©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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02-20-05 |
Changed People Change People |
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2/20/05 Changed People Change People
EPH 4:1 Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called...
Those are the words
with which Paul begins the second major section
of his letter to the Ephesians,
and through them
his letter to all Christians everywhere.
And, as we have moved back into our study of Ephesians,
for the past several weeks
we have seen that everything in part 2 of this letter
rests upon our clearly understanding
what Paul has already told us in part one.
Until we understand at the soul level of our being
who we really are in Christ,
until we gain at least some glimpse
of the recreative work that God has already accomplished within us at the spirit level of our being,
we have no adequate basis
for bringing about practical performance changes in our lives.
If we attempt to bring about changes in our lives
with the hope that those changes will make us more acceptable to our God,
or with the hope that they may make Him love us more,
or like us more,
or that they will in some way improve our standing with Him,
we will never experience the peace with God we seek,
nor will we find the motivation for change we long for.
Do you want to know
what I consider to be
the 5 most tragic words I could ever hear
from Christians who are wrestling with areas of bondage in their lives?
“This is who I am!”
“I wish I could change.
I wish I could be different,
but this is who I am.”
It is that lie above all others
that I believe Satan seeks to imbed into the mind of the Christian,
because once that lie is in place
that believer will continue to live out the same patterns of bondage
for the rest of his or her life.
And Satan’s tactics against us are not complicated,
they’re just extremely effective
unless we listen carefully, closely to the voice of our God.
All Satan has to do
is to fix our eyes onto our past failures,
and onto the emotional impulses that have been programed into us,
and then say to us,
“Now, look at this!
Look at what you have done in the past.
Look at what you feel like doing now.
Look at those emotions and desires within you.
This IS WHO YOU ARE!!
You might as well simply accept the truth.
You may be redeemed,
but you are certainly not changed,
not really.
Do you call yourself a saint? A holy one of God?
In what world?
Certainly not in this one!
Whatever’s going on in those other Christians
is certainly not going on in you.
So just accept the truth
on the basis of the obvious evidence of your life.
This IS who you are,
and it is who you will always be
as long as you remain on this earth!”
Pretty effective lie, huh?
And it is effective
because it seems to be rooted
in the obvious factual, historical evidence of our lives.
And then our God starts talking with us
and the things He says
sounds at first like a foreign language,
or at best,
like words that apply
only to a few Christians here and there,
but certainly not to us.
We hear Paul’s words to the Corinthians,
and if we stop in the middle of the thought
it seems perfectly reasonable to us.
1CO 6:9-10 Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
And we hear those words
and think to ourselves,
“Yep, I knew it! I’m right there in that list
and I knew there was no hope for me,
no redemption that’s really adequate for a sinner like me.”
But that is not where Paul stops.
Listen to the very next thing he says.
1CO 6:11 And such were some of you; but you were washed,
but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.
And such WERE some of you.
But that is not who you are any more.
Oh, you may still act that way,
but it is not who you are.
But until you understand who you are,
you will not be able to break the power
of those lies that have been driving your life up to this point.
And so,
it is not until the 4th chapter in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
that we hear him begin talking with us
about the behavior issues in our lives.
And even then
he anchors those comments
directly to what has come before.
EPH 4:1 Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called...
And with that statement
he points us directly back
to what he has just told us in the first three chapters -
that through the redemptive work of God
we are now and forevermore will be seated with Christ in the spirit world,
and that we are now the physical body of Christ on this earth - filled with His Spirit,
and that the manifold wisdom of God
is now being made known through us to the entire created world.
Through the work of Christ within us
we have become His holy ones on this earth,
with hearts and spirits that know Him,
and hunger for Him,
and seek Him more and more.
And everything that we now move into in this letter
is rooted in our correct understanding of who we really are
at the spirit level of our being.
And with that as the basis for what follows,
Paul then goes on to explain to us
how we can literally live lives
that are in every way consistent with who we are
and with the high calling given to us by our God.
And, as I pointed out a few weeks back,
what we see him saying to us here
may look very different from what we would expect.
It certainly looks very different
from what we are being told
by so many of the religious voices around us,
voices that tell us
that our success in the Christian life
is measured on the basis of the size of the religious kingdom we build in Christ’s name.
How big is the organization?
How many attend?
How vast is its outreach?
Are we “faithful in attendance”,
are we doing our share to keep the system going?
But what we’re going to see in the verses that follow
looks nothing whatsoever like so much of what we’re bing told.
This is running a little bit ahead,
but maybe it will help
if I share with you in just a few sentences
what Paul does in the rest of this letter.
He does not point the Ephesians
toward investing their efforts in the success of any organization.
He certainly doesn’t tell them
that they should build that church in Ephesus
into a mighty work of God in the community
so that thousands more are drawn into their great ministry.
What he does do
is to tell us
that God will be actively seeking to rebuild each of our lives,
bringing us into greater and greater conformity
to the image, the character of Jesus Christ.
And the evidence of that change
will be seen in the way we relate to one another -
in the way husbands relate to their wives,
in the way wives relate to their husbands,
in the way fathers relate to their children,
and the way children relate to their parents.
It will be seen in the way we talk to one another,
in the way we reach out to the needs in the lives of those around us,
in the way our relationships with those around us
are lived out each day.
These are the things
through which the manifold wisdom of God
is now made known through us to the created world around us.
Our Lord reaches in and changes our lives,
and then uses us to reach into the lives of others
and reproduce those changes
that He has made within us.
Changed lives change lives.
Because of my own religious heritage,
and my own natural religious mind-set,
it has taken me many years to mentally connect
the first and second halves of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
For too long
I saw the first half of the letter for what it was -
Paul’s revelation to us of THE CHURCH in all of its majestic glory,
the great work of God,
the Body of Christ on this earth,
given the great calling of revealing Jesus Christ to the world.
And mentally I identified what Paul was saying
with all of those organizations, and programs, and outreaches
that we typically identify as being churches,
church activities, and church ministries.
In other words,
I just assumed that it was those institutions
that were the vehicles through which God did what He was doing.
And then when I got to the second half of Ephesians
I saw Paul talking with us
about our attitudes toward one another,
about the way we talk to one another,
about the way we relate to one another within the family structure,
about all the different aspects
of our one-to-one interaction with the people in our lives.
And because I was holding onto this institutional concept of the church,
I didn’t see what he was saying.
I just assumed that he was telling us
how we should behave
so that we could then effectively assume our proper roles
within the institution of the church
through which God would then perform His work on the earth.
But that is not what’s happening here.
It’s not what Paul is saying to us.
He is not saying that we should do these things he talks about in the second half of the letter
so that we can then be good members of the CHURCH
through which God will then accomplish His work in the world.
He is saying that God bringing about these changes within us
IS His work in this world,
AND that it IS the way through which He reaches deep into our world
and reveals His manifold wisdom to all of creation.
He brings about changes in us,
usually through the influence of others,
and then through us
brings about changes in others,
who then are used by Him to bring about changes in others.
This is the true and only real work of the Body of Jesus Christ.
It is changed people changing people.
And I’ll tell you with absolute certainty
that we are usually the worst possible evaluators
of what He’s doing through us,
or whose life He will impact as a result of it.
I’ve shared with you in the past
that one of the strongest changing influences I ever encountered
during the whole first phase of my Christian life
came through a man I never met personally,
in fact, a man who died years before I was born,
a man who most certainly died believing his life had touched almost no one.
I came in contact with this man’s life during the late 60's.
If you are old enough to have lived through that time in our nation’s history
you will remember the kind of chaos that swirled around our society.
Every previously accepted value and tradition within our society
came under brutal attack by the younger generation - my generation.
I’d only been a Christian a few years at the time,
and I happened to come across a book called “Little Britches”.
It was a true story, written by a man, then in his 60's,
recalling his early childhood
as his family moved out west to homestead in the early 1900's.
The father in that family
was a quiet man who possessed tremendous inner integrity and strength of character.
As I read the account of his life,
and the tremendous adversity he faced and overcame,
I found the Spirit of God using that man’s life
to confront me with the cheap, tacky, selfish little world in which I lived,
and with the absence of any real strength of character within myself.
Everywhere I looked
I saw people who wanted to be popular,
and people who wanted power,
and people who wanted their own brand of the good life,
but everyone had an angle,
had an image,
had something they were trying to hide,
or something they were trying to get.
And I remember thinking
that somewhere in this world
we desperately needed at least a few people who were truly safe,
people who really were what they appear to be.
And in His own perfect way my Lord used the account of that man’s life
to create within me
a longing to be so much more,
and so much different than I was.
And somewhere in that process
I remember thinking how remarkable that was.
Here was a man who lived and died in absolute obscurity,
nearly half a century before I was even born.
And yet the quality of his life
and the daily choices he made
affected me in some ways
as much or more than any other man who has ever lived.
That’s typical of the way Christ lives out His life through His people.
Our Lord reaches into our lives
and begins His reconstructive process in our lives,
step-by-step conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ,
building that foundation of moral excellence into us.
And then, to each of us
He carefully allots the sphere of influence
that is perfectly matched to what He wants to say through us,
and who He wants to say it to.
And what He’s doing through us does matter
so much more than we would ever allow ourselves to believe.
A number of you were here last Sunday afternoon
when this room was filled with those of us who gathered together
for the memorial service for Jeremy and Michelle Davis’ three daughters.
Sandee and I sat where we always do,
in the front row with me next to the overhead projector,
and Jeremy and Michelle sat directly behind us.
I mentioned last week
that my friendship with Jer goes back more than 25 years
back to when he was still in Jr. High.
I wasn’t a preacher back then.
In fact, I was just the maintenance man for a bunch of apartments.
I had no idea where I was going with my life,
much less how I was suppose to get there.
But I was also Jer’s Uncle,
an Uncle who cared about him very much,
and who offered him my friendship,
an offer he eagerly accepted.
I prayed for Jer a great deal back then,
but as he moved into his adult years
Jer got .... well, let’s just say he got a little reckless in his approach to life,
and for a number of years we saw each other only rarely.
He was certainly a Christian,
but so much of what I had hoped for,
and prayed for in His walk with the King simply wasn’t there.
But then in recent years
God has been doing a remarkable work in my nephew’s life.
The Spirit of God has created within him
this insatiable hunger for His Lord.
I was talking with the pastor out at Port Alsworth last week
and he said of Jer, “I can’t believe this is the same man.”
I share this with you
because I had breakfast with Jer this past Monday
and during our breakfast he made a comment to me
that I will treasure for the rest of my life.
He said that he was sitting in that Memorial Service last Sunday,
in the midst of all of that pain,
and yet still filled with this hunger and thirst for his Lord,
and he kept looking at the back of my head and thinking, “You did this to me!”
At first I didn’t understand what he was saying.
But then, as he talked more, I understood.
He wasn’t talking about the crash,
or about all of the pain,
he was talking about this insatiable hunger for His God in the midst of all of it.
And, if I could have sat behind that father in Little Britches 30 years ago
I would have thought the same thing about him,
and the time will come
when there will be those
who will look at Jeremy and think exactly the same thing about him.
Because that is the process through which
Jesus Christ lives out His live through His people
over and over and over again,
one day at a time,
one friendship at a time,
one generation at a time.
And that IS the Church!
It isn’t preparation for the Church,
it is the whole thing.
It is the way in which
the manifold wisdom of God is now made know through the church
to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.
It is the work of God on this planet.
Some of you are just beginning your walk with the King.
And right now
most of His work in your life
involves His building within you
that first step of moral excellence.
It’s hard work,
sometimes painful work,
but already you can see
that who you once were
is not who you now are,
and certainly not who you long to be.
If you are getting discouraged with that process,
maybe this will help.
I can guarantee that what God is right now seeking to produce in you
He will one day reproduce in someone else through you
if you allow Him to continue His recreative work in your life.
Changed people change people.
And for those of you who are farther down the line,
let me simply say that those people God has given you to love right now
are the very heart of all He is seeking to accomplish through you as His child,
and they matter so much more
than you could ever imagine.
And once again
I seem to have failed
to actually make it into the 4th chapter of Ephesians,
but, of course, we always have the hope of next week.