©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
8/13/06 When God’s Word Condemns
We are studying the 4th book of the New Testament,
the Gospel of John.
Last week I attempted to give a brief reintroduction to this study
and didn’t quite get through my introduction,
but we’re in no hurry
and some of the things we’ve touched on seem to be helping.
I had an excellent question come up following our study last week,
a question that grew out of some of the comments I made
about the way in which God’s Spirit seeks to take the Word of God
and use it to bring us hope and security in our relationship with our Lord.
I had a person ask me
what we should do
when our contact with the Bible brings exactly the opposite affect.
What if, rather than encouraging us,
our contact with Scripture leaves us feeling condemned.
That experience is so common
that I want to spend our time today talking about it
before we return to our study of John.
And to do this
I need to talk about three separate areas.
The first is understanding God’s purpose for the law in our lives.
The second is understanding the only correct doorway
into all of our interaction with our Creator.
And the third is understanding the dramatic difference
between conviction and condemnation.
And let me start first of all
with just a few comments about the purpose of the moral law of God in our lives.
I know, of course,
that virtually every religious system in existence,
including all of those religious systems that trace their roots back to either Christianity or Judaism,
are built upon the basic premise
that God has revealed His moral law to us as His creation,
that He wants and expects us to keep that moral law,
and that His acceptance of us
and our standing with Him
is based at least to some degree upon our success in doing just that.
That is what religion does.
It offers us the hope of acceptance by God
based upon our obedience to Him,
and it seeks to motivate us into more faithful obedience
either through threatening us with negative consequences if we fail,
or through promising us rewards of some kind if we succeed.
And even a casual reading of the Bible itself
will make us aware of a whole bunch of laws given to us by God.
In fact, we can’t get through the second chapter of the first book of the Bible
without running up against this Commandment thing.
GEN 2:16-17 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die. "
And as we move through the Old Testament
the laws just keep coming.
The 10 Commandments are given to Moses
and through him to the entire human race,
and then Moses and the other Old Testament writers
go on to apply and expand those Commandments to virtually every area of life.
And I am certainly not suggesting
that these moral laws were not given to us by God
or that they are not applicable to us today
because they very much were and are.
But not for the reasons we so often assume.
And certainly not for the reasons
our religious systems want us to believe.
You see, God did not give us His moral law to try to make us sin less,
He gave it to us to force us to sin more.
He didn’t give us the Law to free us from sin,
He gave it to us to enslave us to it.
Now I know I started out a few minutes ago
to explain what to do about this problem
in which we come away from our contact with Scripture
feeling condemned and unworthy,
and I am going to do that.
But we cannot fix that
until we first understand
what it is that God seeks in our lives.
What does He want?
What is His goal in His involvement with us as His creation?
And why does He want it?
And let me tell you first of all what His goal isn’t.
His goal isn’t
to try to raise the moral performance level
of a whole world full of naughty people
who are doing things He doesn’t approve of.
His goal isn’t to trying to prod us into becoming nicer people
so that He can then feel better about this apparently messed up creation of His.
This isn’t one of God’s weekend projects
that just didn’t turn out like He wanted
so He now keeps fiddling with it to try to patch it up.
His goal from the very beginning
was to create a world system
in which we would be able to discover the true nature of His love for us
and through that discovery
find ourselves loving Him in return.
Let me simplify it.
The goal,
His goal from the very beginning
is a deep individual love relationship with each of us for eternity.
What He wants is true friendship between us and Him.
Does that sound strange to you?
Can you even relate to the concept?
I have no idea what’s going on right now between you and your Creator.
I hope it’s good stuff,
but let me ask you a question
that may help you know whether you’re heading the right direction.
Does the God you’re trying to relate to right now
enjoy you?
Does He delight in you?
Do you think your existence brings Him joy?
Some of you don’t even think He notices you,
or knows your name.
And yet the truth is
that the reason you exist
is because God seeks and wants a friendship with you.
And from the very beginning
He established a world system
in which we would have the best possible opportunity
of discovering the truth about His love for us.
And He knew that the only way that could happen,
the only way we would ever “get it”
was through our seeing His response to us
in the face of our rebellion against Him.
But for this to happen
He needed a tool that would accomplish three crucial works in our lives.
First, He needed a tool with which to trigger the rebellion within us.
Second, He needed a tool that would confront us with that rebellion,
a kind of mirror in which we would be forced to see ourselves.
And then third,
He needed a tool that would cause us to cry out to Him for help.
And the perfect tool for all three needs
is His moral law.
What I’m sharing with you now
is covered in detail in Romans 6 and 7,
and I encourage you to read those chapters on your own if this interests you.
But for our purposes this morning
I’ll just give you the basics
of the way God uses the Law in our lives.
First He uses it to trigger the rebellion within us.
Most of you will remember my favorite illustration of how this works.
I have a crucial instruction for you right now,
one that you absolutely must obey.
Under no circumstances do I want you to touch the chair in front of you.
I don’t want you to touch it with your toe,
I don’t want you to touch it with your finger,
I don’t want you to even think about touching it.
And look what happens.
As soon as the commandment comes in
it creates within us a driving desire to disobey it.
In Romans 7:7-8 Paul puts it this way.
...I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about lust if the Law had not said, "You shall not lust." But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me lusting of every kind...
That is why those commandments
are worded the way they are.
THOU SHALT NOT!!!!!!
It wasn’t to keep us from sin,
it was to drive us into it.
By now most of you know that remarkable statement of Paul’s in Romans 5:20.
And the Law came in that the transgression might increase...
First, the commandments trigger the rebellion,
and then, second, they provide us with a mirror
in which we can see our rebellion.
God gives every human being
the knowledge of His moral law through two sources.
First, He etches it into our spirits
in the form of our conscience.
Why does your two year old
run and hide after he sneaks into the kitchen and steals a cookie?
With every culture,
every person there is within us
a basic awareness of moral accountability.
And then second,
God literally wrote it out for us
and passed it on to us through the written commandments.
And through both the conscience
and the written law
He holds up a moral mirror before us
and shows us we’ve fallen short.
And then, third,
if we allow Him to,
He will take this one step further in our life
and use the law to bring within us a conviction,
an awareness of our helplessness before God,
an awareness that, on the basis of the law,
we have no hope whatsoever of finding peace with God or acceptance by Him.
All of which is to say
that God skillfully uses His moral law in our lives
to draw out our spirit rebellion against Him,
and then to show us why that rebellion
causes us to be justifiably condemned by Him.
In fact, when Christ talked about the coming of the Holy Spirit,
that’s the first role He told us the Spirit would accomplish.
JOH 16:8 And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment...
And if this God we’re talking about really loves us,
why in the world would He want to do that?
Why would He want to drive us into sin through the law,
and then condemn us on the basis of that same law?
Why didn’t He just put Adam and Eve in the Garden
and not put that tree in there with them?
Why did He ever say,
GEN 2:17 “...but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die. "?
He did it because what He has wanted from the very beginning
is not our obedience,
what He’s wanted is our love,
and He knew that we would never love Him,
really love Him
until we saw the depth of His love for us,
and we could never understand
the true nature of His love for us
until we were able to see His response to us
in the face of our rebellion against Him.
You see, here’s the way it works.
1JO 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.
Which means that
until we truly see His love for us
we will not truly love Him.
Do you know when your childen discover the true nature of your love for them?
When they see your response to them
when they fail to measure up to the standard you’ve set for them.
Welcome to the exciting world of adolescence!
But I will not get sidetracked...
And we do not...cannot see God’s love for us as it really is
until we see His response to us
in the face of our rebellion against Him.
And how does He respond to us in the face of our rebellion?
ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
So...
God gives us the law to drive us into sin,
and then condemns us on the basis of that law when we sin
so that we will be confronted with our own heart rebellion against Him.
And then He reaches out to us through Christ
and says, “ROM 3:21,24 But now apart from the Law...we can be... justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus...
And when we respond to that offer
three huge things happen.
ROM 5:1 ... we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
ROM 7:6 ... 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 ROM 5:2 ... we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand...
And what in the world does that mean?
What does it mean
for God to release us from the Law?
It means that now and for the rest of an endless eternity to come
our relationship with God
is no longer based upon how we measure up to the moral law of God.
It is based upon the death of Christ for our sins.
It means that our performance can never again separate us from God
or cause God to turn His back on us.
Remember that question from last week?
Is it true our sins can separate us from God?
ROM 8:1-4 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us...
And what in the world does all of this have to do
with that very common experience
of a Christian reading the Bible
and coming away feeling condemned?
Well, there is one more ingredient I need to add here.
You see, there is also in this creation
an enemy of God
who wages His war against God
by seeking to prevent us from seeing and believing God’s love for us.
Whenever and where ever he is able to do that
he has won the only victory he has to win in our lives
because the result within us will be fear, guilt, anxiety,
and an inability to trust and follow our Lord.
And the easiest way for Satan to accomplish this within us
is by his convincing the Christian
that our relationship with God
is still based upon the law.
He will tell us
that God loves and accepts us when we perform well,
but He turns away from us in disgust when we fall short.
And his favorite tool for these attacks
is the written Word of God.
And unless we understand what he’s doing and why,
when we read the Word
we’ll find his voice right there,
pointing out all of those passages in which the law is revealed,
telling us that we have fallen short,
and that we really have no right or access to the love of God.
And when that happens
the best thing we can do
is to run toward the lie, not away from it.
When that voice within us
brings those words of condemnation for some past failure,
recognize who’s talking to you
and then tell him the truth.
“You’re absolutely right, Satan,
I blew it big time! I did indeed sin against my God.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The truth is, apart from the healing work of the Spirit of God within me,
everything that comes out of my life is sin.
I am, by nature, a profoundly selfish, self-centered person.
But this sin you’ve pointed out,
along with all the rest of them forever
have been nailed to the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ.
And now the law no longer has the power to ever again separate me from my God,
and nothing and no one will ever separate me from His love.
I don’t know why He loves me,
I certainly don’t know why He loves me enough
to die in my place for all my sins.
But He does,
an no accusation you ever fling at me, Satan,
will exceed His grace poured out on me.”
Which brings me back to where I started.
Finding freedom from that condemnation that may come through Scripture
requires our understanding three things.
The first is understanding God’s purpose for the law in our lives.
And that purpose is to lead us into our personal discovery
of the depth of God’s love for us.
The second is understanding the only correct doorway
into all of our interaction with our Creator.
And that doorway is always, only the cross of Jesus Christ
and what it means for us personally.
JOH 14:6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.
And the third is understanding the dramatic difference
between conviction and condemnation.
There are times when God will use His Word
to confront us with some specific issue in our lives
that He wants to address.
When He does this
it is because He knows we are ready to address it,
and He knows that we can never find the freedom we long for until we do.
When God confronts us with an issue,
it is His promise that He intends to lead us into healing in that area.
He will NEVER confront us with issues
that He does not intend to resolve.
The one who does that is Satan.
One of his favorite attacks
comes in the form of dragging up
failures from the past
and flinging them in our face
as his “proof” that we are not,
never were,
and never will be the Holy ones of God.
He delights in sucking us into
the feelings of failure,
and guilt,
and despair
that accompany the memories of past failures
knowing that those feelings will be devastating
to our efforts to really see ourselves
as the people of God we have become through Christ.
There is a world of difference between true conviction,
brought into our lives by God’s Spirit,
and false guilt brought to us by Satan.
The conviction of God’s Spirit
always brings with it a specific course of action
that God wants us to follow,
a course of action that will resolve the issue.
He may bring conviction of sin
so that we will bring that sin to Him
and find His forgiveness
and cleansing.
He may bring conviction of a specific offense
because there are certain steps He wants us to take
to help resolve the consequences of our actions.
He may want us to ask forgiveness from someone we have offended.
He may ask us to make restitution
for something we have done.
The key, though,
is that when God’s Spirit brings conviction
He also brings with it
a means by which the issue can be resolved.
False guilt, on the other hand,
brings with it no means of resolution,
and is aimed at destroying
our correct concept of ourselves
as forgiven children of God
loved, and secure in His arms.
False guilt tells us emotional lies
about who we are,
true conviction tells us the truth
about what we can do
to resolve the issue.
And next week
we’ll return once again to our study of John.