01-02-11 Life Rules

ROM 8:18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Those are the words Paul uses

to introduce us to the passage in the 8^th chapter of Romans

in which he equips us with the truth we need

to cope successfully with the Christian life when we hurt.

If you are new to our study of Romans

let me offer just a few words of background

on where we are in this book

and what Paul is seeking to accomplish in us.

Paul spends the first eight chapters of this remarkable letter doing two things.

He begins by explaining why it was necessary for Christ to come in the first place,

why it was necessary for our Creator God

to enter into a human body

and allow His own creation

to nail Him to a cross.

Through flawless logic

he showed us that on the basis of our own performance

every human being who has ever lived

stands guilty and condemned

on the basis of the moral law of God.

Then He went on to share with us

how, through our choosing to accept the truth that when Christ died

He was dying in our place

for our sins,

through our faith alone,

apart from any works of the law,

God brings us into an eternal love relationship with Him

and recreates us at the deepest level of our being,

placing within us a new heart

that loves Him and longs to please Him.

Then, from there, Paul goes on to describe for us in careful detail

what it means for us to live in the presence of God through faith in Christ.

He began that description

with what I believe to be the most significant single sentence about the true nature of the Christian life

ever given to us by our Creator:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand... (ROM 5:1-2)

And then, for the next three and a half chapters

Paul explains to us

what it means for us to be immersed in grace before our Creator.

In the terms we have been using throughout this study,

he reveals to us the basic operating truths of the Christian life - what it really means

for a person to be a Christian.

And now, as we reach the last half of this 8^th chapter,

we are seeing Paul take all that he has been saying to us in these 8 chapters

and pull it together into 3 concluding statements.

1. He offers us 5 evidences of the true believer.

2. He offers us 5 strong supports for the times when we suffer.

3. And then He concludes with 5 things we should never forget

about God’s relationship with the Christian.

We are now in the second of those three sections,

looking at Paul’s 5 strong supports for the times when we suffer.

He begins those 5 supports

by telling us 3 things we very much need to know about the future,

and then moves on to 2 things

we very much need to know about the present.

And in our study last week

we looked at the first two things

we very much need to know about the future.

In Romans 8:18-22

we heard Paul tell us that:

our future glory will infinitely surpass our present suffering,

and second, this twisted and abnormal world

will one day be put back the way God designed it to be.

Which brings us to Romans 8:23-25

and the 3^rd thing we very much need to know about the future.

And with number 3

Paul’s comments come very close to home.

You see, there is something that has taken place within the Christian,

something that makes the true believer

unique in all the world.

I mentioned a few minutes ago

in my brief recap of the first 8 chapters of Romans

that, when we turn to God through faith in Christ,

one of the things God does in response to our faith

is to recreate us at the deepest level of our being.

We use all sorts of words and terms to try to describe this recreative process of God within us.

We talk about God placing a new heart within us.

We talk about Him placing His Spirit within us.

There was one passage in Romans chapter 7 in which Paul described the change

by saying that we enter into a marriage union with Christ.

At times I have attempted to describe the change

by saying that before we come to Christ

we think we should be good,

after we come to Christ

we wish we could be good.

But, no matter what words we use,

the living reality of this transformation is an absolute of our walk with God.

The true believer lives

with a spirit-level longing

to live a life that honors and pleases our God.

This new heart

is the foundation of everything God seeks to do both in us

and through us as His children.

It cannot be duplicated

by any human religious system.

Guilt cannot produce it.

Fear cannot produce it.

Religious fervor in an effort to earn God’s approval cannot produce it.

Only our spirit’s personal encounter

with the love of our God for us

can bring it about.

But there is a problem with this new heart,

a problem Paul spent no small amount of time addressing

in the 7^th chapter of Romans.

During the time our Lord chooses to leave us on this earth,

that new heart, that new spirit within us

must live out the first phase of its eternal existence

within a physical body

that has already been totally trained

under the leadership of our old spirit that was in absolute rebellion against God.

Our learned reasoning processes,

every one of our emotional memories,

our need-meeting techniques,

even our learned beliefs and expectations of our God,

all of these are now deeply resistant to the values and the leadership of the new heart within us.

Paul captured the true nature of this aspect of the Christian life in a single sentence

when he said of himself in Romans 7:22-23,

For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.

Now, I know that when we get near this concept

we normally focus on the obvious sin impulses that remain imbedded in our physical bodies,

that whole spectrum of physical,

emotional,

and psychologically addictive behaviors

that war against the life of Christ within us.

But before we look at Paul’s words of hope for us,

I want to take just a few minutes

to broaden out our thinking

concerning the extent to which this mistrained body of ours

wars against the truth.

You see, sometimes the most powerful enemies of faith within us

are not just the sin impulses we fight,

but the even more powerful life rules etched into our personalities.

And let me see if I can explain

what I mean by “life rules”.

“Life rules” is a term I use

to describe for myself

all of those things that I grew up believing about myself,

and about other people,

and about my world,

and about my God

because of the impact of the structure and environment in which I was raised.

Our childhood family, of course,

is a major tool through which our life rules are written,

but many other factors influence the process as well,

including our school experiences,

our teachers,

significant friendships,

the massive array of cultural voices surrounding us, and so forth.

And as adults

every one of us have an operational set of life rules recorded within our physical bodies,

rules that form the grid through which we filter every experience we encounter in life.

Let me give you just a few examples

of hundreds of life rules we have recorded within us.

We have life rules that have already determined for us

the answers to questions such as:

Will men accept me and like me?

Will women accept me and like me?

Am I more important than other people?

Am I less important than other people?

Do my ideas and opinions matter to others?

Am I funny?

Am I insightful?

Am I worth listening to?

Am I stupid?

Am I smart?

Will I succeed or fail in social encounters?

Can authority figures be trusted?

Am I a leader or a follower?

Should I fight when I encounter conflict?

Should I run away?

And on and on...

When we come to our Lord

we bring with us

a whole set of life rules that will exert tremendous force on the way in which we respond

to the leadership of the new spirit God has created within us.

To the degree that our existing life rules

are consistent with the truth,

to that degree they can be tremendous assets in our walk with the King.

But when those life rules conflict with the truth of who we are in Christ

or what He seeks to do through us,

they can generate tremendous turmoil.

When I first started preaching more than 40 years ago

I brought with me into that calling

some life rules about what it meant to be a proper or successful or correct preacher.

And for a number of years

I lived with the belief that I was failing miserably at my calling

not because I wasn’t following the leadership of God’s Spirit within me,

but because what He was doing in and through me

did not look at all like what my life rules told me He should be doing.

And the remarkable thing about these life rules

is that, until they are rewritten,

we simply accept them as one of the “givens” of life,

at the same level as knowing the sun will rise and set each day.

And as long as such a rule is in place within us

it actually has the power to blind us to the reality of what’s really taking place around us.

If we have a life rule that tells us, “People my own age will reject me”,

and someone our age offers us genuine friendship,

a little warning bell will go off inside us telling us this can’t really be friendship

because it breaks one of the established rules of life.

Life rules can be rewritten,

and, in fact, rewriting the destructive ones is one of the Holy Spirit’s highest priorities within us,

but it is not an easy process,

and it is at best unsettling,

and quite often it is down right terrifying

because it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of our lives.

And as long as I’ve gotten into this,

I don’t want to leave it

without alerting us to a crucial role we can play

in the lives of those who really matter to us.

With each of us

there are certain relationships in our lives,

given to us by our Lord,

where our words can have a tremendous positive effect

simply by our telling them the truth

about who they really are

and what we see God doing in them and through them.

You see,

it is sometimes very difficult,

even impossible for us to tell ourselves the truth,

but when someone we trust tells us,

we can hear it,

and believe it,

and find the freedom it can bring.

Our wife,

our husband,

our children,

and certain other friendships given to us by our Lord

where we have been able to go beyond

just our external social facades -

each of these provide us with crucial opportunities

to communicate the truth

in ways that can help break the power

of some of those destructive life rules.

I have become a fierce believer

in the importance of telling the people that God puts into my life

the truth about who they really are

and what I see God doing in them.

I’m a writer,

and I sometimes find it much easier

to write it than to speak it,

but sometimes when someone else tells us the truth

it makes it easier for us to recognize

and dislodge those false life rules that defeat us.

Now, I mention all of this

partly because I find this whole business of life rules to be fascinating,

but even more because it helps me

to appreciate why Paul says what he says

when he presents this 3^rd support for suffering.

In Romans 8:23-25 Paul says: And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.

And every growing Christian who has ever lived

has understood at times

what that groaning is all about.

You see, Paul is describing for us

a unique kind of suffering

that every Christian will know in this world,

the suffering that comes

when we see our righteous inner spirit confronted with the rather pathetic mess

that continues to exist in our physical bodies.

The “first fruits of the Spirit” that Paul mentions

is that new heart God creates within us.

It gives a real, constant taste

both of who God designed us to be,

and of the reality of our God’s love for us.

But it is the very existence of that new heart

that causes us to “groan within ourselves”,

to agonize over the resistence of our mistrained physical body to this new life within us.

I have shared with you in the past

that every day of my life

I begin my day with longings for a quality of life with my King during the next 24 hours

that I never ever live out perfectly.

Our reach,

our hunger for godliness

always exceeds our grasp.

And it does so

because right now

our spirit’s ability to express itself

is limited by the strong resistence we encounter

from these mistrained bodies

in which our spirits continue to exist.

And there are times when that tension hurts.

Have you ever seen yourself suddenly retreat to some old hiding place

or lash out with some old defensive response to someone you care about,

and then seen the damage it causes in the relationship

and felt the pain that results?

Have you ever felt your spirit

long to reach out in some new direction

or explore some new area of life,

and then suddenly bumped up against

one of those life rules

that tells you, “You can’t go there.

You can’t do that.

You’ll fail.

You’ll be rejected.”

This is part of what Paul is talking about

when he says, “And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves...”

But that isn’t where he stops.

He goes on to remind us of the truth.

He tells us that our spirit will not always be imprisoned in this mistrained body.

“...even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.”

The day will come,

when our King returns,

when our already holy, righteous spirits

will be placed into brand new bodies,

bodies that have never learned an incorrect thought,

bodies that have no memories of irrational fears,

or of past failures,

or rejections,

bodies that have no life rules recorded within them,

bodies that will be perfectly matched to our new spirits,

and provide the perfect means through which those spirits can express themselves.

And then at last

the redemptive work of our God

will be completed in our lives.

Paul equips us to face the suffering we cannot avoid in this world here and now

by telling us 3 things we very much need to know about the future -

Our future glory will vastly exceed our present suffering. (It really is worth it!)

This physical world in which we live will one day be brought into total subjection to Christ. (We’ve been allowed to read the last chapter, and our side wins!)

And this resistant physical body in which we live

will one day be replaced

with a brand new one that co-operates perfectly with the righteous longings of our spirits.

None of those make the pain go away,

but they do put it into a correct perspective,

a perspective that helps break the power of Satan’s lies

that tell us when we hurt,

“No one knows.

No one cares.

And what you’re going through doesn’t really matter.”

But Paul isn’t finished yet.

He has two more anchors for us

to keep us strong when we hurt,

anchors that focus not on the future,

but on here and now.

We’ll look at those as we move ahead in our study or this remarkable letter.