07-20-14 The Lie That Binds

We are involved in an ongoing study

about the freedom Christ offers His people.

Our study began several months ago

with a statement made by Christ

to His people

recorded for us in John 8:32,

...and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

That single statement

set the foundation for everything we have done since then.

Through that statement

we came to understand the kind of freedom Christ offers His people -

not the false freedom offered by our culture giving us the “right”

to live out our bondage,

but the promise,

and hope,

and growing reality of the true freedom that breaks the power of that bondage in our lives.

And through the statement of Christ’s

we also saw the crucial link

between freedom and truth.

Our freedom becomes a reality in our lives

to the degree we understand

and accept

and build our lives upon the truth.

From there our study moved on

to the 6^th chapter of Romans

where Paul has been revealing to us

some of those areas of truth

we need to understand

in order for us to experience the freedom we long for.

The passage we have been studying is Romans 6:11-14,

Rom. 6:11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Rom. 6:12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,

Rom. 6:13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

Rom. 6:14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

And the very first statement we encountered in that passage

has confronted us with how far from the truth our thinking really is.

Paul says, Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

A few weeks ago

we spent a whole morning

talking about why it is so difficult

for us to hear that truth.

We look at our inconsistent behavior,

we look at our ongoing battles with sin,

we look at so many of the attitudes

and the emotions

and the actions that are so much less than what we long for,

and a statement that says, Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus seems ridiculous to us.

And because we continue to define our true identity

on the basis of what we experience

rather than on the basis

of what our God says about us

we continue to live out

the reality of those lies in our lives.

In the course of our study two weeks ago

I mentioned that the Christian who continues to live

in bondage to sin in some area of his or her life does so

because he or she has allowed two powerful lies

to go unchallenged in their thinking.

#1. They believe their sin is consistent with who they really are -

they believe it fits with their perception of their true identity.

They look at themselves and say,

“This is who I am.

It may not be consistent with what God says,

but I can’t change who I am

and He understands and takes me just the way I am.”

And #2, they believe that their sin

is necessary in order for their needs to be met.

Using a severely twisted concept of grace

they believe that one of God’s primary goals through Christ

was to free us as Christians to do

whatever we think we need to do

in order to attempt to meet

whatever needs we have

in whatever ways we think will be effective.

Now, we have spend quite a bit of time so far on the first of those lies.

We have talked about the way in which

God not only forgives our sins when we come to Him through Christ,

but He actually recreates us at the deepest level of our being,

placing within us a totally new identity

in the form of an inner spirit

that is righteous,

and pure,

and absolutely and eternally holy.

You’ve heard me talk frequently

about they way in which God addresses us as His “holy ones”.

Through His Word

and through His Spirit

He then seeks to reshape our perception of ourselves

in order to bring it into conformity

with the change that has already taken place within us.

And the foundation of God’s whole program for freeing us

from the power of sin in our lives

is a foundation that rests upon our accepting the reality of our new identity in Christ.

It does not mean we deny the reality

of our ongoing battles with the evil in our lives,

but it does mean we begin those battles

by allowing not the evil

but our God to shape our perception of ourselves.

When Paul allowed us to listen in

on his own discovery of this truth

as he recorded it for us in Romans 7,

when he finally came to a clear understanding

of the way things really are for the Christian,

he said in Rom. 7:21 “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.”

I consider that to be among the most remarkable statements in all of Scripture.

Paul does not deny the existence

of the ongoing evil impulses within him,

but neither does he allow that evil

to shape his self-concept.

Paul describes Himself in Christ as

... the one who wants to do good.

That is who Paul is at the deepest level.

He is holy.

He loves righteousness.

He longs constantly, perfectly for the reality of that righteousness in his life.

That is what He was talking about

in the passage we’ve been studying

where he calls us to consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Paul says, “The real me is the one who wants to do good.”

But at the same time he honestly acknowledges

that evil is still present within his physical body,

fighting against his true new identity.

Now, we’re not done with this concept yet,

but I want us to spend the rest of this morning looking at the second of those two lies,

the lie of believing that our sin is necessary

in order for our needs to be met.

Those of you who have read The Grace Exchange

will recognize where we’re going from here on,

but any discussion of Christ’s efforts

to break the bondage of sin in our lives would be incomplete

without our talking about

a powerful

and remarkable lie Satan uses in the lives of Christians.

In fact, when it comes to our battle for moral purity

I believe this one lie

has more power to defeat the Christian

than anything else Satan has ever used against the people of God.

You may not have become fully aware of it,

but a dramatic change took place in our attitude toward sin

and in our battle with sin

at the time we entered the family of God through our faith in Christ.

Before we knew our Lord

there were times when we would fight against Him

and against what He said to us about morality

simply because our spirits were in rebellion against Him

and we resented His intrusion into our lives.

But once that re-creative process took place within us,

and once He placed within us

a new heart,

a new inner spirit,

along with that new heart

came a love for righteousness

and a longing to live a life pleasing to our Lord.

Before we come to Christ

we think we should be good.

After we come to Christ

we wish we could be good.

Some of the most miserable,

unhappy people in the world

are not the non-Christians

who are living out their full-blown,

self-centered rebellion against God.

Certainly they reap the ongoing consequences of their rebellion,

which will make life more difficult for them.

But there is no great tension between their inner spirit

and the way in which they are living.

No.

Some of the most unhappy people in the world

are Christians

who have been pulled back into old patterns of sinful behavior.

They live with a recreated spirit within them

that continues to hunger for purity,

and righteousness,

and a life pleasing to God.

And the tension created between

how they are living

and what their spirit longs for

creates tremendous emotional,

mental,

psychological,

and even physical stress within them.

But why in the world would a Christian

who has discovered the reality of God’s love,

and tasted of the joys of righteous living,

ever return again to those old patterns?

What kind of attack could Satan use

that would have sufficient power

to motivate the child of God to go against his own heart longings for righteousness?

A number of years ago I was in a conversation with a young lady

who was just beginning a new career,

a career she was very excited about.

She was a Christian,

she was married,

she and her husband had children,

and her husband was also involved in his own career.

As I talked with her

I could see that her new career

was something she enjoyed very much.

In fact, for several months

she had been pouring herself into it

at least six and often seven days a week.

But the stress of husband, children, and career was becoming intense.

She couldn’t do it all.

No one could.

Then she made a statement that

when I heard it

made me fear for her.

She said, “I have decided to take Saturdays off because my husband needs me.”

On the surface it seemed like it was just the right sort of choice

for a Christian wife to make.

But when she said it

I feared that perhaps THE LIE

had taken root in her

and was already bearing fruit.

A few months later

I heard she was filing for divorce.

Now, before I share with you

what this powerful lie is

and explain why it’s so powerful in the lives of Christians,

I need to first offer a little background on human needs.

And the easiest way for me to do this

is through 5 statements.

#1. When God created us

He designed us with a wide variety of human needs.

We have physical needs.

We need food, water, shelter, air, warmth.

We have emotional and psychological needs.

We need to feel safe.

We need to know we are loved.

We need to know we have purpose and significance and value.

We need to feel productive,

we need to be able to play, etc, etc.

We have intellectual needs to learn

and use what we learn productively.

We have social needs,

and spiritual needs.

#2. The needs themselves are not sinful,

nor are they the result of sin.

If we took the time

we could look at Adam’s life before he sinned

as it is presented in Genesis 2

and we would see him needing food, water, shelter, work, and love relationships with both God and Eve.

None of his basic needs were the result of his sin.

They were simply a “given” of God’s design for him.

#3. Our sin did not make us more needy,

it only separated us from the One who can meet those needs or show us how to meet them.

That separation created two major problems.

First, it left us with only ourselves as a resource for figuring out how life works

and how our needs can be met.

And second, it left us with both a fundamental distrust of God

and a hostility toward Him

that drives us to reject the very answers we long for.

#4. There is no Biblical basis

for a Christian to feel guilty

because he or she still faces intense needs within him or herself after becoming a Christian.

And here again,

if we took the time we could look at passages that make it clear

that even Christ Himself

when He was on this earth

needed rest, and food, and companionship.

The big change that takes place in our relationship to our needs when we come to Christ

is not that our needs change,

but rather that we enter into a love relationship with the only One who knows perfectly

how all of those needs can be met.

He even talks to us about this in Philippians 4:19.

And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

#5.The only thing right or wrong

in our relationship to our needs

is found in how we seek to meet those needs.

And the problem, of course,

is that each of us bring with us

into our relationship with Christ

some destructive need-meeting techniques,

techniques that didn’t work very well for us in the past,

but techniques that are now firmly established in our memories,

and minds,

and emotions.

God designed us with a need for love.

But apart from the input of our God

we can only guess at how

strong, durable love relationships are built.

So we charge in, armed only with flawed patterns of relationships

modeled for us from our childhood or the society around us.

Did you know that a high percentage

of children who have been abused

grow up to be parents

who then abuse their own children?

The very thing they most hated about their own childhood

they then live out in their adult relationships with their own children.

Apart from the input of our God

we don’t know how to meet our needs

and so we simply live out those patterns

that have been recorded in us through past experience.

And we could spend the rest of the morning

talking about the flawed approaches we bring

to the process of attempting to meet our needs.

How do we handle loneliness?

How do we handle fear?

How do we handle failure?

How do we handle guilt?

How do we handle success?

How do we handle our sexual needs?

And on and on.

With some of them

we may have learned patterns

that are consistent with truth,

and we find them working well in our lives.

With others, however, the patterns we have learned from the past

are doing us far more damage than they are good.

Now,

when God presents His moral framework to us,

implied in that presentation

is the understanding that He is offering us a blueprint

for the only way in which our human needs can be met effectively.

And now for THE LIE.

Perhaps the single most effective tool

Satan has in his efforts to deceive Christians into moral self-destruction

is found in his attempt to convince us

that God’s moral framework

is not a protection for us,

but rather a barrier to keep us

from the things we feel we must have

in order to meet our needs.

He seeks to convince us that we must choose:

And the great power of this lie

comes from the fact that

once we buy into it

either way we choose, we loose.

If we choose to follow after what we think we must have in order to meet our needs,

the result will be bondage,

damaged relationships,

a sense of guilt and shame,

fear of discovery,

and continued unmet needs and unfulfilled healing in our lives.

But if we choose obedience to what God says,

believing we do so at the cost of meeting our needs,

it will create an underlying resentment and distrust of God.

This is where that young lady I told you about earlier was at.

She was going to obey what God required of her -

choosing her husband over her career.

But she was going to do it

believing that her obedience to God

would deprive her of the career success she needed

in order to find real fulfillment in life.

She made what appeared to be the “Christian” choice,

but it was a choice that reinforced in her

a distrust in a God who appeared to be demanding that she deny her own needs

for the sake of blind obedience.

Now, I know this is a difficult place to stop this study,

but we’re out of time.

Next week I’ll pick it up here

and we’ll look at the 3 essential elements

that help to disarm the power of this lie in our lives.