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God's Word as it is recorded in the gospel according to John, the sixth chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 55. Jesus is speaking, "For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. As the Living Father sent me and I

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live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread will live forever." This he said in the synagogue as he taught at Capernaum. Many of his disciples when they heard it said, "This

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is a hard saying, who can listen to it?" But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, "Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are

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spirit and life, but there are some of you that do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe and who it was that would betray him and he said, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father." After this, many of his disciples drew

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back and no longer went about with him. Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God." May the Spirit that inspired these words incline our

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hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Harold Lamb, in his life of Alexander the Great, tells of a moment when the senior officers of Alexander were thrown into consternation. It seems they discovered

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that they had marched off their maps. The Greeks had produced the best maps of which they were capable, but there were areas beyond that which they had known or experienced. Now the generals confronted the Himalayas with all the mystery that was beyond them, but they decided that even though they had

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marched off their maps, they would still follow Alexander. That has led me to think that a good way to define loyalty is to say that to be loyal is to be willing to follow your leader off the map. Now we see this kind of thing in many aspects of life. Let me mention just one. Take the field of medicine. There

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had been various times across the course of the development of medical science that maps have been drawn according to the knowledge which was known at that time, and these maps proposed as to how people were to be cured. I was reading not too long ago the description of the death of Charles II of England and

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the medical treatment that the king received prior to his death. First a pint of blood was taken from his right arm, then a half pint of blood was taken from his left shoulder, then he was given an emetic, then he was given a sneezing powder, then they shaved his head and brought a blister there, and finally they

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had him swallow 40 drops of extract of human skull. And the record concludes, "And then his majesty gave up the ghost," which sounds reasonable when you think about it. Today, of course, we have gone far beyond that. And why? Because those who pursue loyalty to medical science were not limited to the charts of

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yesterday, but were willing to march off the maps of what was known to new and different experiences. And the litany of the medical wonders that they have worked is known to all of us. Now this same thing can be pointed out in the field of economics or astrophysics or theology or geopolitics. There's the rise

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of the Pacific Basin, the development of the European Common Market, there's the discovery of quasars, the new research into the nature of time which is coming from our study of black holes, the interesting questions being raised by liberation theology and by creation spirituality. A lot of different thoughts

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are being given to us that lead us to say goodbye to our old charts and to be loyal enough to the truth to march off our maps. Loyalty then is being allegiant enough to your leader, your goal, your cause, your purpose, to go beyond anything that you've ever known before. Now in the passage of Scripture which I read to you

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just a moment ago, Jesus is talking about loyalty. He's speaking to his disciples and to those who are thinking about being disciples and to those who are his out-and-out enemies. Now this passage is a rather confusing passage and the reason it troubles many people is because they quite naturally look at it

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through 20th century eyes. But to understand it you must put yourself into first century thought patterns. Let me give you just one insight into the passage to make this clear. In the first century most religions practiced animal sacrifice. Now when an animal was brought as a sacrifice it was slain, part of the

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animal was burned on the altar, part of the animal was given to the priests in payment for their services, and part of the animal was given to the one who had donated the animal as an offering in the first place. And he or she would invite friends to come and they would dine off the part of the animal that remained and

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it was believed that in the act of offering the animal the God entered into the animal so that when you ate the animal the God was entering into you. Those who participated in this kind of ritual meal were described as being God-filled. They ingested their divinity. Now Jesus takes that image and he uses

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it here in this passage. He's not talking about literally ingesting him, he uses it as a figurative illustration. He says that loyalty is when I enter into you and become the core of your being, when my will is superimposed upon your will. It's what Paul means when he says it is not I that live but Christ who lives in

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me. Loyalty is abiding in Christ and having Christ so abide in you that you are willing to follow him no matter where, no matter how far off any map that you have ever known before. Jesus is saying to these who are listening and to us this morning, I'm not satisfied to be a figure out of a holy book. I'm not

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satisfied to be some kind of theological curiosity to you. I do not want to be your moral example. I have not come in order to be the teacher supreme. I don't want to be merely a proposition in some creedal affirmation. I want you to drench yourself in me. I want you to be saturated with me. I want you to be

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permeated with me as the sovereign Lord and the Savior who died for you. I want you to be so loyal to me that you will live for me and if need be die for me that you will kneel before me, offer me your sword, and when I take it you will rise with allegiance to no other banner beyond my own. I want you to march beside

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me right off the maps. Jesus understands of course that this kind of loyalty cannot be required and it cannot be enforced. That's the reason he's offering no ultimatum to his hearers here, and I am certainly offering no ultimatum in his name this morning. What Jesus is simply saying is, "This is what I

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understand loyalty to mean, marching off the map with me." By that definition, are you loyal? Now up to this time, Jesus' ministry had been rather successful. Growing numbers of people had joined him, particularly in the Jerusalem and the Samaritan and the Galilean areas. But after Jesus' discourse

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here at Capernaum, after he talks about what loyalty really means, we come across one of the most tragic verses in all of the scripture. It's our text for today. John chapter 6, verse 66. "After this, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him." Some simply defected. They had come into their

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experience with Jesus because they expected to get something out of it, and now suddenly they discovered that they were being asked to give more than they thought they were going to get. They were willing to follow him as long as they stayed on their maps and were not interested anymore when they discovered

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that he wanted to march far beyond those borders. You know, there are in reality only four things that you can do with your life. You can run away from it, that is, try to avoid all responsibility for it. You can run along with it, that is, you try to mimic the lives of those about you, a sheer and crass conformity, keeping

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up with the Joneses. You can take hold of it, that is, make your life your own and lead your life in such a way that your principles and your priorities are always to the fore. Or you can offer your life up. You can give it to a cause or to a person that you consider to be greater than yourself. Now those who defected

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opted for number three, that is, they wanted to hold on to their own lives. And when they heard a definition of loyalty which required the surrender of their swords, they were unwilling to make that commitment. Now we see examples of this in our society all the time, but let me mention just one. We're all concerned, I

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think, about the growing number of people who are living together outside of the bounds of wedlock. They say to you things like, "Oh, we don't need a piece of paper, a mere marriage license. We can live together and have a marriage without those kinds of formalities." And as we study the results of that kind of

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cohabitation with built-in escape hatch, as we look at those marriages, as they call them, which are without any legal or binding commitment on the part of either of the partners, we see the results. Depression, suicide, illegitimacies, these things correlate directly with the more and more persons who are trying to have

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a loving relationship without loyalty. And that's the problem, you see. It's not that there's no love in them. They may love each other quite a bit, but there's no loyalty there. There's no irrevocable commitment there. They're living together without making any binding promises to each other. It's become such an easy

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thing to get out of, and no marriage will be what a marriage ought to be under those terms. When a person enters into a married relationship, protecting always their options for self-gratification, instead of moving into that marriage relationship with a profound and overwhelming gratitude for this one who

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loves them, when someone tries to lead a married experience and to surrender themselves totally to their own self-indulgence, well, the two are utterly incompatible. And Jesus is talking about a marriage with him, if you will, and he's saying there has to be some loyalty and some absolute commitment. I'm not talking

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about a scape-hatched discipleship. And some people, when they heard that, defected. Others deteriorated. That is, they lacked the character. They lacked the moral integrity to stand up under the demands for that kind of loyalty. This is what you see in a person like Judas, who paraded for a while under false colors,

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but who was really wearing the yellow shades of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, you know, does not cause a life to grow larger. It causes a life to grow smaller, because it shrivels the soul. Hypocrisy leads to inner decay. It is vows easily made and quickly vitiated. It's being trapped by things that are lower than the

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allegiances which ought to belong to one. F. W. Borum, the great Australian preacher, tells of standing once on the banks of the Niagara River in winter and seeing the carcass of a dead sheep floating down the river. Now a bird came, a large bird, and settled on the carcass and was feasting on the carrion. And Borum watched

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this, and he fully expected the bird to take flight when the carcass of the sheep reached the precipice and was about to go over the falls. But to his amazement, when it got to that point, the bird just flapped its wings and went over the falls with the animal to death. And he asked others about that, and they

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said they'd seen it many times. You see, what happened was the bird had come down on the carcass of the animal, settling its talons in the decaying flesh, but the cold bitterness of the day caused the talons to freeze there without the bird's knowledge, so that when they got to the precipice and the bird thought it would

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fly away, suddenly it discovered it could fly no more. And so it went over the falls to its death. Now that's what inner deterioration and hypocrisy and moral decay do. We settle on things only to discover that we are not holding them, they are holding us, and what is holding us is lower than the commitments that we

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claimed to be our own. There's no marching off the map in that. That's being carried by a Niagara of deceit to inevitable destruction. You start out looking at Jesus, but you end up looking like Judas. So Jesus sees disciples defecting and deteriorating and turning away, so that he finally says to the few

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that remain at his feet, "Will you two go away?" And then Peter gives his magnificent answer, "Lord, to whom shall we go? For you have the words of eternal life." That's a thrilling affirmation, isn't it? You see, there's a tremendous lifting power in loyalty. Do you remember back in 1985 when they had that live AIDS concert? A bunch

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of rock and roll artists got a billion dollars worth of publicity out of raising about 92 million dollars to help the starving and the suffering of Africa. Now, one of those who was commenting on this event, indeed the man who had thought it up in the first place and who took great credit for what it

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accomplished, described the event as being a shooting star among such efforts. And you know, I thought that was very apt. For a shooting star is something that catches our attention for a moment, but then it's gone. And in the long run, it does very little for anybody. There's not much lift in a shooting star. The lift

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comes from contemplating those who have taken the job of ministering to the hungry and the suffering of the world for centuries and who have laid out billions and have poured out their very blood in a loyalty to Jesus Christ which led them to serve others in his name. And the only recompense that those people

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sought was the word of their master, "Well done, good and faithful servant." That's marching off the map and contemplating that kind of commitment, that lifts the soul. I'll confess that when Christians are loyal to Christ on his terms, he sometimes asks them to do things which they really question and which lead them

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to quake in their boots. The Apostle Paul, after he was won to faith, did not expect to become the missionary to the whole Gentile world, but when that was what he was called to do, he marched. Augustine was interested in being a quiet scholarly bishop in a North African town, but when he was called upon to be the

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defender of the faith and the upholder of the city of God against the city of the world, even though he didn't want to do it, he marched. Luther looked only for peace and truth in his life. He didn't want to create a revolution, he wanted only to lead a reformation. But when he was called of God to a greater

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investment of his life and his gifts in transforming the whole church, he marched. Calvin wanted to be a parish preacher in France or Switzerland, and Pharrell said "You will go to Geneva and there you will become the teacher for God in the greatest school for Christ on earth," and Calvin trembled at the notion. But because

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he was loyal, he marched. The profoundest prayer to come from the heart and soul of Abraham Lincoln was a prayer that the Union might be preserved, and the Union shattered. And through years of disappointment and discouragement and defeat and disgrace and the death of his own son, still called by God and

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committed to God, he marched. Take a young doctor, a Methodist doctor, a lover of Jesus Christ, Thomas McClintock, called to go out to the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana. Great outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever there, 80 out of every 100 people that got the disease dying from it. They thought it was

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transmitted through the waters, he discovered it was through wood ticks. He himself became infected with the disease. He might have lived, but he insisted on making the journey all the way back to Washington DC, the nation's capital, in order that he might be a living laboratory example of the disease. He

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knew this would cost him his life, but he made the journey, the disease is not contagious, and they were able to study him for 36 hours after he got there, before he died. But he loved God, and he loved God's people, and he was loyal, and when he was called so to march, he marched. Now when you hear about that

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kind of loyalty, that lifts the spirit. Any pastor will tell you that the thing which troubles most parishioners in their Christian lives is boredom, dullness, none of the thrill of which they hear the pastor speak from the pulpit, none of the enthusiasm and joy and triumph which the records of the faith transmit. And

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the reason most people suffer from this tedium in believing is that they spend all their time walking around and around on old charts, old maps. They never get out in their loyalty to Christ, walking where there is some risk in their religion, taking a journey that's beyond any spiritual adventuring that they've

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ever done before. I've known people, and you have too, who have gone to their doctors because their lives are full of ennui and boredom. And they say, "What can I do?" And the doctor replies, "Get outside yourself. Latch on to something that's bigger than you are." Why? Because there's a lifting power in

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loyalty. The Christian faith is not just a number of Bible studies, it's not just endless prayer meetings, it's not just the anthems of the choir, no matter how splendid they might be, it's not just the fellowship of worship, it's courageous adventuring in the world in the name of Jesus Christ. That is loyalty, and that

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loyalty makes life exciting. That's where the thrill comes in. So Jesus is saying to all of us today, on this Loyalty Sunday, "Will you too go away? Or will you in the investment of your talents and your time and your treasure in the extension of my kingdom in the world, will you do things beyond what you've

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ever done before? Will you pledge yourself to things that you don't understand now how they can even become a reality, but you'll trust me enough to follow me right off the maps of what you don't know into the truth of what I will teach you forever? Will you come out of those dark theaters where you see a

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Christianity which is a kind of film projected on a screen, an illusion, shadows and lights? Will you come out of that theater into the brightness of the real world where your eyes might hurt a bit from the dazzle of the day, but where you will see life as it really is, and there in the midst of that reality, will

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you live for me? And will you sacrifice for me? And will you serve me? And will you care for me? And will you march with me side by side?" Peter said, "Lord, to whom else will we go? You have the words of eternal life." All right, will you actualize that in your own experience? That's what Jesus was saying to those

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people a long time ago, and that's what he's saying to us today. Get away from this sleepy stumble that some people call the experience of faith, and instead march as you've never marched before. That's what it is to abide in Christ. That's what it is to give all of yourself and experience all of him. This

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is how the peace and the power and the presence of Jesus is experienced. This is what Jesus was talking about when he said, "I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly." He was saying, "Put away those old charts. Clean out the glove compartments of your lives of all those old maps from weekend trips

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long ago forgotten. Instead, see what a real hike can do. See what a real march will do. Follow me all the way off the maps and discover what a glorious thing it is to be a soldier of the King." Let us pray.

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Our Lord, we would be less than honest if we didn't say that your claims to loyalty frighten us. They call us beyond what we have known to what we don't know. Give us faith enough to rise above our fears. Lord, we know that you alone have the words of eternal life and we know that those words and that reality can

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begin in our lives today if we will depend upon thee utterly beyond anything we have ever known before. Call us to this loyalty. Enable us to demonstrate this loyalty. Love us in the midst of this loyalty. Help us build the kingdom to the honor and glory of thy Son whose flag we pledge ourselves to follow. Amen.

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you (15 seconds pause)