10-09-11 A Little More About Other People’s Lists

For most of the past couple of months

we have been studying the 14^th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

It is a chapter in which Paul provides us

with the principles we need

to live out a truly free approach to life

without allowing that freedom

to destroy our relationships with others

or to hinder either their growth or ours

in both freedom and righteousness.

I mentioned toward the end of our time together last week

that true freedom is something none of us have ever known

prior to our union with Christ.

And, when we first get a taste of it,

when we first begin to understand

what it really means to be free in Christ,

to live with our God

not on the basis of our performance,

but rather on the basis of His grace,

and forgiveness,

and kindness,

and love poured out on us,

when some of those truths begin to touch our minds and hearts,

we tend to either abuse that freedom,

or find it so threatening

that we retreat back into our preferred religious system.

Do you know what the apostle Paul called this remarkable arrangement

created between us and our God

through the death of Christ?

In the 6^th chapter of Ephesians

he calls it “the mystery of the good news”.

We translate it as “the mystery of the gospel”,

but the word gospel means “good news”.

In that verse Paul says,

EPH 6:19-20 and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the good news, ... that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

If you’re not familiar with that word “mystery”

as it is used in the New Testament,

it will help you to know that it is a special word used

to describe something that God has done for us

that was hidden from the human race

prior to the coming of Christ,

something that we could not understand,

something that God could not bring out into the light

until after the work of Christ was completed.

And at the top of the list of these mysteries

is the mystery of this remarkable freedom

to live in the presence of our God,

immersed in His love,

with all of our moral debt removed from us forever,

as a result of our faith, our trust in the death of Christ for our sins.

It’s no wonder Paul asked his fellow Christians

to pray for him that he would be able to proclaim

the mystery of this good news with boldness.

Life with God through faith in Christ

is so utterly foreign to our thinking.

It is what our spirits long for

more than anything else in the world,

literally more than life itself,

but living in the presence of a righteous God who loves us,

who understands us perfectly,

and who does not reject us

or condemn us

when our performance falls so far short of true righteousness,

simply doesn’t make any sense to us.

Having lived our lives prior to our entrance into His love

believing He is the enemy,

believing He is the One who is out to get us,

the One who demands what we cannot deliver,

and condemns us when we don’t come through,

when we are confronted with the truth about our God,

when we are first exposed to a Creator

who loves us so much

that He is willing to die in our place for our sin,

it requires us to completely rebuild

our entire concept of God from the ground up.

And in that process

so much of our early encounters with our God,

even as Christians,

will follow the same pattern as we saw in Adam and Eve.

Do you remember their response to God

following their first act of rebellion against Him?

GEN 3:8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

GEN 3:9 Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"

GEN 3:10 He said, "I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself."

Adam and Eve were created naked.

They had lived in the presence of God naked since the day of their creation.

But once sin entered into their lives

their instinctive response to their God

was to hide from Him

not just because they were afraid He would see their physical nakedness,

but because they were afraid of His seeing the nakedness of their souls.

And we do the same thing.

We play all sorts of mental hide-and-seek games with God,

because the thought of living in the presence of a God

who knows us totally

and loves us eternally in the face of that knowledge

simply doesn’t make any sense to us.

I have at times been asked how I would respond to a person who said,

“Yeah, well,

this grace stuff you’re preaching sounds really good,

but it simply doesn’t work in real life.”

First of all I would point out that I didn’t come up with this stuff,

God did.

Left to myself,

apart from what God has said to us

about life with Him through faith in Christ,

I would take the same approach

that all man-made religious systems take -

I would tell people what’s right,

and what’s wrong,

and then look for some emotion-based hook

or prod to try to move them into change.

I would use guilt feelings or shame,

or fear of the wrath of God,

or the promise of great rewards,

or I would attempt to create some sort of social pressure,

or social competition to play on our egos -

“Who did the most for God this week?”

“Who did the most for the church?”

“Who can we bring up front as our winner of the week?”

Left to myself

I certainly wouldn’t stand up here

and tell a room full of people

that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”,

or that, “...having been justified by faith, you have peace with God through your Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also you have obtained your introduction by faith into this GRACE in which you stand...”

I would want to keep the screws on somehow,

to keep people chained to a performance-based relationship with God

that would then hopefully nudge them into better behavior.

I think my second response to someone who said that this grace stuff doesn’t work in real life

is to point out that what really doesn’t work is real life.

What doesn’t work

is people frantically trying to change themselves.

What doesn’t work is people desperately looking

for something, anything that will bring them

some enduring sense of fulfillment

and peace with themselves

and with their lives.

What doesn’t work is accumulating more and more

and at the same time feeling more and more empty,

and frightened,

and lonely.

What doesn’t work at all well is real life as we know it.

And then, I think my third response

to someone concerned about whether the message of the grace of God

will work in real life

is to point out what, for me, has become the most obvious truth in all of life -

the most powerful force for change in all of human experience

is the discovery that someone really loves us.

Being loved, even by another human being,

meets needs within us

and motivates us to change as nothing else can ever do.

And, if we were ever to discover,

at even a minuscule level,

that our GOD loves us-

that He delights in our friendship,

that He enjoys us,

that He places an eternal value on all of those things that make us unique in all the world,

that discovery would alter our lives forever.

It would alter the way we viewed ourselves.

It would alter the way we viewed what He says to us about morality

because we would be able to both see and trust the motives behind what He has said.

It would bring into our lives a sense of value,

and dignity,

and purpose,

and meaning beyond anything we had ever known.

To someone who said to me

that this grace stuff doesn’t work in real life,

I would say that religion can create the facade of change,

it can create highly effective external pressures

for conformity and submission and compliance,

but the only thing in all of human existence

that has the ability to recreate us at the spirit level of our being,

is our personal entrance into the discovery of the true nature of the love of God for us,

and, if what they have heard me say about the grace of God

does not seem to work in real life,

then all it means is that they have not yet really heard

what I have been saying about the grace and love of God.

Of course we all have reasons why Jesus Christ must be kept at arm’s length.

For many of us it’s fear -

fear that, if we let Him in, on His terms,

He will destroy our lives.

We are afraid He will rip from our grasp

all that we are so desperately clinging to

in our frantic attempts to meet our needs,

that He will leave us empty,

and condemned,

and helpless,

and filled with shame.

We have each been given an inoculation against Him in the form of a spirit in rebellion against Him

at the time we enter this world,

an inoculation in which we are filled with

just enough awareness of His truth

to be convinced

that He either cannot or will not meet our deepest needs

if we place our hearts into His hands.

Now, obviously, my brief introductory comments

have once again gotten completely out of hand,

but before we drop back for just a few minutes

into Paul’s comments about lists and freedom in Romans 14,

let me just say that,

if you find yourself in turmoil

in your relationship with life

it is very possible that you are in that turmoil

because under it all

you are in turmoil with your Creator.

It may be that you’ve been hanging out at this church

because I don’t try to cram you full of emotional guilt every time we get together.

But if you know there is an unresolved tension

between you and your God,

if you hear nothing else I say this morning,

please hear this -

from God’s perspective

there is absolutely nothing in your life right now

that could in any way hinder

or prevent you from entering into His love.

The only thing that has ever stood between us and our God

is our sin,

and through Christ’s death

all of that sin has been removed from us forever

and placed onto Him.

And now all that remains

is for us to hear and respond to His offer:

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

But the last time we were in our Romans study

I promised you that the next time we were in the study

we would finish up Romans 14

by looking at Paul’s instructions to us about the healthy approach to other people’s lists,

and the healthy approach to our own lists.

And just to quickly get us back into this 14^th chapter,

let me offer you that overview once again

of the last half of the chapter.

Paul began in 14:13

by offering us the 3^rd principle

governing our freedom in Christ: let us determine this– not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother's way.

Then, throughout the rest of the chapter

he develops this 3^rd principle in 4 steps.

In 14:14 he told us that

because each of us brings with us into our walk with Christ

a different heritage

with different rules,

and different weakness,

and different perspectives,

none of our mental lists defining faithful submission to Christ will look the same.

Our Lord relates to each of us

in the way that is exactly right

given our absolute uniqueness.

Then, in 14:15-18 Paul revealed to us the greater issue.

He wanted us to know

that the goal is not uniformity or conformity but rather our learning how to love one another in the face of our differences.

Which brings us to the final two steps in Paul’s words to us in this chapter.

In 14:19-21 He shows us the healthy approach to other people’s lists,

and then, finally,

in 14:22-23 He shows us the healthy approach to our own lists.

And let’s start with the first -

finding a healthy approach to other people’s lists.

And Paul gives us that healthy approach

in a single statement in verse 19.

ROM 14:19 So then let us pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another.

And I do hope you see what Paul is doing for us in that statement.

He is once again giving us

the questions we need to ask ourselves

that will lead us to the healthiest relationships possible

between us and our fellow Christians.

And maybe we will be able to relate to this better

if we place it into a setting

that is more familiar to us in our culture.

As we’ve seen,

Paul is talking about this whole meat-and-idols thing,

a discussion that has no emotional hooks to us in our culture,

and so misses most of us completely.

But let’s take this concept and plug it into some issues

that are more potentially divisive in our church culture.

We could take something like speaking in tongues,

or eternal security,

or forms of church government,

or acceptable and unacceptable forms of entertainment.

We could take any topic

on which Christians sometimes disagree with one another.

But, for the sake of our illustration this morning

why don’t we take body piercing.

And we’re going to take two Christians and put them together.

And let me describe them.

One of them is in his early 20's.

He has 4 rings hanging from one ear,

another from his nose,

and something else run through his eye brow.

The other Christian is in his late 40's.

He has never had anything run through anywhere,

and the very thought of it

makes him cringe in disgust.

Now, these two brothers in Christ meet.

What comes out of that meeting

will be determined totally

by what questions those two Christians choose to ask themselves

about the other person.

The fellow with all the rings

could approach this encounter by asking himself,

“What can I do to get this guy to loosen up? He obviously believes being a Christian

is mostly just a matter of clothing oneself

in some sort of up-tight artificial facade.

Peter commanded us to act as free men,

and I’ve got to do something

to get this fellow to get past his cultural religious hang-ups

and enter into at least a little of the freedom Christ died to give us.”

Or... he could approach this encounter

by asking himself,

“How can I relate to this brother in Christ

in a way that does the most to promote peace between us

and supports him in his growing friendship with Christ?”

And our Christian in his late 40's

could approach this interview

by asking himself,

“How can I get this guy

to quit clothing himself in the ways of the world?

How can I get him to realize

that we are called to be in the world but not of it?

What can I do to get him to clean up his act and clothe himself in the kind of respectful dignity appropriate for a child of God?”

Or... he could approach this encounter

by asking himself,

“How can I relate to this brother in Christ

in a way that does the most to promote peace between us

and supports him in his growing friendship with Christ?”

When Paul says,

ROM 14:19 So then let us pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another...

he is giving us the first two questions

we should ask ourselves

in every encounter we have with a fellow believer.

How can I promote peace with this person?

How can I build him or her up in love?

You know how I put it, don’t you?

In God’s economy

building our relationships with one another

is more important than our rights,

our things,

or our ideas.

Paul then goes on

to give us God’s perspective on such encounters.

ROM 14:20 Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food.

You see, that’s what it is -

that’s what’s taking place in that person next to you.

It is the work of God.

It is God’s creative, redemptive work in them.

The fact that His handiwork in them

doesn’t look like His handiwork in you

simply means that you really are two completely different people,

with two completely different callings,

and purposes,

and divine plans.

And then Paul concludes

with a reaffirmation

that, when we are called to choose between freedom and strengthening our love relationship with others,

we are called to choose love.

All things indeed are clean, but they are evil for the man who eats and gives offense. It is good not to eat meat or to drink wine, or to do anything by which your brother stumbles.

And I cannot leave this

without reaffirming once again

that Paul is not talking here

about sacrificing our freedom in Christ

simply because some other Christian doesn’t happen to like the way that freedom is being lived out in our life.

Paul is talking about those situations

where our actions

or the exercise of our freedom

could cause our brother or sister in Christ to be pulled back into destructive behaviors from their past.

And with that

we’ll leave the healthy approach to our own lists for next week.