©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

11/07/04

Flawed Expectations Pt. 2

11/7/04 Flawed Expectations Pt. 2

What we do this morning

will conclude our series

on the basic principles that govern the Christian life.

There are, of course, a number of other principles we could include in this series,

but the ones we’ve looked at during the past few weeks

will, I think, serve the purpose I want them to serve.

From this point on

the more we add to the series,

to more likely it is that it will diminish in our minds

the importance of the ones we’ve seen.

And I don’t want that happen.

We enter into this remarkable redemptive Father/child union with our God

solely on the basis of His grace poured out on us.

In response to our simple choice

to believe He is telling us the truth

when He tells us that Christ’s death paid our debt for all of our sins for all of eternity,

God accepts us into His family,

recreates us in absolute holiness

at the deepest level of our being,

places His Spirit within us

and then tells us that He will live out His life through us each day.

And all because we have chosen to believe what He’s said.

And that truth right there

proclaims to all the world

the absolute justice

and fairness of our God.

Do you remember how the human race

originally got itself into this horrible mess we are now in?

Do you recall that original offense

that plunged all of mankind

into separation from God?

It wasn’t Adam and Eve’s disobedience.

The disobedience followed after.

The first offense,

and the one that led to all the others

was their refusal to believe their God.

They refused to believe what He had said,

but even more,

they refused to believe His heart intent toward them.

And now, as we live out our lives

on the back side of that disaster,

the one thing our God asks from us

in order for us to share in His redemption,

and His grace,

and His love poured out on us forever

is that we choose to do

the one thing Adam and Eve chose not to do -

that we simply believe He is telling us the truth.

And even the truth itself that we are called to believe

has striking similarities

to the one Adam and Eve refused to believe.

Both of them involve trees,

and what we find hanging on them.

With Adam and Eve

it was a tree in their garden

and a fruit hanging on it that would bring them death if they reached out and took it.

In our case it involves another tree,

a tree reshaped into the form of a cross,

with the Son of God hanging on it.

And with us,

our God tells us that

if we reach out to Him,

and take hold of Him,

He will give us life,

and our sin will be removed from us forever,

transferred to the account of Christ,

and to the debt He paid.

But both with Adam and Eve,

and with each of us,

all our God asks of us

is that we choose to believe what He’s saying to us,

believe He is telling us the truth.

GAL 3:6 Even so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

And this, by the way,

is also why Satan works so hard

to reintroduce a performance base back into the Christian message.

This is why he wants so much

for us to mingle our theology,

to believe and to preach grace plus...

And we do it most often

not at the point of salvation,

not by suggesting to ourselves

or to others

that we must bring some measure of performance with us

along with our faith in Christ

in order for us to enter the family of God.

But we do it most often

with what we say

and what we believe about our life with Christ following salvation.

We tell ourselves

that we are brought into union with Christ through faith alone,

but we maintain our union with Him

on the basis of our achieving a certain level of performance

that then justifies His continued acceptance of us

and His continued work in us and through us.

And when we do that

we subtly

but, oh so powerfully disbelieve our God.

Never do we ever see the Apostle Paul more enraged

then at those points in his writings

when he seeks to combat this lie.

Do you want to hear him?

We have bumped up against Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:20 repeatedly in this study.

GAL 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

But we have not yet looked at the words

that he writes immediately following that statement.

After boldly proclaiming

that the entire foundation for his daily walk with Christ

is his assurance that Christ can and will live out His life through Paul,

he then goes on to say,

GAL 2:21-3:3 "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly." You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

To the Galatians he is saying,

“So what? You think you needed the grace of God to enter His family,

but you can now live with Him each day

on the basis of your good deeds and high performance?

Are you really that stupid?!”

And he is so forceful

in his attack against this lie

not because our performance doesn’t matter,

but because we can never offer our God

a performance level that in any way ever justifies His acceptance of us on the basis of that performance.

The only thing we can ever offer our God

that provides us with an adequate basis for living in His presence

is the one thing He asks from us -

our simple faith in the death of Christ as payment for our sins.

And a truly remarkable thing happens within the human spirit

when we finally get it,

when we finally simply accept what He’s offering us - eternal life with Him on the basis of faith alone -

with no strings attached,

no probationary period,

no acceptance conditional upon our achieving a certain standard.

When we finally reach the point at the spirit level

when we find ourselves starting each day

by once again affirming the truth

that the only thing that qualifies us to live in His presence that day

is His grace poured out on us,

and the only thing that gives us hope

that anything of value will be produced through us that day

is His ability to live His life out through us,

when we finally reach that point where we understand,

an amazing thing takes place with us.

For the first time in our lives

we begin to hear the love of God for us personally,

to hear it and experience it

in a way that becomes the central motivating force in our lives.

And all He asks from us

is the same thing He has been asking from us as His creation

since the day He brought us into being -

our willingness to simply choose to believe He is telling us the truth -

the truth about the death of Christ for our sins,

and the truth about His willingness and His ability to live out His life through us each day.

After establishing those basics,

we then spent a number of weeks

looking at Paul’s comments to the Colossians

as he warned us about the two forces

that have the power to interfere with Christ’s life being lived out through us as He intends.

The first is religion - man-made religious systems

that reduce the calling of the Christian life

to the careful observance of a prescribed set of religious duties,

and the second is being deceived into believing

that some need in our life

can only be met by our stepping outside of the protective moral framework

revealed to us by our God through His moral commands.

Now, that’s the basics of where we’ve been with this series.

And then, last week we began to pull this study together

by looking at some of the reasons why

the life of Christ within us

so often looks so different from what we might expect it to look like.

There are three reasons I want us to touch on here

and we’ve seen two of them so far.

And the first and most important is understanding

that God has not called us to Himself for productivity,

He’s called us to Himself for friendship.

And any true productivity that comes out of our lives

will always be the byproduct

of our growing friendship with our God.

God did not call you into His employment.

He did not call you to His workforce.

He called you to Himself

because He loves you,

because He delights in you,

and because what He seeks is you sharing your life with Him moment by moment.

It is absolutely true

that our life with Him

will profoundly alter our lives,

and that part of what He will do

is to share with us projects through which we can get to know Him better.

But all of the productivity,

and all of the change

comes as a byproduct of the friendship.

It is one of the fundamental truths of life

that we become like the ones we love,

and the more deeply we love

the more like them we become.

Their values become our values,

their perspective on life becomes our perspective on life,

their way of talking

becomes our way of talking.

And it is exactly the same way

when it comes to us and our Creator.

The more we know His love

and the more we respond to it,

the more like Him we become.

But it is quite common for us to begin our walk with Christ

with the friendship/productivity thing backwards.

Our religious background tells us

that we “prove” our “love” through our productivity,

rather than realizing that our productivity

is simply a byproduct of our growing discovery of His love.

Then the second principle we saw last week

involved our gaining a correct perspective

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

And we saw

that 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.

And my concern here, of course,

is that, if we buy into the big visible ministries mentality

that is so much a part of the church industry in our nation today,

we can actually be doing well the work our God has given us,

and yet feel as though we are failing or falling short of our calling

because we are attempting to measure ourselves by a deeply flawed cultural religious standard.

And what I’m sharing with you right here

is among the more difficult learning areas I have had to go through personally.

For too much of my life

I measured myself by a cultural “pastor” standard of measurement

and saw myself forever falling short of who I should be.

And as long as my focus remained on the organization,

the structure,

the mental image given to me by our church culture

of what an effective pastor

and an effective local church would look like

I lived with a constant sense of failure.

And, of course, there have always been a few voices along the way

who were eager to point out to me

their expectations of me as well,

reinforcing the lies in the process.

For too long I lived with two opposing forces going on inside me.

On one hand there was that mental cultural blueprint

telling me what I really should be doing.

And on the other hand

there were those things going on inside me

that were the natural expressions of the life of Christ within me.

They weren’t things I tried to do

so much as they were things that were just a part of me.

My enjoyment of working with kids on a one-to-one basis is a good example.

For most of my adult life I have known that it is so easy for me to connect with kids.

I love it!

I love being with them, spending time with them,

and getting into their lives.

But any effective involvement with children and teenagers take time,

lots of time,

and for years it was something that simply didn’t fit into my mental pastoral blueprint.

But in recent years

I have been letting the blueprint go, learning how to listen more carefully

not to what I thought I should be doing,

but to what my Lord is really doing inside me,

trusting Him to give me eyes to see

those lives He has really equipped me to touch,

recognizing that every single life is equally valued by God,

and equally worthy of my love and my involvement,

no matter how old or how young they may be.

And I have never felt so free

or so fulfilled in my life.

With all of us

there will be just a few people

that He entrusts into our care.

Those people are our calling.

They are the center of all that God is seeking to do through our lives.

And everything else we do

should find its proper place

in relationship to that center.

And here is the truly remarkable thing -

when we learn to hear that voice,

and when we order our lives around those people He has placed into our care,

it feeds our spirits as nothing else in life can do,

and provides us with the deepest sense of fulfillment we’ll ever know.

I love the way our Lord expressed this truth

when He was talking with that Samaritan woman at the well.

The account is found in the forth chapter of the Gospel of John.

At this point in their relationship with Jesus,

the disciples are all pumped up about this great movement,

this great ministry they see themselves caught up in.

In the fourth chapter of John they are on their way back

from Jesus’ highly successful preaching tour in the south,

and as they pass through Samaria

they take a break so that they can run off and find some food.

While they’re gone

Jesus steps into the life of a Samaritan woman

and a remarkable conversation takes place between them.

When the disciples finally return with their bags full of Big Macs and fries

they urge Jesus to eat.

And listen to what He says.

JOH 4:31-34 Meanwhile the disciples were urging Him, saying, "Rabbi, eat." But He said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." So the disciples were saying to one another, "No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.”

What He’s saying is that

the more our lives line up

with those things that God has designed us to do

and equipped us to do

the more it will feed our spirits

and feed them as nothing else in life can do.

It provides the deepest sense of fulfillment and satisfaction we will ever know.

Which brings me, then,

to the third truth I want to share with you

about why what we so often expect from the life of Christ through us

is not what we actually experience.

And the principle in a single statement is this:

we assume God is working in us in order to make us productive

when what He’s really doing is working in us in order to make us free -

free to be the unique individuals He designed us to be,

free to express His life through us

in ways that are perfectly matched to us.

Paul said it with such simplicity and clarity in His letter to the Galatians.

GAL 5:1 It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free,

and all true productivity in our lives

is simply a byproduct of that growing freedom.

Now, with all of us

there are places in our lives

where freedom does not come either easily or quickly.

And unless we understand what God is seeking to do in our lives

we can easily even find ourselves fighting against

what He’s seeking to do within us.

There are so many forces

that have the power to keep us under bondage.

We’ve looked at two huge ones in this series already -

religion

and immorality.

We’ve seen how religion takes the life of Christ within us

and tries to then squeeze us into conformity

to a rigid set of rules and regulations.

And we’ve seen how immorality

always brings with it an emotional, and psychological,

and often even physical bondage,

a bondage that drives, and controls, and dominates our lives.

But there are numerous other forces

that rob us of our freedom as well.

Some of them come from our childhood,

messages given to us either intentionally or unintentionally

about who we should be,

and how we should act,

and even what kind of careers are acceptable or unacceptable.

Do truly “successful” people work with their hands?

Do “real men” sit in an office all day?

If the messages we’ve brought with us from our past

fit with the way God has designed us personally, great!

But if those messages don’t

there will be areas where our Lord will seek to free us

from lies that have the power to rob us of the freedom to be ourselves.

And there are other lies that come at us from our society,

messages that tell us

true fulfillment in life

comes to us on the basis of our external appearance,

or our IQ,

or our economic bracket,

or our personality type,

or our athletic ability.

And with all of us,

some of the deepest healing God will ever accomplish within us

comes through His work to break the power

of all of those lies that strip us of the freedom to be ourselves.

And my point here is simply this -

there are times in each of our lives

when the life of Christ within us

does not look anything like what we think it should look like

because our eyes our focused on a cultural image of success or productivity,

while His eyes,

and His heart,

and His carefully designed work within us are focused on making us free.

And sometimes that freedom can only become a reality

through His prying our fingers free

from the false measures of success we have been clinging to.

And with that we will officially bring our basics series to a close,

though in truth we will find that these same principles

will be woven into every passage

and every concept we get near

because they form the foundation for everything else we will ever learn

about life with our Creator.