How Much is Enough?

Those of you who don't know who I am, uh I've been married for 36 years, 37 years.

I'm looking at my wife, who is Melanie, and then I have four daughters, uh, Courtney being the oldest, and then uh McKenna, who is uh actually being supported by this church, uh doing a mission work over in in Prague in the Czech Republic, and number three is uh Jessie, and uh number four is Chessa.

And for those of you who have been members of this church for a long time, you'll remember that we used to have an associate pastor by the name of John Horne.

And when Chessa was born, he came up to the hospital, and this is my fourth daughter, and he said, What are you naming her?

And I said, I'm a dun.

And if that didn't show up in the bulletin the next Sunday.

I'm a director of special education on the Minnesota side.

We have uh 13 districts, and um a little bit about my past.

I went to Bible college for four years.

I had three years of Greek and I had of Europe Hebrew.

My Hebrew is extremely sketchy because nobody told me that Genesis, instead of being at the front, is at the back.

And it took me like a quarter and a half to find Genesis.

Uh but I'm really excited about the message this morning.

Um it uh Scott Holst asked me if I would uh preach, and of course, how do you say no to Scott Holst?

But um it's interesting how you get ideas for sermons.

And uh this sermon came as a result of, and in fact, he's here.

I'm gonna even use his name, so if you're not blessed by it, you can yell at Craig Rustad.

Uh he's somebody that I play racquetball and uh is one of the most respected people I've ever met.

But after we finish playing racquetball, oftentimes we'll have discussions.

And um this sermon came as a result of one of those discussions.

So, Craig, thank you for allowing God to use you in this way.

Okay, are we ready?

Are we ready?

Okay.

But I'm not going to start at the beginning.

I'm going to start probably towards the tail end of my life when I was um right around 80 years old, and I was tending flock for my father-in-law, Jethro.

And as I was tending the flock, I western side of our property, I just happened to see that there was a burning bush.

And I thought to myself, that's pretty unusual.

And then I got a little closer, and lo and behold, this burning bush wasn't burning, but it was on fire.

And then I heard a voice that said, Take off your sandals, for you're standing on holy ground.

What would you do if you heard a voice from nowhere?

You take off your sandals, and I did.

And then this voice says, I am the God of your fathers, I am the God of Abraham, I am the God of Isaac, I am the God of Jacob.

And I have heard my people cry out as they're in bondage and slavery in Egypt.

And Moses, I'm sending you to deliver them.

Whoa, I said, uh, Lord, uh, maybe, yeah, well, who do I say sent me?

I am who I am.

Tell them that.

Yeah, okay.

I'm sure, you know.

Well, what if they don't believe me, Lord, that you appeared to me?

Then the Lord said, Moses, take the stuff in your hand and throw it down on the ground.

I did.

Ha ha! It turned into a snake and I ran away.

And then the Lord said, Moses, go pick up the snake.

He said, Lord, come again.

Lord, you know that's no gardener snake.

All right.

So I went over and I grabbed the tail, and the snake became the staff again.

And he said, if they don't believe that, Moses, put your hand into your robe.

I did.

I pulled it out.

Whoa! It was leprous, it was white as snow.

I put it back in the robe, pulled it out, and it was back to normal.

I said, Lord, I'm not very good at talking.

Which I'm sure most of you can believe.

Send somebody else.

And the Lord said, Who made your mouth?

I will teach you how to speak.

I mean, I'm going to get lessons in speaking from Almighty God Himself, but that's not enough.

I said, No, send somebody else.

Lord gets mad at me and he says, Okay, okay, your brother Aaron, he can talk your leg off.

So he will be like a prophet to you, and you will be like a god to Pharaoh.

I still didn't want to go because, you know, when I left Egypt, I didn't leave on good terms.

And I did think about the possibility of going back there.

My life wouldn't be worth much.

But when Almighty God sends you, you go.

And so I did.

Aaron and I stood before the Pharaoh.

And as we stood before the Pharaoh, we said, Almighty God said, let his people go.

And Pharaoh said, no.

And so then Aaron throws the staff down and it becomes a snake.

And then Pharaoh, he summons his magicians.

And the magicians come and they throw down their staff.

And the staff turns into a snake.

Well, the thing about the snake is that our snake eats their snakes.

That should have said something to the Pharaoh, but it really didn't.

And so they go on.

And the next plague is the turning the Nile water to blood.

And we do that.

And so what does Pharaoh do?

He looks at his magicians and he says to his magicians, um, magicians, turn the water to blood.

And they take a little bit of the water out of the Nile and it turns to blood.

Let my people go.

Pharaoh says, No way.

Then we have the frogs.

The frogs come up and they cover the whole entire land.

And this is the perfect example of how government hasn't changed in thousands and thousands of years.

Because Pharaoh says to his magicians, create more frogs.

You don't have enough frogs, so you have to create more frogs?

Are you kidding me?

The next plague are gnats.

Magicians don't do gnats.

The gnats led to the flies, and after each one of the plagues, Pharaoh would not let his people go.

So you went through the boil, the livestock and the boils, and you went through the locusts, and you went through the hail, and then you went through the darkness, and then you got to the last and final terrible plague.

The death of the firstborn.

Well, I'm getting a little tired now.

I'm going to let my servant Gary take it from here.

We have the parting of the Red Sea.

We have the Israelites witnessing the Red Sea closing on the Pharaoh's army.

And after a short time of camping in the wilderness, the people are ready to roll up into a ball and die.

Now I have a daughter who could identify with the Israelites.

Because if I suggested going on a camping trip with a tent, her response would be, you know, I think I might just roll up and die.

So God, and this is amazing, hears the complaints again of his people.

And he says to Moses, Moses, I am going to set bread that will rain from the heaven, and I'm going to provide quail for meat in the evening, and tell the people just to gather enough for each day.

But Friday they can gather a double portion because on Saturday is the Sabbath, nobody works.

And this will be the only time when the food doesn't spoil.

God was providing enough food for each day, no more or no less.

Well, Moses heads off to the mountain.

And as you know, he was given the Ten Commandments.

And most of the time we think that's all that was happening there.

But if you take a look at the text in Exodus, there was chapter after chapter after chapter as far as the things that God was communicating to Moses.

Well, we know he was gone for a total of 40 days, and we're not quite sure when the idol was built, but the people came to Aaron and said, Aaron, build this a god so we might worship it.

I don't think Aaron understood the amount of their disbelief or unbelief, because he said, Okay, give me your gold, give me your silver, give me your precious metals so I can build an idol.

These are people that had nothing their whole life.

They were slaves.

And coming out of Egypt, they for the first time in their life had some wealth.

And I think Aaron was banking on, nah, they're not gonna give that up.

They gave it up.

So Aaron builds the golden calf.

And God told Moses, Moses, there's things going on down there, you gotta leave.

So Moses goes back, and from afar he sees what's happening.

And Moses has got to be thinking, how much is enough?

How much does God have to do for these people to understand that he's enough?

How much is enough?

I mean, Moses and the people of Israel were only three months removed at this time prior to the building of the golden calf.

Three months from seeing the mighty Pharaoh defeated, three months for seeing the divinely parted Red Sea, three months from water gushing from a rock, three months from being guided by a cloud in day and a pillar of fire by night.

Three months, and already they are turning away.

There is a grandmother who was out with her grandson at the beach, and he was splashing and playing around in the water, and she didn't want to get her feet wet.

So after a couple of minutes, all of a sudden this big wave come crashes crashing over him and he swept away.

And the grandmother cries out, Lord, Lord, why?

I have been a good mother, I have been a good grandmother, I have served you, I have taught Sunday school, I've given money to missionaries.

Why?

Couple minutes later, another big wave, and lo and behold, there's her grandson, no harm for the worse, splashing, laughing, and playing in the ocean.

And then you hear this booming loud voice that says, There, are you satisfied?

She responds, he had a hat.

Folks, it's not going to get a whole lot better than that.

He had a hat.

I have often questioned how you can experience the ten plagues cross the Red Sea and all of those sorts of things, and then refuse to follow God and cross the Jordan River into the promised land, into the land of milk and honey.

Okay, I get it.

There are Jebusites, Hittites, Amorites, Canaites, Uzites, Perasites.

I mean, any kind of ice you can imagine was in that land.

But these are nomadic tribes.

I mean, the people of Israel have just witnessed God delivering them from the hand of Pharaoh.

There is no power on the face of the planet that had any kind of power that resembled Pharaoh's power, but yet their unbelief they would not cross the Jordan River.

Well, Moses had to wonder how much is enough?

Well, let's fast forward to the New Testament, because, you know, obviously the Israelites were fickle people.

Let's take a look at a faithful person, shall we?

Well, we we pan in on Peter as he's walking on the water.

Well, he's not exactly walking right now.

He's starting to sink.

At this point in his life, Peter had seen at least 19 miracles.

And I would say he's probably seen more than 19 miracles because John said the things that are involved in Scripture are written down here.

It's not everything that Jesus did or said, but there's enough here for you to believe.

Okay, so Peter saw his mother-in-law healed, he saw the man with the withered hand restored, he saw the deaf to hear, he saw the blind to see, the lame to walk, he saw water that was turned into wine, and the last miracle with a few loaves of bread and a few fish feeds 5,000.

And Jesus is walking out to him on the water, stretching his hand out, and he looks and he says to Peter, Peter, oh you of little faith, how can you doubt?

How can you doubt?

Jesus must have been thinking, Peter, how much?

How much is enough?

There was a lady who went to the vet and she was quite distraught.

She had one of these little carrying cages.

Maybe you've seen them, and uh she rushes into the vet and she's just beside herself, and the vet said, Come on in.

And she goes into the examining room and uh she takes out a duck and she lays the duck on the examining table and she said, Doctor, there's something wrong with my duck.

And the vet looked at the duck and said, I'm sorry, ma'am, but your duck is dead.

Oh, there's something you've got to do something for my duck.

I'm sorry, ma'am, your duck is dead.

She wouldn't buy that, so he says, Okay, just a moment.

So he goes out of the room and he brings back his cat.

He puts the cat on the examining table.

The cat sniffs the duck, duck doesn't move, cat jumps off the table, runs out of the room.

The vet follows the cat out of the room, brings in his big dog.

The dog puts his paws up on the table, sniffs the bird, paws at the bird, even picks the bird up in his mouth, and then sets the bird down and then leaves.

And the vet said, I'm sorry, ma'am, but your duck is dead.

So he writes out the bill and he hands it to her.

She looks at the bill and she goes,$350 for this?

Are you kidding me?

And the vet said, Well, if you would have taken my original diagnosis, all you would have been charged for is$25 for an office call.

But after the CAT scan and lab report.

We want proof.

How much is enough for you this morning?

But Gary, I wasn't there.

Yeah, that's a great question.

Let's take a look at 1 Peter 3.15.

And will you read this with me?

But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

God is saying that we can know.

We can know.

There are three different Greek words, and I know this is gonna excite a lot of you this morning.

Oh boy, Greek words, but there are three Greek words that are used for word.

And the first one we find is in John, and that's the Logos.

John 1, 1, we read, in the beginning was the Logos Word, and the Logos Word was with God, and the Logos Word was God.

He was God in the beginning.

And if you fast forward to verse 14, we read the Logos, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

So the Logos, we have the living word.

Jesus came as the living word and he dwelt among us.

Well, Jesus taught and he preached and he lived, and that was the spoken word, Rema.

And in John 6, 63, we read this: the words Rema that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.

And the next word, grafe, that sounds like one of our English words, kind of, doesn't it?

Grafe, graffiti?

It's writing.

It's the contemporaries of Jesus who, under inspiration, wrote the New Testament.

It was what Jesus taught and what he said, and it was brought back to the recollection.

When I was in college, after my second year, I did a youth ministry in Janesville, Wisconsin.

And one of my best friends, Ron Kelly, who I done a lot of music with, was a youth minister for that summer in Footville, Wisconsin, which was about 15 miles away.

And on Fridays we would get together because it was our day off, and we'd do some music, and then we'd have lunch.

And then he and I would go out looking for Mormons in Janesville, Wisconsin.

They weren't how to spot.

They had white shirts, black pants, black shoes, and they carried really big Bibles.

And we didn't go out looking for them because we wanted to get into an argument.

We knew that these young men were passionate about what they believed.

And so what we wanted to do is go out and have a dialogue and introduce them really to the truth.

If you're looking for truth, if you're looking to know who Jesus Christ is, we can help you.

But it's not where you're at.

Well, on one afternoon, we had a pair of them that came back to the apartment I was staying at, and we sat down and I said, Okay, you have the book of Mormon and we have the Bible.

Let's get some ground rules established.

In the first place, we don't know anything by just what we believe in our heart.

And they go, Well, no, I mean if you pray about it and it feels good in your heart, then it's true.

I said, This comes from the Book of Mormon and this comes from the Bible.

And if there are things in either one of these that aren't true, how can we trust the things that we can't see, the things that we can't examine?

So do you agree to that?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

Then I knew they were in trouble.

And for the next 10 to 15 minutes, I spent showing contradictions to them in the Book of Mormon.

I looked at rivers that Joseph Smith said flowed to the north and they flowed to the south.

I looked at civilizations that history has never ever recorded, and there's no archaeological evidence for that.

And after this time, one of the guys became upset and he goes, You know something?

The Bible is full of contradictions.

I love that when I hear somebody say that, because you know what my response is?

Here you go.

Here you go.

That's easy to say.

And it didn't disappoint me because I kind of thought I knew where he was headed, and he did.

He went to Acts and he said, You know, there are two accounts as far as Paul's conversion on the way to Damascus.

And And the soldiers in one account says he didn't hear anything, and in the second account in Acts, it says they heard something.

He said, Great question.

So I said, Do you know what the Shema is?

And they go, Yeah, it's Deuteronomy 6.4.

And I said, Shema is a Hebrew word for hear.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul.

Hear means I hear, I understand, and I do.

We have another Greek word that occurs here, and it's a kuo.

Oh, thank you, Gary.

Um is the root word of our English word, acoustics.

Okay?

That's sound.

Is that the same concept as biblical hearing?

Absolutely not.

So in Acts, the soldiers heard, but they didn't hear.

There is no contradiction.

There is no contradiction.

So it comes down to this question: Is the Bible reliable?

We couldn't have had any better missionary moment than from the Gideons this morning, and I didn't know he was speaking.

But it's just amazing how God works.

There is only one way to Jesus, and it's through his word that leads to the spoken word that connects us to the living word.

It's the Bible reliable.

Remember the game telephone that you used to play as a kid?

Anyone play telephone?

Okay, whatever you started with, that's not where you ended up.

And there were German theologians in the 19th century by the name of Grafen Velhausen, hold on to your seats because this is really exciting, that applied the Darwinian evolutionary theory to scripture, from simple to complex.

And so they said, whatever we have today isn't anything like the original.

And they looked at the game telephone.

Well, in 1947, there are two Bedouin shepherds that happened to fall into a cave.

Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And the significance of that find is that prior to that we had the Masoretic text, which our Old Testament was built upon.

The find at Qumran went back 1,000 years earlier.

So now we can see if telephone actually occurred.

If telephone actually occurred.

And it was like spelling light L-I-G-H-T-L-I-T-E, like spelling honor H-O-N-O-R or H-O-N-O-U-R.

It did nothing to what that text meant.

Absolutely nothing.

1,000 years.

And most scholars think that where those scrolls were found, they were not perfect scrolls and they were there to be burned.

So this morning, if I asked you, I believe that the Bible is the Word of God, fully inspired and inspired by God and inerrant in the original writing.

How many of you would believe that?

I don't.

What?

That's what I was taught growing up in the Christian church.

That's what I was taught in Bible college, and that's really one of our tenets of faith.

But when you look at this, this is not a whole lot different than what the Mormons believe because you say inspired by God and inerrant in the original writing.

Do we have the original writing?

No.

How can we defend that it's inerrant then?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we don't have to do that because the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure.

And you don't get much better than that unless you've got a copy machine.

Those scribes knew they were copying God's word.

It was an exact science.

Every syllable, every word, every line, every paragraph was counted.

They even would put a small dot on, per se, a page, and if the certain letter didn't end up on that dot, that manuscript would be destroyed.

It would be destroyed.

So how do we understand what the original said if we don't have the originals?

There are more than 24,000 partial and complete manuscript copies of the New Testament.

That's a lot, friends.

In the many thousands of manuscript copies, there are some 150,000 variants.

Alright?

Stay with me here for a little bit.

I know this is not the most exciting thing, but I want you to understand how different our scripture is, how different this book is from any other book on the face of this planet.

And this is it.

Well, that sounds like a lot.

But when you boil it down, and New Testament scholars have, you get down to really 50 variants, and not one of those changes the meaning of the text.

That's amazing.

Science of textual criticism.

That's how we establish what probably the original writing said.

And take a look at this.

Manuscript 1, Jesus Christ is the savior of the whole world.

2, Christ Jesus is the savior of the whole world.

3, Jesus Christ is the savior of the S, the Savior of the whole world.

4, Jesus Christ is T H Savior of the whole world.

5.

Jesus Christ is the Savior of the whole W R L D.

Now taking a look at that, can we deduce probably what the original writing would be?

Absolutely.

Take a look at manuscript 2.

Christ Jesus is the savior of the whole world.

You've got three, four, and five that have Jesus Christ.

So the original would say Jesus Christ is the savior of the whole world.

Friends, that's textual criticism.

We can get and defend inerrancy of Scripture by what we have, and it's enough.

It's enough.

There are secular references to Jesus.

There's Cornelius Tacitus, and he shows up in the census, and Tacitus was a Roman senator, and he wrote this Christ, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty of crucifixion during the reign of Tiberius.

One of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition.

A contemporary of Tacitus, Caius Sutanius Tranquillus, say that fast five times.

He says this, Claudius banished the Jews from Rome, who were continually making disturbances.

And Josephus, the greatest historian of the era, mentions Jesus a couple of times in his monumental work, Antiquities of the Jew, and he writes this, and I quote, Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men, as received the truth with pleasure.

He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.

He was the Christ.

End of quote.

Here's what blows my mind.

Josephus was not a Christian.

Jesus Christ is not like Santa Claus.

Jesus Christ is not like the Easter bunny.

Jesus Christ is not like the tooth fairy.

He came, he lived, he died, he was buried, he was resurrection, he was resurrected.

That's enough.

In fact, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, 6, he says, after that he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.

So the apostle Paul was saying, hey, if you don't believe me, there's over 500 people that saw Jesus after his crucifixion.

Go ask them.

You see, God knows that we are a fickle people.

God knows that we will ask the question, how much is enough?

And God is providing that which is enough so we might believe.

Defense to everyone who has to give you an account.

Peter says that each one of us has to be able to defend what we believe.

And if you see the that word for defense, apologia, it sounds like logos, it's defending the living word.

Defending the living word.

And it all comes down to the reliability of the Bible.

Each one of us needs to understand and know what to present to somebody about, you know, the scripture is reliable.

You can trust what it says because of boom, boom, boom, boom.

There is no room or question for doubt.

There is no need for us to apologize about what we believe because what we believe is true.

Because what we believe can be tested, because what we believe can be examined.

It is enough.

It is enough.

How much do we need?

How much is enough?

We have to stop being pretenders and start being professors.

We have to stop being doubters and start being doers of the word.

We have to stop living in the cellar and start dwelling in the light as children of the king.

How much is enough?

How much does God have to do for you to say, I'm all in?

For you to say, Lord, you know I've been standing with one foot in the world, and I've been standing one foot in the word, and Lord, you have given me enough.

I'm giving you everything I have because I know it is true.

How much, how much is enough?

The answer is simple.

Jesus is enough.

Let's pray.

Father God, forgive us of our unbelief.

Lord, we have more evidence today to believe than what those early first century Christians had.

We thank you for your word.

Lord, it is a light under our path.

Lord, it is living, it is dynamic, it is sharper than a two-edged sword.

It guides our way.

Lord, help us this week to reach out to those who do not know you, to give us the confidence, to give us the assurance and certainty to be able to speak your word, your truth, in gentleness and reverence and in love.

Bless us as we leave in Jesus' name.

Amen.