©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

10/31/04

Flawed Expectations

10/31/04 Flawed Expectations

The principles that govern the Christian’s life with Christ

are not nearly as obscure,

or complicated,

or mystical as we are sometimes led to believe.

What God has offered us through Christ

is not a salvation for the select few,

not a salvation for the intellectual elite,

not some secret pathway back to our Creator that can only be discovered by those who,

through good fortune,

or determination,

or intricate mental and spiritual gymnastics finally enter into the hidden truths.

The salvation offered to us by our God

is a salvation designed by Him for every man and woman who has ever lived,

a salvation built upon principles

that can be understood

and then experienced daily by everyone who listens to what He says

and then chooses to believe He is telling us the truth.

In fact,

Paul told the Corinthians

that the ones who would have the hardest time with these truths

are the smarter ones among us,

the ones who draw their security

and their prestige in human society

from their superior intelligence.

1CO 1:26-29 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.

For the past several months

we have been reviewing once again

those principles that form the foundation of our walk with Christ.

It is a walk that begins with our recognizing our own separation from our God,

a separation that exists

because we enter this world with spirits in rebellion against Him,

determined to be our own god,

to keep ourselves at the center of our own little world.

From there,

for those of us who respond to Him,

He then brings us to the understanding that,

on our own there is nothing we can ever do

that can fix the brokeness that exists between us and our God.

It is at that point in our lives

that He then points us to His Son, Jesus Christ,

and tells us that He loves us so much

that He gave His Son to die in our place for our sins

so that we could enter into an eternal Father/child union with Him.

And here is the first and greatest principle of life -

all He asks of us

in order for us to share in the sacrifice of Christ

is our admission that we need a Savior

and our choosing to believe that our debt has been paid in full forever.

JOH 3:16 For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

JOH 1:12-13 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

So, the first principle we’ve looked at,

and the one upon which all others are built,

is that it is by the grace of our good God,

through simple faith in what He has said to us about Christ,

that we enter into the family of God for all eternity.

Then, from there we saw that,

not only do we enter into His family through His grace,

but we then live with Him each day on exactly the same basis.

ROM 5:1-2 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand...

This grace in which we stand...

This grace in which we stand...

This grace in which we stand...

And it doesn’t stop there.

It gets better and better.

For, from there we went on to look

at the way in which our God goes about changing us here and now.

He doesn’t do what we might expect.

He doesn’t write up for us

a list of duties,

and activities,

and responsibilities He wants us to fulfill.

What He does do

is to place His Spirit within each of us who come to Him,

creating within us

a heart longing to please Him.

Then He tells us that He will live His life out through each of us

in the ways that are perfectly matched to His unique design of us.

And in the process

we become the literal physical body of Jesus Christ on this earth.

We become the means through which, as Paul puts it,

 EPH 3:10 ... the manifold wisdom of God (is) made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

And then, most recently,

we have been looking at the two major weapons

used by Satan

as he seeks to undermine this process through which the life of Christ is lived out through us.

The first is to try to get us

to replace the life of Christ within us

with an external religious system.

Rather than growing in our understanding

of how to hear and respond to the voice of our Lord within us,

we turn to an external system of religious performance,

a system that assures us that, if we do certain things faithfully,

we can then rest secure in our relationship with God.

And the second enemy of the life of Christ within us

is being deceived into believing

that some need in our life can only be met

if we step outside of the protective moral framework given to us by our Lord.

And we ended our time last week

by recognizing that 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.

But making a statement like that

brings up one more question I want us to look at

before we bring this series on the basics to an end.

If Christ really is living within every believer,

and if He really is living His life out through us on a daily basis,

then why is it that our lives so often look so different from what we would expect them to look like?

Why isn’t He turning us all into Billy Grahams,

and doing great and mighty works through our lives?

Why do most of us

spend most of our lives in routine and obscurity?

Why does what we have

look so very different from what most of us would expect

if it is really true

that God Himself is living in us

and has appointed us as His spokesmen on the earth?

To answer that

I’d like to offer three statements that will help.

And the first and most important of the three is this -

God has not called us to Himself for productivity,

He’s called us to Himself for friendship.

John 3:16 does not say,

“For God so desperately needed workers in His Kingdom that He gave His only Son so that all those who believe in Him could join His workforce and live productive lives on this earth.”

There may be no place in this whole thing

where we have been more deeply deceived

by the messages being given to us through the religious community around us

than right here.

So much of the message we spew out within the church community

suggests that the primary focus of life with God is productivity.

“What are you doing for the Lord?”

“What is your ministry?”

“Are you diligent in doing God’s work here on this earth?”

Some of those messages come at us

as the natural result of our basic religious nature,

a nature that assumes that performance is the basis of our relationship with God.

Some of them, I think,

come at us because we have such an extremely difficult time

believing that God could really like us just for ourselves,

and we assume there must be something else He wants from us,

something that would, to our minds, more reasonably justify our existence.

And I think some of those messages also come at us

because we have created within our culture

a massive religious industry in the name of Christ,

an industry that demands massive manpower

and huge quantities of money to keep going,

and the cry of “What have you done for the Lord?”

is one of the key guilt or ego motivators

used to keep the industry going.

But the truth is,

though God does indeed choose to do His work through His people,

and what He does through us does change our world dramatically,

still, He doesn’t need us, and never has.

And He certainly did not call us to Himself so that He could then use us,

He called us to Himself

simply because He enjoys each of us,

and delights in our friendship with Him,

and loves us with an everlasting love.

When my daughter, Joni, was about five years old,

she and I helped some friends move into their new home.

I carried boxes and furniture from the truck to the house

while Joni played in the yard

and watched her daddy go back and forth with his heavy loads.

Finally, she came up and said,”Daddy, I want to help you do your work.”

I told her that the loads were way too heavy for her

and there was no way she would be able to lift them.

But she was determined to help.

She loved her daddy

and she wanted to do his work with him.

That’s what love does to us.

So, when it was time to move the couch into the house,

I called her over to myself,

dropped my end way down low

so that she could put her little hands along the bottom edge,

as my friend and I carried the couch in.

She trotted along next to me all the way into the house,

pleased to be able to do Daddy's work.

Our desire to do God's work is just like that.

Human flesh,

even incredibly gifted and motivated flesh,

can never do the work of God.

Only God can do the work of God.

But here is the amazing thing.

Because of His great love for us,

He is committed to do that work through us.

He lowers the couch down low enough

so that we can place our little hands along the edge next to His.

He walks at a speed that makes it possible

for us to trot along next to Him.

He allows us to carry

exactly the amount of weight we are able to handle.

And right here is the thing we can never allow ourselves to forget.

He does not do this

because He needs us in order to get the job done.

He certainly doesn’t do it

because it goes faster

or more efficiently when we are involved.

He does it for the same reason

I let my daughter ”help” Daddy move the couch.

He does it because of the value He places

on the relationship with us

that develops as a result of our working together.

But always,

from the very beginning,

it has only been about the friendship.

And unless we get this right,

nothing He does with us,

or in us,

or for us,

or through us will ever make any sense.

I have been a Christian, now,

for almost 40 years.

In those 40 years

I have gone through countless different situations,

and experiences,

and jobs,

and positions both inside and outside of organized religion.

There have been times

when the Christian world labeled me “missionary”

and held me in high regard

because I was “serving the Lord on the foreign field”.

There were times when I was labeled a “layman”,

and spent my days cleaning toilets,

and washing windows,

and scrubbing bathtubs and shower doors,

and people asked me when I planned to return once again to “the Lord’s work”.

All such thinking,

and all such labels,

and all such divisions between “God’s work” and “man’s work”

are the product of a profoundly confused and ignorant religious culture,

a culture that has no clear understanding

of the true nature of the life with God we enter into through Christ.

From the day I came to my Lord in the fall of 1966

there has always, only been one thing He has wanted from me -

that I live each day openly in His presence through faith in the death of Christ for my sins.

There have been times when my life with Him

has placed me in front of a large group of people, teaching His Word.

There have been times when my life with Him

has placed me at the back end of a truck in the Texas sun unloading crates,

or crouched over one more dirty toilet as I clean another vacated apartment.

But as long as I share whatever situation I am in with my Lord,

as long as, that day, He is my life,

and my reason for doing what I’m doing,

and my hope both for the present and the future,

there is absolutely no difference between the teaching and the toilet.

Our calling is simply to live daily in His presence with honesty and integrity before Him,

growing in our understanding of His love, and His grace.

As we grow in Him,

He will use that growing knowledge of Him

to impact and alter the lives of those around us for good.

But where,

and when,

and how He does that is entirely up to Him,

and it should make no difference to us whatsoever.

We have not been redeemed for productivity,

we have been redeemed for friendship with God,

and everything else of value in our lives will flow from that friendship.

The second principle I want to share with us

concerns gaining a correct perspective

on God’s basic program for bringing about change through His people.

And here again

I believe our institutional religious systems

have sometimes blinded us

to the true nature of the way in which God usually brings about changes in our lives.

Too often I think we tend to believe

that most of God’s work is done through big meetings,

and big organizations,

and big outreaches of one kind or another.

But the truth is,

most of the time that is not the way He does what He does.

And maybe I could illustrate what I want us to see here best

by asking you a question.

I want you to think back to time in your life

when you know that God changed you in some significant way.

He brought some significant healing into your life,

or He stopped you from heading down some highly destructive path and turned you in a whole new direction,

or He gave you the strength and the encouragement you desperately needed at a very deep point in your life.

How did He do it?

There are times, of course,

when He does what He does

solely through the working of His Spirit within us.

But if there was another human agent involved,

I’ll bet it wasn’t through a meeting,

I’ll bet it was through one other individual that God brought into your life at that time.

And here’s my point -

God’s basic plan for what He does through His people

is not to have a few key people touching millions,

but rather to have millions of His people touching just a few.

He has described us as the “salt of the earth”.

It’s a fascinating word picture.

When you want to season your food,

why don’t you take one large chunk of rock salt

and drop it into the center of your plate?

Obviously,

because it wouldn’t work.

It would ruin the food immediately around it,

and do nothing for the rest of it.

When you grab that salt shaker and sprinkle it over your food,

how many grains of salt to you use?

We don’t even think about it, do we?

Hundreds?

Thousands?

All we know is that it takes lots and lots of them over the entire plate.

Folks, that’s us.

God’s whole design for change in this world

is to spread His people throughout all of society.

And then He entrusts just a few people into our care,

some of them just briefly,

and others for a few months,

or a few years,

or occasionally, in the case of our families,

or in exceptional friendships,

for a lifetime.

And then,

our calling with each of those entrusted into our care,

is not that we try to convert them

and not that we try to change them.

Our calling is that we learn how to love them,

and how to allow our God

to love them through 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.”

That is our daily battleground.

That is our daily calling - the discovery

of what it means this day

to love those He has entrusted into our care.

And it is through that process

that He accomplishes His finest work

both in us

and in those around us.

But the crucial point I want us to recognize here

is that there is nothing in any way insignificant or unimportant

about what is going on in your life right now.

If God has given you just one other person right now to love,

then you have been given a very high calling indeed.

If you have been given two,

or three,

or four,

then you have been entrusted with a truly great calling.

Do you think your life is in some way insignificant

because no one has pasted a religious title on you

or recognized you publicly for your work?

If so, then you have been lied to by the Enemy.

God’s great plan for His people

is not a few reaching millions,

it is millions each touching,

and loving,

and changing just a few through that love.

And if anyone or anything ever leads you to believe

that your role in that process is in any way insignificant

they are speaking lies from Satan Himself.

And I did not get as far as I’d planned,

so next week

we’ll look at the last truth I wanted to share with you.