©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

08/15/04

A Case Of Mistaken Identity

8/15/04 A Case Of Mistaken Identity

Two weeks before Sandee and I left for vacation

we began a series on the basic principles that govern the Christian life.

We have looked at two of those principles so far.

The first was recognizing that in Christ

we have entered into a relationship with God

that rests not upon our performance for God,

but rather upon Christ’s performance for and in us.

Then, second, we spent a morning

talking about why we continue to battle evil impulses within ourselves

even after God has recreated us in absolute righteousness and holiness at the heart level.

We are going to resume our series this morning,

picking up our thinking right where we left off,

and do something that I hope will help us better understand

why practical changes sometimes seem to come into our lives so slowly,

and how God views and then approaches this changing process within us.

The more we understand what’s happening,

and why,

the easier it is for us to cooperate

with what our Lord is seeking to do in our lives.

So, to help with that process,

I want to tell you a story that I think may help.

This is the story about a good King of a small country.

This king loves his people deeply

and does his best to rule his subjects with wisdom and compassion.

But he has a huge problem for which he has no answer.

He is growing old

and has no son of his own to rule in his place after he dies.

For months he broods over his situation,

and then one day the most fantastic idea occurs to him.

The more he thinks about his plan,

the more pleased he becomes with the idea.

It seems to answer his greatest concerns

about the man who will rule his nation in the future.

He wants to be sure

that the one who rules after him

will share his heart of compassion for the people he rules.

He wants it to be a man

who can understand the problems,

and the concerns,

and the needs of even the most lowly of his subjects.

The king’s plan is simple.

He will go to the poorest part of his great capitol city

and find there a orphaned child, perhaps 11 or 12 years old,

perhaps even a boy who has been forced to live by his wits on the streets.

He will then legally adopt this child and raise him as his son,

teaching him the skills and giving him the knowledge he will need

to one day rule in his place.

The King is certain that boy’s deprived heritage

will give him a strong identification with the people he will one day rule,

while his careful training under the king’s guidance

will give him the tools and the foundation he will need for the great work.

The king commissions the most trusted members of his staff

to find a boy who meets the qualifications he has outlined,

and tells them to report back when they have found a suitable child.

When the selection is finally made,

the king personally goes to interview his prospective son

and present the proposition to him.

The king enters his royal limousine

and instructs his chauffeur

to drive to a certain very poor part of town.

He finds the boy loitering on the street,

and the king has the chauffeur stop

and then orders several of his guards to bring the child to him.

Understandably, at first the boy is terrified.

He has been arrested by the police for petty theft numerous times,

but when he sees the king drive up,

he assumes he’s probably going to be executed.

The king asks the boy to step inside the limousine.

He assures him that he is not in trouble,

he’s not being arrested,

and he has nothing to be afraid of.

At first the conversation is awkward and strained.

The two of them sit there together,

the king in his royal robes

and the orphan in his rags.

But then, the longer they talk,

the more they both begin to relax

and the more they find themselves enjoying one another.

After some time,

the king is confident that this boy is indeed a good choice for his plan.

When there is a little lull in the conversation,

the king tells the child that he has a proposition for him.

The king explains in careful detail

all that he has in mind

and concludes by saying,

“I want to be sure that you clearly understand exactly what I am offering you.

If you agree to my terms,

you will become my legal son forever.

You will return with me to the palace

and live with me there.

From this day forward

I will personally take responsibility

for meeting all of your needs.

I will feed you and clothe you,

train and educate you,

and prepare you for the day when I die

and you will rule in my place as king of this great nation.

There are no strings attached to my offer,

and if you choose to

you can step outside this limousine right now

and I will never trouble you again.

But if you accept my offer

it is a permanent, inalterable agreement between us.

What is your decision?”

The boy gives the proposition a full thirty seconds consideration

and then says simply, “Sounds great! You’ve got yourself a son!”

The two of them return to the palace,

and at first everything seems to be going well.

The boy spends hours just wandering around the palace and the grounds,

overwhelmed by more wealth and luxury than he has ever seen in his life.

He begins his schooling

and the king is pleased to see

that his new son has a sharp mind and learns quickly.

The plan seems to be working out well.

But then the king begins to observe

some strange behavior in his son.

At the dinner table,

when the boy thinks that no one is looking,

he will take a piece of meat or a roll and some cheese

and slip it into his pocket.

When he walks down a hallway,

his little hand will quickly reach out

and grab some shiny object sitting on a table

and then slide it under his coat.

The boy then takes his treasures back to his room

and stashes them under his bed.

At first the king is puzzled by the boy’s behavior.

Every need the child has

is being met in abundance.

The king has withheld none of his treasures from his son,

and yet the boy seems compelled

to hoard a small pile of little treasures in his room.

Then the king finally realizes what’s happening.

His son has the clothes,

the food,

and the legal position of a prince and a future king,

but he still has the mind and the emotions of a street kid.

He has been told that the king is now his father

and that he will never again want for anything,

but he doesn’t feel that way at all.

In his mind he still sees himself

as a boy who must live by his wits,

a boy who has no one he can really rely on but himself.

It is true that through an amazing series of events

he has ended up in a king’s palace for a while.

But he feels certain that eventually something will go wrong

and he will be back out on the street again.

All of his life he has survived by taking what he can get

when he can get it

and, in his mind, nothing has really changed.

And so the king realizes

that this child will need some very special attention.

There will be some need for certain types of discipline, of course.

But, most of all, he

must find ways of helping his son

to learn how to think like the prince he really is.

The problem is not that the child is stealing.

The real problem is that the boy believes he must steal.

Gradually the king needs to find ways

of helping his son to understand who he really is,

to understand that, through his father, he already owns everything,

and that he no longer needs to meet his own needs

by taking and hiding and hoarding.

When we come to Christ

we are very much like that boy coming to the king.

We hear our God telling us that He has

“raised us up with (Christ), and seated us with Him in the heavenly places” ( Ephesians 2:6).

He promises us that He will

“... supply all (our) needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” ( Philippians 4:19).

Over and over again

we are told clearly

that we now share in an eternal Father-child relationship with the God of the universe ( Romans 8:15-16),

and “He Himself has said, ‘ I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you...’” ( Hebrews 13:5).

We hear the words,

and yet we,

like that boy,

do not really believe they are true.

We have the legal standing of a prince,

but the mind of street kid.

We have spent our entire existence, prior to coming to Christ,

diligently training ourselves to think and live on the assumption

that we are totally responsible for governing our own little world,

meeting our own needs,

taking care of ourselves without the involvement of our Creator.

Then, in an instant, all of that is changed forever.

Our spirit knows it has changed,

but our mind, emotions, and memories do not.

That’s why Paul says what he says in Romans 12:1-2.

“I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

After calling us to the challenge

of bringing our bodies under the leadership of our new spirits in Romans 12:1,

Paul then goes on in verse two

to tell us just exactly how this can be accomplished.

He says that we can “be transformed by the renewing of (our) mind”.

Just like the boy in our story,

we too must begin to learn how to think differently.

So how in the world to we begin?

Learning to think differently

about ourselves and our relationship with our Creator

is a process that begins at the time we come to Christ

and continues as long as we are on this planet.

It is not a project we complete,

it is a process we participate in

under the careful guidance of God’s Spirit.

We begin the process with a strong ally -

that new heart within us, indwelt by God’s Holy Spirit.

Our new heart provides us with an ever-present longing

to please God

and to live in a way that honors Him.

This new heart is central to God’s whole renewal program for the believer.

But there are other forces at work as well,

forces that war against true mental renewal.

As we saw two weeks ago,

we also bring our physical bodies

with all of their corrupted reasoning processes,

emotional memories,

and responses that exclude the reality of our King.

And there are other forces at work against us as well.

We also come to our Lord

with a strong religious nature

that leads us to believe

that our relationship with Christ is fundamentally

an agreement based upon our efforts to do things for Christ.

We tend to see ourselves as subjects of a great Ruler,

and our obligation is to perform those acts that He finds acceptable

and avoid those acts that He finds offensive.

Like the young prince,

we naturally assume that our presence in the palace

is a performance-based agreement,

one that depends upon how well we learn our lessons

and stay out of trouble.

It was perfectly logical to the young prince

to assume that he would be out on the street

if his performance dropped below a certain level.

And it seems perfectly logical to us

to assume that our relationship with God

ultimately depends upon how well we are able to deliver what is required.

We, just like that boy,

find it virtually impossible

to picture our King as truly delighting in us as His child.

So how can that king approach his son

if he is ever to be successful in producing a prince

who has the inner confidence and security

to function effectively as the young ruler he has become through the king’s kindness.

Now, obviously, the king’s perspective on the boy

is radically different from the boy’s perspective on himself.

The king sees this child as his son and legal heir.

He understands that the boy has a history

that carries with it some difficult hurdles to overcome,

but those hurdles cannot and will not ever change the reality of who the boy is.

He is a prince,

he will become a king,

and nothing and no one can ever alter that fact.

The boy, on the other hand,

has never seen himself as anything but an orphaned street kid.

Now it’s true that he may be living in a palace.

He may have a king who calls him “son”.

But, to the boy, it is all just part of some temporary good fortune,

some game that could end in an instant.

The boy sees his challenge

as being one of playing his part shrewdly

so that he can reap as many benefits as possible

before the whole thing comes crashing down.

The boy’s efforts to collect whatever trinkets he can get his hands on

serves as his “Plan B”.

It is his ultimate long-range ‟security”

for the time when the king finally decides to kick him out.

So how does the king go about helping his son

to mature into the man he wants him to be?

The first, most crucial, and most difficult challenge the king faces

is that of shifting the boy from the belief

that his presence in the palace depends upon his playing his part well,

to his relaxing in the truth

that his presence in the palace

is an unalterable fact of who he really is - the legal son of the king.

For the king,

job one is to bring the boy to the point where he understands that,

no matter how he acts or doesn’t act,

no matter whether he does his lessons well or flunks them miserably,

no matter whether he stashes stuff under his bed or not,

no matter where his performance level may be at any given moment,

he is still and will always be the child of the king.

Who he is, the prince and future king,

is not,

never was,

and never will be a result of what he is doing or has done.

It is a result of what the king has done.

In other words,

the king will not be ready to make his son’s behavior an issue

until he can first communicate to his son

that his true identity is not and never will be tied to his behavior.

The king knows

that the thing that will ultimately stop his son’s theft

is not heightened security in the halls

and threats of whippings if he is caught.

That approach would only reinforce in the boy the lie

that he is still a street kid temporarily living at the palace.

The thing that will ultimately solve the stealing

will be when his son realizes he no longer has to steal.

When the boy finally sees himself as the prince he is,

stealing will become absurd.

Why steal when he already owns it all?

So, if the king is going to be successful

he will begin by sitting down with his son and saying,

“My child, I know you have been stashing things under your bed.

I know that right now you do not yet understand

who you are or what has really taken place in your life.

But listen to me carefully.

I want you to know that you truly are my son forever.

Nothing and no one will ever change that.

I will not get tired of you.

I will not throw you out of the palace if you do not behave.

I will never ever abandon you to the streets again.

I know that your whole life up to this point has been a life of stealing.

I understand that.

I know, too, that those patterns are sometimes very difficult to break.

As time goes by we will work on those patterns together, as a team.

But for right now, I want you to hear just one thing:

I am your father, you are my son, and nothing can ever alter that truth.”

And how about us?

" \l 2

The training program that our Lord has designed for each of us

is very much like the one the king designed for his boy.

We too come to Christ with a heritage

of seeking to meet our needs

by taking what we think we need

when we think we need it.

We need love and don’t know how to build healthy relationships

so we find techniques

for picking up little love substitutes along the way.

We need to feel good about ourselves,

to feel significant,

so we grab at a little recognition here,

a little acknowledgment there,

taking and doing whatever we can

to make us feel a little better about ourselves,

a little more secure about our identity and our future.

Like our young prince,

we do not really believe

that we now have a Father who has taken us as we are,

who is well pleased with us as His child,

and who is totally committed to meeting our needs.

We, too, still feel like we’re hanging out there all by ourselves,

and that the bottom line in our walk with God is how well we perform.

With us, just like the prince,

the first and greatest challenge our Father faces

is that of bringing us to the point

where we can truly rest in who we are apart from how we perform.

We all bring behavior patterns into our relationship with Christ

that are highly destructive to ourselves

and to our effectiveness as God’s people.

But we cannot make progress in breaking the power of those patterns

until we first understand that our Father/child union with Him

and our security in Christ

do not rest upon our success

in making progress in breaking those patterns.

We are fearfilled creatures

when it comes to our relationship with our God.

The problems and sin patterns that trouble us most deeply

can never be healed

unless we can bring them out before our Lord and look at them honestly.

But all too often

our fear of God’s rejection

causes us to take those problems,

and to stuff them deep inside,

and then cap them over with a heavy layer of external Christian coating.

“No problem here, Lord! I’m doing just fine. Don’t worry, I can handle it.”

This is why our King begins His life with us the way He does.

This is why,

just a few verses after Paul tells us

about the way in which sin continues to dwell in our bodies,

he gives us the most all-encompassing and nonconditional statement of God’s love for us

found anywhere in Scripture.

“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, ‘ For Thy sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Rom. 8:31-39

This passage is placed where it is

and worded the way it is

so that every one of us can begin our life with our Creator

knowing that no one and nothing

can ever separate us from our King.

We may have a great deal to learn about ourselves,

and about our God,

and about our calling,

but, just like the prince,

our Father/child union with God

is not and never will be

dependent upon how well we do in school.

The first and most crucial area of mental renewal

is understanding that we truly are children of the King for all eternity.

Only when we begin to see ourselves

as who we truly are

will we then be able to make progress

in seeing our performance change.