09-18-11 The God We Never Expected

For the past several weeks

we have been studying Paul’s instructions to us

concerning the use of our freedom in Christ.

We are studying Romans chapters 14 and 15,

and so far it has taken us three weeks

to study our way through the first 4 verses.

We will pick up the pace considerably this morning,

but I don’t want us to move so quickly through it that we miss the significance

of what’s really going on in these verses.

You see, apart from the principles themselves,

there is something taking place in this section of Romans that is so different

from what most of us would have expected.

Do you know what this passage is like?

This is like a conversation between a father

and his 16 year old son.

The son has just come back from the Department of Motor Vehicles office

where he has passed his driving test

and received his first driver’s license.

On the way home

the dad says to his son,

“OK, you’ve got your license.

Now, before you start driving on your own

I need to have a talk with you.

As soon as we get home

I want to sit down with you and go over a few things.”

Now, what do you think the son expects the father say?

I think he would expect his dad

to hand him a list of rules governing his driving,

rules such as where he can drive

and where he can’t,

when he can drive

and when he cannot,

who can be in the car with him

and who cannot,

what consequences he can expect if any of the rules are broken and so forth.

But what if this boy were to sit down with his dad

and his dad reached into his pocket

and took out a set of keys

and a credit card.

And then he said to his son,

“Now that you have your license

I’ve decided all of us trying to share the same car just isn’t going to work,

so here are the keys to your own car.

And I know you don’t have a job right now

so here’s a credit card for gas and oil.

Now, son, I want you to know it’s going to be your responsibility

to check the oil and keep that tank filled.

I know you’ve got good judgment,

and you’ll use that judgement in the way you approach this wonderful new freedom.

You’re car is out back.

You’d better go see how it drives.”

Now, apart from the fact that it is almost impossible for most of us to imagine

that any such conversation could ever take place between a father and a 16 year old son,

what I want us to see here

is that the conversation our Lord is having with us

through this passage in Romans 14

is so very different from the conversation that most of us expect

when we first come into the family of God.

What our religious heritage has led us to expect,

and what much of our religious training has led us to expect

is God handing us a list of rigid restrictions and requirements for faithful Christian living.

And what we actually receive from Him

is a commandment telling us to...1PE 2:16 Act as free men...,

and then a handful of principles

that help us to manage our freedom

in a way that makes certain we don’t hurt either ourselves

or one another in the process of living out the freedom we have in Christ.

And I can’t let this pass

without pointing out

that this brings us back once again

to the central battle of life - the battle for the personal discovery of the absolute goodness of our God.

And by that I do not mean

simply the discovery that He is right,

I mean the discovery that He is absolutely and eternally GOOD,

and that His every intention toward us is good,

and that, when we see Him as He is,

we will discover in Him what our spirits have been hungering for

since the day we entered this world.

I remember back in the days when the airlines would actually give you a meal on your flight,

that Alaska Airlines would include a little piece of paper with the lunch,

a piece of paper with a pretty picture

and a verse from the Psalms printed on it.

One of those that I received

had a beautiful mountain scene

and then these words from Psalm 107:1:

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever.

When I read those words

I found myself amazed at the way in which that one sentence says so perfectly

everything we need to know most

about the God who created us.

He is good,

in the deepest, truest sense of the word.

And He pours out that goodness

on all who come to Him.

And His love endures forever.

He never stops loving us -

never in this life,

and never in the eternity to follow.

And our only calling,

the turning point of our existence comes

when our spirit will trust His love enough to give thanks.

Having entered this world

with spirits in rebellion against Him,

we automatically distrust Him

and doubt His intentions toward us.

We look through our own lives

and the lives of those around us

and collect our protective defenses against Him -

all those things that “prove” to us

why this God could not really be good.

We blame Him for all those things we hate about ourselves

or about our world,

refusing to recognize

that what we hate entered our world

as a direct result of our own rebellion against Him or as a result of the rebellion of others.

We live in fear of Him

and in determined rebellion against Him,

and then tell ourselves

if God was really good

He would never have allowed this or that to touch our lives.

And all the time that we are running from Him,

hiding from Him,

blaming Him,

trying so hard to convince ourselves He does not exist,

or does not matter,

He continues to reach out to us,

inviting us into His love,

never forcing Himself on us,

honoring our free will that forms the foundation of our relationship with Him.

And even His invitation is so different from what we would have expected.

We would have expected Him to say,

“Come to Me, all you who are willing to change your lives,

all you who will promise to change your ways,

all you who will reshape your lives after the pattern I have required of you.”

But that’s not what He says.

What He really says is,

MAT 11:28 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

MAT 11:29 "Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls.

MAT 11:30 "For My yoke is easy, and My load is light."

With everyone of us

there is at least one thing in our life

that we believe disqualifies us from being able to accept His invitation to enter His love.

The specifics are different with each of us,

but the end result is the same -

we simply cannot imagine Him accepting us,

loving us,

wanting us close to Himself

unless we first make some drastic changes in our lives.

And nearly always they are changes

that we know we are incapable of making.

I just want you to know

that all such thinking is a lie.

That’s one of the reasons I love that passage I just read from Matthew 11.

Our God makes it clear

that the only requirement for entrance into His love

is the weariness of spirit

that comes from trying to face life without Him.

Whatever changes need to be made

He will accomplish within us,

recreating us from the inside out.

All He asks of us

is our acknowledgment of our need -

our need for Him,

our need for His love,

our need for His forgiveness,

and His compassion,

and His kindness,

and His life within us.

I don’t know what your God is like.

I do know that if your God does not love you more than His own life,

if He does not delight in you,

and hunger for friendship with you,

if He does not take all of your sin,

and your failure,

and your confusion,

and your emptiness onto Himself,

and make it His own,

so that it can never again separate you from Him,

or Him from you,

if that is not your God,

then your God is not the God who really exists.

And see how I get carried away with my introductions.

All of this started

simply because I wanted to point out

that the most significant thing about Romans 14 and 15

is the overall theme of the passage itself.

This is not our God handing us

an intricate religious system

with an endless series of hoops we must jump through

in order to maintain a good standing with Him.

This is our God talking with us

about the freedom He has given us in Christ,

the freedom He has longed for us to know since the day He created us,

the freedom to structure our lives

in the way that fits perfectly with our own unique design.

This is a little bit off track,

but during the past 45 years of living

I have made a fascinating discovery.

I have discovered that the real enemy to fulfillment in life

has certainly not been the leadership of God,

it has been the assumptions I have brought with me into my walk with God

about what will bring me fulfillment,

and satisfaction,

and happiness in life.

When we enter the family of God

we bring with us two mental lists -

one of them contains all of the things we are certain we must have

in order to be happy,

and the other contains

all of the things we know we cannot have in order to know fulfillment in life.

And we use these two lists

to measure the correctness of God’s involvement in our lives.

In fact, our whole perception of God -

what He is really like,

whether or not He can be trusted,

whether or not He is really GOOD,

is bound up in how we see Him relating to those lists.

They become the standard by which we measure our God.

If He delivers what we want,

and delivers us from what we do not want,

then we declare Him good.

But if He does not meet the standard we have set for Him,

our first response is to doubt Him

rather than the standard by which we have measured Him.

And one of the most freeing discoveries of my life thus far

has been the realization that I have it all backwards.

The absolute goodness of my God

makes it impossible for Him to lead me anywhere,

or give me anything,

or remove anything from me that is not consistent with what He knows

is best,

and right,

and truly good for me.

And whenever what I want

and what my God gives me differ

the problem is not with my God,

it is with my deeply flawed perceptions of what I have believed I need in order to be happy.

All of which is really a complicated way of stating a rather simple truth -

faith....true faith in any given situation is simply reaching the point

where we will trust the goodness of God,

that is, where we will choose to believe that everything He has said to us,

and everything He has done in our lives is motivated by His longing to be good to us.

The author of Hebrews says it so perfectly.

HEB 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

...He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

And still we fear Him,

and hide from Him,

and doubt Him,

and choose to trust our own muddled minds

more than we trust Him.

And of course my introductory comments to Romans

sort of got out of control again.

But I do want to take us a little farther into chapter 14 before we close this morning.

We saw last week

that Paul begins the 14^th chapter of Romans in the very first verse of passage

by offering His first major principle

for the use of our freedom in Christ.

ROM 14:1 Now accept the one who is weak in faith...

The stronger Christians

are to use their strength

to protect and care for their weaker brothers and sisters.

He then takes the next 5 verses

to illustrate his principle

with 3 examples from the 1^st century cultural setting.

We looked in some detail

at the first of those three examples last week -

whether or not a Christian

would eat meat

that had been previously sacrificed to one of the Roman idols.

The second example comes in verse 4:

ROM 14:4 Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

Paul compares our relationship with Christ

to a servant’s relationship with his master.

And he tells us that our criticism of one another

in the area of the personal rules we have in our lives

makes about as much sense

as our criticizing another man’s servant for the way he is handling his responsibilities.

And with this illustration

he is preparing us for the next major principle he will be presenting to us

in verses 6-12...

we must never loose sight of the fact

that our greatest accountability is not to one another,

it’s to God.

Actually, I believe what he wants to do with this servant illustration

is to arm us with some much needed protection against the sometimes well meaning,

and far more often petty and inappropriate attacks

that so often take place within the world of religion.

There is something about religion

that gives some people the belief

that they have the right to evaluate the quality and correctness of their fellow Christians’ lives

and the responsibility to point out where and when they feel others

are not meeting the “correct” standard.

The closest I have ever come

to resigning as a pastor

took place a number of years ago.

I am a self-doubter by temperament

and I was still young in my own understanding of what it meant for me to be the pastor of a local church.

I received a call from a person in the church

asking if I would attend a meeting with several others that evening.

Of course I agreed,

and when I showed up

I was met by a handful of folks

who, for the next hour, took it upon themselves to grill me

on everything from how much I was paid

to what I did with my time on an hour by hour basis each day.

It was clear they saw me as directly,

personally accountable to them for the way in which I handled my entire life.

That attack came as close as anything ever has

to driving me out of this pastor thing altogether.

I have often wished I would have known then

what Paul tells us here.

You know how it is -

after it’s all over

and everyone is gone

you think up the perfect response.

I have often wished I would have left that meeting that night

by quoting this one verse to those who were there:

ROM 14:4 Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

It is to prepare us for those types of attacks

that Paul offers this illustration.

And, just so I’m not misunderstood here,

let me say that I am certainly not suggesting that, as a preacher, I have no human accountability.

No one is safe in this world

without some form of human authority over them.

It is a crucial and vital part of God’s work in our lives.

We are far too vulnerable to self-deception without it.

But as a pastor in our local church here

my accountability is not to everyone who listens to my teaching.

My accountability is to our board of Elders.

They have been given the oversight for me and the way I conduct my work here,

and my submission to them and their authority

is a huge part of God’s protection for me as His child.

Well, the 3^rd illustration comes in verses 5 and 6.

ROM 14:5 One man regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Let each man be fully convinced in his own mind.

ROM 14:6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord...

He’s talking, of course,

about the religious systems and rituals that will always grow up in the Christian world.

And He wants us to know

that the systems in themselves

are neither right nor wrong.

The only rightness and wrongness about them

comes in how we choose to relate to one another

at those points where our rituals and systems differ.

Which brings us to the next major principle governing our freedom.

And we’ll save it for next week.