5/20/07 A Friend In Disguise

I have a principle to share with you this morning that you will not like.

I don’t like it.

At least, my flesh doesn’t like it a bit.

Some of you will leave this morning saying to yourselves,

“Well, that’s just his opinion, and I believe he missed big time today.”

Or more likely

you will find some very reasonable explanation

why, even though the principle itself may have some merit,

it doesn’t actually apply to you personally in all situations.

I understand that.

I understand that because I have fought

and at times continue to fight the same battles in my own life.

But I will say also,

that if you can ever reach the point where you can make peace with this principle

and embrace it as the true gift from our God that it is

it will result in a level of freedom,

and peace,

and security,

and gratitude to your Lord beyond anything you’ve ever known before.

I had intended to move back into our study of John chapter 5 this morning,

but several questions came up last week

following my closing comments,

and the urgency with which they were asked

made me think it would be good for me to say a little more

about a subject that has remarkable significance for all of us.

If you were here last week

you will remember that I talked about the Isaacs in our lives-

those times at which our Lord asks us

to let go of something we have come to believe

we really must have in order for our needs to be met.

I won’t reteach the concept again this morning,

but at the end of that talk

I shared with you three things that I have found to be of tremendous value

at those times when that Isaac process is going on in our lives.

The first two seemed to cause little problem for most of you.

They were, first, to choose to hold all things loosely,

and, second, to cultivate a daily heart of gratitude to God

for whatever He has chosen to give you for that day.

Certainly those two do not happen automatically,

and frequently not without active choosing on our part,

but the principles themselves seemed reasonable, sensible, obvious.

But the third suggestion I made

caused some of you more than a little concern,

and it is that third suggestion

that I want us to return to this morning

and look at in a more organized way.

The third suggestion I made was this -

I urged you to trust absolutely

the authorities that God has placed in your life

because those authorities that He has placed in your life

are the best tools you will ever have

in knowing the difference between what God has given you

and what you are simply clinging to

in your own flesh-based self-deception.

After talking with some of you about this

I spent some time looking back over my teaching during the past few years

because I was just certain that I had taught this life principle repeatedly.

But, to my surprise,

I discovered that I’ve touched on it occasionally,

but haven’t really addressed it for a long time.

It is a principle that was given to me early in my Christian life,

and once I saw it and accepted it as the truth it is,

it has been one of the most crucial freeing principles of my life.

And to do this correctly

we need to lay a little groundwork.

You see, there are few things in most of our lives

that cause us more irritation,

more frustration,

more anger at times

than do the actions and attitudes of those who hold authority over us.

There are five specific sources of human authority mentioned in Scripture,

and through them

the foundation is laid for a multitude of others.

The five that are mentioned are a child’s submission to his or her parents,

the mutual submission of the husband and wife to one another within marriage,

a slave’s submission to his master (which is the most extreme form of the employee/employer relationship),

a citizen’s submission to the governmental structure under which he or she lives,

and then, finally, though with several crucial differences,

the human authority structure established within the local church.

But for this to make any sense

I need to back up one step

and make just a few comments about where and when and why

God introduced human authority structures into the human race.

In the beginning,

before Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God,

there were no human authority structures of any kind,

apart from Adam and Eve’s absolute authority over the rest of the physical creation.

The only authority Adam and Eve were under

was the authority of God Himself.

And it wasn’t simply because there were no other people at the time.

It was because, as long as there was clear communication between God and His creation,

and their willingness to trust and submit to His rule in their lives,

there was no need for anything else.

But once man rebelled against God,

once that trust/submission relationship was destroyed,

once sin entered into the world

God put in place two key new tools

that were essential if the human race would be preserved long enough

for His redemptive plan for mankind to be fulfilled.

And let me keep this in perspective here.

You do remember, don’t you,

what this whole thing is about -

I mean this WHOLE thing...the creation, the human race, man’s rebellion, God’s purpose.

From the very beginning

it has always been about God creating a framework

in which we would be able to understand how much He loves us

with the hope that we would respond to that love by loving Him in return.

And the only way we could ever even begin to understand the true nature of His love

is when we see His response to us

in the face of our rebellion against Him.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

But there are two huge problems with sin beyond the obvious problem that it separates us from our God,

two problems we try very hard to hide from,

but can never escape.

Sin is highly contagious, and it is always self-destructive.

And left unchecked

once it entered the human race

it would have quickly and utterly destroyed the human race

long before God could have completed His revelation of His love for us through Christ.

And so, to restrain and help contain the destructive powers of sin,

He did two things.

He introduced authority structures into the human race,

and, to help reduce the contagious nature of sin,

He isolated the human race into thousands of self-contained groups

through the introduction of separate languages,

and through them, separate cultures.

There are more than 6000 separate spoken languages in the world today,

and each one provides a protective barrier against the contagious nature of evil in our world.

But it’s God’s purpose for human authority structures

that I want to talk about this morning.

And what God tells us about human authority structures

is remarkable to the extreme.

Now, I’ll share the heart of what He’s saying to us

through a principle I’ll give you in a few minutes,

but first let me take you to the source.

There are two key passages

in which God communicates this principle to us,

one in the writings of Paul,

and the other in Peter’s first letter.

I’ll read them both for us,

and then we’ll try to make some sense out of what’s being said.

OK, the first,

and by far the most clear and therefore more disturbing

is found in the first six verses of Romans 13.

If you remember our study of the book of Romans,

you’ll remember that Paul uses the final few chapters of that letter

to reveal to the Christian

the basic operating principles of life within the family of God.

After sharing with us why Christ was needed in the first two and a half chapters,

and what it actually means to live with God on the basis of faith in Christ in chapters 3-8,

and then explaining what happens with the nation of Israel in light of God’s establishment of the His Church in chapters 9-11,

in the final 5 chapters of the book he gives us the basic operating principles of life in the family of God.

And it is early in this section, in 13:1-6 that he says,

Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.

ROM 13:3 For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.

Now, the power and significance of Paul’s words

are all the more intensified

when we remember the governmental structure in place at the time he wrote.

The Roman government during his lifetime

was at best grudgingly tolerant of these new Christ-followers,

and at times hostel to the extreme.

In fact several of Paul’s letters that we now have preserved for us in the New Testament

were written by Paul from a Roman prison

where he sat waiting for his own trial before Caesar

on charges of treason against the Roman Empire because of his activities as a Christian.

It was Roman soldiers who stood guard before the cross of Jesus Christ on the day of His death,

and it was those same Romans who gambled for His few possessions.

And Paul is not alone in his instructions to us

about our submission to the human authorities in our lives.

In First Peter 2:12-17 Peter says,

Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right. For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men. Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God. Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.

These are Peter’s words to us

about the same governmental structure

that ultimately crucified him upside down.

So what in the world is going on here?

The truly disturbing thing about these passages

is the clarity with which they speak.

We as Christians are being told

that part of our moral obligation to our God

is to choose submission to the human authorities in our lives,

knowing that those authorities have been established over us by God Himself.

Now, before I give you the principle involved in all of this,

let me offer just a few more comments.

First, it is both God’s design and God’s intention

that all of us live

under some form of human authority

from the day we are born until the day we die.

None of us are exempt from the need for human authorities,

and not only does our submission to Christ not free us from that need,

but in fact it intensifies it.

Second, God assumes that all human authority is corrupt.

He is in no way naive about the heart attitudes

of those who hold positions of authority.

He’s the one who has told us

that (ROM 3:23) ...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

and that there is no righteous, not even one (Rom. 310).

Those who hold authority over us

do so not because they are in some way inherently better human beings,

or more virtuous than us,

but because God has allowed them to hold those positions.

Some measure of corruption both in motives and performance is an assumed fact

in all those who hold positions of authority

because some measure of corruption continues to exist

in even the most godly people who have ever walked this earth.

So here’s the principle I want to share with you concerning human authority.

God has committed Himself to accomplishing His will in our lives

through the human authority structures He has placed us under.

Human authorities in our lives

serve as God’s tool with which He literally accomplishes His perfect work within us.

To which we just naturally respond,

“I don’t think so!”

“Do you have any idea what an idiot my Boss is?”

“Do you know what our government does with our tax dollars?”

“Don’t you realize that my parents haven’t got a clue about my life,

and what I really need?”

“Are you really trying to tell me that I’m suppose to trust and submit to that decision that the board made?”

And from a strictly human point of view,

our evaluation of the motives and judgment of those who hold authority over us

may be right on.

Just recently I was a close observer to an authority confrontation

in which those who held authority were absolutely wrong in the conclusions they had reached

and they were even more wrong in the actions that followed from those conclusions.

And those actions

had potentially devastating consequences

in the lives of a number of people.

And at the time I felt tremendous anger,

and frustration,

and fear,

and a sense of helplessness.

And I told the Lord that I could make no sense whatsoever

out of what was happening or why.

And right here is the first great problem we run into

when it comes to our relationship to the human authority structures in our lives.

Everything within us tells us

that submission to authority is only justified

and only required when we believe that those who hold that authority

are using it from pure motives for correct and justifiable ends.

But if their motives are wrong,

or their attitudes are bad,

or the goals they’re seeking are not right

then we feel we have a reasonable and justifiable basis for fighting against them.

In other words,

we tell ourselves that we will submit to the authorities over us

as long as those authorities submit to our evaluation of their motives and actions.

And when we do that

we completely misunderstand

both what God is doing in our lives through human authority

and what kind of commitment He is making to us when He calls us to submit.

And let me start with the first of those two

and then we’ll look at the second.

You see, we do not understand what it is

that God is seeking to accomplish in our lives

through the human authorities He places us under.

Now, as I mentioned earlier,

God certainly uses human authority

to keep the corrupting influence of sin in check within our world.

He literally preserves the human race from self-destruction through human authority

until His redemptive plan for us is completed.

But there is far more going on than just that.

The truth is

human authorities are the greatest tool He has

for bringing our flesh into submission

to the leadership of the new spirit He has created within the Christian.

You see, every one of us enters this world

with spirits in open rebellion against God,

believing that we have both the right and the ability to run our own lives any way we want.

And God uses human authority to keep that self-centered spirit in check

protecting and guarding us from that stubborn flesh rebellion

as we grow in our ability to hear and follow His Spirit within.

The easiest place for us to see this protective nature of authority in action

is in parenting process.

Picture your children without any parental authority in their lives.

Picture them having absolute freedom

to do anything they want, any time they want, any way they want.

Terrifying thought, huh?

The problem is that we allow ourselves to believe

that once we reach our adult years

that rebellious, self-centered flesh within us is no longer an issue.

The truth is that all that’s happened as we get older

is that we have learned how to exercise our self-centered flesh desires

within socially acceptable bounds.

But the basic flesh desires don’t change.

Don’t believe me?

Look at the internet - this huge empire in which there is virtually no authority whatsoever.

And then look at where people go,

and what they say,

and what they do within that world.

That is the human race,

that is us when there are no human authorities in our lives.

Now, the problem we run into as Christians is two-fold.

First, when we come to Christ,

because we are so keenly aware of the presence of Christ within us,

we tend to believe that we can now simply live under His direct authority,

knowing and hearing and following His voice without difficulty.

And second, we can be deceived into believing that all of those old self-centered flesh impulses

just sort of went away when we came to Christ.

But the truth is

our flesh is flesh until the day we die

and it will fight submission to God our entire lives.

Which brings us back to the crucial role

that God has for human authority in our lives.

You see, the real issue,

the great issue,

the critical issue is submission,

bringing our flesh into submission to the Spirit of God within us.

And it is to accomplish that role most of all

that God uses human authority in our lives.

And that is why He tells us that human authority “... is a minister of God to you for good”.

What He is saying

is that He has personally committed Himself to accomplishing His will in our life

through the authorities He has placed us under.

Here’s the thing - we will know the difference between the voice of God

and the voice of Satan,

and the voice of our flesh

through the human authorities God has placed over us.

To trust the voice of authority

is to trust the voice of God,

not because the authority itself is always right in either their motives or their actions,

but because God Himself has committed Himself to working through it in our lives.

And in the most remarkable way

He will use those authorities to accomplish a refining work within our lives

unlike anything He could ever accomplish through any other means.

He uses it to reshape us in remarkable ways,

and to teach us about His commitment to us

and His faithfulness to us

at a level we could never know any other way.

I mentioned a few minutes ago

an authority confrontation

in which I saw those who held authority

getting it wrong in a huge way,

a way that had significant, potentially devastating consequences.

My first response was to try to fight against the authority

which only intensified the turmoil.

Then I started praying, asking God to do what He promised -

to work through the authority structures He had established.

And in the end I realized that He had already carefully positioned two people within that authority structure

who were ultimately used by Him to bring the truth to light.

And the work He accomplished in me

and in the lives of several others involved throughout the process

was huge.

And He did something else in the process as well.

Several times throughout the process

He brought to light the remarkable work He had accomplished

in the lives of several of those involved.

He used the situation to proclaim in no small way,

“Look! Look at the work I do in the lives of My people!

Look at my ability to recreate.

Look at what I can accomplish in the lives of those who come to Me!”

But surly there are exceptions to this divine call to submit to authority.

Yep, two are mentioned in Scripture that I’m aware of.

The first is when the authority seeks to force us to worship some God other than the one true God.

The second is if the authority over us

demands immorality from us.

But the truth is,

rarely are those the real issues we face with our human authorities.

Usually the issue we face

is simply the fact that we think we’re right and they are wrong.

In those situations,

assuming we recognize that we have every right to negotiate with and dialog with the authorities over us,

in the end, our calling is to submit,

trusting that God both can and will accomplish His work in our lives through our submission.

Now obviously that doesn’t even begin to address all of the questions,

but at least it will provide you with a starting place -

understanding the basic principle

behind God’s call to us that we submit to the human authorities in our lives.