6/15/08 The Flexible Framework
Listen

During the past few weeks

we’ve spent a great deal of time

talking about the first great project our Lord shares with us

as He seeks to build His friendship with us as His children.

If you are new with us,

it will help you to know that we are being guided through this study

by the Apostle Peter.

We are studying the first chapter of his second letter in the New Testament,

a section in which he tells us

that everything we will ever need for life and godliness

will come to us as a byproduct of our growing personal friendship with Christ Himself.

He then goes on to tell us

that this friendship grows

as we share with our Lord

the process of “becoming a partaker of the divine nature”.

From there Peter then leads us through the progressive steps in that process.

And the first step is that of our Lord building into our lives

what he calls “moral excellence”.

That’s how we got to where we are.

And if you’ve been here the past few weeks

you know that we’ve been growing in our understanding

of both why and how He goes about accomplishing that rebuilding process.

The “why” grows directly out of His endless love for us.

He wants us to know how human love relationships work.

He wants us to be able to live within any culture,

at any time in history

without fear or anxiety

because we know both what works and what does not

in our relationships with those around us.

He wants us to know how we can go about meeting

the second greatest need of our existence - the need for strong human love relationships.

The first greatest need, of course,

is our need to know the reality of the personal love of God for us.

And as we saw a few weeks ago,

God’s moral commandments reveal to us

the foundation for all healthy love relationships.

It is the concrete slab

upon which we can then build our friendships without fear.

That’s the why.

And then we’ve talked some about the how as well.

We’ve seen that our moral battles fall into two distinctly different areas.

Before we come to Christ

there are times when a determination to run our own lives

drives us into rebellion against the moral commandments of God

simply because we react to His authority over us.

But once we come to Christ

those types of battles quickly go by the way

because we begin to discover the reality of His love for us

and we understand that it was that love that caused Him

to draw the moral lines He has drawn.

But there are also some areas in all of our lives

in which we have been hooked by the addictive power of sin,

places where we have reached out to some form of immorality,

not in rebellion,

but in a desperate attempt to meet some need in our life.

And even though our attempts brought us bondage rather than freedom

it is a bondage that we cannot break free from on our own.

It is in these areas especially

that, because our God loves us,

He will intervene in our lives,

exercising His perfect divine discipline

in ways that help us to break the power of evil in our lives.

The author of Hebrews said it perfectly.

HEB 12:6, 10 For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,...but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

And when we see what He’s doing

we will see it as one of the greatest expressions of His deep personal love for us

that we will ever know.

OK, that’s a quick summary of where we’ve been

as we’ve looked at Peter’s call to moral excellence.

But before we leave this and move on to the next step

I want to take one more morning

to offer a very quick, concise statement of what true moral excellence looks like.

And perhaps the best way for me to do this

is to return to a couple of drawings

that have been a part of my life and my thinking

for nearly 40 years now.

They are drawings I put together many, many years ago

at the point in my life

at which I first saw what God was really doing for His children

with the moral commandments He’s given us.

In our attempts as a society to free ourselves from our sense of guilt

and from our accountability to our Creator

we have thrown out the belief that moral absolutes even exist

and replaced it with the bold affirmation

that every person has the right to choose any life-style or value system they want.

We have believed that this great step “forward”

is a wonderful gift to our children and their children after them -

giving them the “freedom” to live any way they want to live.

But the truth is

what we’ve really done is to create the most terrifying,

brutal world we could ever imagine,

a world in which each of our children

must now start from nothing

and, through trial and error, attempt to figure out what works and what doesn’t in life.

We ask them to do

what no human being has ever been qualified to do,

and in the process they sometimes get deeply wounded by their misguided choices,

and frequently discover too late

that what feels good and what brings true freedom in life

are two very different things.

The freedom to choose anything we want to choose

is sometimes the greatest enemy of true freedom we will ever know.

Which brings me to my drawing,

the one that illustrates for me

what God is doing for us through His moral commandments.

What He’s doing

is revealing to us

the protective moral framework

that guarantees true freedom in our life,

the framework that marks the lines between freedom and self-destruction.

What it does is to create for us

a life-framework

that allows us do anything we want,

to be anything we want,

to live any way we want within the framework

without ever having to fear destruction to either ourselves or others.

It is the most remarkable head start on life we could ever imagine,

and when we finally really see what God is doing for us through it,

it gives us both a security and an advantage over the rest of our culture that is remarkable.

It is a big part of what our Lord was talking about

when He said,

JOH 8:31-32, 34, 36... "If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. ... Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin... If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

It is what David was talking about when he said,

PSA 40:2-3 He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay; And He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm. And He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; Many will see and fear, And will trust in the Lord.

And bringing us into the security and freedom of this protective framework

is where the healing work of our Lord Jesus Christ in our lives always begins.

To your faith supply moral excellence...

I was in my mid 20's when I first saw all of this -

when I saw the framework,

and realized what it was and what God was doing for us through it.

And it affected me so deeply

that I wanted to find some way of hanging onto it,

some way of stating it to myself in a concise form.

So what I did

was to go through the entire New Testament,

beginning with Matthew and going right through Revelation,

and I made a list of every moral commandment I found.

Then I took them all

and grouped them into categories

and tried to state in a concise sentence

the basic principle contained in each group.

I came up with five basic principles

that help me to better relate to what I see God giving us through this framework.

In the rest of the time we have together this morning

I’d like to do two things.

First, I want to share with you those five principles

because they are the easiest way I have

of offering you a simple definition of the protective boundaries our God offers us.

And then, second,

I need to offering you one additional drawing

that will help you to better understand

how God uses this basic moral framework

in each of our lives personally.

OK, first let me share with you

those five principles.

The first grows out of the fact that

true morality is inseparably linked

to the way we approach our relationships with one another.

In fact, that’s an understatement.

We’ve already seen in this study

that at it’s very core

all true morality

is simply God sharing with us what it means for us love another person.

All true morality is deeply relational.

The first major principle, then, in God's moral framework is this:

1. In God's economy, building love relationships with one another is always more important than our rights, our things, or our ideas.

It is our rights, our things, and our ideas

that we most commonly tend to elevate above our relationships.

This is what gives birth to the strife, covetousness, disputes, stealing, envy, malice, jealousy, greed, murder, gossip, and so forth that scar our human relationships.

And when God begins rebuilding the moral foundations of our lives

it is not surprising that He begins

by causing us to rethink our human relationships,

and especially to reexamine what things we have chosen to place above those relationships.

Placing relationships above our rights and our things

is pretty straightforward.

At least, it’s easier for those of us in the Christian community

to see and accept the truth.

But when it comes to the world of religion

it’s sometimes much harder for us to choose to elevate our relationships above our ideas.

There may be no group of people alive

who are quicker to shatter relationships because of ideas than are those within the Christian community.

We don’t call them “ideas”, of course,

we call them “doctrines”.

And the dark side of the history of the church

is the history of group after group of believers

elevating ideas above their relationships with one another.

And I’m certainly not suggesting that we should discard our doctrines,

but I am saying that when we allow our belief systems

to become more precious to us than a workable relationship with a fellow believer

we have failed.

For many years now I mentally divided up my fellow Christians into two distinctly different groups.

First, there are those who are in a learning mode, trying to understand some doctrinal truth.

If they ask me for my input on some area,

I eagerly share with them my perspective.

Second, there are those believers who have already reached some level of conviction

about their doctrinal beliefs.

If, in my conversation with them,

I discover that we differ in some area,

I simply will not discuss that area of doctrine with them.

I avoid it at all costs.

The relationship is far more important than proving who’s right and who’s wrong.

And given how unhealthy our culture is in the area of relationships

I cannot in good conscience offer this first principle

without also offering a strong word of clarification.

In God's economy,

while building love relationships is more important than our rights, our things, or our ideas,

we are never to “sacrifice everything”

in order to preserve some co-dependent bond with another person.

The kind of love relationships we are called to build

are clearly defined and illustrated throughout Scripture.

They must be founded upon such things as honesty,

accountability,

appropriate confrontation,

sensitivity,

respect for the rights and privacy of the other person,

and forgiveness, just to mention a few.

To accept the call to live within God's protective moral framework

is to accept the call to learn how to love.

But it is not a “love” of our own definition,

formed in the image of one of the sick substitutes

being peddled by the world around us.

It must be the real thing as modeled and communicated by our Creator.

Our calling is not simply to build relationships,

but to build them according to the pattern and standards outlined in Scripture.

But let me move on quickly with these last four principles

so I can still take us where I want us to go before our time is gone.

The second principle is one we looked at in some depth not too long ago.

It is probably the one our flesh most violently reacts against when we first encounter it,

but one that forms a major pillar in God’s work in our lives.

The second crucial principle in God's moral framework, then,

is the understanding that human authority is God's tool, used by Him to accomplish His will in our lives.

Scripture abounds with the assurance of God's commitment

to use the human authorities in our lives

as tools to help accomplish His will.

Paul boldly affirms in Romans 13:1, “There is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God,”

and he assures us in Romans 13:4 that human authority “is a minister of God to you for good.”

Peter picks up this same theme in 1 Peter 2:13-15:

Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right. For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.

Understanding and accepting this truth

is a crucial protective portion of the moral framework given to us by our Lord.

The third principle is another one that many people struggle with,

especially if they have confused sex and love

and have attempted to meet their love needs through sex.

That, of course, is one of Satan’s favorite slight-of-hands,

telling us that sex can be a doorway into true love

or even that it is true love.

Those who have bought into this lie

have all ultimately discovered that not only can sex not produce deep, healthy, durable love relationships,

but when misused

it can be cruel and destructive to the extreme.

The third principle, then, in God's moral framework

is that sex is a special means of communication

within the context of a lifelong marriage commitment.

God did not just happen to plug sex into the marriage relationship

because He didn't know where else to put it.

He designed sex for marriage,

and it does not fit well or work correctly in any other human relationship.

The fourth principle will, at first,

seem to some of you to be rather insignificant or unimportant

when placed next to the others.

If you find that thought crossing your mind,

it is only because you have been blinded

to what is perhaps the greatest single tool any of us will every possess

for accomplishing either good or evil during our lifetime.

One of the greatest surprises to me personally

when I made that first list of all of the moral commandments

was to discover how much God says to us about our speech-

our verbal communication with one another.

During the remainder of this day

you will speak a lot of words to a number of people.

Each of those words,

and the attitudes with which you speak them

will impact the hearers’ lives for either good or evil.

In some cases

the words you speak

will literally shape the self-concept of another person,

and some of them will either reveal or blind them to the reality of the love of God.

And so, the fourth principle of this biblical moral framework

is the understanding that, when correctly used, our speech will always edify the listener.

The word edify means “to build up.”

When we use our speech correctly, it has a positive impact on those who hear,

and the way we use our speech

is a more profoundly moral issue than most of us would ever realize.

And the fifth and final principle

concerns our longing to numb the pain of life

or find some temporary way of escape through the misuse of alcohol or drugs.

God has designed us to live in a spirit union with His Spirit,

a union in which His Spirit literally gives moment by moment leadership to our lives.

The final principle, then, in God's moral framework

deals with the calling God has given us

to establish and maintain healthy spirit leadership over the soul and body.

The principle is this: We are never to willfully yield the leadership of our life to anything or anyone other than the Holy Spirit.

Those five principles have helped me to better understand

what God is saying to me and why

when He offers me His moral framework.

But there is one additional step we need to take here

in order to complete the picture.

You see, these five principles are just that -

they are principles, not specific moral laws.

By that I mean that knowing how to apply them to our lives on a daily basis

is impossible without constant daily interaction with

and openness to the Spirit of God in our lives.

It is fine to know that relationships are more important than our rights, our things, or our ideas,

but what does that mean in the context of each new human interaction we face?

When is it best to overlook another person’s offense against us,

and when is it better for the relationship to confront?

How do we set our priorities in relationships

and establish and maintain correct and healthy boundaries?

Our Lord once gave a parable

that perfectly illustrates

the true nature of our walk with Him on a daily basis.

He said,

LUK 5:37-38 "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.”

The illustration is lost on us

because we no longer put wine into skins.

In their culture

new wine had to be put into a fresh new wineskin

because the skin was flexible - it stretched and expanded as the wine fermented.

And old wineskin would be brittle and hard

and the pressure from the fermentation process would cause it to burst.

What our Lord wanted us to know

was that in His design for His people

He was not going to do what was done under the Old Covenant.

He wasn’t going to give us a rigid set of rules governing every detail of life.

What He has done is to give us a basic moral framework of principles

and then He has placed His Spirit within each of us,

assuring us that His Spirit will then teach us how to apply those principles

to every new situation,

every new relationship.

And both the framework and the Spirit are essential.

Without the framework we would not be able to recognize the voice of the Spirit

from all of the deceiving voices around us.

Whenever we hear a message or a voice

that tells us we must step outside of the framework in order to meet some need

we know we’re being lied to.

Without the revealed moral framework

we are incapable of distinguishing between the voice of the Holy Spirit

and the voice of Satan.

But then given that framework,

we are utterly dependant upon the inner voice of the Spirit

to teach us how to live out true morality moment by moment.

Which brings me to my second illustration.

In God’s design,

if His Spirit is able to accomplish what He intends,

He then takes that universal moral framework

and expands it and applies it in an ever-changing way

for our unique personalities,

and cultural settings,

and personal strengths,

and unique areas of weakness,

and specific people-projects given to us by Him.

What this means

is that there are times

when God’s Spirit will write a personal boundary in our life

because it serves His purpose in what He wants to do in and through us at that time.

There was a year in my life

when He told me not wear a watch

because, in the culture I was in at the time, my obsession with times and schedules

was a hindrance to the relationships He wanted me to build.

For me, at the time,

not wearing the watch

was every bit as binding on me

as God’s commandment not to murder or not to commit adultery.

But it was for me alone, non-transferable.

So here’s where we end up.

1^st, we are to be rock-solid in our understanding of

and commitment to the universal moral framework given to us by our God.

2^nd. we are to actively cooperate with the Holy Spirit

as He seeks to expand and apply that framework to our unique life settings.

And 3^rd, we are to offer absolute freedom to one another

for each individual to apply that moral core under the Holy Spirit’s leadership.