11-11-07 Lies Part 4

This will be our final week on the lies I have believed,

partly because I want to get us back to John next week,

and partly because I think I can complete the remaining lies I jotted down on our vacation

in the time we have together this morning.

If you’re new with us

or have not been here the past few weeks

I should offer just a little explanation for what we’ll do today.

I have known for many years now

that every struggle we face in our lives,

every moral battle we face,

every attack that comes at us from the enemy

has at its root a lie.

Once we come to Christ

bowing before Him as our God

and place our lives into His hands,

from that time on

the truth, whatever it is,

is always on our side.

It will always bring us greater freedom,

and purpose,

and strength,

and hope,

and security in our God.

The more we see our world,

ourselves,

and our God as they truly are,

the more we break the power of evil in our lives

and discover our own utterly unique voice

with which we proclaim to our world

the grace and majesty and love of our God.

The series we’ve been involved in the past three weeks

and again this morning

is a series that has grown out of a few thoughts I jotted down

while Sandee and I were on vacation the first part of October.

I began to think about some of the more significant lies I have believed in my lifetime,

and of the power they have had over me -

the power to rob me of some of the things my God sought to bring into my life.

And as I looked over my list after I jotted it down

I decided that many of them were universal enough

to justify my sharing them with you.

We’ve looked at three of them so far.

The first one we looked at

is the belief that dependance and submission are signs of weakness.

The second is the belief that there is something I can own,

something I can possess that will bring me happiness.

And then last week we looked at the third,

the belief that God is a resource,

that His primary role in our lives

is to provide us with a means to an end.

If you were here last week

you may remember that after we looked at that third lie

I ended with a statement made by Paul

in a conversation he had with some of the philosophers in Athens.

In his attempt to communicate to them

the truth about our God he said,

ACT 17:28 ... in Him we live and move and exist...

We have a number of people from outside of Alaska

who pick up these notes on line each week,

and I had an e-mail from one of them last Sunday evening

saying that it appeared as though part of the notes had been cut off

because what he had

just came to that verse and then stopped.

I’ll admit that from a speaking point of view

that may not have been the best way for me to end our teaching,

but the truth is

that single statement is the best answer to the lie I had believed

that I could ever offer,

and having stated it

I didn’t have anything else to say.

Not only is our God not just a resource,

or a means to an end,

but He is, in fact, the very source of this life into which we are immersed.

He is to our spirits

what the Kenai River is to the salmon.

When the New Testament writers tried to find words

that would help us to grasp the true nature of the Christian’s relationship with God

they did things with language that had never been done before or since.

They did this when they told us that we now are “in Christ”.

Paul tells us the central goal of his own life is that he...

PHI 3:9 ...may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith...

And this same concept is repeated again and again throughout the New Testament documents.

It isn’t just that we know Him,

or that we live in submission to Him,

or even that we worship Him and honor Him as God,

as valuable and essential as those things are.

When our God talks with us about this relationship He has created for us

He tells us both that we are IN CHRIST

and that Christ is IN US.

COL 1:27-28 to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ.

The problem we run into with this whole thing

is that so often we have either never heard

or else ceased to listen to what’s really being said.

God is using words in a way that they simply are not ever used in any other situation.

How can we be IN another person

or another person be IN us?

And yet that is exactly why God chose these words.

He wants us to wrestle with the true nature of our relationship with our Creator.

We live every moment of our existence

utterly, completely, absolutely immersed in His presence.

And the fact that we live most of our existence

totally unaware of this,

unaware of HIM with us,

is the best example I could ever give

of how blind our minds are to the truth.

Following our time together last week

I was asked an excellent question.

I was asked how, in the light of what we were looking at last week,

I would define “spiritual growth”.

I, like many of you in the church community,

began my Christian walk

with the understanding that “spiritual growth”

was the direct result of accumulating more and more Bible knowledge

and then applying that knowledge to my life.

“Read your Bible, pray every day and you’ll grow...grow...grow.

Neglect your Bible, forget to pray and you’ll shrink...shrink...shrink.”

Greater content equals greater growth.

Being highly motivated in my desire for “spiritual growth”,

I began an extremely aggressive personal program of “growth”

from the earliest days of my walk with my King.

There was one point at which I even resolved to memorize all of the New Testament Epistles

and made more than a little progress toward that goal.

And before I say more,

let me say that all of the knowledge I’ve gained over the years

has been of tremendous value to me.

It has become the mirror in which I can see reflected

so many of the lies I have believed in my life.

But having said that,

let me also say that knowledge in itself

can never and will never produce true spiritual growth

because true spiritual growth is not the process of becoming competent in a system of beliefs

or skilled and faithful in the performance of certain religious duties.

True spiritual growth is always, only growth in relationship - our relationship with our God.

It certainly involves our gaining more and more knowledge about Him,

but it goes so far beyond that.

It involves our learning to hear His voice,

our choosing to trust Him,

our discovering how to enjoy Him,

how to walk with Him,

how to correctly recognize both His role and our role in this life we live with Him.

Paul says it so much better

and so much more simply.

PHI 3:8-10 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death...

That’s spiritual growth.

It is knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,

discovering what it means to be found in Him,

learning the living reality of His power within me,

finding the kind of fellowship with Him that only comes through suffering with Him

and being conformed to His death.

Do I know what all of that means?

No, but I know some,

and what I know brings me forever back to what I shared with you last week -

that my God is not a resource, a means to an end, He is the goal,

and if we are growing as He intended

we will recognize that growth because it produces within us

an ever growing awareness of our desperate dependance upon Him -

His presence with us, His love for us, His life through us.

Well, that’s where we’ve been the past few weeks,

and now in the rest of the time we have this morning

let me just touch on some of the other lies that have influenced my life over the years.

The fourth lie I jotted down on my list

is one that will come as no surprise

to those of you who have listened to me teach for any length of time.

It is the lie that God’s love is in some way dependent upon my performance.

There are things I can do that will make God like me more

and things I can do that will cause Him to like me less.

I really don’t think there is any lie

that is more universally accepted as truth than this one.

And the great tragedy is that the strongest perpetrator of this lie

is the voice of organized religion.

More often than not

when a person attempts to reach out to God through our organized religious structures

what they receive is a strong confirmation

that God’s acceptance of them and love for them

is directly linked to their performance.

And before I go any farther here

let me try to protect myself from being misunderstood

by affirming that Christ’s presence in a person’s life

and their submission to Him

will have profound affects on that person’s behavior.

I’ve seen it in my own life,

and I’ve seen it countless times in the lives of others.

I was talking with a person this past week

who, prior to Christ’s entrance into his life,

had a tremendous problem with anger.

He would sometimes just explode.

But during the past few years

that explosiveness has been replaced

with the most amazing self-control and gentle spirit.

Christ in us changes us.

But that is a very different thing

from our believing that His presence with us

or His love for us is in any way dependant upon our behavior.

In fact when God talks with us about this whole area

He goes to the extreme in what He says

so that there can be no misunderstanding.

EPH 2:1-6 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. 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)...

ROM 5:6-8 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

I do know how hard it is for us to hear correctly what our Creator is saying to us in passages like this.

We have a hard enough time accepting ourselves

in the face of some of the junk we’ve gotten into

and some of the blunders we’ve made.

When we think about God knowing it all,

knowing every wrong action,

every wrong thought,

every wrong impulse in our lives

and then, with all of that knowledge,

having Him say, “I love you, I accept you just as you are.”,

well, it just doesn’t make any sense.

I was in a phone conversation just recently

with a person who was obviously, honestly reaching out to God,

I think for the first time in her life.

She was asking me, “But what do I do...what do I do?”

I told her, “You just say, ‘Here’s my life, Lord. Thank you for loving me. Amen.”

Then she said, “But there’s so much stuff in my life that isn’t right.”

And there it is again - the great lie,

the belief that God’s love for us

and His willingness to accept us

is in some way dependant upon our performance.

How could it be otherwise?

And yet it is.

Do you have children,

or have you been involved in a child’s life?

If so, then it may help you to understand a little bit.

Do you love them less when they fail?

If so, then the truth is you never loved them at all.

In fact, what happens most often

is that if they will invite you into their failure,

rather than driving you away from them,

it causes your heart to reach out to them even more.

Let me make this as simple as I know how.

I know I’ve said this before,

even in very similar words,

but it is what I believe to be the greatest personal realization of my entire life.

It is the truth that helps me make sense of everything else.

It is the lense through which everything I know about God

and certainly everything I understand about Jesus Christ comes into perfect focus.

It is the truth that allows me to understand

how Satan attacks us,

what he’s attempting to do,

and why his preferred weapon of choice against us is the weapon of religion.

And most of all

it is the one truth that, most of all,

makes sense of my own life and all that my God has done in His interaction with me.

And what is it?

It is simply this,

that from the very beginning of all things

the one thing God wanted,

the goal that He has been seeking to achieve in all that He has done

is the goal of creating a world system in which we, His creation,

could understand the true nature of His love for each of us,

and the only way that goal could ever be achieved

was through His creating a way in which we could see His response to us

in the face of our open rebellion against Him.

There simply was no other way we could ever...would ever get it.

For God so loved the world...

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

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 ...

It is simply impossible for us to see the heart of God for us

if we think there is any performance-based reason why He should love us.

Before their rebellion against God

Adam and Eve could not see His heart.

Why shouldn’t God love them?

They were His ultimate creation and as such worthy of His ultimate love.

So that’s the goal, the central theme of all that is - our discovery of our God’s love for us.

And to the degree that we enter into that discovery,

to that degree our lives begin to make sense.

We begin to know who our God is,

and we also begin to understand who we are - why we have value, why we have purpose.

And there is only one adequate motivational force in life

that has the ability to bring about true, enduring change in our lives - our discovery of His love for us and our response to that love.

Which brings me back to this great and hideous lie,

the lie used by Satan to blind us

to the one truth we most need to understand,

the truth about the true nature of God’s love for us,

the lie that God’s love for us and His acceptance of us

are dependant upon our performance for Him.

And the reason this lie is so powerful

is because, once we accept it,

it becomes impossible for us to discover God’s heart

even if we believe our performance is good.

If our performance is bad

of course we see God as rejecting us,

disgusted with us.

But even if we believe our performance is good

we cannot hear His love for us

because we believe His acceptance of us is the result of what we have done or not done,

and “love” that is given in exchange for performance is not love

and it certainly has no power to heal.

It is simply wages earned for performance delivered.

Why do you think one of the first works of the Spirit of God within a person

is to bring conviction of sin in our lives?

Why do you think He works with us and keeps working with us

until He can bring us to the place

where we will honestly, without excuse, confess our sins before Him?

Why do you think He has allowed that one huge painful area of failure in your life,

that area that terrifies you so much,

that black hole you are so afraid to face?

Why does He keep bringing you back to it,

nudging you into honesty about it?

Do you remember -

do you remember that in Christ ALL truth is on our side?

That includes even the truth about those areas in your life that terrify you.

He does not face us with those things

because He’s ticked at us

and wants to bash us with our offenses against Him.

He wants to face us with those things

because He knows that we will never ever understand His heart for us

until we stand before Him honestly, drenched in our failure,

and then here Him say, “My child...I love you.”

And it is that knowledge,

that understanding that forms the foundation for everything else.

Only when we know He loves us

will we begin to listen to Him and trust Him in everything else He says to us.

Well, that’s the forth lie on my list.

And the rest of them I’ll just mention quickly before I close.

Probably they are more personal than the others anyway.

The next lie I believed when I was younger

was that the human spirit ages.

It does not.

It cannot.

It is an eternal creation of God

and as such has no age.

That’s at the heart of what seems so strange about our physical bodies aging.

At the spirit level I’m still just me,

but somehow this ageless spirit

has ended up inside this physical body that is showing all sorts of signs of wear.

And its all so strange,

and so wrong.

There is a solution to this, of course.

It’s a brand new body - one that, just like my spirit, will never age.

But for now it’s just all so stupid...and wrong.

And then the final lie I would mention

is the lie of believing that life is not just a vapor.

James said it with rather brutal honesty.

JAM 4:14 ... You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

And I don’t mention this simply to be morbid or gloomy.

I mention it because it is a crucial bit of knowledge we need

in order to make the choices we need to make each day.

Our time here is so brief

and the choices we make matter so much -

the choices we make about how we invest our very limited time and resources.

I can say it better.

The one thing you can do on this earth

that will leave an enduring impact on this world

is if you choose to actively love those God has placed into your care.

The time we have to accomplish that

is so brief,

and it matters so much more than we could ever realize.

And knowing the brevity of our time here

is a crucial motivation

in helping us to recognize the importance of the choices we make each day.

Well, with that I’ll end my lies.

There was a little more on my list,

but nothing, I think that I haven’t covered in what we’ve already looked at.

So next week, perhaps,

we will return to our study of the Gospel of John.