©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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07-23-06 |
Feeding The Hunger, Healing The Soul Pt. 7 |
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7/23/06 Feeding The Hunger Pt. 7
Seven weeks ago we started
what, at the time, I thought would be a one week break from our study of the Gospel of John.
This morning we will reach the end of our study.
And even what we do this morning
will not really finish what we started.
But hopefully it will equip you with the understanding
and the attitudes you will need
to then take what our Lord offers us in the section of Ephesians we will be looking at
and dig into it on your own,
allowing it to guide you into a clear understanding
of how our deepest love needs can really be met.
And you do understand, I hope,
that this is what the Bible is all about.
Not just the love thing, of course,
but it’s about our God explaining to us
the crucial truths we need
for...well, as Peter put it,
for “...everything pertaining to life and godliness” (II Peter 1:3).
It is how we find out
all that we need to know
about everything that matters most in this life -
beginning with our relationship with our Creator,
and then our relationship with ourselves
and with one another,
and with our possessions,
and with our past,
and our future,
and with the physical world in which we live.
And if you were here last week
you’ll remember that we spent our time
looking at a powerful deceptive lie used by Satan
to rob us of the kind of true love relationships God seeks to build into our lives.
It is a lie that enters through our emotions,
and because it does enter through our emotions
we spent about half of our time last week
talking about that whole emotional aspect of love.
In that study we saw that when God talks to us about love
He tells us that the real thing,
true enduring love, is not primarily a feeling,
it is in fact an approach to another person
that is rooted in our choices.
True love is not what we feel,
it is how we choose to act toward another person.
Now, we haven’t talk much yet
about what those choices are,
and that’s where we’ll go this morning as we move into this passage in Ephesians,
but the beginning of all correct understanding of true love relationships
demands our discovery of this critical truth.
Love is, at it’s core,
not what we feel,
but rather how we choose to relate to another person.
But having said that,
we then spent a good deal of time last week
looking at the way in which the love relationships we build
do then affect us deeply at the feeling level.
The most powerful emotions we will ever feel
will be feelings that are a direct result of the love relationships we build.
The more we choose to love,
the more we will open ourselves up
to greater and greater intensity of feelings in those relationships,
both positive and negative feelings.
For the past 30 years
Sandee and I have been involved in the daily process
of making love choices toward one another.
Those choices have produced in both of our lives
some of the most powerful positive feelings either of us have ever known.
There are times now
when the two of us will just be sitting together,
sipping coffee on a park bench,
or watching TV together,
and I will find myself simply overwhelmed with a sense of joy
and gratitude to my God for what I have in my relationship with my life partner.
Living with her at this point in my life
is my great reward from my God
for the choices I’ve made during the past three decades.
But I also know that in the normal course of life
it is those same choices
that will lead to possibly the greatest pain one of us will ever know
because the time will come at some point in the years ahead
when one of us
will have to cope with the loss of the other.
To choose to love
is, at certain points, to choose to volunteer for pain,
and yet to choose not to love
is to choose a life without purpose,
without meaning,
and without true joy.
But my point here is simply that,
although true love is, at it’s core, a clearly defined pattern of choices
that we make in our relationship with another person,
still it is those choices
that then create the quality of relationships
that result in the deepest feelings
and the richest living experience
we can ever know this side of eternity.
The true love relationships we build here and now
will deeply affect every aspect of our being.
And we went through all of that last week
in preparation for what we then looked at
in Satan’s great counterfeit love,
used by him to create within us
deep doubts about God’s love for us
and about His ability or willingness to meet our deepest love needs.
And without reteaching everything we looked at last week,
let me see if I can just sum up
the heart of this lie
so that we can easily see what it is
and how it accomplishes Satan’s purpose in our lives.
We saw last week
that this counterfeit love,
called a passion relationship in Scripture,
always comes at us through our emotions.
It is feeling-based and creates within us the belief,
the feeling that this one person for whom we feel this emotion
knows us and accepts us totally at the soul level of our being,
and that they possess the ability to meet our deepest love needs forever
without us or them changing in any way.
But here’s the hook -
it will be a relationship that will tell us at the feeling level
that we cannot really meet our deepest love needs without this person,
and we can only have this person in our life at the level we want them
if we step outside of the protective moral framework revealed to us by our God.
In fact, it will tell us
that not only is God’s moral framework not a protection for us,
but it is in fact a barrier that is walling us off
from the one thing we absolutely must have
in order for our love needs to be met.
This deception often starts subtly, gradually in our lives,
presenting itself as simply a harmless, enjoyable friendship,
a friendship that feels so good,
and seems to offer the ability to meet deep needs within us.
But if we take the bait,
it isn’t long before we find ourselves becoming emotionally dependant,
emotionally addicted to the friendship,
even though we know that it causes us to question the protective boundaries
that our God has established in our lives.
You see,
what Satan wants to do
is to create within us the belief
that we must choose between meeting our love needs on one hand
and trust in and obedience to God on the other.
At the heart of all passion relationships
we will find this lie in some form
because Satan’s ultimate goal
is to offer us irrefutable proof
that our God cannot be trusted,
that He doesn’t really understand our deepest needs,
or if He understands them, He simply doesn’t care about them.
And with every passion relationship
there will come some critical point at which
we find ourselves convinced that what we need the most in order to meet our love needs
demands that we turn our back on our God and His leadership in our life.
Over the years I’ve heard all sorts of carefully formed explanations
for why a person simply must pursue some passion relationship.
“I have finally met my true soul mate,
and I simply cannot turn my back on what was clearly meant to be.”
Some of my favorite lies
involve the skillful use of God
as the One who is the driving force behind the choices that are being made.
“Obviously God is the One who put this person into my life.”
“I have prayed and prayed about this,
and God has shown me clearly
that this is indeed what He has for me
and what He wants me to do.
I know this isn’t exactly what the Bible says,
but I know, too, that this truly is what God is saying to me and what He wants.”
Which brings me back to that second lie I mentioned last week.
I mentioned that there are two huge lies
fed to us by Satan
in his efforts to keep us from discovering the kind of love relationships
that our God wants to bring into our lives,
those relationships that have the power to heal us and meet our deepest needs.
The first lie, the one we looked at last week,
involves that counterfeit love offered to us by Satan
in his efforts to keep us from the truth,
and the second involves our belief that certain relationships in our lives
are of necessity exempt from these principles.
This second lie takes a variety of forms in our lives,
but in each case we will find ourselves thinking,
“The principles outlined by God for human interaction
simply do no apply in this particular case.”
Obviously this is the kind of thinking we run to
when a passion relationship has taken root in us
and we start questioning or tampering with
those protective moral boundaries established by God.
“I know the level of emotional intimacy I’m entering into with this person
may be inappropriate for me as a married person,
but my partner doesn’t seem to mind...or to notice,
so what’s the harm?”
But I separated this lie from just passion relationships
because it shows up other places as well.
It’s not uncommon for us to think that honesty and integrity are essential elements
when it comes to our personal friendships,
but that such qualities cease to be relevant in our business dealings.
I mean, business is business,
clients and customers are not really relationships,
they’re simply people to be managed and manipulated
to bring about the desired result.
It’s also common for us as parents
to believe that some of these principles do not apply
when it comes to our relationships with our children.
One fascinating principle of love relationships
involves the way God tells us we are to handle a situation
in which we have offended or sinned against another person.
He tells us simply
that we are to go to them and admit our offense to them.
But it is easy as parents
to fall victim to the belief
that this particular principle doesn’t apply
in our relationship with our children.
I mean really!
I’m the parent!
I’m the adult!
There’s no way I’m going to apologize to a child!
And yet we’ve talked in the past
about the kind of wounds we inflict in a child’s spirit
when we offend them and refuse to go to them and ask for their forgiveness.
Such offenses cause their spirits to close up to us,
to make it impossible for us to reach them or feed them at the soul level
until we acknowledge our offense against them.
And what I’m saying here simply
is that if we find ourselves believing
that some relationship is of necessity exempt from the relationship principles given to us by our God
then we have very likely been fed a lie
that will ultimately rob us of the depth of love relationships
that our Lord is seeking to bring into our lives.
OK, so with all of that as preparation,
let me sum this up
and then point you to the passage
that provides us with the core principles governing our building love relationships.
Our Lord’s commitment to teach us how to love is absolute.
Not only does it matter to Him,
but it is, in fact, at the top of His priority list for us as His children.
It is the ultimate commandment He gave us,
it is at the heart of all His instructions to us as His people.
Our union with Christ
has accomplished within us
a cleansing work that has, for the first time in our lives,
made love accessible to us as never before.
Peter said it with perfect clarity and simplicity.
1PE 1:22-23 Since you have in obedience to the truth
purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one
another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is
perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of
God.
He knows the isolation and fear that entered our lives through sin.
He knows our desperate hunger for true love relationships.
And He knows exactly how we can go about building those relationships in our lives.
Then, to help us in this process,
He begins by modeling for us the true nature of love
through His own relationship with us.
Then He goes on to explain to us in careful detail
how we can reproduce that pattern
in our relationships with one another.
And finally, He places His Spirit within us
to give us understanding as to how these principles apply to each relationship in our lives,
and far more than that,
to guide each of us
through our own personal pilgrimage
into the healing we need
for love to become a growing reality in our lives.
And with that let me just offer you an overview
of the type of things He talks with us about.
And it is at this point
that I need to do two things
if what we’ve done during these seven weeks
is going to be of any real value to you.
First, I need to entrust the content of the rest of this series
into your own hands
and your own involvement in Scripture.
The bulk of the principles are given to us in a concise statement
in both Ephesians and Colossians.
The Ephesians passage begins with 4:25
and continues through 6:9,
and I’ll offer you a brief overview of what you’ll find there before we end this morning.
But there is something else I need to do first.
I need to prepare you for the way in which this process of learning to love
will work out in your life.
What we have being given to us here in Ephesians
is not a stagnate list of specific actions we are suppose to avoid,
but rather it is a collection of broad principles
that can only be understood and applied to specific relationships
through our daily active openness to the leadership of the Spirit of God within us.
You see, this is the way the whole thing works.
This is what our God has offered us in Christ.
He has not just offered us forgiveness and then a list of things we should do.
He has recreated us in spirit
and then offered us entrance into a life lived forevermore in His presence,
with His Spirit living in us and living through us.
But the whole thing,
the whole God/man plan from the very beginning
has always been about the friendship - our friendship with Him,
and without that active, moment-by-moment process of Christ in us, with us,
it just doesn’t work.
Let me give you just one example of what I’m talking about.
It will come as no surprise to you, I’m sure,
to learn that one of the things Paul does in this Ephesians passage
as he offers us that protective framework in which love exists
is to outline for us the basic principles
that govern the most critical relationships in all of human experience,
the relationships within the family structure -
husband/wife/parent/child.
But do you know how he begins his comments to the husband and wife?
He begins with this:
“...EPH 5:21 and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”
Now what in the world does that mean?
Well, what it means
is that when we marry
from that time on our marriage partner becomes the voice of Christ in our life.
Huh?
It means that, to trust the voice of Christ in our life
is to trust what He is saying to us through our partner.
Huh?
It means that the greatest protection against self-deception we will ever have
is given to us daily by God through the attitudes and words of our partner.
Huh?
It means that if we fail to listen to what God is saying to us through our partner
then at that point we forfeit our ability to know the mind and leadership of Christ in our life.
For the past thirty years
I have given Sandee absolute jurisdiction
over every other relationship in my life.
If she is uncomfortable with any aspect of any relationship
then I recognize what she sees and what she says as being the voice of Christ in my life.
But it is never a stagnate process.
It isn’t a rule I keep,
it is an attitude I bring to both my God
and my wife each day.
And with every one of the principles outlined in this passage
it works exactly the same way -
it only works
within the context of an active, daily dependance upon the Spirit of God in our lives
to explain
to us what those principles mean in each unique relationship.
Some of what we find in this passage will come as no surprise.
Paul talks with us about our need for honesty with one another,
about how to handle our anger,
about not stealing from one another.
He talks about sexual purity,
about recognizing and respecting the carful boundaries
God has placed on sex in human relationships,
knowing that those boundaries have been established by Him
because He loves us
and because He wants to protect us from the deep wounds and scars
that the misuse of sex always leave behind.
He talks about the destructive power of bitterness,
and then he spends a great deal of time
talking with us about the tremendous power of speech in our lives,
power both for good and for evil.
I don’t know why so few people ever seem to understand this,
but by far the greatest impact for either good or evil
that we will ever have on this earth
comes through the words we choose to speak or not to speak
to those God has entrusted into our care.
Do you want to change another person’s life,
to literally alter the course of their life for good?
Speak to them the truth about who they really are in Christ.
Speak to them with words of respect,
with dignity,
with affirmation of their tremendous value to their God
and to His work in this world here and now.
But with all of these things
we can only understand how they apply to each unique relationship
through God’s Spirit taking them and applying them for us.
I know I’ve mentioned this before,
but I consider one of the greatest works of God
that ever took place through our mission team that went to Mexico earlier this year
to be that conversation they had with one another
when they decided to put an end to the sarcasm that had crept into their speech with one another.
That was no small thing.
In fact it was huge
because it changed the direction
of the greatest source of power for good or evil within that team,
the power of speech,
and it was a direct result of the Spirit of God
applying the relationship principles of God to their lives.
Paul also goes on in this passage to single out several specific relationships,
the most crucial relationships in all of human society,
and to give specific instructions to each.
As I’ve already mentioned, He talks about the husband/wife relationship,
about the role of the husband
and the role of the wife,
about the child’s relationship with his or her parents,
and then he also singles out the father’s relationship with his children.
There is no more power-filled relationship in human experience
than the relationship of a father with his child,
and because of this
Paul gives the father a strong caution
about the misuse of that relationship.
EPH 6:4 And, fathers, do not provoke your children to
anger...
Dad, you’ve got the power over your child,
but the goal is not control and submission,
the goal is protection,
and affirmation,
and encouragement,
and love.
It is the recorded memory of your voice, etched into your child’s mind and heart,
that they will be playing to for the rest of their lives.
If that voice spoke mostly about what dad saw wrong in them
they will never find peace with themselves or with their God.
There’s more in the passage as well,
but that will give you a feel for where he goes.
And with all of it
his goal is to reveal to us
how true love relationships can be built and maintained.
And through all that he says
there is an urgent underlying message about our God
that he wants us to understand.
He wants us to know with certainty
that our God knows about our desperate need for love.
He knows how those love needs can be met.
He knows, too, the lies that are currently imbedded in our thinking,
those lies that make it impossible for us to give or receive the kind of love we hunger for.
And He knows how to bring healing and truth into our lives.
His principles are our guide
His boundaries are our great protection from pain and self-destruction.
To love another person
is to know and trust the pattern for human relationships
revealed to us by our God.
Sometimes the healing He must accomplish within us
before we are ready to know love
will cause Him to lead us through a process that is neither easy nor painless.
But His commitment to our needs is unwavering.
He simply will not ever cheat us.
If we choose to trust Him more than we trust our feelings,
more than we trust the culture around us,
more than all else,
the time will come
when we will look back on the careful work He has done on in our life
and we will find ourselves saying, “My Lord, I know what you’ve done,
and what you’ve done is glorious beyond belief.
You have taught me how to love,
and then you have filled my life
with a wealth of love beyond anything I have ever deserved,
beyond everything I could ever have hoped for.
I am rich beyond measure,
and it’s all because of You.
You really do understand.
From the very beginning you have understood me,
you have understood my need for love,
and you have understood perfectly how that need could be met.
I know what you’ve done, Lord.
I know what you’ve done,
and I stand in awe of You.”