04-18-10 Figuring Our Faith

Last week we began our study of the first major section

of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

It’s the section that begins with Romans 1:18 and runs through 2:20,

a section written by Paul

to explain to us why it was necessary for our Creator God

to take on human form and do what He did as the Person of Jesus Christ.

And Paul answers that question

by showing us what the human race looks like without Christ.

It is not an easy section of Scripture to read

because it forces us to face the most terrifying facts of our existence,

the fact that most people spend most of their lives trying to hide from.

It is a passage that confronts us with the confrontation between a righteous God

and a human race in rebellion against Him,

a passage that clearly, powerfully, ruthlessly confirms God’s absolute right

to pour out His judgment, His wrath on His creation.

We’re only half way through our study of that section,

and we’ll return to it again next week,

but this morning I want us to take a break from that section of Romans

so that we can look a little more closely

at this whole faith thing we’ve already touched on a little

and will look at a great deal more throughout our study of Romans.

You see, any proper presentation of the Biblical teaching on the wrath of God

can only be correctly understood

when seen within the context

of the grace, and compassion, and kindness of God

as revealed to us through Jesus Christ.

Our Creator is not

and never has been out to get us because of our sin.

From before the first day of creation

He has been out to redeem us

and reclaim us for Himself

in spite of our sin.

Those of you who were here last week

discovered that even as our God

pours out the first phase of His wrath on the earth,

He has done so

in a way that is designed by Him to call us back to Himself.

The very consequences of our sins

are designed to wake us up to the reality

of our desperate need for our God

and His Lordship in our lives.

It is no act of kindness

for a doctor to hide from the patient

the diagnosis of cancer

when there is still time to remove the disease

that will otherwise bring about death.

But this morning

we are going to pull back from our study of Romans

just long enough to spend a little more time

with a question that grows out of a passage I referred to last week in Romans 5

where he says,

Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

As I thought about it

I realized once again

what a huge gap there is between what our God says to us

and what so many Christians actually experience.

If what Paul said is true,

have you ever wondered why there seem to be so few Christians who experience the reality of that peace?

I think that’s a great question.

Though at first glance it may not seem like it,

it is actually a question we have wrestled with in different forms

repeatedly in our times together.

You see, the broader question,

and the one that pops up nearly every time we read a passage of Scripture is,

‟Why does there seem to be such a huge gap between what we hear God saying

and what we end up experiencing in our daily lives?”

Let me give you some other examples

of this same question

as we’ve seen it in other areas.

Q. If God says I am His holy one (and He does),

then why do I so often feel like a fumbling little sinful wretch?

Q. If God says I have been freed from sin (and He does),

then why do I still sometimes experience

a tremendous sense of bondage to old sin patterns in my life?

Q. If God says He has already made me adequate as a servant of His new covenant (and He does),

then why do I frequently feel totally inadequate

for the life I believe He has called me to live?

Q. And of course,

If God says that now, having been justified by faith, I have peace with God through my Lord Jesus Christ,

then why do I sometimes feel anything but peace with God?

Why is that?

In response to those questions,

and especially in response to the one about not experiencing peace with God,

I want to share with you something this morning

that is going to require some major rethinking for most of us here.

I want to begin helping us

to restructure our understanding

of what it means for us to have faith in God.

Now, we started to lay the groundwork for this

just a little bit

with a question I raised a few weeks ago

but at the time didn’t even begin to answer.

I used the illustration of a teacher

who told his students

he was offering them two possible ways

of getting an ‛A’ in his class.

They could either pursue an ‛A’

through doing all of the class work perfectly

or they could get an ‛A’

by having faith in him.

In that context

every student in that class

would be demanding more information

about what it means to have faith in the teacher.

And my point in the illustration, of course,

was that we have been so bombarded with faith talk in the Christian world

that we have ceased to relate to faith

as a word that has any meaning at all.

Our God says to us,

(Heb. 10:38) But My righteous one shall live by faith...

Such a statement should cause us

to want to know

just exactly what that means.

Unfortunately, if we relate to it as having any real meaning at all,

the best we can do

is to assume it means we should just trust God to give us the strength

to get through the hard stuff in life.

Now that is all well and good,

and in fact I do that on a daily basis,

but if that is where our understanding of this faith thing stops,

it will leave us with a tragically limited and deficient understanding

of what’s going on in this whole faith relationship between us and our Creator.

We are going to return to that

peace-with-God question in a few minutes,

but we cannot deal with it correctly

until we first make some progress

in our understanding of faith.

And let me offer you

a concise statement

of what I believe to be the most common error we make

in our understanding of faith,

and then I’ll give you 4 points

that I hope will explain the statement.

And first of all, here is the statement:

The heart of all true Biblical faith

is not choosing to believe

that God will do something we want Him to do,

it is choosing to trust

what He has already done

and what He has already said .

And I think I can explain this best

buy offering you a series of 4 points.

#1. As Christians, in our practical daily living,

we do not automatically experience what is true in our relationship with God,

but rather, we experience what we BELIEVE is true.

If what I believe about God

is consistent with who He really is

then what I experience will also be consistent with truth.

But if I am believing a lie,

I will experience the results of that lie in my life as if it were true,

even though that lie has no basis in fact.

Some examples will help.

God tells us clearly,

repeatedly that now, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

However,

if I still believe God is angry with me,

if I believe He is irritated with me,

if I believe He is still demanding from me things I cannot deliver,

then I will feel rejection,

and find myself trying to hide from Him.

If I believe the battle is still raging,

even though an eternal peace has already been established by God Himself,

I will continue to live in warfare.

God tells us clearly, specifically, that

(Titus 3:5) He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit...

However, if I still believe my standing with God

is directly linked to my performance for God,

then I will experience all of the things

that grow out of that belief system.

I will experience a sense of pride and security when my performance is where I think it should be.

I will experience a sense of condemnation,

and alienation from God

when my performance falls short.

I will view God primarily as my Judge,

the great Righteous Evaluator of my life,

checking each day, each hour, each minute,

to see how I’m measuring up.

I will have no trouble viewing Him as all-powerful,

and absolutely righteous,

but I will have little if any awareness of His deep, personal love for me as His child.

Here and now,

in this life on this earth,

it is not what is true that determines what I end up experiencing in my walk with God,

it is what I believe is true.

#2. Everything God tells us in His Word

is absolute, pure, perfect truth.

Truth is the only thing He CAN tell us.

1 John 1:5 And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.

Which means that

every time we encounter a statement in Scripture

that differs from what we are experiencing,

we know we have discovered evidence

of a lie in our personal belief system.

Which brings us to what I want us to see

as the first great step toward the true life of faith.

#3.Living by faith

is the ongoing, daily process

of actively seeking to replace our lies

with the truth revealed to us by our God.

Now, having said that, I need to follow it up immediately

by saying that replacing those lies imbedded within our souls -

our minds and emotions and memories -

with the truth our God reveals to us

is not like correcting a mistake on a math problem.

It isn’t something we do

simply by hearing the truth.

With most of us in most situations

it will take us months or years of slow growth

before we can even recognize the lies we have believed.

And even after we can finally see some truth -

for example the truth that our God truly does love us personally, deeply, eternally,

having seen that truth at some point in our life,

we are very prone to forgetting it

or doubting it the first time some apparent evidence to the contrary reenters our life.

And then finally, I want to add one more statement here

to help complete the picture.

#4. We will know that we are believing the truth

when what we experience at the spirit level

is consistent with what God says is true.

You see, the life of faith

has very little to do with believing God can or will do anything.

The life of faith is most of all

accepting as true

the things our God has already told us

about ourselves,

about our world,

about our past, our present, and our future,

and about our relationship with Him through Christ.

Now let me try to apply this to just a few areas

so that hopefully you can better relate to what I’m saying.

We’ll start with that question I brought up earlier -

why, if we really do have peace with God through the work of Christ for us,

why do so few Christians seem to experience the reality of that peace?

The answer to that question

is that so few Christians seem to experience peace with God

because, having lived our entire first phase of our life with God

believing that He is the great enemy of our happiness,

the eternal condemning Moral Judge of our lives,

even as Christians

we simply don’t believe God is telling us the truth when He says we have peace with Him.

And the most common reason

for Christians not to believe

that we have peace with God

is because we do not believe

two other things God has said to us.

#1. We do not believe the death of Christ

was literally a full, complete, and eternal payment for all our sin.

Col. 2:13 And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions,

Col. 2:14 having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

2. And we do not believe

we have been freed forever

from a law-based union with God.

We do not believe we have been freed from the law.

Rom. 7:6 But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

And if we do not believe either of those,

we will continue to live out an approach to God

in which we assume we must generate a certain level of good deeds and good living

in order to achieve and maintain peace with God...

which is the soil in which all religious systems thrive.

You see, it isn’t that we don’t have peace with God,

it’s that we don’t believe we have peace.

It isn’t that Christ’s death

wasn’t full payment for all our sin,

it’s that we don’t really believe it was full payment.

It isn’t that the measuring stick of the law

has now been removed from our lives forever,

it’s that we don’t believe it has been removed.

And because we do not believe it,

we do not experience the benefits

and the reality of it in our lives.

What I’m trying to say right here

is not nearly as complicated

as I may be making it sound.

What I’m trying to say

is that we have only one perfect,

infallible resource

for understanding the true nature of our God.

That resource is the record of Himself

and His dealings with us

that He has given us through His Word.

To the degree I choose to accept the truth of that resource,

to that degree I will experience the reality of that truth in my life.

And just a warning here -

our strong tendency

will be to understand our God

on the basis of our circumstances.

But the heart of faith

realizes that our true calling

is to understand our circumstances

on the basis of our God.

We live our lives immersed in a world of evil.

If I look at my circumstances

and then attempt to understand my God through them

my relationship with God will ultimately collapse

under a weight of confusion,

and doubts,

and questions,

and fears.

I’ll drive down the road

and hit a bump

while drinking a cup of coffee

and then wonder what kind of God

would allow me to slop a big stain

on my nice clean shirt.

Or I’ll see a close friend

fighting a difficult battle with cancer

and question the integrity of my Creator.

Only when I begin with my God,

and understand who He is

on the basis of His revelation of Himself

through His Word,

and through Jesus Christ

can I begin to find solid footing

both with Him

and with my circumstances.

And when I look at my God

and at His revelation of Himself through Christ,

this one thing I understand -

my God is absolutely

and eternally GOOD,

and His every action toward me

grows out of that absolute goodness.

And when I begin there,

when I begin in faith,

choosing to believe what my God has already said to me about Himself,

and about how He relates to me in Christ,

two things about my circumstances

then become clear.

First, my God will go with me

through everything I encounter in life,

and I will find His presence

more than sufficient to sustain me.

And second, He will not only bring me through those circumstances,

He will also reshape them

into good in my life.

There was a statement in the Romans passage we were studying last week,

a statement it pained me greatly

to have to skip over.

It was that statement in Romans 1:21

in which Paul reveals to us

the core of humanity’s great offense against God.

Paul's says, Rom. 1:21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

We did not honor Him as God

or give thanks...

Our great offense against our Creator

is in no way complicated.

He simply asks us to affirm

the two pillars of truth

upon which everything else exists -

God is there,

and He is GOOD.

The beginning of all true faith

is not in hoping God will do something good to me now as defined by my mostly flesh-based goals and desires and perspectives,

it is in affirming He is,

and always has been,

and always will be

absolutely and eternally good

in His every thought and action towards us.

When I look back at so many of the things I asked my God to do for me throughout my life,

things I simply knew I needed to have to be happy,

things He chose not to do for me,

and when I now see what He accomplished in me and for me

through His refusal to answer my prayers,

I now understand His love as I could not have done any other way.

In fact I would go so far as to say

that most of my greatest discoveries of the depth of God’s love for me

have come through the prayers He, in His kindness, chose not to answer.

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.