©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

10/24/04

Christ In You

10/24/04 Christ In You

For most of the past two months now

we have been looking at the moral commandments give to us by our God.

We have been seeing them

from a number of different perspectives.

It is a study we got into

because of what the Apostle Paul does for us

in his letter to the Colossians.

Paul wrote his brief letter to the Colossians

because he was afraid for them,

afraid that, in his words, they were being “defrauded of their prize”,

cheated out of the kind and quality of walk with Christ

that they both longed for

and were entitled to because of what Christ had done for them.

From Paul’s comments to this group of Christians,

it is clear that they hungered for an effective, fulfilling, power-filled walk with Christ.

He had seen clear evidence within them

of both their growing faith in Christ

and their growing love for one another.

But there were some men in the group

who had moved into leadership positions,

men who were taking advantage of the naive, youthful enthusiasm within the group,

feeding them a religious system

that, if it took root and grew,

would rob them of the quality of Christian walk they hungered for.

And so Paul writes,

telling them from the very beginning of his letter

that he intends to share with them

the spiritual wisdom and understanding they will need,

“... so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might...”(Col. 1:10-11).

The principle he then lays out for them

is not complicated,

it’s just so different

from anything we would expect,

or anything being given to us by any of the religious voices in the world around us.

In a single statement

he tells the Colossians

that the will of God for them is nothing more and nothing less

than “...Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Col. 1:27)

And then he takes that truth

and sets it next to the lies they are being fed

by the ego-driven religious leaders surrounding them

so that, through the contrast, they can see more clearly what he really means.

And in the contrast that follows,

Paul calls his readers to a choice.

On one side is the religious system that sounds so right,

so holy,

so faithful,

the system that calls them to the careful observance

of a list of religious duties and exercises,

promising them success,

and productivity,

and freedom,

and effectiveness if they will follow that system well.

And on the other side

there is simply “Christ in you”.

There is the promise of God

that Christ Himself now literally lives within our spirits,

and that He can and will live His life out through us

moment by moment,

day by day,

as we abide in Him,

and trust Him to do what He has promised He would do.

And even as I share this truth with you once again

I realize how strange this is to us,

and how difficult it is for us to accept what Paul is really saying to us.

Our basic insecurity

both with God

and with ourselves

makes us hunger for some sort of external “proof” or validation

that God really is within us

and that He is really living His life out through us.

Entire religious movements

and church denominations have been founded and built upon this hunger

for some external evidence of God in our lives.

Being flesh-based creatures,

deeply dependent upon both our physical senses and our emotional responses,

our strong initial tendency is to reject anything we cannot either feel with our emotions

or validate in some way through our senses.

And when our Lord tells us that,

EPH 1:13 ... (we) were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise...

and that GAL 2:20 ... it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me...,

and that 1CO 6:19 ... your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God...

unless we can somehow confirm those truths through our emotions or senses

we tend to just file them away in that special mental file all of us possess labeled,

“Religious Platitudes That Have No Direct Correlation With Real Life”.

We realize, of course, that God CAN dwell in some individuals,

and that He has, at certain times,

expressed Himself through certain select men and women.

But not US,

and certainly not on a daily basis.

Some of you here this morning,

listening to my words right now

honestly believe that there is something fundamentally different

between my relationship with God and your own.

You may even assume

that I have somehow gained some sort of access to God,

or that He has gained some sort of access to me

that enables Him to then work through me in special ways

that are inaccessible to other people.

I remember those thoughts.

I remember during the early years of my Christian life

sitting under the teaching

or coming in contact with men and women

who seemed to live in some other spiritual realm than the one I lived in.

The life of Christ seemed so evident within them

and I wondered how they were able to do what they did.

Now, more than 30 years later,

I know the truth -

the only difference between them and me

was that they had a few more years to get to know the King a little better,

and they had made a little more progress

in trusting Him to do what He promised He would do -

live His life out through each of His children.

He has different roles for each of us, of course,

different people He wants to touch through us,

different forms of evil He wants to counter through our lives.

He has unique messages He wants to communicate about Himself through each of us,

and as we grow in our discovery of those messages in our own lives,

one thing I can promise you with certainty -

they will be perfectly matched to our own unique gifts, and abilities, and personalities.

They will flow out of us so naturally

that most of the time we won’t even recognize them as the special works of God they really are.

I went on an outing recently with a young friend of mine,

a boy in his early teens.

A cold rain had been falling earlier in the day

so we’d built a good sized fire,

and then my young friend

decided that he was going to show me

how he could cut down a very large tree

with a very small hatchet.

(He made far more progress

than I ever thought he would,

but the tree is still standing, by the way.)

While we were out together

two Mormon missionaries drove by, stopped, and then came up to us,

obviously with the hope of winning us over to the Mormon Church.

They were nice fellows,

but I felt so sorry for them,

standing there in that clearing,

all dressed up in their suits and ties,

trying so hard to find some way to market their god to the world.

After they left I got to thinking about the striking contrast between

what religion produces in a person’s life

and what the Spirit of God produces within us.

Here I was, with my young friend,

doing what my God has equipped me to do,

just being myself,

spending time with this boy simply because I care deeply about him,

and enjoying every second of it more than I could express.

Not only did I not have to try to conform to some pre-established “preacher” mold,

in truth, the only thing my God wanted me to do

was to be myself

and to rest in the knowledge that

whatever He wanted to do or say through me

He would do just fine

without me trying to plan it or script it or force it in any way.

... it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me...

And then there was this product of religion -

these two young fellows,

all dressed up in their suits,

looking awkward and uncomfortable,

trying so hard to be good missionaries,

packing around their heavy burden of duty to their god.

And not only did their religion not give them the freedom to just be themselves,

in fact it did exactly the opposite -

it demanded from them close conformity to a rigid “missionary” mold,

a mold that carefully hid them from world.

When I went home later on that afternoon

I did so feeling so grateful to my Lord

for the people He’s given me to love,

and the life He’s given me to live,

and the freedom just to be myself,

knowing it was exactly what He wanted me to be.

And, I think, when those two missionaries went home for the night,

they went home with a sense of relief

because they finally had a few hours in which they were “off duty”

before they had to once again put on their uniforms,

and assume their carefully crafted religious facades,

and get back to their work for their god.

After they left us

I explained to my young friend

how their church requires each young man

to go door-to-door as missionaries for a year or two

after they get out of school.

My friend asked me,

“Will I have to do that?”

I assured him he wouldn’t,

but his response reminded me of the way we naturally respond

to the demands of religion.

We know it doesn’t fit us,

any more than those suits and ties and shiny shoes

fit as the four of us stood around that blazing fire in that muddy clearing in the woods.

It’s amazing how our God can change us though.

When my friend ask, “Will I have to do that?”,

it reminded me of a conversation I had with my Aunt

when I was still in High School.

I was involved in a great deal of speech and drama in school at the time,

and she and I got into a conversation

about possible career choices for me in the future.

Some options were discussed,

and then she said, “You could be a preacher.”

Of all the stupid things I’d heard adults say up to that time,

that was at the very top of the list.

I couldn’t imagine a more hideous way to spend my life.

Then, less than three years later

Someone else asked me that very same question,

“Larry, will you be a preacher?”,

and my response was very different.

In His own perfect way

the Spirit of God asked me the same thing,

and when I finally said “Yes”,

not only did I not recoil at the thought,

but I felt as though I had just been singled out for a very great honor

and received the highest calling anyone could ever receive.

And that right there

is possibly the best illustration I could ever give you

of what Paul is trying to communicate to us in Colossians.

From start to finish

it is always, only “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Christ Himself is literally within every Christian.

And He can and will live out His life through each of us.

And right here is the glorious thing -

He doesn’t dress us all up in matching suits and ties,

giving us the same haircuts

and the same pasted-on facades.

What He does do

is to seek to match His expression of Himself through us

to each of us in ways that blend perfectly with our uniqueness in every way,

and then fills us with the only motivation

that is truly adequate

for the calling He’s given us,

the motivation of love.

And the thing that never ceases to amaze me

is the way He matches His life in us and through us

not to the person we should have been,

or to the person we could have been

had we not been corrupted by evil,

or wounded by our own sins or the sins of others.

He matches His life in us

and His work through us

to who we really are, here and now,

in this life - redeemed in spirit, but still corrupted and damaged in flesh,

with all of our tender places,

and all of our fears,

and all of our areas of ignorance and weakness.

And in His own incredible,

glorious way

He doesn’t just bypass our weakness,

He recreates them

in ways that transform them into our greatest strengths.

And “...there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me -- to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Cor. 12:7-10

Do you know what that means to us?

It means that it is that area in our lives,

that issue,

that weakness,

that wounded area from our past,

that still unresolved struggle

that we are so convinced

is the one thing keeping us from really soaring with the eagles of God,

it means that it is that one area most of all

through which we will see the love,

and the power,

and the glory of our God revealed.

It is there,

more than anywhere else,

where we will discover the true nature of the grace of our God,

and where we will see the breadth, and length, and height, and depth of His love

revealed both in us and through us.

As Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians

he understood all too well

the kind of false security that comes

from successfully living out a neat little system of religion.

He understood it

because it was the story of his life

prior to his confrontation with Jesus Christ.

He knew how good that system could make you look to those around you.

He understood how skillfully it allowed a person

to hide all the weaknesses,

all the fears,

all the deepest issues of our lives behind our external image.

But He also knew the emptiness,

and the loneliness,

and the intense longing for true peace with God

that was always there at the end of the day

when the door closed,

and the suit and tie came off,

and the facade melted away.

And the message he offered to the Colossians,

and, through them, to all the rest of us was clear -

what you really hunger for is not a better system,

what you hunger for is the living reality of the love of your God poured out on you,

and His life being lived out through you one day at a time.

And, wonder of wonders,

that is exactly what we have been given-

...Christ in you, the hope of glory!

But Paul wants us to understand

that most of the time

the life of Christ through us

is not something we see,

not something we feel,

but simply something we chose to rest in by faith.

So here’s what he says to us.

Christ literally dwells within every Christian,

and He has committed Himself to living His life out through us.

Our calling is simply to believe what He’s said,

and to trust that He’s doing just exactly that.

Then Paul goes on to warn us

about the two major forces

that war against the life of Christ being lived out through us effectively.

The first is religion -

that strong impulse within us

to replace the living reality of the life of Christ within us

with a system of religious rules,

and duties,

and observances

that are suppose to define “successful” Christian living.

 COL 2:16-23 Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day -- things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.

If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!" (which all refer to things destined to perish with use) -- in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

And then, the second great enemy of the life of Christ within us

is our being deceived into believing

that some need in our life can only be met

by our stepping outside of the protective moral framework given to us by our God.

And this, of course,

is where we took our two month side-track

into our study of the moral commandments,

seeing in them

the expression of the love of our God for us.

And so Paul writes,

COL 3:5-10 Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him --

And when we put it all together

what he’s telling us is this -

Christ is living in us

and has committed Himself to living out through us.

Our calling is to grow in our ability to hear and understand His voice,

and to rest in the assurance

that He is really doing just exactly what He has promised He would do,

whether we can see it or not.

As long as we do not allow ourselves to get pulled into the religious systems that replace the life of Christ

with a system of duties and rules,

or deceived into believing that we must step outside of the moral framework of God in order to meet some need in our lives,

we can rest in the assurance

that what we have going on in our lives

really is the life of God as He has promised.

And of course I realize

that stating it that way cannot help but raise the question

of what our role is in all of this,

and why the life of Christ within us

so often looks so different from what we had expected.

And we’ll take one more week with this basics series

and answer those questions next week.