3/16/08 Moral What?!

We are just one week away from our Easter celebration.

I know this is Palm Sunday,

and I know that we often pull out of whatever series we’re in at this time of year

to switch to more seasonal topics,

but my mind has been so focused on our study of Spiritual Growth

that I’ve decided to keep us in this study for this morning as well.

Then next week we’ll pull out of it for a week and celebrate the most significant event

every to take place on planet earth.

But this morning we’re going to take one more step in our efforts to understand

what Spiritual Growth is and how it takes place in our lives.

This is our tenth week in this series,

and, although I didn’t mention it to you when we began,

I think many of you who have been going through this study with us

have come to realize that the concepts I’m sharing with you

are very personal to me.

By that I mean

that these are in a very real sense

the foundation blocks of my own life,

the truths that have literally shaped and sustained my own walk with the King

throughout the past forty years.

And as such

my discoveries of these principles

are deeply bound up in my own personal history.

Each of us have our own unique learning styles,

and my own style of learning

is nearly always a direct and often agonizing process

of being driven to cling to some Biblical principle I’ve discovered

as the result of some massive turmoil in my life.

For some reason

rarely have I been able to simply pick up a book

or listen to a talk

and hear a truth and then integrate it into my life.

Nearly all of the truths I have shared and will share with you throughout this series

did not come easily to me.

This morning we’re going to move into Peter’s list

that we’ve been bumping up against for several weeks,

that list found in Second Peter 1:5-7.

You remember what he says there, don’t you.

2PE 1:5-7 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.

So far we’ve talked about the over-all purpose of the list -

the way it reveals to us the projects our Lord has chosen to share with us

that enable us to then get to know Him better.

And we’ve talked about how these qualities on this list

then provide us with our doorways

into all true productivity in our Christian walk.

In fact Peter simply offered this to us in the form of a glorious promise.

2PE 1:8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We do not seek these qualities so that we can then be productive,

but productivity of the right kind in the right way

will always be a fringe benefit of our growth in these qualities.

The goal is never productivity,

but productivity will always result in the right way at the right time

when we allow God to build these qualities into our lives.

David comes at these same truths in a different way in the first Psalm.

He begins by talking about how blessed the person is

who seeks a truly Godly character.

He says, PSA 1:1-2 How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers! But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night.

Then David goes on to create a vivid mental image of such a person.

He says,

PSA 1:3 And he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water...

It’s powerful imagery -

a massive, healthy, growing tree with deep roots and great strength.

But then he goes on to make this comment. He says it is a tree... “Which yields its fruit in its season...”.

I do love that so much

because it tells us that there is a definite fruit-bearing season in each of our lives,

a season chosen by God Himself,

and if we keep our focus on the growth process He has for us,

when our season comes

we will bear fruit.

We won’t have to try to bear fruit,

we won’t have to somehow try to manufacture it.

We won’t have to take a series of ten classes on fruit bearing,

or follow 6 steps,

or memorize someone else’s preestablished system.

It will happen as an unavoidable part of our life.

The fruit isn’t the goal,

it certainly isn’t something we should seek,

it’s simply the by-product of the natural growth process

and life cycle established by God.

And that’s exactly the same thing Peter is telling us

in the first chapter of his second letter.

Do you want a truly productive life?

Then keep your focus always, only on who you are,

not on what you’re doing.

I had a phrase I told myself repeatedly during the early years of my walk with the King.

The truth is

even at 60 years old it’s still a major block in my life foundation.

I simply told myself,

“Larry, if you keep focused on your character,

God will take care of your career.”

Peter says it a whole lot better, of course.

2PE 1:8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And then, the last time we were in this study,

we saw that Peter prepares us for a life-time dual relationship

to the qualities on this list.

God begins His reconstructive process in our lives

by leading us through these progressive growth steps in the early years of our walk with Him.

But the truth is we never ever arrive.

...for if these qualities are yours and are increasing...

And in God’s design for us

we will walk through these qualities

at deeper and deeper levels

over and over and over again

as long as we remain on this planet.

And then just one more observation I’d like to make about this list

before we start looking more closely at the specifics.

Did you happen to notice where Love is in this list of qualities?

We in our society are so conditioned to believe

that Love is primarily something we feel

that when we come to a passage like this

we can be easily utterly blinded to the truth.

Every one of the qualities mentioned here by Peter

are choices we make.

That is the point.

That is what Peter wants us to know.

None of these are feelings,

none of them are dependent upon our emotions.

They are all qualities

that God’s Spirit can and does seek to build into us.

And the building process is clearly progressive.

By that I mean that each quality

can only be built upon the existence of the foundation of the qualities below it.

Which means that the ability to love,

the ability to choose to truly love another person

can only exist within a life

in which at least a measure of all of these other qualities exist.

I’m making this too complicated.

Let me just put it this way.

True love choices can only exist in our lives

to the degree that we have already built into our lives

a strong foundation of moral excellence.

In other words, any choice we make toward another person

that is not based upon Biblical morality is not true love.

Or, to turn it around,

to love another person

means to act toward them

in a way that is absolutely consistent with Biblical morality.

Well, we’ll talk about this more as we move through this study,

but it should come as no surprise to us

that the highest and most Godly quality we can ever express,

and the one that is far and away the most difficult for us to build into our lives is love

because the real thing demands that we seek the highest good for the other person

no matter what the cost of that choice may be to ourselves

or to what we may feel like doing at the time.

For God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son...

Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it...

But we’ll look more closely at this as we move ahead in the study.

I began this morning

by telling you that nearly everything I share with you in this study

came into my own life through at least some degree of agony.

It seems to be the only way I can learn most of the time.

And I can remember well

the turmoil I was going through in my own life

at the time when I first came across this remarkable passage in Second Peter.

It was in the fall of 1970.

I graduated from college in the spring of 1969

and then spent most of the next year

working with The Evangelical Alliance Mission on the Island of Trinidad.

Then, in the fall of 1970 I returned to the U.S.,

but first I took a two month detour

to study with a man who was having a significant impact on Christian thinking at the time,

Dr. Francis Schaeffer.

He had a loosely structured school in Switzerland,

and I’d been accepted into his program for up to three months of study.

I know that Schaeffer and L’Abri have come under attack in recent years

by some who now question the value or motives behind some of what was said and done,

but for me, during those few months in the fall of 1970,

it was the first intellectually safe place I’d ever been,

a place where, for the first time in my life any honest question was encouraged,

where no pre-packaged doctrinal system was crammed down my throat,

a place where thinking, and asking, and doubting, and churning were openly encouraged.

It was a time of tremendous upheaval in my life.

I’d been a Christian for about four years at the time,

and I’d gained a tremendous amount of doctrinal knowledge in those four years,

but my life just didn’t seem to work.

I can remember one afternoon especially,

a Sunday afternoon, immediately following the morning church service.

It was an incredible fall day in the Swiss Alps,

and under other circumstances I’m sure I would have been overwhelmed

with the intense beauty everywhere I looked.

But not today.

To be honest, I don’t now even remember

what huge unresolved issue I was wrestling with that day.

There were so many of them back then.

All I remember is walking out of that chapel,

and on down the mountain trail used by the local farmers

to move their cattle from mountain pasture to mountain pasture.

I remember the tears streaming down my face,

and my longing to make certain I got as far away from any other human being as possible.

Why was my life such a mess... why was I such a mess?

I’d been a Christian for nearly four years.

Why was there still so little strength and stability in my walk with God?

Why was I such a moral wimp sometimes?

Why couldn’t I be like Daniel and Joseph

who stood strong in the face of powerful forces seeking to drive them into sin?

The pain and the confusion that engulfed me that morning certainly wasn’t new.

The same agonizing questions had tormented me for several years.

Christ’s entrance into my life four years earlier

had created within me a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

But it was a hunger I couldn’t satisfy,

a thirst I couldn’t quench.

I ‘d heard the sermons

explaining how God now saw me through the blood of Christ

and because of that blood declared me righteous.

It was a great truth,

a truth I clung to, but it wasn’t enough.

I didn’t just want to be seen as righteous,

I wanted to BE righteous.

I wanted the strength to choose godliness,

the power to turn my back on sin.

For two months that Fall

I drenched myself in Schaeffer’s teaching.

I attended every lecture,

I pumped the man with questions whenever I had the chance,

I listened to his tapes for four hours every day.

At one point I even tried to listen at a higher tape speed

so that I could cram more content into my muddled mind.

In the end, though, Schaeffer’s greatest gift to me

wasn’t his highly refined perspective on human philosophical thought

or his remarkable insights into the chaotic cultural changes

that were taking place in our nation in the late 1960’s and early 70’s.

His greatest gift to me

was an attitude that was deeply imbedded in everything he thought and taught.

Francis Schaeffer understood that

any answers that could be found

would be found within the Christian thought framework.

He applied this truth in areas of philosophical thought.

But, as I listened to the man,

I began to realize that the same truth applied to every area of life.

The answers to the churning chaos inside me

would also be found within the thought framework offered to us by our Lord.

Shortly after leaving L’Abri

I discovered Peter’s words in the first chapter of his second letter,

the words we’re studying today.

It was a discovery that flooded me with hope.

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 (2 Peter 1:5-7).

When I first discovered this passage

I knew I’d found the road map I’d been looking for.

There I was, just one step above saving faith,

fighting to establish a foundation of moral excellence in my life.

So many pieces suddenly snapped together through Peter’s words.

I’d spent four years living in fear and self-condemnation

because moral strength and purity

hadn’t instantly entered my life at the time I met my Lord.

But through Peter’s words

I finally realized that moral excellence

wasn’t something that instantly resulted from submission to Christ.

It is a quality our Lord builts into our lives

step by step following our submission to Him.

It is the first great adventure He’s called us to share with Him,

the first project through which I could begin discovering what my God is really like.

Peter’s words made it clear

that everything else God seeks to share with us

rests upon the foundation of moral excellence.

Our contemporary Christian landscape

is cluttered with the broken lives

of people who believed they could find

some alternate path to effective Christian living.

They are men and women who refused to allow their Lord

to lead them through the sometimes painful process

of establishing moral stability in their lives,

people who clothed their lack of moral integrity

in a glittering Christian facade of image and activity,

only to discover that a house without a foundation can’t stand for long.

Our Lord’s approach to growth and productivity

is so different from the stuff that’s marketed

in so much of our church world.

We’re quick to tell ourselves and one another

all the things we really should be doing in order to be good Christians.

I think if we would have written this passage for Peter

it would have sounded more like this:

‟Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply church attendance, and in your church attendance prayer, and in your prayer daily devotions, and in your daily devotions tithing, and in your tithing witnessing, and in your witnessing world evangelism. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

But Peter’s words helped me to realize

that God was focused not on what I was producing in my walk with Him,

He was focused on what I was becoming.

He wasn’t calling me to clothe myself in a glittering external image of Christian success and productivity.

He was asking me

to openly acknowledge the existence of evil within myself

and to cooperate with Him in the task of bringing that evil

under the jurisdiction of this new life in the Spirit.

Strange how it is...

When I first looked at that stairway

and realized that I wasn’t even on step one yet,

rather than discouraging me

it freed me as nothing else had been able to do

because I realized that not only did my Lord not condemn me for being a mess,

He assumed it,

and then went on to show me both where He could and would take me if I’d follow.

And with that as background,

the next time we’re in this study

we’ll look more closely at what Peter is talking about

when he calls us to build a foundation of moral excellence into our lives.