©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

01-29-06

Transcendent Truth Pt. 3

1/29/06 Transcendent Truth Pt. 3

This is our third week

in a series that has grown directly out of my own inner churnings

over trying to understand

how I can most effectively communicate my Lord Jesus Christ

to the changing culture in which we live.

Two weeks ago

I shared with you my realization

that the changes that have taken place within our culture during the past 40 years

are far more significant than simply changes in fads and clothing.

During the second half of the past century

we entered into a radically different way of thinking as a culture,

a way of thinking that has had a profound affect on the way truth can be passed on from one generation to the next.

I was brought up in a cultural framework

that still accepted the concept of an absolute, universal standard of moral right and wrong,

a standard that grew out of our shared Christian heritage,

a standard that had its roots in Scripture itself.

That certainly isn’t to suggest that there were any more real Christians 50 years ago than there are now,

but it does mean that there was a cultural recognition

of the concept of a real, universal moral truth that had application to all of us.

But during the last half of the last century

in the name of “freedom” we turned our backs on that heritage

and exchanged our acceptance of that universal moral standard

for a very different concept of social “good”,

a “good” in which there is no absolute standard of right or wrong,

a “good” in which we now grant to each person the supreme “right”

to live by any value system and life style they choose

so long as they do not bring harm to others or infringe on other’s “right” to do the same.

In the name of social progress and forward thinking

we have returned to the same tragic moral sewer

that existed in the Nation of Israel during one of their lowest times in history.

In the Old Testament book of Judges,

a book that records for us some of the most hideous and degenerate behavior possible,

twice we have this statement recorded for us:

Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.

Every man did what was right in his own eyes...

This is where we are once again as a culture,

and the message that is now being communicated

through our politics,

through our news media,

through our entertainment industry,

through our educational systems,

through every significant voice within our society

is a message that says true good is defending every individual’s right

to choose any moral standard and approach to life they prefer.

In the name of freedom

we have created a terrifying nightmare for our younger generation

as each of them must now go through an agonizing trial and error process

of figuring out for themselves what works and what doesn’t,

a process that none of us have the ability to fulfill successfully.

Yet what we have created within our society in the name of “freedom”

is completely incompatible with our basic design as human beings.

We know within our spirits

that there must be governing principles, rules of life.

And what we now see being lived out in our younger generation

is a kind of layered approach to human relationships.

There is their peer layer

in which a clearly defined set of rules

define how those relationships are conducted.

Then there is their parent or authority layer

with a completely different set of rules that apply.

Then there is their school or teacher layer,

and their dating layer,

and their church or religion layer,

and with each distinct layer comes another unique set of rules.

Each layer is consistent within itself,

but the rules that operate in one layer

have no relationship with those that govern another layer.

You see,

it isn’t that they are without rules.

In truth, they live with an extremely complex

and highly refined set of rules for each group they have contact with.

But those rules change radically from group to group.

And the thought that there really might be

a universal standard of life rules

that applies to all situations, all relationships

is to them utter absurdity.

And then here we are in the Christian community

still thinking in terms of that universal, Divinely revealed moral standard,

believing we are having an effective voice of communication

as we seek to call our nation to submission and obedience

to God and to His written Word.

And we wonder why so few listen

and even fewer respond

and why we are viewed as being so utterly out of touch with the “real” world.

Our problem, of course,

is not that we are in any way incorrect

in our acceptance of and allegiance to the moral standard revealed to us by our Lord.

On the contrary,

it is that standard

that gives us tremendous insight into how to live truly free in spirit.

JOH 8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

Our problem is that all too often our message is not being heard

because we are beginning our communication at the wrong place.

It is certainly truth

that the Spirit of God will lead every growing Christian

into greater and greater understanding of and submission to

those moral absolutes that have been revealed to us by our God.

He will do that because He loves us

and because true freedom of spirit in this life

can be found no other way.

But that is not where He begins.

The truth is

that has never been where He begins,

even back in the days when our society still accepted that moral standard.

He begins with this culture

where He began with those 12 disciples 2000 years ago,

and where He seeks to begin in each of our lives ever since,

by loving us,

and by seeking some way in which to communicate that love,

right where we are, just as we are.

It is a fascinating thing,

that we can come to know moral absolutes by beginning with the love of God,

but we can never come to know the love of God by beginning at the moral absolutes.

We enter this world with spirits that are, for obvious reasons,

fearful of our God and resistant against His authority in our lives.

Paul makes it clear in the first three chapters of Romans

that the first great role of the moral law of God in our lives

is to drive us into sin

and then to condemn us when we fail,

creating in us a desperate need for some alternative.

And that alternative, of course,

is Christ Himself.

And when He enters our lives

what we see in His hands,

what He carries with Him into our lives when we let Him in is not the Ten Commandments,

but rather a blood-stained wooden cross,

a cross intented to communicate just one thing to us -

the depth of His love for us.

Only when we have seen that cross

and understood what it really means -

our debt of sin is gone forever,

removed through Christ’s willing death in our place,

only then will we begin to hear and accept some of the other things our God has to say to us.

And last week I shared with you

the approach I am now finding effective

in my efforts to communicate my Lord Jesus Christ

to the younger generation.

It’s not complicated,

it’s certainly not in any way original.

The greatest challenge with it

is keeping it free from so many of those religious trappings

that we are so fond of in the church community.

All I do is begin by loving those God places into my life,

being the best friend I know how to be.

As I build the friendship

and as they begin to trust me enough

so that they let me see more honestly

the struggles going on in their lives,

the only thing I want to do at that point

is to let them know that what they’re really looking for

and what their spirit is really longing for is their God.

And the only way things will ever begin to make sense

is if they choose to place their life into His hands.

I’m not offering them a religious system of any kind.

I’m not trying to get them to change their behavior.

I’m certainly not trying to offer them rules they should follow.

All I want to do is to point them to a very real God

who loves them

and wants just one thing from them - their willingness

to place their life into His hands.

I don’t push.

I don’t preach.

I just keep it as simple,

and as uncomplicated as possible -

God is really there,

He doesn’t want you to try to change anything,

He just wants you to place your life into His hands

and then let Him do with it whatever He chooses.

And then I pray, and I pray, and I pray.

I pray that God’s Spirit will give them ears to hear

and a heart to respond to Him.

And if they do,

if they choose to place their life into His hands,

then I remind them that they are not promising God that they will try harder,

or that they will make changes for Him,

they are simply giving Him permission

to change them from the inside out.

Then I wait and see what God does,

and if it was a real choice in their life,

God will do just what He promised,

He will begin reshaping them from the inside out.

HEB 8:10 “...I will put My laws into their minds, And I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, And they shall be My people.”

And as I see His work taking place within them,

as I see a desire to do what’s right that was never there before,

as I see an openness to truth,

or a sensitivity to sin,

as I see evidences of that new heart that God has created within them

I tell them what I’m seeing,

and I tell them what’s happening.

I tell them that their God

really is recreating them from the inside out.

I do that

because one of the first great lies Satan will often try to use in their lives

is the lie that nothing has really changed.

Typically what he’ll do

is to make sure that something bad happens to them,

or some destructive impulse from their old life barges in,

pulling them back into some old behavior pattern,

and then he’ll be right there accusing,

telling them that nothing really happened

when they chose to place their life into God’s hands.

Telling them what we see going on inside them

can be a powerful tool in helping to defeat those lies.

And I mentioned last week, too,

that I find it to be of tremendous value

early in a young Christian’s life

to prepare them for what it means to have our new hearts

being placed into an already trained body that knows nothing about God,

or His love,

or His ways.

Their heart will long to please their Lord,

but their mind and emotions will often violently react against it.

They need to know why that’s happening

and how God views it.

It’s really hard for me not to get side-tracked here,

but for now I’ll just offer one thought

and then maybe when I finish this series

we’ll take a whole Sunday for a refresher lesson on this critical concept.

But for now I’ll just say that

Paul presents this conflict between our new heart and our physical bodies

in the last half of Romans chapter seven.

And immediately following the presentation of that truth,

immediately following his affirmation that as God’s child, “...ROM 7:25 ...on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin...”,

the very next thing he says is this:

ROM 8:1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

In other words,

when God looks at all of the corrupt responses and impulses

that are still imbedded within our flesh,

He does not condemn us for them.

He understands why they are there,

and knows that they are in no way an expression

of the true new heart that He has created within us.

Certainly He commits Himself to working with us

in learning how to bring that rebellious body

under the leadership of our new heart.

But the resistance and rebellion within our flesh is a given of our life with God on this planet.

Now, before we leave this study,

there is one more area I want to touch on.

It concerns how we can most effectively

pass on moral truth

without passing on a list of moral decrees.

How do we offer moral absolutes

to a generation that doesn’t even think in such terms?

Keep in mind that, imbedded in the learned reasoning processes of those who are a product of this culture

is the assumption that there really are no moral absolutes in life.

There are simply things that work

and things that don’t work,

and what seems to work in one type of relationship

will not work in another.

At the same time,

God’s Spirit within the Christian

will give them both a hunger for truth

and a growing trust in what our Lord says to us about life.

If I meet a person who does not accept Scripture as absolute truth,

I never attempt to convince them otherwise.

Having rejected the authority of Scripture as a culture,

there is only one way a person will ever return to it -

by first meeting and submitting to the Author of Scripture.

And when I meet a person who rejects the authority of the Word

I simply assume I am talking with a person

who has not yet met the One who spoke the Word,

and until they do nothing else matters.

But having said that,

I have found that there are approaches to this generation

that seem to make it far easier for them to begin reshaping their thought processes

into a growing acceptance of those universal truths given to us by our God.

And, to try to state this in a single sentence,

let me just say that with this generation

we will find it far more effective to offer them truth through life principles

rather than through moral decrees.

And, before I offer a few examples of what I’m trying to say here,

I need to warn you that doing this will require us to work through our own understanding

of what are truly universal moral principles

and what are personal applications of those moral issues in our own lives.

If we pass on the universal moral truths give to us by our God,

His Spirit will take those principles

and apply them perfectly to the individual lives of those who are listening to Him.

But if we clutter up those universal moral principles,

including with them cultural issues that are not universal in nature,

we will very quickly lose both our credibility and our audience.

Shall I get specific?

If we try to tell the next generation

that pierced ears on guys,

or pierced anything on anyone,

or tattoos,

or hair length,

or clothing styles,

or smoking,

or legal use of alcohol are universal moral issues

we will not be heard.

And don’t misunderstand me here.

I am not talking about dealing with those issues in the parent/child relationship.

As parents we have both the right and the obligation

to establish whatever standards in those areas we feel are correct

during those years when our children are still under our care.

But even here

it is essential that we do so in a way that makes a clear distinction

between those things that are truly universal in nature

and those things that are simply your own personal convictions.

“My son, my daughter,

when you leave this home you will have both the right and the freedom

to make your own decisions about what’s right for you as God’s child in this area.

And I will respect that right in you.

But for now,

you’ll need to follow my house rules.”

But let me bring us back to this distinction between presenting truth through principle

and presenting it through decree.

And I can probably say what I want to say here best through a few examples.

We’ll start with speech.

Forty or fifty years ago,

during my childhood,

there were clearly established boundaries in the areas of speech.

There were certain words that were universally recognized as “bad” words.

But during the past 40 years those boundaries have been so blurred and confused as to be virtually nonexistent in our younger generation.

If you listen to the unguarded conversations of most people

and certainly of most young people in our society today

they sound exactly like every run-of-the-mill R rated movie that comes out.

And yet,

and yet there are very definite universal moral principles

given to us by our God

that govern the whole area of our speech.

But if we are going to effectively communicate those universal moral principles

we cannot come at them from a list point of view.

What we need to do

is to present to them

the underlying purpose for which speech was given to us by God

and then help them to see how that purpose can be fulfilled.

There have been times when I have said,

“It’s not the words you use that trouble me,

it’s that you’re using words in a way that destroying relationships.

Speech is given to us by God

as a powerful tool with which we can accomplish either good or evil in the lives of those who hear us.

There are times when you use that tool

in a way that does not accomplish what you really want to accomplish in the one you’re talking to.”

And if God gives them ears to hear that principle,

they will begin to reshape their speech

in ways that no list could ever do.

Or take the role of authority in our lives.

Even with the presence of the Spirit of God in a young Christian’s life,

approaching submission to authority from the perspective

of a divine universal decree will simply not work.

But if we begin talking with them

about what God accomplishes in our lives through the authorities He places us under,

letting them know that God tells us that human authority is a key tool in His hands,

used by Him to free us, to reveal His will to us, and to protect us,

it will allow them to receive the truth

without getting stuck in the decrees.

There are times when I’ve described authority as a precision tool

with which God is able to take a diamond in the rough

and turn it into a brilliant gem.

And I’ve described it as a guard rail

placed along a mountain path

so that during a blinding snow storm

as we seek to find our way home

we don’t step off the edge to our death.

I try to take the same approach

when sharing what our God says to us about sex.

There are clear, powerful reasons why God tells us

that sex is a special means of communication

designed by God exclusively for a husband and wife

within the context of a lifelong marriage commitment.

He’s not out to cheat us,

He’s revealing to us what works and what doesn’t in human relationships.

But my point in this whole thing

is that with this generation,

a generation that has no allegiance to or concept of an absolute moral standard,

when we begin passing on God’s moral truth to them

we need to talk with them not about the decrees

but rather about the principles imbedded in those decrees

and about the depth of God’s love that causes Him to reveal those decrees to us.

If we can communicate the principles,

we will find that the Spirit of God within them

will take those principles and reshape them into internal rules for life

that fit exactly with what He’s doing both in them and through them.

HEB 8:10 ....I will put My laws into their minds, And I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, And they shall be My people.

The great challenge with this whole thing, of course,

is that those of us who have spent most of our lives

thinking in terms of an absolute moral standard revealed to us by our God

and who have simply submitted to that standard

without thinking through what God is really saying to us through it

will have to go through a lot of new, honest learning ourselves.

What are those absolute moral standards that I want to pass on,

and what are simply my own personal rules for life,

given to me by the Spirit of God for me alone?

And why has God said what He’s said in those areas of morality?

And where we don’t yet know those answers,

or where we are still resisting His truth in some area of our lives,

don’t pretend and don’t speak beyond what we live

or we’ll soon loose all credibility.

Allow yourself to be in an open growth and learning mode

in the eyes of those you love and those you want to reach.

And one other thing I have found that seems to be of value

is giving our next generation of believers

a vision of who they really are in this world.

“You have been chosen by God for a special role in this world.

You will demonstrate to your own generation

what it means to live in a love union with God Himself.

Your life will not look like the lives of those around you.

It will certainly not look like mine.

But you will know a quality of life

that few will ever know.

And those who are hungry for answers

and weary of the bondage in which they now live

will be drawn to you for hope and for answers.

You will communicate the truth of God

to a world I will never see

with an effectiveness and a credibility that I could never have.”