10/28/07 More Lies More Truth

We’re going to spend another week on lies.

If you weren’t with us last week that may sound a little strange,

so let me explain what I mean.

While Sandee and I were on vacation a few weeks ago

I started thinking about some of the lies I’ve believed in my life,

lies that I accepted as truth

and, at some level, built my life upon.

I made a note of some of them

and started sharing them with you last week.

We spent most of last week looking at the power of lies in our lives,

where they come from ,

and why Satan can use them as such effective weapons against us.

We saw that once we come to Christ

the truth is always our friend.

It is always on our side

and will bring greater freedom into our lives when we believe it.

We saw that Satan has two goals at the top of his list

when in comes to the lies he tells us.

First, he wants to attack God’s integrity,

His true motives in all that He does and all that He says.

He wants to raise doubts in our minds

about whether or not He’s really for us, loving us, caring about us.

Maybe God is just on a controlling power trip,

playing games with His creation.

Maybe it’s mostly about power and dominance and submission.

Maybe the bad stuff that happens to us

is His way getting back at us for the bad things we’ve done.

Maybe we can only expect good things from Him

if we’ve done good things for Him.

And if this God is really as good and loving as He says,

then why doesn’t He stop at least some of the evil in this world?

And as long as Satan can continue reinforcing lies like that in our minds

it makes it very difficult for us to hear His love,

or to respond to it,

or to trust what He says to us.

Oh, and just a reminder, here, for those of you who may be just entering into your discovery of God.

You do know where the doorway is, don’t you?

I mean, you do know where God has told us

we can begin our discovery of Him

without fear of confusion,

where we can begin our knowledge of Him

without misunderstanding or deception or lies.

You know where God publicly, clearly demonstrated to the entire human race

who He really is,

and how He really feels about us,

and what has motivated everything He has ever done in His involvement with us

since the first instant of creation, don’t you?

Are you confused about God?

Do you want to be certain you’re seeing Him correctly?

Do you want at least one absolute, solid block of truth in your understanding about Him

that will allow you to evaluate every other idea about Him that you encounter for the rest of your life?

Then start here:

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

EPH 2:4-7 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

COL 1:15 (Jesus Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

JOH 14:9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?

Do you want to see God correctly?

Do you want to avoid all confusion,

all misunderstanding,

all the religious sewage that mucks up our ability to understand?

Do you want it simplified enough for a child

and yet profound enough to challenge the greatest minds among us?

Do you want the doorway into the correct knowledge of God

that will always lead you to the truth?

Then begin with your God nailed to a cross,

dying in your place,

in payment for your offenses against Him,

and then hear Him saying to you,

“This is how much I love you.”

Are you having trouble trusting Him or trusting what He’s said to you in some area of your life right now?

Then go back to the doorway,

back to the one certain point of entrance into the discovery of Him

and remember the truth.

To doubt His love,

to doubt His motives

to doubt His plan and purpose for your life

is to allow Satan to succeed

in the first great lie He seeks to tell us -

the lie that we cannot trust our Creator and His love for us absolutely.

And the second great attack Satan uses

in his efforts to keep us from the truth that will set us free

is the attack against our own correct perception of ourselves.

I didn’t mention it last week,

but the struggle each of us have in this area,

(and it is a struggle that every human being faces from the day we enter this planet,)

is a struggle that exists because we enter this life

without the ability to hear the voice of our Creator.

And because we cannot hear His voice

we have no way of knowing who we are,

or what our purpose is,

or why or even if we have value.

It only makes sense, of course.

Because we are created beings

the only voice that has the ability

to correctly, accurately tell us who we are

is the voice of our Creator.

And when our own rebellion against Him

severed our communication with Him

we, as the human race, were plunged into a desperate, frantic attempt

to find some alternate voice to tell us about ourselves.

We turned to the people around us - our parents,

our friends,

our teachers,

our marriage partner and our children.

But because none of them know us completely, absolutely,

and because they are all desperately trying to find out who they are themselves,

none of those voices can bring us peace with ourselves.

I remember reading about an incident that took place shortly after Richard Nixon’s re-election for his second term.

It was before the whole Watergate disaster came out,

and as I recall, he won that re-election by one of the largest margins in history.

When he sat at his desk in the Oval Office

he had a habit of leaning back in his chair

and placing his feet up on the edge of the desk.

After several years of this

he’d left marks and scratches on the edge of that desk.

During one of his extended trips away from Washington D.C.

some White House staff member arranged for the edge of that desk to be restored and refinished,

and when he returned and saw that all of his scratches were gone he was furious.

When someone asked him why

he said that he’d wanted those marks on that desk

so that long after he was gone

they would still remember who Richard Nixon was and that he’d been there in that office.

How many people does it take,

how many votes before we finally find peace with ourselves?

We simply can’t get there that way.

The only voice that can begin to bring that inner peace with ourselves

is the voice of the only One who knows us perfectly - the voice of our God.

And we can only begin to hear that voice

when we come to Him just as we are,

and bow before Him,

and place our life into His hands.

And even then it’s not all that easy to hear

because by the time we start listening

our minds are already so filled with the lies

that it’s frequently very hard to believe the truth.

But I mention this today

because it helps us better understand

why we are so vulnerable to the second great target of Satan’s lies,

those lies that are targeted at destroying our correct perceptions of ourselves as unique, treasured creations of God.

It’s a perfect open door for him.

We cannot hear God telling us the truth about who we are

and our enemy is more than willing to tell us lies

with the goal of convincing us that our God could never really love us.

There seem to be so many reasons why He shouldn’t,

and so few reasons why He should.

And it’s an amazing thing -

once we believe that lie - that God doesn’t really love us,

or at best that His love is in some way conditional upon us, upon our behavior or performance or productivity,

once that lie is imbedded within us,

even when He communicates His love to us we can’t hear it.

Welcome to the central battle of life -

the battle for our personal discovery

of the true nature of God’s love for us.

Which, of course, is why Paul prayed what he prayed

in that remarkable passage at the end of the third chapter of Ephesians.

You remember it, don’t you?

You remember where it is in the letter.

Paul wrote those incredible six chapters

to reveal to us what it means for us to be God’s people here on this earth.

He talks with us about where we came from...dead in our trespasses and sins...

...separated from God...with no hope in the world.

Then he talks about God stepping into our lives

and raising us up with Christ

and forming us into His body here on the earth.

He talks with us about how the manifold wisdom of God...

will now be revealed to all of creation through us.

But then, immediately following this revelation of our amazing role in the world,

he drops to his knees and prays that God would accomplish in each of us

the one thing that must happen

if we are ever to be truly equipped to fulfill our calling.

EPH 3:14, 17-19 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father ...that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fulness of God.

To know His love for us

is to know our true identity,

and to know the only adequate reason for all that we do in life.

And if Satan can block us from that knowledge

he has won the only battle he needs to win in our lives.

Well, that’s where we were last week,

and that also brings me back to some of those lies that came to mind

that have formed a few of my more difficult battle grounds.

I shared one of them with you last week,

the belief that dependence and submission are signs of weakness.

The truth is that, as created beings,

the only logical, reasonable foundation for our lives

is one of absolute dependence upon and submission to our Creator.

And then a second lie I jotted down

deals with the true source of happiness and fulfillment in life.

I suppose we are especially susceptible to this one

because we live in such an affluent society,

but I have sometimes found it far too easy to believe

that there is something I can own,

something I can possess that will have the power to make me happy.

We’ve just come through our dividend time here in Alaska.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand

our state government hands out to every child and adult in the state

a check of some considerable size every year.

What did you buy with yours?

Do you remember planning for it,

researching it,

checking prices,

watching sales?

Do you remember feeling as though,

once you had it,

you would be satisfied at a level you’d never known before?

Did it deliver what it promised?

Do you now feel truly complete and fulfilled in life?

Why not?

There is a concept, a truth that I heard from preachers early in my Christian life,

a truth that, when we hear it correctly and accept it, like all truth, brings tremendous freedom.

But it was presented to me in a twisted, distorted, religious casing,

and because of that I missed it.

If you’ve encountered that same distortion of this truth,

when I say one single word

you’ll know what I mean.

It’s the word “stewardship”.

Now, when you hear that word,

what do you think I’m going to talk about?

Some of you think I’m going to talk about giving money to the church.

The whole concept of “stewardship” in the religious world

has so often been twisted into little more than a manipulation technique

used to get people to give more money.

How sad.

That isn’t what God is saying to us at all in this truth.

What He’s doing is offering us a perspective on our total lives,

a concept that, once we understand it,

frees us in the most remarkable ways.

You see, the real problem with this lie I’ve just mentioned,

this lie of thinking there is something I can get,

something I can possess that will bring me happiness, fulfillment,

the real tragedy here

is that we are believing that true fulfillment in life

can be found in something other than our love relationships -

our love relationship with God Himself,

and our love relationships with the people He brings into our lives.

In other words,

we are trying to fill a relationship void,

a hole within our souls with a thing.

And so we try thing after thing after thing,

and when one thing doesn’t stop the ache,

we try something bigger.

The four year old child drags his mom to the toy department

and points at that certain toy he just has to have,

the toy he knows will make him happy if only he can take it home.

The teenager just know that, if he or she had an x-box,

or a snow board, or a skateboard, or a certain dress, or an i-pod or an i-phone,

then all the world will be perfect.

As adults maybe it’s a new car,

or a new house,

or a bigger house,

or an airplane,

or our own business.

I’ve mentioned in the past

that Sandee and I enjoy watching some of the programs on HGTV -

the Home And Garden network.

I can’t tell you how many times now

we’ve heard a couple,

or a family with one or two children,

living in a 3500 square foot home say,

“This place is just way too small to meet our needs. We simply have to find something larger.”

It’s the aching emptiness inside,

the hunger of the soul that no THING can ever fill.

But when our Lord talks with us about this whole area

He does two things for us

that, when we begin to understand them,

have the ability to bring us both freedom and peace with ourselves.

First of all,

He talks with us about relationship,

first about our relationship with Him.

MAT 11:28-30 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light."

JOH 7:37-38 "If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.'"

COL 2:10 and in Him you have been made complete...

No thing,

and no person

can ever fill the God-shaped cavern within the human heart.

Either we find Him,

or rather we allow Him to find us,

or else we live our lives in a never-ending search for something to fill the void,

or something to dull the pain of the emptiness.

And so He begins by seeking each of us,

drawing us to Himself.

That’s why many of you are here this morning.

Maybe you just told yourself it was the need for a little added insight into life,

or curiosity about this God-stuff you keep bumping into.

But under all of that is the hunger for Him.

And so, the first thing He does in bringing us the truth

is to bring us to Himself.

But there’s more.

From there, He then turns us to the second great need in our lives,

the need for strong, healthy love relationships with those around us.

JOH 13:34 "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

And what He’s doing when He gives us this commandment

is revealing to us the answer to how we can fill the second great void in our lives,

the void for human love.

And to the degree that we allow Him

to lead us into the discovery of how to love Him and how to love one another,

to that degree the two huge holes within our souls are filled.

And then, when it comes to all the stuff around us,

and all the stuff within us - our unique creative abilities,

our physical bodies,

our personalities,

our IQ’s,

our special talents and interests,

and of course our little pile of physical possessions,

with all of that He gives us the concept, the truth that frees.

1CO 4:2, 7 In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy... And what do you have that you did not receive? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?

Now, in Paul’s immediate context

he is talking about specific spiritual gifts given to us by God,

but he’s bringing up a much broader concept,

one that Christ taught frequently - that of stewardship.

It’s not complicated.

It’s simply calling us to accept this basic truth -

we own nothing,

everything we have is simply loaned to us for a brief period of time,

and our calling is to be wise stewards of all that has been briefly placed into our care.

That one question Paul asks

is at the very heart of this whole thing.

And what do you have that you did not receive?

How about this day?

Did you do something that gave you the absolute right to live this day?

Or has it simply been loaned to you,

entrusted to you by your Creator?

How about those things that we typically view as our possessions?

Where did you get them?

“Well, I worked...worked hard to earn the money so that I could buy them.”

OK, but where did you get the physical health, the personality, the IQ, the creative abilities

that equipped you to perform your job?

And what do you have that you did not receive?

When it comes to feeding the hungers of the human spirit

our number one ally is our Lord Jesus Christ.

He knows why the hungers are there,

and what can meet them.

He is the One who created all that is,

and He created it for us,

for our enjoyment.

But He also knows that if we attempt to meet the needs of our soul

through possessing, clinging to the things around us,

it will poison our relationship with the things,

and leave our souls still empty and aching.

And so He tells us the truth,

and then offers us Himself and His Word

to guide us into the discovery of true fulfillment in life.