7/8/07 Keeping It Simple

We are going to take a one week break from our study of John this morning

simply because there are some things I want to say,

things I need to say about my God

and about what’s really going on between us and Him.

For more years than some of you have been alive now

nearly every week for most of my adult life

I have stood before some group somewhere

and attempted to explain to those who listen to me

the correct meaning of some passage from the Bible.

It’s what I do.

It’s more than just that,

at some level it’s part of who I am.

Since the earliest days of my Christian life

I have had the ability to look at a passage of Scripture

and see both what it means and what it means to us here, now,

as we attempt to live growing lives of faith before our God.

At first I assumed that this was something that happens in every Christian,

but in time I came to recognize it

as my own individual expression

of the gift of teaching that God’s Spirit sovereignly distributes throughout the family of God.

I certainly take no credit for it,

but I do recognize that I bear responsibility for stewardship over it.

I mention this today

because one of my chronic fears in life

is that, with such a flood of words

publicly pouring out of my mouth for so many years,

I could so easily make complicated the simple

and end up obscuring the truth in an endless flow of verbiage.

I have a young friend who tells me frequently that I talk too much.

I think he secretly really likes the sound of my voice,

but I’ll grant that occasionally he may be right.

And there are times when I fear that, with all the words,

I really have made the simple complicated

and the clear confusing.

One of the theme verses of my life for most of the past forty years

has been Paul’s caution to the Corinthians when he said,

2CO 11:3 But I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

It happens so easily,

and all the more so when we begin to accumulate

a growing body of knowledge in our Christian lives.

The knowledge itself is great

so long as we never loose sight of that simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

Without that none of the rest of it matters.

I was talking this past week with one of the counselors out at Solid Rock

about a devotional he’d given for a group of grade school children.

The thought of giving a devotional for that age seemed like a challenge to say the least,

and I asked him what he’d done.

He said he read them the story of when Jesus calmed that raging storm on the sea,

and then he talked with them about the storms in their own lives

and how Jesus can and will do the same thing for them.

Now isn’t that great!

Simple,

clear,

true...

Then I set that next to some things I’ve done recently

and found myself wondering if sometimes I’ve taken the simple

and made it more complicated than it needed to be.

Whenever my time and the weather permits

I take walk around the block early in the morning

just to help me wake up and reconnect with life.

And so many times on those walks

I find myself filled with the longing

to get up here on Sunday mornings and just say over and over again,

“Do you have any idea how GOOD He is?

Do you know how good He is to us

and how much He loves us?

He is in every way everything we hunger for the most.”

But then, when I get back to my office

and start putting words on paper

what was so clear to me on my walk

sometimes seems to get buried under lots and lots of words.

All of which is to say

that what I’d like to do this morning

is to keep it simple.

I just want to share with you

as clearly as I know how

what our God really wants from us, with us,

and then to talk a little bit

about what He’s doing in our lives,

and how He’s doing it.

The work of God that I understand the best, of course,

is the work I see Him doing in my own life.

Although, in truth that is not always correct.

Sometimes the hardest place for us to see the working of God correctly

is within ourselves

because we are simply too close to it

and too deeply involved in the process to gain a correct perspective.

But still,

there are many things about God

that can only be understood from inside.

What does it feel like to be loved by God?

I can’t teach you that

any more than I can teach you what it feels like

to be loved by another human being.

I can tell you that God does love you,

but only God Himself can communicate His love to us personally

in a way that we are able to hear it, and believe it, and receive it.

And that is certainly not just a point in our lives.

It is a daily process of discovery

that progresses and deepens as long as we are on this planet.

I have been teaching about God’s love for us

for most of the past forty years.

It is the central theme of everything I say,

everything I believe,

everything I most want to communicate about my God.

And yet just during the past two years of my life

God has been revealing His love for me to me

in ways that make me wonder now

if I had anything other than just a head knowledge in years past.

I know what’s happening a little,

and why.

It’s taken Him this long to break the power of some of the lies I have believed,

lies that have kept me from hearing, and believing, and receiving His love.

There are many days now

when my conversations with my Lord begin with the same words.

“I can’t believe how you love me, Lord.

There’s simply no reason why you should,

and yet You do.

I know what you’ve done.

I know what you’ve done for me

and I have no words,

and no way to even begin to express my gratitude.”

There are times when I find myself wondering

if there really are many others on the earth who know,

if there are others who have heard His love for them,

and have discovered that it isn’t just generic,

it isn’t just some sort of divine love for humanity,

but that it is deeply, utterly personal in nature.

And if there are others who know,

why aren’t they standing on the street corners screaming, “GOD LOVES ME! GOD LOVES ME! GOD LOVES ME!”

I know it doesn’t work that way, of course.

Usually the things that touch us the deepest

are the ones that are the most difficult for us to express.

And that is certainly true when it comes to love - both human and Divine.

But what I started to say here

was that what I understand best about the workings of God

are the things I have come to understand in my own life.

And yet there are also times

when He allows me to get close enough

to the work He is doing in the lives of others

so that I can also see at a remarkable level

His redemptive work in them as well.

And it is at those times

when I see most clearly

the way things really are between us and our Creator

and how tragically wrong we so often get it.

So let me see if I really can make it simple,

keep it simple,

and explain what I understand to be

the most important truths of life.

And let me start with what He wants,

what He’s really seeking from each of us.

And by now you probably know already what I’m going to say.

It isn’t our obedience.

It isn’t our submission.

It isn’t our faithfulness to any religious or doctrinal system of beliefs.

Certainly there is a place for obedience and submission and faithfulness,

but that’s not what’s at the center.

That’s not His goal.

That’s not why He created us in the first place

or what He has been seeking from each of us since He brought us into this world.

What He wants,

what He seeks is our personal discovery of the depth of His love for each of us

and our heart response to that love.

What He wants is an individual friendship with each of us at the deepest level.

What He wants is just simply us.

From the very beginning

it has always, only been about our discovering how much He loves us.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

But the relationship between the Creator and His created beings

is not an easy thing.

And from the very beginning He also knew

that we would never really understand,

we could never correctly see His heart

until we saw His response to us

in the face of our rebellion against Him.

And so He designed a world system

in which we could do just exactly that.

He gave each of us real, true free will,

He allowed us to turn our backs on Him and walk away,

and then He responded to our rebellion against Him

not with the judgment and wrath we deserve,

but with His own death in our place as total payment for our sins against Him.

For God loved us so much that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16

What is He after?

What is He seeking?

Just us, and our discovery of His love for us.

Do you have any idea how that truth changes things once we begin to see it?

Some of you here this morning

have lived your entire life believing

that what God is saying to you is, “I judge you I judge you I judge you.”

And it’s no wonder you live with such fear,

such tension in your interaction with Him.

But what you’re hearing is not the voice of your God

because if it was

what you’d be hearing is your Creator saying, “I love you I love you I love you.”

And if you could believe Him

it would change the course of your life forever.

And then let me say a little bit

about what happens,

about what He does in the lives of those who hear and who turn to Him.

And right here is where we encounter

the great dividing line between God and religion.

You see, even though change is not God’s goal in our lives,

even though what He wants is friendship with us,

still friendship with God always brings about profound changes in our lives.

He changes every life He enters.

It’s not just His ideas,

it’s not social pressure from the group,

it’s not human determination or self-discipline or guilt or shame or fear.

It’s God.

If He’s there He brings about changes from the inside out.

And if He’s not,

then it is neither wise nor safe for us to pretend

or to paste on a religious bandage to hide the truth.

I have been involved in organized Christianity long enough

to have learned long ago that people have all sorts of reasons

for professing a commitment to Jesus Christ.

And for a number of years now

I’ve found it best to take what I guess I’d call a wait-and-see approach

to those who claim to have turned to Christ.

I wait and see if there are any observable expressions of the presence of Christ in their life.

Is there a growing hunger for righteousness in their lives?

Are they drawn to other Christians?

Do they have a growing personal commitment to the authority of Scripture in their lives?

Do they trust and submit to Godly counsel and authority in their lives?

Is there a change in their life goals and priorities?

I’m not talking about instant,

absolute,

all-inclusive life change.

Such a thing does not exist.

But I am talking about evidences of new life within,

and I will tell you with absolute certainty

that Christ cannot exist within a life

without bringing about deep remarkable changes within that life.

And when He does

it is remarkable to behold

and one of the greatest wonders in life.

The world that my generation is passing on to the young people of today

is a nasty, ugly, profoundly corrupt world,

a world that seeks to destroy virtually all that is good and right in the lives of our children

long before they ever enter their adult years.

It’s as if we as a society

have taken all of our children

and in the name of personal rights and freedom

flung them into a huge lake of sewage

and then we’ve proclaimed to them,

“See children! See what we’ve done for you!

We’ve whole-heartedly granted to you

the absolute freedom to go anywhere in this life you choose,

to wade any direction you want,

to select your own personal preference of sewage

without any fear of judgement or condemnation from us.

See what great things we have done.”

And left to themselves, long before they’re even out of high school,

they’ve done everything, and seen everything, and tried everything.

And when you look into their eyes

all you see is emptiness,

and sadness,

and boredom,

and deadness,

and an innocence that is forever lost long before they knew what they were throwing away.

And yet...

and yet I have also seen what God recreates within the lives

of those who come to Him.

I have seen the way He literally recreates their spirits

in purity

and righteousness.

And I have seen the way He creates within them

a deep, powerful, personal commitment

to moral values

and a life of moral integrity

that utterly shames the generation that gave birth to them.

I have been guilty in the past of doing my share

of trying to somehow drive the next generation into morality

through logic,

or debate,

or teaching,

or even fear or guilt.

But I’ve long since given that up.

It may make me feel a little better,

but it’s never changed another life.

But now do you know what I do?

I look for that remarkable work of God within the lives of those who are coming after me.

I look for that amazing work of God

that only He can perform,

that work of His

in which He creates within them their own personal commitment to a life of moral integrity.

It is a work that only He can do within a person,

a work that is not the product of religious training,

or social pressure,

or family values,

or skillful parenting.

It is the direct result of the personal redemptive and recreative work of God within the human spirit.

And when it happens

it is glorious to behold.

And when I see it,

when I see them standing before their own generation with remarkable courage

directly against the current of this world in which we live,

I tell them what I see,

I tell them they are a truly remarkable work of God,

worthy of the highest possible praise.

And then, when I am able,

I try to help them find practical life tools

for living out those commitments that God has created within them.

But one thing I know with absolute certainty -

there is no culture on the face of this earth,

no matter how corrupt,

or how deeply immersed in evil,

that can stand against the recreative power of God in a life that has been placed within His hands.

When God exists within a life,

He will bring about changes.

Paul said it better, of course.

He says everything better.

ROM 8:29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren;

To enter the family of God,

to enter into a living Father/child relationship with God,

is to enter into a predetermined work of God Himself

in which He reshapes us more and more and more into the image of Jesus Christ Himself.

God’s presence within a life brings change from the inside out.

And the promises He makes to us about this changing process

are some of the most encouraging and hope-filled promises He’s ever made to us.

I especially like the one in Philippians 1:6.

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

I love that statement so much.

I love it for the clarity and simplicity with which it says

everything I’ve been trying to say this morning.

That isn’t a call to us to try to achieve greater faithfulness to God

or to some religious system that’s suppose to move us closer to God.

That’s God sovereignly reaching into one individual life at a time,

God Himself beginning a good work within that life,

a work that only He could do,

a work that He would only do because He loves,

and then His promise that once He begins a work within a life

He never walks away from it,

never turns His back on it,

never ever stops caring and working in that life

until He brings that person directly into the presence of Christ Jesus forever.

So there it is.

What He wants is us,

us united with Him forever.

And what He does when He enters a life

is to recreate that life one step at a time,

one day at a time from the inside out,

doing in them and through them

a work that no culture, no matter how evil, how corrupt, can ever defeat or destroy.

And then once He has begun His work within us

He promises He will complete and perfect it

until the day we leave this earth.

Now I think I may have a little more to say about some of this next week,

but I’m going to stop there for today.