4/13/08 Moral What? Pt. 2
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We are easing back into our study of Spiritual growth,

a study we’ve invested nearly three months in so far.

Four weeks ago, before we broke away from the study for Easter,

we were just beginning to look at the first step

in seven progressive steps of grow

outlined for us by Peter in the first chapter of his second letter.

And just so that we always keep this whole thing in perspective,

let me remind us once again

about how we got to these steps.

Peter began his letter by telling us

that what we’re after in life,

that everything we need the most

for a life that really works

will come to us through our growing friendship with our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is what spiritual growth is -

simply growing in our own individual friendship with Him.

And then Peter went on to tell us

that one of the major tools God uses in our lives

to help us grow in our friendship with Him

is His sharing with us the project of our becoming partakers of the divine nature.

In other words,

our becoming more and more like God Himself.

It is in this shared project

that we are able to learn things about our God -

things about the way He loves us,

things about the true nature of His grace,

things about the way He feels about us.

Friendships grow through sharing projects together,

and our friendship with God grows

through sharing with Him the project of our becoming increasingly conformed to His nature.

Does that sound strange to you?

Does the whole idea of literally growing in a friendship with God sound strange?

Does the thought that we can learn things about God,

and even more, that we can literally discover the mind and heart of our God

as a result of going through life experiences with Him sound strange?

We begin our pilgrimage with Him

with no thought at all of a friendship.

In the beginning it’s all about demanded obedience,

and commandments,

and judgement,

and duty,

and fear,

and reverence,

and submission and rebellion.

And depending on our background and temperament

we will either try to hide from His existence

or appease Him through religious duty.

But we certainly have no thoughts of any kind of a growing, nurturing,

intimate personal friendship with Him.

And yet...

and yet when we finally begin to see life as it really is

we will find, at the center of life,

our God seeking us, calling to us, drawing us to Himself.

And with nearly everything He does

our first responses are always wrong.

We’re going to spend some considerable time

wrestling with this first step of growth outlined by Peter,

the step of building moral excellence into our lives.

And I know just exactly how this process so often plays out inside us.

Our first response to our God

when He begins to dabble in our areas of moral brokeness

is to cower in the bushes from Him,

assuming He is doing what He is doing

because He wants to heap judgement and condemnation on us

for our failures.

And the truth is

that we could not be more wrong.

The truth is that His bringing us into honesty

about our areas of moral failure

is the first huge step we will ever take

into our personal discovery

of the true nature of His love for us.

It is not until we see ourselves honestly,

until we see either the depth of our own sin or the depth of our potential for sin

that we will understand the depth of His love

because only then will we know personally

what He means when He says, ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And there are so many other powerful ways

in which He allows us to discover Him.

In my own life I have found that

one of the most powerful teaching techniques He has

is to put me into a situation in which he allows me to feel something for another person

and then He steps in and says, “And that, my son, is what I feel for you.”

I can remember a time when I stood beside the bed

of a man who’d made some very bad choices,

choices that brought about tremendous pain in his life.

His clothes were stained and torn,

he smelled of several days of sweat and dirt,

and from a natural point of view everything about him

made me want to be somewhere else

or at the very least hold him up as a bad example

to anyone who would listen.

But as I stood there,

seeing his pain, and his helplessness, and his need,

I found myself flooded with the most intense sense of compassion and love,

and all I wanted to do was to help him heal and rebuild his life.

And then, as I stood there,

God’s Spirit showed me

that this is His response to me.

This is the way He feels

in the presence of my helplessness,

and the stench of my moral offenses against Him.

And in that instant

I learned a little bit more

about the heart of my Creator.

I can’t tell you how God will communicate His love to you.

I don’t know what things He will say or do

that will quite your fears

and allow you to risk entering into a friendship with Him.

I do know that you will face barriers of religion,

or pride,

or fear of condemnation for moral failures,

and they will stand in the way of your being able to hear His voice

and trust His love.

And I also know that He knows what those barriers are,

and they don’t repulse Him,

they don’t drive Him away,

they don’t cause Him to want to lash out at you in anger or disgust.

They cause Him to respond to you

just as I responded to that man in his pain.

Do you want to hear it from His own mouth?

ISA 30:18-19 Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him. ... you will weep no longer. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when He hears it, He will answer you.

And I know, too,

that He is eternally committed to the destruction of those barriers,

no matter what the cost

so that you can begin to hear the truth

and respond to it.

Well, from there, after Peter shares with us

the truth about what’s really going on -

the truth that what we hunger for the most is our God,

and that our highest calling in life

is the calling of growing in our friendship with Him,

from there

Peter takes us the next step

as he hands us a roadmap for that calling.

And he shares with us

the seven progressive steps of growth

that our Lord will seek to lead us through

in our growing discovery of Him.

2PE 1:5-7 Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge; and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness; and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love.

And then,

just to give us a little added incentive in this growth process,

he gives us a remarkable promise.

2PE 1:8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If we accept the calling He’s given us,

and allow Him to lead us through the character growth steps He has for us,

He promises us a truly productive fulfilling life.

And then, just so that we have a little better idea of where we’re headed,

I think I’ll offer you some brief, life-oriented definitions of each of these steps.

We’ll look at them in much greater depth as we move through this study,

but I know that sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the words,

and maybe this will help us relate to them a little better

until we can look at each of these steps more closely.

And even though Peter is writing exclusively to Christians

and as such assumes a measure of faith in our lives

I think we’ll include faith in these definitions

just so that we can keep everything clear.

Faith, of course, is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

But so much stupidity and religious piffle has grown up around this word during the past 2000 years,

and I want to offer you a definition this morning that,

if you can hear it,

should help rid you of much of the junk.

You see, faith, as it is used by God in His relationship with us,

is simply our choosing to believe that God loves us enough and is big enough to meet our deepest needs through Christ.

It is always a choice we make,

a choice rooted in our understanding of the true nature of God.

In Hebrews 11:6 we’re told, And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

And most of the time

we are called to make that choice

in the face of a whole lot of voices

that are screaming a whole different message at us.

And nearly every time we choose to believe

that our God is really there,

and that He loves us enough to meet our deepest needs,

there will be some other voice screaming, “What! Are you a fool!”

And the voice will back up its words

with what appears to be a flood of logical, reasonable, credible evidences

from our own history,

and from the lives of those around us,

and from this physical world in which we live,

all supporting the idea

that any real practical trust in either God’s ability or His willingness

to involve Himself in our lives at that level is ridiculous,

as ridiculous as Abraham and Sarah

believing that Sarah would conceive a son

years and years after she had gone through menopause.

And yet...ROM 4:3..."Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."

I don’t know what voices in your life

are telling you that God cannot or will not meet your deepest needs

if you choose to trust His words and His leadership in your life.

But I know they’re there,

and I know they are so very convincing.

And yet that is first of all and most of all

the battle we are called to fight,

the battle for practical trust in the love and integrity of our Creator.

Nowhere on this list

is our dual relationship to these qualities

more evident than right here.

Do you know what faith really is?

It is simply choosing to believe

that God is able to handle

whatever I choose to place into His hands.

Peter begins by assuming the existence

of some measure of faith

in the lives of those he is writing to

because he makes it clear in his opening words

that he is writing exclusively to those who have trusted the death of Christ

as total and eternal payment for their own personal sins against God.

But clearly faith is not a point,

it is a growth process we are actively involved in

throughout the rest of our lives,

choosing one day at a time

to once again trust our God’s love for us,

and His life through us.

‟If these qualities are yours

and are increasing...”

And then, from there Peter moves on to those other steps of growth.

The next is what he calls Moral Excellence.

And for now,

just to help our minds prepare for where we’re going,

let me offer you this definition.

Moral Excellence is our choosing to live within God’s moral framework

because we have chosen to believe it is the only way our needs can be met.

And at this point the main distinction I want to make

is that true moral excellence

is far more than simply obedience to the moral commandments of God.

There are lots of people who submit to at least some of God’s moral commandments

out of fear of judgement,

or because of social pressure,

or because of habit or family heritage.

But that is not moral excellence.

True moral excellence is submission to the moral leadership of God in our lives

because we trust HIM,

and believe that He truly does understand our deepest needs,

and is absolutely committed to meeting those needs in our lives.

And without getting into it in any depth,

can you see a little bit now

how and why our sharing these growth steps with our Lord

results in a deepening friendship with Him?

You see, right here, with this first step,

the heart of what is happening within us

is our seeing and trusting His heart

to the point where we will submit to what He says to us

even when our flesh screams at us that it will never meet our needs.

And in that process,

as we listen and follow,

we learn things about our Lord’s love for us

that simply cannot be learned any other way.

He really understands,

He knows not just that we hurt but why we hurt,

and He knows how that hurt can be healed.

So many of our need-meeting techniques simply attempt to cover up the pain.

It’s what we do.

But His leadership is designed by Him to heal,

to restore,

to redeem,

to recreate evil into good.

And true moral excellence becomes a part of our lives

to the degree that we choose to embrace His moral leadership in our lives

because we trust Him more than we trust the lies imbedded in our minds and emotions.

The second step in this growth pilgrimage is knowledge.

And it will help here

if I tell you that this is not the same word for knowledge

that Peter used in the opening verses of this letter.

This is not epignosis,

that special spirit-to-Spirit knowledge of God that can be known only by the Christian.

This isn’t that growing friendship between us and our God that we’ve been talking about so much.

This is gnosis,

and the best way I could define it for you

is to tell you that

it is a critical stage of growth in the believer’s life,

a time in which we discover

the basic operating principles of life within the Kingdom of God.

It is not simply the accumulation of facts.

It is not simply conquering the content

of the Bible

as we would conquer the content of a text book

in preparation for a test.

The term Peter uses for knowledge in this passage

assumes a kind of learning that grows out of hands-on experience,

knowledge that is the result of doing

and being

and seeing for ourselves.

It is that incredible, thrilling process

of discovering the principles

that govern a life lived as a child of the King.

We’ll look at this in more depth in the weeks ahead,

but I’ll give you just a few examples of what I’m talking about.

During this knowledge phase of our growth we will likely discover

that all true productivity

is not the result of effort and time invested,

but rather it is the by-product of character growth.

Such knowledge is a central pillar in a healthy, growing walk with the King.

Another example of knowledge is the discovery that

Our friendship with God

rests not upon our ability to maintain an acceptable level of performance that justifies the friendship,

but rather upon His mercy and grace poured out on us through Christ.

Growth in Knowledge will also lead us to the discovery

that our greatest areas of strength always grow out of our deepest areas of weakness.

Another knowledge discovery will bring us to the understanding

that absolute freedom can only be found in accepting the boundaries and limitations

that God has placed upon us.

This knowledge step is that phase of our growth

in which we build our functioning operating framework for our lives as Christians,

that phase of growth in which we learn how rebuild our reasoning processes

on the basis of the life principles given to us by our God.

It isn’t just the accumulation of facts,

it is the discovery and integration of remarkable truths into our lives

in a way that alters the way we view every aspect of our lives -

ourselves,

our possessions,

our future,

our past,

our God,

human governments and authority structures,

history,

prophecy,

our careers,

our spouse, our children and on and on.

Knowledge, the kind of knowledge that Peter is talking about here,

is the integration of principles with real life

in a way that provides us with the basis for learning to think

from a truly Christian world view.

The third step in our growth process is self-control.

And for our purposes this morning

we’ll define self-control

as the ability to choose right when our emotions lie to us.

And the fourth step in the growth process, perseverance

is closely linked to self-control.

Perseverance is the ability to exercise self-control as long as God asks us to so -

an hour

a week

a year

a life-time.

The definition I’ll offer you for godliness

is that godliness is the ability to do what is right when there are no external reasons for doing so.

It is the ability to make right choices

that flows out of a correct knowledge of who we really are.

Everything that God does

He does not because He has chosen to do it

but because it is an extension of who He is.

God didn’t decide to love us,

He loves us because ...God is love.1JO 4:8

His love for us flows out of His very nature.

And there is a process of growth that God seeks to accomplish within us

that is designed to bring us to the place

where we make right choices in life

not simply because we are trusting God in what He says

but because we have come to know the truth about ourselves as new creations

to the point where we know that any other choice would be inconsistent with who we are.

It is the ability to do what is right in any situation

because we truly know who we are

and no other choice would fit.

And then, the last two on Peter’s list are brotherly kindness and love.

Brotherly Kindness is the ability to meet the needs of our fellow Christians even when it conflicts with our personal rights, possessions, or ideas.

And Love is the ability to seek to meet the real needs of a fellow human being no matter what their attitudes, actions, or responses to us may be.

Brotherly kindness is using whatever resources our Lord has given us

to help meet the needs of our fellow Christians,

the people in the family of God that we care about.

Love goes far beyond that.

Love reaches out to the deepest needs of another human being

in the face of their open hatred, or rejection, or resistance, against us,

no matter how offensive we may find them to be.

It is the highest expression of the character of God we will know.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

God showed us His highest expression of love

at that point when we literally sought to destroy Him,

to eliminate Him forever from our world

in the most painful way possible.

Love looks beyond all offenses, sees the deepest need,

and reaches out to meet that need.

It is utterly oblivious to race,

or age,

or sex,

or culture,

or tattoos or ear rings or hair length or clothing styles,

or speech, or economic bracket,

or sexual orientation,

or how long it’s been since they’ve had a shower.

Love, as God defines it,

and as He demonstrates it,

is possible only through first our experiencing His love for us,

and then His living out that love through us.

Well, that’s a bit of a whirlwind survey of where we’re headed,

but it may help prepare the way.