I would like us to stand in honor of hearing the word of God. This is different than we normally do things. You may have already ascertained that this is a bit if a serious service, maybe even a little heavy feeling. There is nothing we like more than presenting positive message each week through song, drama, video and sermons but there are times when we must look at the whole Bible and read it for what it says. 
I am going to read several passages and there is historical precedent for people coming before God to hear His word and being filled with a real sense of reverence and awe.
Passage 1: Psalm 139 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:13-16
This is what God has to say about the life of the unborn child.
Passage 2: Romans 1
This is God’s perspective on a society and His judgment on them These are hard words. Let us hear the word of God.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools . . . 24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.( Notice how it occurred.)
26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. . .
32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Romans 1:18-32
A perspective on the wrath of God in societies, written almost 2000 years ago. You can follow the progressive nature of sin as it evolves in a society.
Passage 3: Exodus 20 ( The second tablet given to Moses)
13 "You shall not murder.
14 "You shall not commit adultery.
15 "You shall not steal.
16 "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
18 When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 19 and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." 20 Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." Exodus 20:13-20
According to what we learned last week I have taken on the role this morning of a spiritual farmer. Jesus taught that a farmer is one who takes seed or the word and spreads it out or plants it. You remember that we talked about four kinds of soils the nature of rich determines the receptivity of the seed.
According to what we learned last week everyone one in this room that heard the word of God is going to respond one of four ways. For some of you there is no way will see it. You heart is hard and your mind is made up. God wants to say something to you but it bounces off and you have no ability to take it in. For others you may immediately respond but your heart is shallow and while you have an emotional response there is no difference in your life. For others you hear it and receive it but the things of this life take precedence over biblical truth. The culture is too important for you and you like being politically correct more than being biblically accurate when it comes right down to it.
For the large majority in this room today I am thinking that you will hear this and not only agree to the truth of it but you will be the witness to the light of God that He sheds on and through you.
The passage is one of the strongest in the book of Mark. Mark is giving us a warning following Jesus teaching on the four soils he follows it up with a lesson on what it means to be doers of the word and not just hearers.
I. The Warning Concerning the Word (v.21-25) 
A. The Lamp (v. 21-22): The Truth Revealed
21He said to them, "Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don't you put it on its stand?
22For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open.
Transition (4:23) – “If any man has ears to hear, let him hear.”
“There are many times when it is dangerous to tell the truth. There are many times when to tell the truth is the quickest way to persecution and to trouble. But the man or the woman or the Christian will stand by the truth in face of all. In every walk of life there are times when we know quite well what the truth demands. What is the right thing to do, what the Christian man or woman ought to do. In every walk of life there are times when we fail to do it because it would court unpopularity or even worse persecution. We ought to remember that the lamp of truth should be held aloft and not concealed in the interest of cowardly safety.”
Hundreds of years ago in Germany there was a monk who taught greed exegesis on the books of Galatians and Romans at the University at Wittenberg. He was a little eccentric at times and sometimes a little extreme but he was a man of God. He was a monk all his life and consumed with guilt a lot. The common man in these days did not have a copy of the word of God only the priests and monks. It was men like Tyndale and Huss and Wycliffe who gave there lives that we might have copies of the Bible.
Corruption had entered the Catholic church and they were trying to raise money to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and so they came up with a way to do it that was not in any way scriptural. They sold indulgences. You could purchase your way into heaven by donating money to cover your sins. Martin Luther was studying the book of Romans and read, “the just shall live by faith.” He discovered that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone.
He did not just discover that and conclude that it was truth but the church teaches something else so I’ll just sit over here and not say anything. He went to a church at the university where crowds were coming once a year for All Saints Day and posted on the door of the church 95 reasons the selling of indulgences was wrong and we are justified by faith alone. He took a stand and became the light that lit the reformation and freed people.
In the early church, emperor worship was not optional. Every person alive was required to worship the emperor at least one day a year. It would have been really easy to fake it for a day, get your card punched and move on. The early church didn’t do that. They were so committed to Christ and His word that they refused to do it even when the penalty was death. They had some convictions that would not change regardless of popularity or the political correctness standards of the day. They refused to worship the emperor even in the face of death.
He is saying to this group, my word must be revealed not concealed.
"If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proven and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point." - Martin Luther. 
B. The Measure (v. 23-25): The Truth Received
Jesus moves on to another parable and illustration. He uses the common measure.
24"Consider carefully what you hear," he continued. "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more. Are you listening with an ear to put it into practice? Thimble, cup, bucket or bushel basket.
25Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him."
This is the law of increase. When you hear a scripture read or you read it yourself or you hear a tape or C.D and God pricks your heart with a conviction you either move forward or you lose ground. Does the Holy Spirit ever nudge you to take a stand for something, or get something in line in your life or in your job? What do you do with the Spirit of God when He convicts you of something that you are doing that is not good for you? Do you ignore it? Do you distract yourself with the cares of your life until He goes away?
What kinds of things has He said to you? Jot a note, make a call, be pure in your private life or in your relationships? Quit sleeping around, break off some bad habits or a relationship? Here’s what He is saying, If you respond your capacity to receive the truth expands but if you reject or ignore it your capacity to receive His word shrinks.
There are a lot of people that God would be happy to give wisdom and knowledge to but we have invented our own system of Christ following. Are you ready for this? We have substituted knowing a lot about God instead of knowing God. We have settled for head knowledge but have rejected the idea of God getting too close and messing with our personal lives.
We can be life long learners but if we never act on what we know we have substituted and settled for far less that what God desires for us to have. You have to let the word of God live in your life.
Jesus is giving a very clear axiom or truth in these scriptures. You either use it or lose it.
Here is how it works. How many of you have taken a foreign language in high school or college? How many of you remember what you learned? You either use it or lose it. How many played an instrument back in the day? How are you now? How many of you have ever had a cast on your arm or leg? What happened during those weeks of immobility? When they cut the cast off you had to regain strength in your leg or arm.
Use dumbbell: right arm/left arm
When you do not use what God has given you it will atrophy. This is a warning about how we use the word of God.
C. Summary = Revelation Demands a Response
Application: You either respond and illuminate the truth or you withdrawal and you will shrivel up.
Things God may have spoken to you about:
Your devotional life
Your marriage
Your business life
Your finances
Your children
Your attitudes at work or school or at home
You know that God has spoken to you about some of those things but you have kept yourself busy so that you won’t have to deal with them. (Journal) It is in our nature to ignore things that may demand change in our lives.
“You don’t go look at where it happened,” said Scott Goodyear, [speaking of race-car drivers who have been killed in crashes at the Indianapolis 500]. "You don’t watch the films of it on television. You don’t deal with it. You pretend it never happened." The Speedway operation itself encourages this approach. As soon as the track closes the day of an accident, a crew heads out to paint over the spot where the car hit the wall. Through the years, a driver has never been pronounced dead at the racetrack. A trip to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Racing Museum, located inside the 2.5-mile oval, has no memorial to the 40 drivers who have lost their lives here. Nowhere is there even a mention.
I read three passages at the beginning of this message. Let me deal with each of them for just a moment or two.
1. The unborn child: (Psalm 139)
We believe as a church that the Bible teaches clearly that the unborn child is a human being. You need to know that 1.5 to 1.6 million are being murdered every year. For every six abortions one of them occurs in an evangelical girl or woman. Of the five or six left two or three of the abortions in America occur in a catholic girl or woman. That means over fifty percent of abortions done in this country occur among the two groups that oppose abortion. It tells me that while the word is clear that when the rubber meets the road and the pain is personal there are a lot of people who can discount the word and do their own thing with relative ease. When it comes to abortions, you need to know that God forgives and that is wonderful but there is usually healing that needs to take place in the lives of mothers who made this choice and the church better be there.
2. Godlessness and Wickedness: (Rom. 1)
These verses were about societies that turn and shove God away. They strive to get as far away from God as possible. They reject His commands and God eventually allows them to descend in a downward spiral that leads most often to sexual perversion. You can’t get it spelled out more clearly than it is spelled out in these verses. The Bible clearly states that the ultimate failure of a society is when we not only practice these things but wholeheartedly indorse and approve of them.
The question is do you believe the Bible to be the word of God and if it is do you have the courage and moral backbone to stand up in a world will call you intolerant and defend what you believe?
The problem with this issue is that the church has often been so hateful of people in this sin that our actions or lack thereof have discounted anything we have to say on the issue. Where are the Christ followers who are reaching out to individuals or communities suffering from aids, depression and some of the other outcomes of this sin? I am not talking about condoning the sin but we are called to love and reach out to all sinners.
All you have to do is open your eyes at much of what is being forced on the American people through the media and what comes out of Hollywood. Just this week, People magazine in their 100 most beautiful people issues, included a two page spread picture of a very pregnant Angeli Jolie and Brad Pitt sitting in the dessert with the caption, At some point, as a Christ follower you have to take a stand. You have to read the word of God and let it live out in your life.
At what point do you finally grow up in Christ Jesus and quit running after this world and filling your mind with the garbage our society is producing? This is so serious I hardly know how to teach it without screaming this from the rooftop. Hopefully this will get your attention and cause you to stop and think and then act in a Christ like manner.
3. The purpose of God’s law. “Do not murder”
It is that we will understand life and embrace the experiences that accompany our lives both good and challenging. Life is important. Life is precious. I know that we all know someone that is dying and you may have had thoughts around how much better life would be if they could just not live anymore with the pain.
“In his book How Should We Then Live, the 20th Century's foremost Christian philosopher explained that when America's legal system rejected the idea of moral absolutes, arbitrary consensus became the new basis of law. This being the case, it's not hard to see that law is embracing many heinous things, including not only the removal of legal protection from the unborn, said Schaeffer, but also euthanasia, infanticide and harvesting body parts from those who are brain dead. In the three full decades since the Roe decision, technological advances have carried our debate over life issues to new levels. Just as Francis Schaffer predicted, issues like euthanasia (doctor-assisted suicide), stem cell research and cloning are now dominating headlines. Yet the technology many use to further a culture of death in America may become a double-edged sword.
General Electric, perhaps inadvertently, is teaching people that wombs hold much more than "tissue." There, during the primetime hours of network television, many of us got our first glimpse what resides in a womb, and it looked like a child. As General Electric ran ads for their new 4-D Ultrasound technology, viewers were greeted by an active preborn baby with distinct features. Singers set the mood with a voiceover of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Kellyanne Conway, president and CEO of the Polling Group, points out, "Did you ever notice that even the people in Hollywood name their babies in the fourth month of pregnancy."
A preborn baby that is wanted by its mother is a "baby," and any other pre-born is a fetus. The test for what is alive becomes, "Is it wanted by someone?"
As we see the couple in the GE commercial marveling at their baby's first photo, taken several months before the child's birth, it becomes harder to deny that baby's humanness.” From the writings of Stephen and Candice McGarvey are freelance writers living in Northern Virginia. www.crosswalk.com
Here’s some straight forward things that I need to say. These issues are not political. These are moral, theological issues. These are biblical issues in a society that the church is to be the conscious of. We are not to be a light we are the light of Jesus Christ in this world.
This sermon is really not about a couple of hot button issues but I used those today to cause us to face ourselves and think. Can we just think about what other issues are found in the word of God that we have learned to live with or in spite of?
"When Hitler began interfering with the churches and humiliating the German Jews, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a loyal German himself, began to resist and protest. He refused to participate in the state churches, which bowed down to the fuehrer’s demands. Several of Bonhoeffer’s friends urged him to bend. They argued that they would lose the opportunity to preach altogether if they followed Bonhoeffer’s example. He replied, "One act of obedience is better than a thousand sermons." He eventually paid with his life for holding that conviction" (Herb Miller. Actions Speak Louder Than Verbs. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989, p. 38).
Is our conviction for Christ that strong?
Solomon had just finished the temple. . .
"I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices.
13 "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, 14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 15 Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. 16 I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.
You see what our world needs more than anything else is for the church and individual Christ followers to be people of convictions that embrace something as truth. It won’t always be popular. It may not always enable you to win friends and influence people but it will be right. What our world needs is for you and I to be so in love with Jesus Christ and His word that we are living it out everyday. Taking it in and living it out. That’s how He intended it would be. When we get bogged down by sin and the stuff of this world our lights are all but extinguished. They are meaningless and point no one anywhere.
(Mat 5:14-16 NKJV) "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. {15} "Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. {16} "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Ending Song: This little light of mine.