5/18/08 Moral What Pt. 3

We are involved in an extended study of a remarkable passage in the first chapter of II Peter,

a passage in which Peter outlines for us

one of the major ways in which our Lord

helps us to grow in our friendship with Him.

After telling us that all that we long for the most in this life

will come to us through our growing personal friendship with our Creator,

Peter then tells us that a key means by which that friendship grows

is through our Lord sharing with us the ongoing project of become a partaker of the divine nature.

He leads us through the process of becoming more and more like God Himself.

And then, just so that we don’t get caught up in some religious stupidity,

he describes for us what that looks like.

And what it looks like

has nothing whatsoever to do

with the endless games and counterfeits

that swirl around the bottomless world of religion.

What it looks like

are very practical steps

that lead us first into greater and greater moral integrity,

and then that move us into greater and greater stability and perseverance,

and then ultimately into greater and greater ability to reach out to the lives of those around us

and bring healing and redemption into their lives through our practical love for them.

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 this morning we are going to pick up our study of this passage

with that first step following faith,

the step of moral excellence.

And, just so you’re prepared for it,

I’ll tell you right now that we are not going to rush through this first step.

I don’t yet know how many weeks we’ll spend on it,

but I will tell you that because it is the foundation upon which everything else is built

it is well worth our spending as long as we need to with this topic.

And today we’re going to do two things.

First, I want us to spend a little time understanding where we got the moral values we currently hold,

and then I want to spend a little time

talking about God’s first step

in this process of building into us

a foundation of true moral excellence.

Let me begin by reminding you of that definition of moral excellence

that I shared with you the last time we were in this study.

Moral Excellence is choosing to live within God’s moral framework because we are convinced it is the only way our needs can be met.

Every one of us bring with us

into our relationship with Christ

some areas of moral confusion -

some places where we are absolutely convinced

that what God says in the area of morality

is just a fuzz off center -

out of touch with the “real world”,

or not applicable to our own unique circumstances,

or not accessible for us personally

given who we are and where we’ve been.

I find personal moral codes

to be fascinating things.

Each one of us here this morning

have our own unique

tailor-made moral code -

our own personal convictions about

where the absolute moral boundaries

actually are in life -

what can

and cannot be done

and why.

Nearly every human being has some moral boundaries

that they feel are universal in nature.

Years ago when the Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma

the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a proclamation

condemning the bombing.

When I heard that I thought to myself,

‟Well now, there’s a courageous moral stand if I ever heard one! I wonder how they ever mustered the votes for that!”

Apparently even the most corrupt politicians

still feel that it is morally wrong

to arbitrarily kill several hundred innocent children and adults.

There are a number of forces

that have been actively involved

in shaping the moral codes

that each of us bring with us into our friendship with Christ.

I can think of at least 5 major forces in that process.

#1. The conscience:

Every human being is born with a God-given inner moral compass

which Scripture calls the conscience.

We come into this world knowing in our spirits

that there are moral boundaries to life.

It’s part of our basic operating system

given to us by a loving God

who wants to protect us from those self-destructive behaviors

that work directly against the way

He designed us to operate.

This basic moral conscience

is totally distinct from parental teaching

or cultural forces of any kind.

Why does your child’s face go all funny when he tries to tell you a lie?

Why does he or she feel it would be best to sneak into the kitchen

to steal a cookie

when mommy is somewhere else in the house?

Why does a person find such intense inner resistance

the first time he or she crosses certain boundaries of sexual conduct?

Because we’re wired that way by God Himself.

Certainly the conscience can be seared -

it can be deadened through repeated choices on our part to violate it,

but with all of us it serves as our first introduction to moral right and wrong.

#2. Probably the second most powerful factor in shaping our personal concept of morality

is the home environment in which we are raised.

What dad and mom think is OK

we will assume is OK unless there is some other compelling reason to question it.

What dad and mom say is wrong,

we will assume is wrong

unless something motivates us to reexamine it in our adult years.

I think the relationship between our conscience and our parents

is very similar to the relationship between the 10 commandments

and Moses in the Old Testament.

When Moses came down from that mountain in the Old Testament

and stood before the nation of Israel

he brought with him 10 brief statements of moral right and wrong:

You shall have no other gods before you.

You shall not make any graven image.

You shall not bear false witness.

You shall not covet.

You shall not commit adultery...etc.

That’s like our conscience - fundamental boundaries of right and wrong -

lines etched within our spirit

that we know should not be crossed.

Moses then took those 10 basic boundaries

and, under the leadership of God’s Spirit, produced the pages and pages

of detailed rules for life

that we find recorded in the Levitical law.

LEV 19:9-10, 13-15 'Now when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the Lord your God...You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning. You shall not curse a deaf man, nor place a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall revere your God; I am the Lord...You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.

Do you see what Moses was doing?

He was taking those 10 basic commandments and applying them to the business of daily life.

This is one of the key roles of parenting - to build a world view

that provides the child with a system

for interpreting that inner moral conscience.

You should not tell a lie,

but you have a right to protect your personal privacy.

You should not covet things or possessions,

but it is good to work hard to better

your living situation

or environment.

It is our parents most of all

who teach us through their lives

how to make such fine distinctions between moral right and wrong.

#3. A third major influence on our personal moral value system is the culture in which we are raised.

When we turn on the TV

or read a magazine,

or watch a film,

what are we being told about what is good and what is bad?

Everything we watch,

everything we hear has within it a basic moral value system,

a moral value system that will impact our own values at some level.

#4. A fourth powerful influence in shaping our personal moral value system

grows out of our longing to meet our needs.

Without getting into an involved study here, let me just say that God has designed us all

with a wide variety of human needs.

We have obvious physical needs,

needs for food, water, air, warmth.

And we also have deep emotional and psychological needs,

needs for love,

dignity,

a sense of worth and productivity, and security, and so forth.

Prior to our union with Christ,

during that first phase of our life

when we are operating with ourselves as the center of our own life,

the full weight of figuring out

how to meet all of those needs

rests squarely, totally upon our own shoulders.

To complicate matters,

our own spirit resistance to God

makes us unwilling to trust Him

for input on how those needs can be met.

As a result,

there are times in every person’s life

when we will feel like we must alter our moral value system

in order to meet some need in our life.

When faced with what we believe is a choice between

meeting our needs

or remaining faithful to our inner sense of morality

we will go with what we think will meet our needs

and ‟adjust” our moral code to fit the behavior.

#5. The final force affecting whatever personal moral system we develop

that I want to mention this morning

is what Paul calls ‟the law of sin and of death”.

We enter this world with a spirit

that just hates having anyone

or anything boss us around.

Why, when you say to you toddler,

‟Don’t touch the plant!”

does he watch you like a hawk

and as soon as your back is turned

run over and poke his little finger through a leaf?

Why, when I say to you, ‟Don’t touch the chair in front of you”,

do you suddenly find yourself

wrestling with this ridiculous compulsion to touch that chair?

There are times when we will do exactly

what God says we should not do

simply because He said we should not do it,

and we will shape our personal moral value system

to allow that behavior.

OK,

all of these forces go together to cause

each of us to end up with a moral value system that at some points

is radically different from what we see God offering us through His Word.

The problem comes in that

no matter what variation of morality

we personally may come up with

it doesn’t change the way things really are.

We were carefully designed by God

in His own moral image,

and whenever we choose to act

in ways that violate that moral image

it always ends up hurting us

and those around us.

There are two fundamental characteristics about immorality that are unchangeable facts of human existence:

#1. All immorality is always ultimately self-destructive behavior.

#2. Immoral behavior is highly addicting -

it has hooks in it,

hooks that can sink deep into our personalities and hold us tight.

And the remarkable thing is that,

once we’ve been hooked,

even when we can logically see the destructive force of our actions,

we often cannot break its power in our lives.

So:

It should come as no surprise

that JOB #1,

the first great project God offers us

when we come to Him

is the project of reshaping our moral foundation

into conformity to the truth,

into conformity to the way we were designed by Him to operate.

It’s non-negotiable

because He loves us far too much

to allow us to continue in self-destructive,

addicting behaviors

that work to our own down-fall.

I believe one of the chief dangers

or mental traps at this first level

is believing that God’s goal is to get us to act better,

to shape up our performance.

We see Him doing things to get us to stop lying

or to stop cheating

or to stop our immoral sexual behavior

or to stop our outbursts of rage.

That’s how we parent our children, by focusing on their external actions that offend us,

and that’s how we assume God must parent us as well.

‟Stop fighting with your brother!”

‟Stop screaming!”

‟Stop throwing those toys at the window!”

‟Now I’m taking you into the store with me and I want you to behave while we’re in there, do you hear me?”

Why do we say things like that? Why does it matter that the child behaves well in the store

any more than that he behaves well in the car?

Or in the house?

Because we are concerned about

what other people may think about us

when they see our child misbehaving.

In fact,

if we were honest we would have to admit

that a huge amount of the parenting

and especially the disciplining we do

is motivated

not by a pure love and concern for the child,

but rather out of a concern for what other people may think

or out of our own irritation or frustration

or out of our own selfish concerns.

God, on the other hand,

has no such concerns.

When He chose to muck through the sewers of human existence

in a human body for thirty-some years

and then allowed Himself to be dragged off

to the public dump

and be nailed to a cross

it’s pretty obvious that preserving His image was not His driving motivation.

When He deals with the whole issue of

moral excellence in us

He does so, not because He wants to change our outer behavior,

but because He wants to bring us into true freedom.

Let me put it this way -

when God builds a foundation of moral excellence into our lives

He does it not because He wants to ‟shape us up”,

He does it

because He longs to set us free

to be the people He designed us to be.

There may be no more pain-filled phase of Christian growth

than this first step of moral excellence

because it is at this point that our Lord must face us

with the inescapable reality of the corruption within us.

And there is no area of self-knowledge

that we try harder to hide

both from ourselves and from others than this one.

And unless we understand what God is doing and why He is doing it,

this can be a terrifying experience for the child of God.

When the Apostle Paul reached this point in his own life,

discovering that ‟...evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good...” (Romans 7:21),

his initial agonizing response was to cry out,

‟Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24).

When God brought Isaiah to this point,

in preparation for his remarkable prophetic ministry that was to follow,

Isaiah’s only response was,

‟Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." (Isaiah 6:5).

Developing true moral excellence in our lives

is an impossibility

until God can first bring us to the place

where we will acknowledge our need for that moral excellence.

Several weeks ago I shared with you

a point in my own life when I felt myself overwhelmed

with all of the junk inside me.

When I walked along that mountain path in the Swiss Alps,

tears streaming down my face,

my heart aching within me,

I felt like a hideous failure in the family of God.

Though at the time in my own mind my future seemed bleak

and any hope of usefulness as God’s child nonexistent,

I understand now that every hope my Lord had for my future with Him

depended upon my willingness

to allow Him to face me with my desperate need for true moral excellence.

And here’s one of those remarkable things about our walk with the King...

Even though we instinctively run in terror

from the truth about ourselves,

apart from that honest realization of who we were prior to our union with Christ,

and who we would continue to be

apart from His daily healing, transforming work in our lives,

the Christian life becomes nothing more than religious games and image-building.

Those of you who have listened to me for any length of time

know by now that the most effective hiding place we can ever find

from ourselves and our God

is in the world or religion.

It is what religion does best -

clothing us in the appearance of piety

while allowing us to skillfully avoid the real destructive issues in our lives.

And bringing us into a point of honesty

about the areas of moral weakness within us

is the foundation block

upon which all the rest of God’s work within us and through us must be built.

When I was a child our family attended a church

in which every Sunday the entire congregation stood and read in unison

a statement acknowledging that ‟we sin daily in word, thought, and deed”.

The statement went on to affirm our gratitude

for the grace of God as revealed through the death of Christ for that sin.

Of course I can appreciate the intent of that congregational confession,

but rarely does that kind of group acknowledgment of immorality

bring about true awareness of our own personal battles with evil.

It’s been both my experience and my observation

that God has a far more effective technique

to help us face our moral corruption.

Rather than confronting us

with the massive quantity of selfish, self-centered, sinful attitudes and actions that flood our lives,

He often selects just one specific moral weakness,

the one that we have been hiding, justifying, defending, rationalizing, disguising, and avoiding up to that point in our walk with Him.

It doesn’t matter what it is.

It could be our uncontrolled temper,

or some physical or mental addiction,

or some area of sexual immorality,

or an unforgiving heart toward someone who has wronged us,

or a lust for power or possessions or security,

or a determination to not submit to the human authorities in our lives,

or any of the countless other sins that have the power to dominate our lives.

Then, having selected the tool for the work He must do,

our King skillfully maneuvers around our carefully constructed protective defenses,

placing us in a position in which we are suddenly forced to face this evil within.

When that confrontation first takes place

we instinctively recoil at what we have seen.

To us our sin appears to be the most hideous, horrible thing we could ever imagine.

‟Wretched man that I am!...”

The truth is

that sin is simply representative of the whole sin problem

that we have brought with us into our relationship with God.

That point of moral confrontation between us and our Lord

may be the most crucial point in the whole process of Christian growth.

If we correctly respond

to the light He’s given us about ourselves,

recognizing His call to accept His program

for developing moral stability in our lives,

He is then freed to begin the process of moral transformation within us.

Along with Paul, we find ourselves proclaiming,

‟It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. And yet for this reason I found mercy, in order that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience, as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (I Timothy 1:15-17).

Gone forever is the critical, judgmental spirit of the self-righteous saint.

Gone, too, is the foolish reliance

upon our own ability to generate a quality of life

that we think can make us worthy of His love or qualified for His service.

And in its place, perhaps for the first time,

we understand what Paul meant when he talked about ‟... this grace in which we stand...” (Romans 5:2),

and we find our hearts ‟...overflowing with gratitude...” (Colossians 2:7).

If, however, we respond to that revelation of personal evil

by refusing to face honestly

our need for the development of moral excellence,

we will become the victim of one of three possible tragic alternatives.

We may, like the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32),

close our eyes to the true issues of evil God has shown us,

and invest our efforts into creating a performance-based facade

that generates an impressive external image hiding a corrupt inner nature.

Or we may plunge into a life of guilt-driven penance,

frantically attempting to generate a volume of goodness

that we hope is sufficient to atone for the evil we have seen inside us.

Or, rather than reaching out to our Lord

for the redemptive healing work He offers,

we may just give up, allowing the evil to consume our lives.

The Apostle Paul shares God’s alternative with us in 2 Corinthians 12:9.

After being faced with his own personal thorn in the flesh,

having brought that thorn to God, he says,

‟And (God) has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

He doesn’t deny the weakness.

He doesn’t hide from it.

What he does do is to recognize that here, most of all,

he will discover the healing, transforming, sustaining power of Christ in his life.

Christ’s program of growth for each of us

begins with the establishment of moral excellence in our lives.

The beginning of that process

is His confronting us with the need for moral excellence

by facing us with the existence of our own ongoing battle with evil.

Once that painful first step is accomplished,

the rebuilding process can begin.