this. Look it up later and read it and meditate upon this fact: Deuteronomy tells us the relationship of watchfulness to our relationship to God. And now in Exodus 34, we see watchfulness important relative to our relationships with people—our horizontal relationships as well as our vertical relationship.

Very importantly here, we’re to be watchful that we don’t enter into covenants with the unregenerate, with those who are not called and elect to be God’s people. In this case, in the Old Testament, those outside of Israel. In our day and age, those outside of the church. But for what purpose? Because if you make a covenant with them, God says they’re going to then serve gods, and eventually your children will end up serving those gods.

What’s the point of this? Our watchfulness is not just to remove us from the idolatry of the nations. Our watchfulness is to extend to the fact that we’re to be watchful, that we are diligent, to remove idolatry from the lands in which we live. You see, there’s no neutrality in this watchfulness. It’s not just that we can keep ourselves pure and removed from the world until Jesus returns. No. In fact, God says that he’s set it up in such a way that if we try to go back into a version of neutrality—and whether it’s neutrality relative to not working on our own personal sins or whether it’s neutrality relative to not taking effort to get rid of the idolatry in our land—either way, God says it’s going to come back and bite you. It’s going to come back, and you’re going to end up becoming idolatrous yourself, or your children will become idolatrous, because you fail to actively take the fight to the opponents in the land who are idolatrous.

Or, by way of extension, the scriptures legitimately tell us—a way of extension of this application of this truth—to fight sin in the context of our land. Our bodies are lands also. We’re to actively work on the sins that beset us.

And so in any event, watchfulness is to extend not just to avoiding certain things, but to actually making sure we pursue certain things. Because God says, “If you don’t pursue the elimination of idolatry in your land, and if you make a covenant by which you say, ‘Okay, you live there, I live here, let’s just be at peace. We can be good pluralists, and Christianity can live alongside of Judaism or alongside of Islam or alongside of other forms of cultish behavior or alongside paganism or secularism, and we’ll just let each other live and let live’—no. God says if you do that, your children will be tempted and sucked off into those forms of idolatry.”

So the antithesis that God tells us to keep in our mind between the people of God and those outside of the elect community of Christ is not simply to keep us away from them, but to actively pursue the elimination of idolatry in our land. So watchfulness is the key also to the active pursuing of seeing the earth become again the garden of God and converting men and nations to that end.

And so part of watchfulness has to do very much so with evangelism—not letting these relationships stay static. There’s no neutrality in God’s version of the world. And watchfulness is to remind us of that lack of neutrality.

Okay, let’s go on to the Gospels. And of course, our Lord Jesus Christ tells us many times in the Gospels to watch. Matthew 24 is one section, verses 42 and following: “Watch therefore if you know not what hour the Lord will come.”

Then he goes on to tell this story: “If the goodman of the house had known when the thief would come, he would have taken watch and he would not have suffered his house be broken. Therefore be ye also ready for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh.”

So he says Christ is going to return. “I’m going to come back. He says and if you know when I’m coming back then you take care. But you don’t know when I’m coming back. And as a result of that, I set this up such that you must be watchful at all times. At all times.”

Verse 46: “Blessed is that servant whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing, being a good steward over the household that God has made him steward over.”

“And verily I say unto you,” Jesus says, “that he shall make him ruler over all his goods.”

“But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, ‘My lord delays his coming,’ and then begin to smite his fellow servants and to eat and drink with the drunkards, the lord of that servant shall come in a day when he knoweth not, in an hour that he is not aware of. And he shall cut him asunder and point him his portion with the hypocrites. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

So Jesus says: “It’s as if I’ve given you a house to take care of and people to feed in that house. And one day the master of that house is going to come home and demand an accounting. And if you’re watchful to the end, then your life is consistent in terms of the stewardship that I’ve given you. Then when I come back, I reward you. And if you’re not watchful, then when I come back, I cut you in pieces. Cut you in pieces—nightmare, Freddy, whatever it is—I cut you in pieces, he says. And I assign you a place where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Fear should be our response when we hear these words. You know, I thought of this text a lot. And we rent, and you know, renting is a good picture of what this is all about. Because if you rent a house, you have a landlord, an owner of the house who occasionally comes around and sees how it’s going. And you know, the law says he’s got to tell you when he’s coming, and you don’t have to let him in otherwise. Well, that doesn’t really apply. I mean, he’s the owner of the house.

And we, a couple months ago or a month or so ago, several weeks ago, we had a van pull through our driveway. We don’t know if it was our landlord or not. The person who owns our house actually lives in Saudi Arabia. We got relatives in Portland, and he comes back once a year or so, and usually will stop in at the house and see how it is. And but you know, I—it may well have been him. We don’t know that it was him, but it looked like it might have been him as he drove around and out.

And you know, we all—the landlord’s here. We ought to clean up. The point is the correlation here: you should be a steward over your house, if you rent such that when the owner of the house comes to visit you, whether it’s night, day, whenever it is, you should be prepared for his coming. You’re to be watchful.

But if you’re an unfaithful steward and you let things decline, you don’t do what you should do, and the place might be a mess, and that isn’t good.

So it’s a good model for us of what’s being spoken of here. And our Savior tells us over and over again, and I list various verses for you. He says it again in Mark 13:37: “What I say unto you, I say unto all, watch.”

That’s one of the key words that our Savior gives us, preparing us—preparing his disciples for his departure that would come at the end of his ministry here on earth. One of the key words he leaves them with is to be watchful.

You see the importance of this? What I’m trying to get at here and give it a context is the great importance of blessings and cursings assigned to what happens when he returns.

Well, there are other texts you can look them up later perhaps.

Now let’s go to the epistles. And again here in the epistles, we have a great emphasis upon watchfulness. Ephesians 5:11 have no fellowship of the unfruitful works of darkness. Rather reprove them.

And then in verse 14: “Wherefore he saith, awake thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

“See then that we walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.”

Also in 1 Thessalonians 5:6: “Therefore, let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober.”

In the epistles and other places as well, our Savior’s words—there’s a relationship between watchfulness and wakefulness. And if you’re not watchful, then you’re sleeping or you’re drunk. That’s the idea.

In fact, our Savior warns us in the epistle or the gospel accounts that I have given you references for: not to let our hearts be overcome with pleasures of the flesh, to the end that we become not unwatchful. And so drunkenness, in a spiritual sense—also of simply not being diligent and watchful—is compared to not being awake.

And Ephesians 5 tells us then: “Awake thou that sleepest. See that you walk circumspectly. Watch yourself. Watch your walk. Walk circumspectly.”

And I read that first verse of Ephesians 5:11 where it says: “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”

To see that this is the same message that God gave us in that text from Exodus: You know, not just “Don’t have, don’t be involved with works of darkness,” but rather “reprove them.” Don’t be happy just to let them be content outside of your home. Reprove them out there in the public square as well. Again, no neutrality. We’re to be progressively pressing forward. And watchfulness is related to all those things.

But then also—and this is a very important text—I just mentioned the gospel text where Jesus says he’ll come back in an hour you don’t know. Therefore, you should be watchful. We read those texts, and most of us, coming out of our background, relate them to the final coming of Jesus Christ, the second coming, his bodily return to earth and the consummation of all things.

But clearly the scriptures teach us that is not the only application. In Revelation 3:1 and following, we read the letter to the angel of the church of Sardis, and he says: “Write this. These things say he that hath the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know thy works that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead.”

Now verse 2: “Be watchful and strengthen the things that remain that are ready to die for I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard and hold fast and repent. If therefore you shall not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.”

And then in verse 5: “He that overcomes, the same shall be clothed in white raiment. And I will not blot out his name from the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”

The point is this: These are letters to churches, contemporary churches. Now, they may have application to ages of the church, but in the first instance, they’re letters to specific churches. And there are warnings against the removal of the church’s lampstand contemporaneously with the writing of these epistles.

In other words, our Savior is taking that statement of watchfulness relative to his second coming and saying that he comes—as we know in this church, hopefully by now—in many ways prior to the final consummation of all things. There’s a coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to church on Sunday. We talk about the covenantum quarter. We talk about our ascent to heaven. But just as equally, the scriptures teach that Lord’s day worship is Jesus coming to the church to judge the church and evaluate the church’s works.

He comes to us as much as we go to him. Remember in the book of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” That’s a reference to worship. He comes to us, and what does he say? You open the door, he comes in and he eats with us. And we have a dinner with Jesus every Lord’s day at the communion table.

So our Savior says that he comes in a wide variety of ways and he comes at particular endpoints as well of churches. He comes to judge these churches and removes some lampstands—not at the final conclusion of the eschaton, not at the final conclusion of the created order, but rather in history he comes and he warns that the watchfulness—in other words, that he spoke of in the Gospels—does not simply mean that we’re to be watchful toward the end of all things, but rather he comes to judge us on a regular basis. And therefore, our watchfulness applies to contemporary judgments and evaluations of God as well.

This is really important. The scriptures tell us that if we were to judge ourselves, we would not be judged. Speaking of communion, speaking of the need to evaluate ourselves, be watchful as we come to the communion service itself.

Well, the epistles tell us, in other words, that watchfulness is not just related to the final coming of Christ, but to many comings of Christ in judgment in our lives, individually, corporately as well throughout.

And so these verses—one other text from the epistles is Revelation 16. We read in verses 13 and 14 of the great evil and unclean spirits that come forth from the mouth of the dragon to fill the earth. And then in verse 15: “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame.”

Again, there the idea is that in the midst of great wickedness, you see, it’s not enough just to avoid wickedness. He says you’re supposed to be positively clothed with garments. Other places in the book of Revelation identify the garment of the saints as the righteousness of the saints—both the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, but also the practical works of righteousness that we do, the deeds we do.

So it’s not enough just to avoid this terrible evil that’s portrayed for us in this portion of the book of Revelation. No, the watchfulness is to the end that we would have positive robes of righteousness clothed on us in the midst of that kind of world. So again, neutrality is driven out, and understanding that there is no neutrality in all of this.

Okay. So what we’ve seen so far, the summary account of going through the Pentateuch, the Gospels, and the epistles is that watchfulness is related to covenantal faithfulness. It’s related to an observance, a doing of the laws of God, his statutes and judgments. It’s related very importantly then to our relationship to God. And it’s a necessary component of the believer’s life if we’re to avoid idolatry and God’s judgment.

It’s also a necessary component of our life and our relationship to other men, as the book of Exodus taught us from that Pentateuchal account. Watchfulness relates to our relationship to God. It relates to our relationship with men as well.

Our Savior tells us it’s to be at the center of what we remember of his last words to us: to be watchful in all things. Great warnings from our Savior, repeated throughout the gospel accounts, and then in the book of Revelation, to be watchful, to be awake, to not be lulled to sleep in the context of the age in which we live.

And then we see then that it relates to his contemporary comings and not simply his second coming, the final coming in his body.

And we’ve also seen in these texts that there is this watchfulness is related to the absence of neutrality—that we’re to watch not simply removing ourselves from unrighteousness but to positively on the other hand drive out unrighteousness in the nation in which we live.

Okay. Now let’s look at some specific biblical texts then, going through these texts topically as many as we can today, and look at this relationship of watchfulness to various things.

First of all, there’s a motivation for watchfulness given to us in 1 Peter 5:8: “Be sober, be vigilant. Because your adversary, the devil, is a roaring lion. Walks about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”

So Peter says, “Be watchful. Be vigilant. Watch what’s going on. Watch yourself.” Why? Because you have a very real adversary walking the earth. The devil is chained, but it is he—the chain lets him out enough to trouble us. Jesus does this so that we might be watchful and obedient in righteousness.

Luther, in his great hymn that we sing several times usually each year at this church, says of Satan: “His wrath and power are great and armed with cruel hate. On earth is not his equal.”

You know, I’ve known people, many people, who sing that song, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and they sing that song, “on earth is not his equal.” And you know how you sing songs—you don’t even think about the words. And I know people who have thought that refers to Jesus Christ. That’s not what he’s talking about there. “His wrath and power are great and armed with cruel hate. On earth is not his equal”—as a reference to our adversary, the roaring lion, Satan. The lion in the streets—it really is out there.

And that we need to understand we have a real adversary in this world. And the knowledge of that adversary should awaken us. You know, you don’t go outside—it’s like living in gangland, you know, in whatever port, North Portland or in, you know, parts of New York, these big cities. There’s gangs. You don’t go out in the streets without being watchful and vigilant.

Well, we have a much bigger enemy than gangs. We have an adversary that Peter sends as a roaring lion, seeking to devour us out there. And so it’s a great motivation to us to wake up—wake out of your slumber—to be watchful and vigilant in terms of the relationship you have to God and to your fellow men.

But then secondly, the motivation is God himself. Again, personal fear of God. 2 Chronicles 19:7: “Wherefore now, let the fear of the Lord be upon you. Take ye to do it.”

“Let the fear of God be upon you.” That’s another motivation for watchfulness. After all, if Satan does devour you, it is, as the book of Job makes clear, only under the superintending power of God. God has brought that into your life to cause you to fear him and his judgments, which he frequently exercises through the ungodly.

Well, so we have great motivation to watchfulness.

And then secondly, and I want to spend most of our time here—subjects of our watchfulness.

And we may return to this next week. First of all: ourselves. Ourselves.

Deuteronomy—well, first of all, Matthew 24:4: Jesus says, “Take heed that no man deceive you.”

We have to watch to make sure that we’re not deceived by other men. I mentioned the tapes on Eastern Orthodoxy earlier. About a week or so ago, I also got some material on a new thing going on in the churches, and I guess some homeschoolers are somewhat attracted to this. I don’t know what the term used—”open church” or whatever. It’s the idea that people meet in homes in small groups, apparently. There’s no clergy. There’s no elders who teach. There’s just a sharing of what people think about various verses. I don’t know.

I read a couple reviews of a book that sort of overviews this movement—one very critical of the movement by Gary Mos. It looks very bad. It looks like they have a very poor understanding of church history, a poor understanding of what the scriptures teach about the nature of the church. And I read these articles and I became aware that this is apparently some kind of growing movement, particularly within the homeschooling community in the country.

And then within a week or so, I started reviewing these tapes on Eastern Orthodoxy because I know people who are interested in Eastern Orthodoxy as well. And you know, I was watching these tapes, and I just sort of one night I just thought, “This is terrible. What’s going on in this country? The church seems on the verge of collapse.”

On the one hand, we have, you know, extreme nominalism, and we have just a complete rejection of everything the church has taught for 2,000 years in terms of the institutional church and a movement toward just kind of a sharing feeling. I don’t know—terrible. I think it’s a terrible thing if that’s an accurate characterization of this new movement. And on the other hand, we have people being sucked back to look at ancient churches that in my mind simply have not matured.

The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches various terrible things. I think certainly Armenian. They believe in what they call synergy: man cooperates with God. They believe that men are basically good, that you can achieve sinless perfection in his life. They believe that children are born without sin, but they’re mortal, and because of our death, that’s why we sin. So there’s much to commend the Eastern Orthodox Church. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s as if they solidified their doctrine with the early church and the apostles—not the apostles, but the church fathers—and failed to mature.

And I think that God has taken the church to various maturations, doctrinally speaking, over the last 2,000 years.

Well, in any event, it’s distressing to me that we live in such a culture where people are so confused about the basic nature of the church and end up going here, there, and everywhere. We must take great watchfulness. We must be very vigilant about the relationship of the scriptures to the people that we fellowship with and worship in the context of—that people don’t deceive us. Don’t deceive us with simplistic solutions, humanistic solutions, on one hand, and don’t deceive us with the claims of the traditions of men, of being the ultimate standard by which all things must be judged in terms of the institutional church—the Eastern Orthodox view on the other hand.

These are times of great deception—great deception in the context of the churches. And we must be vigilant and watchful to guard against that.

But secondly, and this is even more important, believe it or not, secondly, even more important than not letting men deceive us: Deuteronomy 11:16: “Take heed to yourselves that your heart not be deceived.”

You see, folks, the scriptures tell us quite clearly that we are prone to deception. What does Jeremiah say? The heart is desperately wicked. It’s deceitful. “Who can know our own heart?” is what the book of Jeremiah tells us. “The heart is desperately wicked.”

Let’s read—turn to that text. I think it’s important. Jeremiah 17:7-11. Turn to there if you would please in your scriptures.

I’m going to—my wife was reading this to me the other night. She reads through the book of scriptures. Right now she’s in Jeremiah, and she was kind enough to read aloud to me one evening. We read this and Jeremiah 17, verse 7: “Blessed is the man that trusts in the Lord, whose hope the Lord is, for he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh. But her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”

Now, that’s a very interesting verse. We’ve memorized Psalm 1, and we’re working on Psalm 2 in our household. And of course, the description of the righteous man—man who avoids the unrighteous temptations in Psalm 1—is as “a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth her fruit in her season, whose leaf also shall not wither.”

Well, this verse in verse 8 of Jeremiah fleshes that out a bit for us. And it tells us that in time of drought, that tree that trusts in God and is planted in God and a reliance upon him, his covenant, his word, that tree will not cease to bear fruit even in times of drought.

Now, that’s important because what it tells us is: yes, Psalm 1 is correct—we will be like trees that continue to bear fruit. But it tells us more—that there will be times of drought. There’ll be times of great heat. There’ll be times of great deception in the context of the world in which we live. And that’s the kind of time I believe we’re in right now.

But in this sort of time, ones who hope and trust in God, in the midst of drought, yet because her roots are deep into the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, we’ll continue to have sustenance when the world doesn’t minister God’s word, God’s gracious word, in the context of our communities or our lives much. Still, our deep roots in the Lord Jesus Christ and his word will sustain us in these periods of time.

That’s the context of the statement that I’ll go on to read.

Now, verse 9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? I the Lord search the heart. I try the reigns, even to give every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings.”

“As departure sits on eggs and breaketh them not. So that he that giveth riches and not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.”

God says that in the context of this, we must needs rely upon God because our heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. “Who can know it?” God knows it, and God reveals it to us. He tries us. He sifts us. He puts us through various tribulations and trials. He—his word, his spirit—scorches our heart sometimes with that word to try us out and to reveal our hearts to us.

But only if we’re being watchful to ourselves. Only if we acknowledge, admit, and confess to God that indeed our heart—our heart, not somebody else’s heart or people’s heart in general—our heart is desperately wicked. We’re unknowable to ourselves apart from God’s gracious revealing of who he is. And then by way of analogy, who we are.

God reveals himself to us. And so watchfulness applies at its very first place of course to our relationship to God as a result of that self-evaluation.

If you come away from this sermon with nothing else, but if you walk into this new year with a sense of watchfulness about your actions, with an acknowledgment to God, to yourself, and to each other that your hearts are desperately wicked and you can deceive yourself so easily, and then become more watchful in the context of the church and in your families, open yourself up to the counsel of other people more—then this sermon will have had its desired result.

And I believe that God will then bless your life in relationship to the degree in which you apply these very scriptures: that you “take heed that no man deceive you” and that you “take heed that your heart be not deceived.”

So ourselves—we must be watchful in terms of ourselves, first and foremost. And of course that means first of all our relationship to God himself.

Jeremiah 22:5: “Take diligent heed to do the commandments in the law which Moses taught you, to keep his commandments, to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and soul, with all your mind.”

And then Joshua 23:11: “Take good heed, be watchful. In other words, therefore, that for yourselves that you love the Lord your God.”

So Joshua tells us in 2:25 and 23:11 that our watchfulness in terms of making sure our hearts are not deceived in relationship to God is a result of applying God’s law, doing God’s law, loving God with all our heart, and serving him in all that we do.

That’s how we’re supposed to be watchful. We’re supposed to be evaluating our lives on a regular basis, to look at them and be watchful about them to see: How well are we obeying God’s law? How well are we loving God with all our heart? And are we really serving God in the ways that he has instructed us to serve him?

And of course, we don’t measure up when we do that. When we read those verses and we consider that, of course, we must confess sin. And we confess sin to God, and we repent of that sin. And he causes us to mature then and go from glory to glory and strength to strength.

Watchfulness is the beginning. Really, I probably should have mentioned this before, but in 1 Corinthians 16:13, watchfulness is the beginning of the charges to have Christian character that are laid out for us in the context of that text that Paul writes for us.

Watchfulness is the beginning, isn’t it? I mean, it’s good to have strength, and it’s good to be courageous, and it’s good to have resolution. But if you have resolution, strength, and courage, and yet aren’t watchful about yourselves and aren’t self-evaluatory, and don’t open yourself up to evaluation by others, it does you no good. You’ll be resolved to do the wrong things, and your strength and courage will be focused upon things that may not be what God would have you focus on at all.

Watchfulness is the beginning of the process.

On the contrary, of course, on the other hand, to be watchful, to understand your weakness and your proneness to sin and deceive—being deceived both by yourself and others—and to just leave it at that, to simply always be evaluating and never then moving to resolution on the basis of that evaluation of God’s word and God’s people, and never resolving, encouraging yourself and strengthening your hand to the task—well, of course then, that is the other side of the coin. It would be fatal as well.

Watchfulness is the beginning. It proceeds on.

So here we are at the beginning of a new year, and you should think back over this last year. Be watchful: what you’ve done this year, this month, this last month into December. And then, resolving to take that evaluation and watchfulness into this new year and be encouraged and have strength to do that.

And of course, love is not the end conclusion of that. Love, the next verse 14 of 1 Corinthians 16, undergirds all the actions where to love God—as a result of our watchfulness in relationship to that, our resolution, our strength, our courage—are all related. All things, verse 14 says, “let all things be done in with charity and love.”

So the scriptures teach us that watchfulness is central to our lives as Christians, and that central to our watchfulness is a watchfulness to our own hearts in relationship to God, relative to his law, relative to our love for him, relative to our service to him.

And you know, he gives us a very specific—that’s a general thing still, but specifically, now: Deuteronomy 12:13: “Take heed to yourself. Now watch what we’re going to watch for—now watch that you offer not your burnt offerings in every place that thou seest.”

Well, now you know, we look at that and we say, “Well, there was a historical context. God was going to set up a place where his name was going to be worshiped at Jerusalem, at the temple, of course. And he’s saying that he’s going to restrict worship to there because he doesn’t want him worshiping in the pagan places.” That’s all fine and well. But the principle applies throughout history.

God says that watchfulness relates to worship. Our watchfulness relative to our love, obedience to God—both in his law and in service—is very specifically applied then in terms of being watchful as to where we offer burnt offerings, where we worship, how we worship.

Worship is to be understood by, regulated by, defined by the word of God. Take that word of God as the means by which we worship. Worship is not an individual experience primarily between an individual and God. Worship is the worshiping community of Jesus Christ coming together to offer our burnt offerings—all that we have—to him.

Central to that, or that worship, is of course our offerings. It is a burnt offering that’s spoken of here as being a summary description of all what worship is in the book of Deuteronomy. And so our worship also is to be dictated by a watchfulness relative to God, that we do it the way he tells us to do it.

You see that sort of sets the pattern for our days. At the beginning of our week or at the beginning of a year, we’re being watchful, stressing watchfulness and resolution as we go into 1994. The same way, every week at the beginning of our week, we watch our feet. We watch our paths, our feet, and we direct them specifically to where God has said we should be—the church, the worshiping community—to come together and to have all our time patterned for us by an obedience to God, by not doing what we want to do this day, not deciding, “I think this day I’ll worship here, I’ll worship there.” No—coming together with the host, the congregated host that you are in relationship to now, or God has brought you in his providence to worship him and to use your tithes and offerings in a specific way.

God has done that. The end of the year, we’re going to have—I’ll have contribution receipts for you next Sunday in terms of tithes and offerings to the church. And I got a little note on there. And you know, it’s a way of evaluating yourself as well.

God says that just as our time, the first day of our time, is devoted to him, so the first fruits of our increase are given to him. And it sets a model then for watchfulness over all of our lives. If we’re watchful over the first portion—the first fruits, the burnt offerings, the tithes, the offerings that we give to God—and don’t use them as we see fit, but turn them over to him, to his church, his institutional officers of the church, that it trains us. That really the rest of the money—the other 90%, the other six days out of the seven—also are consecrated to him, and we’re to be watchful how we do in those things as well.

So God tells us that this watchfulness, this warning against self-deceit, that relates to him, has very specific application by watching how we worship him and what we do with our offerings. And as a result of that, it sets a model for—we must be watchful in all things and all of our time with all the distribution of our resources that God has given to us.

All of that’s given to him first and foremost. Not to the church as an institution—the church is simply a model of giving things to God. Our time and our money, etc.—all things are offered up to God through this mechanism, and that forms the basis for watchfulness to offer all things to him across the board.

Well, my wife was corr—