©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

0912/04

Free At Last!

9/12/04 Free At Last!

We are approaching the end of our series

on the basic principles of life with Christ,

but we have a few more steps to take

before we will have done what we set out to do.

This is the first Sunday after Labor Day,

the first Sunday after our frantic Alaskan summer season.

The children are back into their school routines,

and our own schedules become more predicable, and less intense.

And in the Alaskan church world

it is also the time of year

when people we haven’t seen for some considerable time

rejoin the group.

I understand that.

I also understand that

your hearing me say we are nearing the end of a series

may be a little frustrating

since some of you didn’t even know we were in a series.

So let me see if I can quickly review where we’ve been recently.

When we first place our lives into Christ’s hands,

we enter into a relationship with our Creator

unlike anything we have ever known before.

It is a relationship that rests totally upon Him as our Savior,

a relationship that Paul describes in Romans 5:1-2 as our having been granted“...peace with God...” and entrance into “...this grace in which we stand...”.

For more than two decades now

I have been teaching here at Peninsula Bible Fellowship.

More than a thousand times during the past 20+ years

I have stood up here and shared with you

my understanding of our God and of His Word.

If I could choose just two phrases

from everything I have ever taught

that I most want you to understand at the heart level,

it would be those two phrases from Romans chapter 5,

“...peace with God” and “...this grace in which we stand...”.

Tragically, most Christians live out their lives

believing the battle is still raging between them and their God,

believing He cannot really be trusted to understand their needs, or to feel their pain,

certain He is deeply displeased with them,

living out lives filled with frustration, and fear, and shame.

Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden,

they see their own failures

and cower in the shadows,

hiding from their God.

As a general rule I really don’t like Christian plaques and slogans very much.

I suppose it is a side effect

of my intense dislike for the commercial marketing aspects

of the Christian religious industry in our nation.

But having said that,

there is a plaque hanging in the Cook Inlet Academy office

that has had a significant impact on me recently.

Each Sunday morning I go into the office to run off our notes for the morning,

and nearly every week I notice once again

a plaque hanging in the back office that says,

“Tell the kids I love them.”

and then it’s signed, “God”.

In the most remarkable way

my Lord uses that thing each Sunday

to remind me once again

why He chose to put me in front of His people

and what He wants me to do when I’m here.

The thing might as well read,

“Larry, tell My kids I love them.”

“...peace with God” and “...this grace in which we stand...”.

It is that truth

and only that truth

that has the power

to lay a foundation within our spirits

that will transform our lives

and enable our God to set us free-

set us free from the hideous bondage of religion,

to set us free from the tragic corruptions that always accompany immorality,

to set us free to discover both who our God really is,

and who He has designed us to be.

And when we began this series a couple of months ago

that is where we started -

by looking at this union between us and our God

given to us by Him on the basis of our simple faith in the death of Christ for our sins.

Then, from there,

we’ve gone on to look at the handful of principles

that form the basic life structure

in which our relationship with Christ is lived out on a daily basis.

Life with our Lord Jesus Christ

is unlike anything we have ever experienced prior to our union with Him

and certainly unlike anything we have ever encountered

in any human relationship.

And the more we understand

about the nature of that relationship

the easier it is for us to cooperate with His life within us.

And so far in our study we’ve looked at the relationship between our performance and our relationship with God,

and we’ve looked at why we still continue to find such an intense battle with evil raging within us,

and we’ve talked about how we are to go about allowing Christ to live out His life through us,

and then, most recently,

we have looked at those forces used by Satan

in his attempts to undermine that life of God within each believer.

Paul’s letter to the Colossians

has been our guide through the most recent phase of our study,

and during the past two weeks

we have been listening to him share with us

the first great enemy of the true life with Christ - manmade religious systems.

We saw the three characteristics of those religious systems

that war against the Spirit of God within the believer.

1. Religion reduces the calling of the Christian life to the careful observance of a prescribed set of religious duties.

2. Those who introduce false religious systems frequently base their authority upon some source of Divine revelation that is not accessible to other Christians.

3. False religious systems introduce laws that are not included in God’s universal moral framework, declare them applicable to all believers, and then evaluates the quality of a Christian’s life on the basis of how successfully he or she observes those laws.

And now, this morning,

I want us to move on to the second weapon used by Satan

in his efforts to defeat the life of Christ within the believer -

seeking to deceive the Christian into believing

that his or her needs can only be met

by stepping outside of the protective moral framework given to us by our Lord.

Healthy Christian living

is very much like walking on the solid ground

between two swamps that breed spiritual death and decay.

On one side is the mire of manmade religion

that calls to the basic religious nature within all of us.

As we have seen the past two weeks,

r eligion preys on our longing to be in control,

to hear the applause of those around us,

to feel the foolish pride or false sense of security

that comes from believing

that the careful fulfillment of all the duties on our little list

will somehow improve our standing or guarantee our acceptance with God.

Once we slide into that swamp and allow it to engulf us,

it can hold us as tightly as any other form of human bondage.

I didn’t mention it a few weeks ago

when we were looking at those words of Christ

in which He compared religion and true Christianity

to old and new wine and old and new wineskins,

but Christ ended that parable

with the most fascinating statement.

He warned His disciples that, “...no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’” ( Luke 5:39).

In context, Christ was using the “old wine”

to symbolize that religious spirit

that feeds the human ego

through careful observance of a highly refined religious system.

He wanted us to understand that,

once we drink deeply of religion,

it is hard to put it down,

even though it is intensely hostile

to the true life in the Spirit that Christ offers each of us.

That swamp of religion

calls to each of us

and we must be diligent in defending ourselves against it.

But there is a second swamp on the opposite side of the road,

one that has engulfed much of our modern society.

It is the swamp of a life lived outside of God’s protective moral framework.

Just as manmade religion

has the power to breed bondage

and rob its victims of the freedom to be the people God created us to be,

so immorality has tremendous power to do exactly the same thing.

Prior to our submission to Christ

we are all drawn into this swamp at some points in our lives

simply out of a compulsion to prove to ourselves

that we have both the right and the ability to run our own lives,

apart from the meddling interference of our Creator.

But even after we come to Christ

it is not at all uncommon for many of God’s people

to be drawn in through the sincere belief

that the path they are taking

is the only one that will truly meet their needs,

victims of the confusion and ignorance of the world in which we live.

And what we sometimes fail to realize

is that, from Satan’s perspective,

it really does not matter which swamp we slip into.

Either one serves his purposes beautifully.

The only goal Satan has for the Christian

is to insure that God’s Spirit

is unable to express Himself through our unique personalities with simplicity and purity.

Do you remember that beautiful description Christ offered us in John 7:37-39

of what we could expect

as the result of the life of Christ within us?

“ Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, “From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”’ But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive;”.

In this passage

Christ pictured the presence of God’s Spirit

as a bubbling, gurgling, river of life flowing out from deep within the Christian.

He was attempting to create a mental picture

of the way in which His people

would approach being the people of God.

God’s Spirit would indwell each of us

and His life would literally flow out through us,

fed by an endless spring supplied by God Himself.

As we have already seen,

Satan’s strategy is to squeeze off the flow of that river

by dragging us into either one of the two swamps

that have the ability to mire us in fruitless frustration and futility.

Either one of them serves his purposes equally well

because the end result is identical.

Both those caught up in religion,

and those mired in moral bondage

are equally unable to experience the reality

of the life of God’s Spirit flowing through them.

And once we are caught in either of these swamps,

the destructive power is intensified

by our natural tendency to look at the swamp on the opposite side of the road

as the solution to the swamp we happen to be stuck in.

Those who have been entangled in the world of religion

and have labored under the heavy load of endless rules and restrictive systems,

suffering the guilt, despair, and shallow Christian experience that those systems generate,

will often reach a point where they explode,

violently reacting against any rules.

They believe freedom can only be found

in throwing out all boundaries of any kind.

There are some of you here this morning

who have been there and done that.

Somewhere in your distant past

you were fed a heavy dose of religion,

being told the system you were being fed was true Christianity.

You tried hard to do what you were told to do

and to be what you were told to be,

and for a time it seemed to work.

But you were a sprinter,

trying to run a marathon,

hiding from unresolved questions and struggles,

believing you were the only one in the group who was having trouble,

covering yourself in an external Christian coating

so no one would know what was going on inside.

And eventually you hit a point where you simply couldn’t do it any longer.

You threw it all away,

knowing the system you’d been in could never bring you freedom

and believing true freedom could only be found in a life with no boundaries at all.

But it wasn’t long before you discovered

that all you’d done is to exchange

one form of bondage for another.

Not only were you not truly free in spirit,

but your life became all the more painful

as you saw your actions destroying

the most precious relationships in your life.

And it may well be that your presence here this morning

is nothing short of a quite but courageous cry for help,

hoping against hope that there is yet another way.

Well, I want you to know there is.

There may be no statement made by our Lord

that has the ability to more powerfully stir the hearts

of those who have lived in either the bondage of religion or the bondage of immorality

than the words He spoke in John 8:32 and 36.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free... If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Those words contain both a test and a promise.

They contain a test that we can apply to everything we hear.

Christ tells us that the end result of all truth

will be greater freedom in our lives -

freedom from the bondage and addiction of sin,

freedom from the sticky, clawing entanglements

of manmade religious systems,

freedom that allows God’s Spirit

to pour through us in a river of living water;

freedom to express the truth and reality of God

through our own unique personalities.

If what we are hearing

does not move us increasingly toward that kind of freedom,

we know with certainty that,

no matter how good it may sound on the surface,

or how many hundreds of others may testify to its validity,

it is not God’s truth.

God’s truth, when correctly taught and correctly understood,

will always result in greater freedom for the child of God.

And there is a clear promise in Christ’s words too,

His personal promise

that He is committed to working for our freedom.

He is on our side,

totally,

completely,

eternally.

And when He is allowed to work in us

and through us as He seeks to,

His involvement in our lives will not just be what He wants,

it will be what we want,

what we have hungered for our whole lives,

a true freedom that delivers us forever from the bondage of religion,

and from the bondage that always accompanies all immorality,

freeing us to live in the reality

of Christ living His life out through us each day.

And as we move through Paul’s comments to the Colossians,

after warning us of the destructive power of religion,

he then turns his attention to the equally destructive power of sin in our lives.

I mentioned last week

that I picture the moral commandments of God like this –

I see it as a protective framework given to us by our God,

a framework that guards us

against all of the lies and deceptions flung at us by the society in which we live,

a framework that allows us to live our lives

without ever having to fear

that we will make choices

that will ultimately be destructive

either to ourselves

or to those we love.

Funny how it is...

We as a society say to the next generation,

“We give you the right, the freedom to live any way you want to live,

to choose any lifestyle or value system you would like.”

And we think that when we say that to them

we are giving them some great and wonderful gift.

We in America

honestly believe

it is some huge step forward

in the evolution of our society.

We are so very shortsighted,

and we so quickly forget the past.

In reality,

not only is our “freedom to live any way we choose” philosophy not a bold step forward,

it is, in fact, a huge step back,

way back,

more than 3000 years back

to those 300 years in the history of Israel

between the death of Joshua

and the establishment of the monarchy.

We have that time recorded for us

in the book of Judges,

and twice in that book we find the author saying,

JDG 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.

JDG 21:25 ¶ In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

If you read through the pages of Judges

you’ll find that it was a hideous time in the nation’s history,

a time filled with confusion,

ignorance,

deception,

tragedy,

and hideous immorality.

And in truth, when we tell the next generation

that we give them the “right” to choose any life they want to live,

and then say no more,

we are giving them the most hideous and terrifying burden

any generation can give to another

because what we are really saying is this,

“You have to figure out all by yourself

what works in life and what does not.

You have to figure out what it really means to love another person,

and how to go about finding an approach to life

that will bring a true sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

You have to decide all by yourself

what choices in life will bring true freedom,

and which ones will ultimately bring about a deep sense of shame,

or regret,

or guilt,

or fear.

And you only have one shot at this thing,

only one life,

only one attempt at every issue and every relationship that comes your way.”

And tragically,

our world is now filled with countless people,

both young and old,

who have attempted to figure out life on the basis of trial and error,

listening to the conflicting messages coming at them from every direction,

forever wondering why their lives don’t look like those pretty people in the movies,

and in the sitcoms,

and in those nice songs on the radio.

There is no way our God wants His children

to ever go through that kind of confusion,

or frustration,

or pain.

He doesn’t just want our spirits equipped for heaven,

He wants our minds equipped for life here and now.

He wants us to know how life really operates,

especially to understand

how to go about building the kind of love relationships with one another that will last forever.

That is exactly what He is doing for us

when He reveals to us those moral boundaries He’s given us in His Word.

And next week we’ll spend a few minutes

talking about the three phase pilgrimage

God’s Spirit seeks to lead each of us through in our relationship to His moral commandments,

and then talk a little bit more

about how they protect us in life

and keep us free.