3/2/08 Step Right Up!

For most of the past two months

we have been involved in a study of Spiritual Growth.

Our goal in this series

is not complicated.

Hopefully by the time we finish

we will understand both what it is

and also how it is accomplished in our lives.

In the past seven weeks of this study

we’ve spent most of our time

looking at what Spiritual Growth is,

and in the process we’ve seen

that, at its heart, it is simply a process of our growing in a living, personal friendship with God Himself.

It’s not a matter of gaining more and more knowledge,

it’s not a process of cultivating greater faithfulness to our chosen religious form or system.

It’s all about us getting to know our God better,

learning more and more how to correctly hear His voice,

and trust what He says,

and follow His leadership in our lives,

and trust His promise to live His life out through us.

It’s all about us and Him.

Our guide through our discovery of the true nature of Spiritual Growth

is the Apostle Peter.

In the first chapter of his second letter

he outlines for us what Spiritual Growth is

and how it is accomplished in our lives.

And so far in our study

we’ve looked at the first four verses of II Peter

and seen in those verses

that everything we hunger for the most in life,

everything we need for a truly fulfilling life

comes to us through a growing epignosis of God -

through a growing personal friendship with Him.

And then we heard Peter tell us

that friendship grows as we share with our Lord

the process of “becoming a partaker of the divine nature”,

and that the key tool with which God accomplishes this changing process

is through the gift to us of His “precious and magnificent promises”.

We spent three weeks talking about those promises,

and now, this morning, we’re going to move on

to what I believe to be the most remarkable two verses on Spiritual Growth ever written.

But to introduce these verses to us

I first want to take you back to an event that took place in my life in the winter of 1960.

I was 13 years old at the time,

living in the north end of Seattle where I spent nearly my entire childhood.

At that point in the city’s history,

though there was a huge surge in new home construction in our area,

there were also a number of older houses,

many of them pretty run down,

sitting on large lots,

with the owners waiting for some land developer to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

There was one such house just a few blocks from our home,

used by the owner as a rental until he could get the offer he wanted.

We’d met the current tenants,

a husband and wife with three small children,

and as our casual friendship with them grew

they began hiring me to stay with their children occasionally in the evenings.

They had no TV set,

so whenever I was lined up for an evening with the kids

I would come prepared with my survival kit.

It consisted of a can of pop,

one of the really big $.10 candy bars,

and the most recent edition of Popular Science Magazine.

The first part of the evening went fine.

I played board games with the children until their bed time,

then made sure they were all tucked into bed

in the room just off the kitchen

before I settled down in the living room with my treats.

Looking back on it

I’m sure the family couldn’t have had much money

because the children simply slept on mattresses laid on the floor.

I suppose it must have been about 9:00 o’clock in the evening

when I finally finished all my duties

and got settled into the one comfortable chair in the house.

It wasn’t long before the only sound I could hear

was the soft breathing of the children as they slept.

I sat, and read, and munched my candy bar for maybe a half an hour or so,

sitting with my back to the darkened kitchen.

Then all of the sudden I heard a noise,

a kind of scratching sound coming from the kitchen behind me.

I turned around and saw at least four cat-sized wharf rats

scurrying around on the kitchen floor.

One was sniffing under the stove,

another was rooting around under the kitchen table,

a third one was just crawling up into the kitchen from out of a large hole under the sink,

and a forth rat was heading right into the room where the children all lay sleeping on the floor.

I had no idea that rats could get that big,

and the terror I felt was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

Obviously they were well acquainted with the house routine

and they waited every night until things were quite

and then come on up in search of food.

As soon as I saw them I let out a bellow

and started stomping my feet on the floor.

When they heard me

they all made a dash back under the sink

and disappeared back into their hole.

For a few minutes I just stood there in a 13 year old frozen terror,

and then finally inched my way into the kitchen to do battle.

I turned the light on,

found the evening paper,

and then began wadding the pages up into little balls.

I flung them in the direction of the doorway to hell under the sink,

and then took a kitchen chair,

held it by the legs,

and used it to herd my paper balls into the hole the rats had come out of.

When I’d packed as many chunks of paper as possible into the hole

I shoved the chair up against them

and then spent the rest of the evening sitting on a chair

staring at the opening,

waiting for the beasts to come charging out an tear me to shreds.

They never came back,

and neither did I.

And what does that have to do with spiritual growth

or with our building a friendship with God?

Well, I think there is a similar experience that most Christians go through

at some point after we come to Christ.

Before we come to Christ

the truth is that we live at peace with the rats in our lives.

We were comfortable with them,

we understood them.

We knew their ways

and even viewed them as our friends -

all of those ugly little techniques we’d developed in order to try to meet our needs.

Our spirits scrounged around in the garbage of life,

looking for anything that might make us feel better,

or look better,

or help us to hide from the pain we felt inside.

Paul’s description of us in Ephesians 2:3 is dead on,

‟...we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”

Of course we did what we could

to make sure that, to the world around us,

we looked great, or as good as possible.

But deep inside we lived in our own self-centered world of corruption.

Then our Savior, Jesus Christ, stepped into our lives,

bringing His light and His hope,

His kindness and His grace and His forgiveness.

And deep inside we knew that at last we’d come home.

Being loved by our Creator brought an inner peace that nothing else could duplicate,

a peace grounded in the realization that at the deepest level of our being

we really were now new creations, washed clean by God Himself.

But there’s a danger in that transformation process -

a danger that can shake us to the very core if we’re not prepared for it.

It’s not unusual for us to enter the family of God

believing that our battle with evil has finally come to an end.

Just like I entered that living room when I was 13 years old

and settled into that chair thinking everything was just perfect,

sometimes we too may enter the family of God

expecting a nice quiet evening with our can of soda, our candy bar, and our favorite magazine.

But with every growing Christian

there will come times

when a hideous noise makes its way into our consciousness

and we turn in horror

to see rats pouring out from under our kitchen sink.

Problems we just knew had died when we died to our old self

suddenly reenter our lives with a power that sends a shock through us,

and the evil we just knew was gone forever

suddenly penetrates our lives in ways that’s just terrifying.

Peter knew exactly what that was like.

That’s why he understands us

and we understand him so well.

He knew what it was like

to have His Lord suddenly tell him

that the words he was speaking were the very words of Satan himself.

He knew what it felt like

to have his own addiction to fear

drive him to openly deny his Lord three times.

And even after he’d taken over leadership of the early Church

his battles with pride and fear plagued him and pulled him into sin (Galatians 2:11-14).

Those were just a few of Peter’s rats

crawling out from under the kitchen sink.

Of course his rats don’t bother us,

we don’t even think they’re any big deal,

because they’re not our rats,

but the principle is the same,

and Peter’s comments in the first chapter of his second letter

are designed to prepare us for those rats

by revealing to us the true nature of a growing trust-friendship with Christ.

We’ve seen so far that spiritual growth

is the process through which we deepen our trust-friendship with the Person of Christ.

But the assumptions we bring with us into the Christian life

about how that friendship develops are often totally messed up.

So Peter writes the first chapter of his second letter

to set the record straight.

And in just three verses of that first chapter

he gives us the most remarkable blueprint for spiritual growth

found anywhere in Scripture.

It’s a passage that comes right out of his own life,

a passage in which he reveals the eight progressive steps of growth

that Christ seeks to build into each of our lives.

These are the projects He has carefully selected for each of us.

This is the trail map for our wilderness adventure with our Lord,

carefully planned by our King to enable us to grow in our friendship with Him.

The passage is found in 2 Peter 1:5-7 where Peter says,

Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge; and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness; and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love.

Now, Peter has carefully worded this passage

in a way that is designed to show us

that these eight qualities he presents are progressive in nature.

Each one builds upon the foundation provided by the one preceding it.

This is the way I picture what Peter is doing for us:

Before we finish this series

we’ll walk through each of those steps,

looking at what they are and why they are progressive in nature.

But first I want us to begin with an overview of what’s happening in this passage.

Lists in Scripture are tricky things.

Our flesh-driven, performance-based religious nature

longs for a list to sink its teeth into.

Committing ourselves to the fulfillment of a list

makes us feel productive,

competent,

holy.

It is what our flesh understands.

Paul attacked this universal human weakness head-on

when he found the Colossian Christians

exchanging the true life in the Spirit

for a list of duties they thought would lead them into effective Christian living.

In Colossians 2:20-23 he calls this religious list mentality

the ‟elementary principles of the world” and writes:

If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!" ...in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

He wants us to know

that no list in existence has the ability to transform our lives.

It may seem so right, so holy, so wise,

but in the end it has no power to transform our flesh.

Only Christ Himself,

purifying our hearts and rebuilding our lives,

can ever bring about true life transformation.

And yet, clearly Peter has provided us with a list -

eight qualities carefully organized into progressive steps of growth.

But this list can only be correctly understood

in the context of the four verses that come before it,

verses in which Peter tells us

that the goal God offers each of us

is not the goal of fulfilling the list,

it’s the goal of growing in our epignosis of Him.

These eight qualities aren’t the goal,

they’re just the means, the tools, the shared projects

through which the goal of growing in our epignosis of Christ

can become a reality in our lives.

There are only two ways in which these tools can fail to accomplish their purpose.

The first is if we turn the project into the goal.

The calling God has offered us is clear -

we’re to share this growth process with our Lord,

keeping our eyes fixed on our deepening trust-friendship with Him.

But if, rather than focusing on our growth in that trust-friendship,

we begin to evaluate our progress and standing with God

by how far we think we have climbed the stairs,

an ugly religious spirit will replace true growth in God

and poison our walk with the King.

Rather than finding the freedom to face honestly the growth issues in our lives,

we’ll attempt to paste on a facade that we think makes us look good to our fellow Christians.

We’ll build a protective external image

and then hide behind it from the real growth issues in our lives.

Have you ever wondered why some church people

whose lives seem to be among the most holy and righteous in action

also seem to be among the most judgmental, unloving people in the world?

That’s what happens when we allow the means, the list, to become the goal.

This trap can produce only two possible results in a person’s life.

Either it will produce a critical, judgmental spirit

because we see ourselves achieving a level of spirituality that others lack,

or it will produce a deep sense of failure and defeat

because we see ourselves forever falling short of the mark.

Have you ever gone through some hard growth issue

feeling as though you’d failed miserably,

but then realized that even in your failure,

or maybe because of it

you learned things about your Lord and His love for you

that you’d never known before?

Welcome to true spiritual growth.

Only when we see Peter’s list in context,

as a means to help us towards the real goal of growing with our King,

only then will it serve the purpose for which it was given.

The second way we can undermine the effectiveness of these growth tools

is by refusing to embrace the specific character growth project our Lord has selected for us.

We’ll look at this trap closer later in this series,

but for now it’s enough to realize

that our Lord carefully selects the specific growth projects for each of us

that He knows will most effectively help us to grow in our friendship with Him.

There are times in each of our lives

when the project He has selected for us

will involve some issue

or fear

or area of weakness we simply don’t want to face.

Those are the times when it takes the greatest courage and practical trust in our Lord

to take His hand and allow Him to lead us through the growth process.

But if we refuse to allow Him the freedom to select the growth priorities for our lives,

that refusal will put our maturing process on hold

until we are willing to reach out to Him in trust

and accept the growth challenge He seeks to share with us.

The growth issues the Lord selects for each of us

are neither arbitrary nor negotiable.

His selection of those growth issues

are rooted in His deep love for us

and His perfect knowledge of our needs.

If we reject the growth issue He seeks to share with us,

He doesn’t toss that issue aside

and select another one that we might find more to our liking.

What He does

is to continue to work in our lives

until He can bring us to the point

where we will once again accept the priorities

that He knows are essential for our continued growth in Him.

Those times in our lives

when we’re fighting against the growth issue He’s selected for us

are sometimes the hardest times in our lives.

Resisting the leadership of God

is not an easy thing for the Christian.

Just like Adam and Eve after their sin,

we’ll try to find some place to hide from the issues our Lord wants to share with us.

Some Christians hide by attempting to drop out and run away,

closing their ears to their Lord.

They may continue to carry on the motions and the form of their faith for years,

or for the rest of their lives,

or they may drop out of the Christian scene all together,

returning to a hollow resurrection

of the flesh-driven lifestyle the Lord called them out of in the first place.

They enter into a sort of spiritual coma

in which no inner spirit activity can be detected.

But there’s another very different type of hiding place,

one that Paul warned Timothy about in First Timothy 1:5-7.

Paul had left Timothy behind at Ephesus

to complete the process of selecting local leadership for the infant church.

He writes his young friend,

outlining the qualifications necessary for those in positions of leadership in the local church.

But he begins his instructions with this warning:

But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions.

Paul takes Timothy right back to the basics,

reminding him that the heart of all true Christian growth

centers on our sharing with our Lord the practical process

of facing the character growth issues God brings into our lives.

Paul mentions three specific growth areas:

we are to learn how to love those God places around us,

we are called to build greater moral purity into our lives,

and we are to grow in our practical trust in our Lord.

Real straightforward, practical stuff.

But then comes that remarkable warning.

Paul tells Timothy that there will be some within the Church

who have rejected these goals that God has established for them.

They’ve seen their Lord place His finger

onto some issue in their life that they’re just not going to face.

But, rather than running away from the family of God,

they hide from the issues by becoming “teachers of the law”.

Sounds holy and righteous, doesn’t it?

Did you know that not one New Testament writer,

not one Apostle,

not one growing disciple of Jesus Christ

ever identified themselves as a “teacher of the law”?

They called themselves bond servants of Christ,

and Apostles of the GRACE of God,

and ministers of the Good News of God - His offer of salvation through Jesus Christ.

But those who are looking for a place to hid from God

and from the unresolved issues in their lives

become “teachers of the law”,

highly skilled at sharing with others

rules and lists and responsibilities

that every good Christian should fulfill.

And our Christian world is full of them.

The problem, of course, is that the law has no power to save,

no power to transform our lives.

It does, however, provide a great hiding place

for those who want to keep people’s attention focused away

from the inner growth issues that they themselves have refused to face in their own lives.

So what’s Peter really doing for us here?

When we see it correctly,

Peter’s progressive steps of growth

provide tremendous hope and encouragement for each of us who come to Christ.

Not only does Peter not condemn us for the absence of these qualities he lists,

his wording makes it clear that he assumes

that we will all begin our walk with Christ without them.

The only thing he assumes is a measure of faith.

He says, ‟To your faith supply...”

In Second Peter 1:1 Peter makes it clear

that he’s writing exclusively to Christians,

‟...to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Our lives may be filled with countless other unresolved issues,

but our union with Christ has laid a solid faith foundation within us.

This foundation is the only prerequisite

for the growth program Peter outlines in these verses.

In his call to growth

he’s preparing us for that hole under the sink cabinet,

and for the rats that will try to enter through it.

He knows we begin our Christian lives

lacking the moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and ability to love

that we so desperately need for the quality of life our Lord seeks to give us.

We come to the King with only one thing in our hands -

a measure of faith,

having chosen to trust the salvation offered through Christ.

Peter understands the pain and terror,

the sense of shame, failure,

and defeat those rats can bring with them

when we see their heads poking through that hole.

He wants us to understand that,

though the rats may shock us,

they do not shock our Lord.

He assumes their presence in our lives.

Obviously, He knew they were there all the time.

And He knows, too, that as we share the challenge of facing and defeating them with Him

the growth we experience in our relationship with Him in the process

will take what was once evil and bring great good from it into our lives.

Now, there’s something else Peter tells us about our relationship to this list,

something filled with hope,

but we’re out of time for the morning

so we’ll pick up or study right here next week.