6/1/08 Moral Excellence Pt. 4
Listen

Download (right click - Save Target As)

I know that we human beings like to believe

that we are basically logical people,

doing the things we are doing

on the basis of sound choices that grow out of sound reasoning processes.

But the truth is that

most of the time

we use our reasoning process

not to show us what we should do

but rather to justify to ourselves and to others

what we want to do.

Apart from the intervention of God in our lives

we are basically need and emotion-driven creatures

using our reasoning processes

to arm ourselves with rational explanations

for why we are doing what we feel like doing.

And nowhere is this more evident

than when it comes to those choices that we consider to be moral in nature.

I have long ago ceased being surprised

at the kind of mental gymnastics people will perform

in their efforts to provide themselves with “logical” reasons

for doing something they believe to be morally wrong

but are strongly emotionally driven to do.

I remember talking with a man many years ago

who had chosen to enter into a series of immoral sexual relationships.

But when he moved into the first of those relationships

he explained to me that he had approached his decision to do so

from an honest, open, purely logical point of view.

His Christian heritage told him

that what he was thinking of doing was wrong,

and he had to somehow reasonably, logically, rationally

get rid of that heritage.

So he told me that he had made a very reasonable, logical bargain with God.

He knew he wanted to get into this relationship,

but he also knew that the God he’d been told about as a child

did not approve of such a relationship.

So he struck a bargain with God.

He told God that, if this was really such a big deal,

and if it was really something God didn’t want him to do,

all God would have to do

is to make it so that his car wouldn’t run out of gas for the next month.

If God would do that

then He would know God was really there

and that He really didn’t want him to do what he was planing to do,

and he wouldn’t do it.

Then he went out and drove his car until it ran out of gas,

which he then took as logical proof

that God either wasn’t there or didn’t care about what he was planning to do.

Now, we can look at that so-called reasoning process

and see it for what it so obviously is -

simply a desperate, pathetic attempt

to find some pseudo-logical reason

for doing what he’d already decided he was going to do anyway,

but the truth is that in our own way

we all at times follow similar approaches.

With all of us

there are some places in our lives

where our fears,

or our emotional wounds,

or our desperate attempts to meet some need in our lives,

or deeply imbedded voices from our past

drives us to fantastic and utterly illogical “reasoning” processes

so that we can justify to ourselves

some choice we feel we simple must make in order to meet our needs.

And to understand the process

that our Lord sometimes has to lead us through

in His attempts to bring us into true freedom in our lives

let me offer you a story that might help.

It’s the story about a little boy in a daycare center

in a large city on a day when a strong earthquake hits the city.

The earthquake hits without warning,

jolt after hideous jolt,

turning the city into a terrified panic in a matter of seconds.

Both children and adults in the third floor Day Care Center

shriek in terror as the floor heaves beneath them

and the exterior brick wall shifts and then crumbles into ruins,

leaving all those inside instantly exposed to the billowing dust and disintegration surrounding them.

Four year old Sammy has no idea what he’s suppose to do

or where he’s suppose to go.

All of his “safe” people are screaming and running away from him.

He grips his teddy bear tightly

as chunks of ceiling tile crash onto the heaving floor in front of him.

He turns around and sees the teacher’s desk pushed up against the wall

with just enough room under it for him to crawl inside.

He moves as far under the desk as he can get,

then curls into a tiny terrified ball with both arms tightly wrapped around his little stuffed friend.

The search and rescue workers don’t arrive on the scene for a child’s eternity.

The dust and confusion has subsided some,

but the building, or what’s left of it,

continues to shift and crumble around the boy.

Each time another section of wall gives way

or another chunk of debris from the floors above comes crashing down

Sammy pushes himself harder under the desk.

He can hear the trucks and the commotion down below.

He sees the extension ladder placed against the side of the building,

then he sees the fireman’s head peering over the edge.

The boy doesn’t make a sound.

He just keeps himself huddled

in what seems to him to be the only safe place in the whole world.

When the fireman finally spots the little fellow

he knows there is no way the crumbling floor between himself and the boy will hold his weight.

In a matter of minutes

this whole section of the building will collapse.

The boy’s only hope of rescue

depends upon the fireman being able to coax the boy out from under the desk,

across the crumbling floor, and into his arms.

He calls to the boy to come.

Sammy looks at the man,

but doesn’t move, doesn’t answer.

The thought of leaving his boy-sized cave

is simply not an option.

Here at least he feels safe.

“Son, listen to me!

I can’t get to you so you’ll have to come to me.

I need you to crawl out from under that desk and come to me here.

Don’t be afraid.

If you trust me I’ll get you out of here.

Come on now,

come on out.

It’s not safe where you are.

I know it feels safe under there,

but this building is going to collapse

and you have to let me help you out of there.”

The boy listens to the man’s words,

then he looks at the distance between himself and his rescuer.

He feels the solid wood of the desk against his back.

No, this is better,

this is safe,

this is what he needs.

He shakes his head, hugs his teddy bear,

and squeezes himself more tightly against the inside of the desk.

He’ll just stay here until his daddy comes to get him.

The fireman continues without success to call to the boy,

urging him to leave his hiding place.

Then, suddenly some major support pillar from down below gives way,

causing the floor under the desk to shift violently.

The shift snaps the desk’s wooden legs, causing it to drop nearly six inches.

The top of the desk cracks Sammy on the head

and the edge of the now legless desk catches two of the boy’s tiny fingers,

smashing them against the floor.

Sammy lets out a scream,

yanks his now bloodied hand free,

drops his teddy bear and scampers as fast as he can go

out of his hiding place and into the arms of his savior.

That’s not unlike our situation when our Lord

begins to work on developing

practical moral excellence in our lives.

At some points in our lives

we are crouching in fear

under a crumpled-up desk

on a foundation that’s about to give way under our feet.

Like that little boy

we want very much to believe

if we just stay there long enough

it will all go away -

all the pain,

and the fear,

and the confusion,

and the chaos of our life.

Our Lord begins His healing process

right where that fireman began his.

He must force us to be honest

about the hiding place we have chosen.

It’s not safe.

It will not and cannot meet our needs.

Sometimes He’s able to do that

simply through building within us

a level of trust in His love

sufficient for us to follow what He says.

But sometimes we simply cannot leave our hiding place without a measure of pain.

We’ll come back to this next week,

but today I want us to talk about the first huge step

that God brings about in our lives

as He begins His moral rebuilding within the life of the Christian.

And before I say any more,

let me say again what I cannot repeat too often,

that this process of moral reconstruction within us

is not something we do for God,

it is a rebuilding process that God seeks to accomplish within us.

Certainly we can resist His rebuilding efforts

and make the whole process far more difficult.

But He is the One who knows what must be done

and how it can be done in our lives.

And His commitment to work for our moral freedom

is an absolute given of our life with Him on this planet.

But let me begin by sharing with you

the first huge step in this changing process

that God brings about in our lives.

The moral recreative work of God within the Christian

is a truly remarkable thing.

Before Christ enters our life

our pursuit of moral excellence

is simply a guilt or fear driven attempt to clean up our conduct

with the hope of avoiding God’s judgment or earning His acceptance.

The truth is that at the spirit level

we resist His moral authority over us,

even if we are submitting to it at certain points.

As we saw last week, the rigid, uncompromising law of God,

written within the human conscience and

and then reinforced in His written Word,

demands from us a life of absolute moral purity

and then condemns us when we fall short.

And our inner spirits just hate it.

Our desire to run our own lives,

to be the captains of our own fate,

to do it our way no matter what the cost,

drives us into a constant tension-filled antagonistic relationship

with those aspects of God’s moral law

that we consider to be unreasonable or unattainable.

In the end we find our security in keeping our moral conduct within “socially acceptable” boundaries,

while, as a society, seeking to stretch those boundaries wider and wider

so as to accommodate our preferred lifestyles.

In Romans 7 Paul compares the non-Christian’s relationship to the moral law of God

to a marriage relationship in which the moral law of God is the husband

and the human spirit is the wife.

It’s a hideous marriage relationship

in which the husband demands absolute obedience

and criticizes and condemns his wife when she falls short

while the wife fights against the husband’s authority

and yet finds herself powerless to escape.

But when we turn in faith to Christ,

recognizing our need for His forgiveness and our submission to Him

He accomplishes the most remarkable work within the human spirit.

He doesn’t just forgive us and give us a second chance to do it right.

He literally recreates us at the deepest level of our being.

Scripture uses a number of different word pictures

in an attempt to help us understand

what it is that God does within us at the spirit level when we turn to Him.

Christ described this work as being “born again” (John 3:3,7),

telling us that this new birth will result

in our having a “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6).

The author of Hebrews quoted the words of God Himself saying,

“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws upon their heart, And on their mind I will write them," (Hebrews 10:16).

Paul continues his marriage analogy in Romans seven

by saying it’s as if our first husband, the moral law of God, has died

“ so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.” (Romans 7:4).

In other words, he’s telling us that it’s sort of like

our spirits have entered into a marriage union with God Himself.

What all of these passages are telling us

is that when we turn to Christ,

God recreates us at the spirit level,

placing inside us a longing for a life of moral purity,

a life that honors our Lord.

This recreative work of God isn’t to be confused with the conscience.

The conscience, which is present inside all of us,

makes us aware of our moral accountability to God.

The conscience makes us feel like we should be good,

but the rebirth of the human spirit makes us wish we could be good.

We’re not talking here about the conscience

nor are we talking about that pathetic religious substitute

that is so common in our world today.

Nearly all religions try, at some level,

to motivate their followers to a higher moral conduct.

But all of them attempt to do it

through the use of emotional blackmail and manipulation.

Typically the religion will use social pressure,

or fear of judgement,

or guilt feelings,

or the promise of great rewards

in an attempt to improve the moral conduct of those involved.

In other words, religion tries to alter human conduct

by introducing an external emotional motivator

as the key to changing behavior.

Depending on how effectively the religion can affect or control the person’s environment,

it will bring about some degree of change,

but it is a change that lasts only as long as the social or emotional pressure can be maintained.

But the true recreative work of God

is built upon a totally different foundation.

It places within the child of God

a longing for moral purity that is rooted

not in some external social or emotion-based motivator,

but rather in the literal recreation of our spirit,

giving us a spirit that can now know and respond to the personal love of God.

This recreative work of God at the spirit level

is the foundation upon which God builds all true moral excellence into our lives.

I will never ever waste either your time or mine

in an attempt to convince you that you should try to be a better person.

God alone can accomplish that work within us.

Until He accomplishes that work within a person

all I could do is to try to create some sort of external facade in your life,

driven by some sort of emotion-based motivator.

But once God has accomplished that work in your life,

once He has given you a hunger and thirst for righteousness,

there are lots of things I can share with you

that will make it easier for you to turn that spirit longing

into a living daily reality in your life.

When Peter writes to us

he doesn’t try to create that hunger within us,

he simply assumes it’s there

and then gives us important knowledge

to better equip us to move toward that goal.

And right here is the crucial distinction I want us to see.

When we come to Christ our lives may be, (and in fact usually are),

filled with all sorts of flesh-based impulses,

and addictions and emotional responses and behavior patterns

that are completely inconsistent with true moral purity.

That’s the nature of our flesh.

But underlying all of those flesh-based responses

there is within the child of God a heart desire for a life that honors the King of kings.

In many areas of our lives

just the presence of that new heart within us

is all that is needed to bring about dramatic changes.

Our priorities,

the things that interest us and don’t interest us,

the way we view relationships,

our concepts of success and failure,

our attitudes toward other Christians and the Bible...

all of these begin to change dramatically.

God’s Spirit within our new heart literally recreates us from the inside out.

But with all of us there are certain places in our lives

where our moral conduct prior to our union with Christ

has broken down our resistance to sin

in ways that has quite simply made it impossible

for us to choose righteousness apart from the direct intervention of our Lord.

We’re like our little Sammy during that earthquake.

He was left at a critical point in his young life

with a real and urgent need for something,

anything that would make him feel more safe,

with no resource outside of himself.

With his world falling apart around him

he lunges out at the first thing he can find

that seems to relieve a little of the terror and makes him feel better.

Once he finds it, he can’t bring himself to let go of it,

even though his refusal to leave it behind

will soon bring about his own death.

We each bring with us into our life with the King

our own carefully constructed emotional caves

into which we have retreated in our frantic attempts to meet our needs outside of Christ.

They don’t really satisfy,

they simply allow us to hide from the pain

or to avoid facing the unresolved issues in our lives.

They frequently come at great cost to us

in our relationships with others and in our own sense of dignity and self-respect.

Through the eyes of the new heart within us

we can look at them and realize that

they are in every way inconsistent with the life our Lord is calling us to live.

And yet still we cannot let them go.

We have long since lost our natural protective moral resistance against them.

These are the issues Peter is addressing

when he calls us to moral excellence.

He is telling us that breaking the power of those moral lies in our lives

is the first great step in our growth with the King.

So, what have we seen this morning?

Well, first of all, we’ve seen that there are two distinctly different types of moral rebellion

that we human beings get ourselves into.

There is that defiant rebellion we looked at last week,

that “I did it my way” kind of rebellion

that’s triggered within us

by our determination to not let God tell us what we can or cannot do.

It is that defiant spirit response that,

when we hear God say to us, “THOU SHALT NOT!!!”

causes us to respond, “I’ll do whatever I want!”

And we’ve seen that this defiant moral rebellion

is resolved within us

when our spirits bow before the King

and submit to His Lordship in our lives.

At that time

our God literally recreates us at the spirit level,

giving us a hunger and a thirst for righteousness,

a longing for a life that honors and pleases our King.

It’s not a fear of judgement

but rather a love response to our God.

But then we’ve also seen

that there is another very different type of moral turmoil

at certain points in our lives,

a turmoil that I’ve tried to illustrate with our terrified little Sammy

cowering under the teacher’s desk.

There are some places in our lives

where it is not rebellion

but fear, or insecurity, or a deeply rooted lie from our past

that has driven us into self-destructive behaviors

that we may or may not recognize as destructive,

but that we feel powerless to walk away from.

And these are the places

where we are utterly dependant upon the healing and redemptive work of our Lord in our lives.

These are the places where we need Him

to intervene in our lives

in ways that make moral excellence accessible to us.

It is these areas most of all

that Peter is addressing

when he talks with us about moral excellence.

And next week we’ll pick up our study right here

and look more closely at how God goes about accomplishing that work in our lives.