©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

12-11-05

Content And Attitude

12/11/05 Content and Attitude

After a two month break

we are going to return this morning

to our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

I do understand, of course,

that, from a teaching point of view,

this is a really dumb way to go about studying a book.

But I also know that what we do here on Sunday mornings

is not primarily intended to build up facts, content,

it is intended to help us with our attitudes -

our attitudes toward our God and toward what He says to us in His Word.

In just few more weeks

we will complete our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians,

a study that we have been involved in for about two years.

And when we finish

I know that many of you will probably not be able to state the central message of the book

or offer a concise outline of what we find in this letter.

But, amazing as this may seem,

that doesn’t trouble me at all,

because even though we may not have retained some of the factual content of the book,

we have, I think, made progress in working through some attitude issues,

issues we all fight at times in our relationship with our Lord.

And if we have made some progress in that,

then our time has been well spent.

In order for us to grow in our walk with our Lord

we need to make forward progress in two critical areas -

content and attitude.

But of the two,

the most critical and most challenging for us is attitude.

If our attitude toward or Lord is correct

then we can gain and apply the content relatively quickly.

But if our attitude toward Him is not healthy,

all the content in the world will not bring about change in our lives.

Maybe I can illustrate what I’m trying to say here best

by simply applying it to the book of Ephesians.

If you were to ask me

what I considered to be the most important single content statement in this letter,

the one statement that brought the central message

of everything Paul was trying to tell us

down into a single verse,

I would take us to Ephesians 3:10:

... so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

In that single, remarkable line

Paul reveals to us the heart of the concept he longs for us to understand -

that the Church,

made up of all true Christians on this earth at any given time,

is the means through which God has now chosen to reveal Himself to all of creation.

We are the wide-screen, high definition, multi-media display

through which God now reveals Himself to both the seen and the unseen world.

It’s as if He is saying,

“Do you really want to know what I’m like?

Then look at what I have done in the lives of My people.

Do you really want to know My heart?

Do you want to see My power to save,

and My ability to recreate,

and the way I can deliver?

Then look at My people, My Church.

Do you really want to understand My compassion,

and My kindness,

and My forgiveness,

and My grace,

do you want to see Me up close and personal?

Then look at My Church!!”

Do you really want to know what God has been about

since the first instant of creation?

Then look at what He has brought into being

when He brought into being the Body of Christ,

and look at how He did it.

It is this message,

this content that Paul wants to communicate in this letter.

He wants our minds filled with the wonder

of who we are,

and of how we became who we are through Christ,

and of what God is accomplishing through us here on this earth.

And when it comes to content

the key statement in this letter is clearly,

...that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

And of course, by now I do hope it is clear

that we are not talking about these human religious organizations

that we call “churches”.

We’re talking about the real thing -

all those who have bowed before their Creator in spirit

and, by faith, accepted His offer of forgiveness through Christ,

no matter what group, or organization, or doctrinal system they may have chosen to associate themselves with.

Of course there is a lot more in the way of content

given to us by Paul in this letter.

He talks with us about our past,

about who we were prior to our becoming the Church,

and he talks a little bit about our future,

and he explains to us how we can “walk in a manner worthy” of this remarkable calling given to us.

But the heart, the core of the message

is our grasping that we are not just saved sinners,

but that we are in fact the literal, physical body of Jesus Christ here on this earth.

And if I would point you to content,

that’s where I would go.

But that is not the key attitude passage in the letter.

The attitude thing is altogether different.

In fact,

it is fascinating to see the way in which Paul links these two -

content and attitude.

After giving us the content,

he then says, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father...”,

and then he prays that we would be filled with that one attitude

that has the ability to equip us to fulfill the role assigned to us.

And by now most of you know where I’m going.

For Paul then prays that we

“... 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 fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:18-19)

It is our discovery of the true nature of His love for us

that forms the heart of every battle we will ever face.

When we fear,

underlying that fear is our doubt in God’s love for us.

When we worry

that worry is, at its core,

our expression of our ongoing battle with doubt about God’s love for us.

When I first wrote up my notes for this morning

and reached this point in my comments

I skillfully skipped over the whole worry thing

as an expression of our doubt in God’s love.

I talked about fear,

I talked about moral battles,

but I never even mentioned worry.

Do you know why?

Because I’m a worrier,

and because that is one of my most chronic expressions

of my doubts about God’s love.

I don’t call it “worry” to myself, of course.

I call it “being concerned”,

or “caring”,

or even “loving”.

But it’s worry.

It is my own personal ongoing inner declaration

that my God is inadequate,

or uncaring,

and that, when it comes right down to it,

God’s plan of salvation

rests ultimately on me,

on my ability to bring about change

both in my own life

and especially in the lives of those I love.

And when I worry,

that worry becomes my most frequent doorway

back into once again trying to be my own God.

I take upon myself

the responsibility to try to fix

what I think is broken in the lives of those I care about.

No, even that isn’t quite honest.

What I do

is to take on myself the responsibility

of trying to fix

what I think God has thus far failed to do correctly

in the lives of those I care about.

And do you know something?

I make a really lousy God.

All I have to work with

are externals -

ways of bringing pressure from the outside,

and if it works at all,

it only works as long as I can keep the pressure on.

And, in the end,

it becomes such a very heavy burden - trying to be God.

And all sorts of ugly things start going on between me and my Lord.

I get mad at Him

because He’s not doing what I think He should be doing.

He’s not fixing what I think He should fix.

When I get myself into these things,

and when God’s Spirit is once again able to give me eyes to see what I’m doing,

there are two key truths I must once again reclaim.

The first is telling myself that I make a really lousy God.

To be honest,

when I talk to myself

I use stronger language than that.

I remind myself that I am utterly incapable

of bringing true heart change

into the life of any other human being.

The truth is

I can’t even change myself,

much less someone else.

And then, second,

I remind myself once again

of what’s really going on -

my worry,

and my frantic attempts to be God

are simply another expression of my ongoing battle

of doubt in His love.

Do I really think that I love more than He does?

Do I think that I care more than He does?

Do I think that I must somehow fill in what is lacking in His efforts?

Do I think that He no longer cares,

or that He no longer has the power to save,

or the heart to do so?

Was I really His last great redemptive work on this earth

and now He’s closed up shop

and the rest of humanity has no hope?

And then, in those rare moments when I get very honest,

I ask myself if it is even possible

that my interference at certain points

is actually hindering what He knows needs to be done.

And when I worry,

underlying that worry

is my own personal proclamation

that God’s love for me

or for those I care about

is inadequate.

And since I’ve allowed myself to get sort of way off track here,

let me just add one other comment.

When I say here

that we are incapable of being God in another person’s life,

that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of affecting the lives of those around us.

The truth is

God has clearly revealed to us

the way in which we can have a powerful impact on the lives of others.

But it’s not by our trying to change them.

A new commandment I give to you...

that you change one another.

Oh, that isn’t it, is it?

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.”

We cannot change another human being,

but when we love them

our love can be used by the Spirit of God

to give them a reason to change,

and in fact one of the strongest reasons they’ll ever have.

God has designed us in such a way

that we long to become like those we love

and, if we will receive their love, those who love us.

But let me get us back on track here.

Every battle we ever face in life

has at its root

our battle for the rediscovery of the true nature of God’s love for us.

Every moral battle we ever face

has at its root

our battle for the rediscovery of the nature of God’s love for us.

Why has He said what He has said?

Why has He established the moral boundaries He has established?

Is it some sort of a power thing with God?

Is it because He takes some sort of satisfaction in forcing us to submit?

Or is it because His love for us

is of such a nature

that He seeks for us

the absolute best, richest, most abundant life we could ever know?

The enemies of God come... only to steal and kill and destroy; Jesus Christ came that we may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10)

And right here

is the key attitude

upon which everything else in this letter to the Ephesians,

and in fact everything else in our Christian walk depends -

Jesus loves me, this I know,

for the Bible tells me so.

And even if, in our two years of inching our way through Ephesians,

we may have briefly grasped and then lost much of the content,

it is my hope

and my prayer

that what we have done each week

has helped us make progress in our battle for that attitude

upon which everything else is built,

that we 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 fullness of God.

There is a problem with this whole thing, of course.

It is the same problem that caused Paul

to take such a radically different approach

in his attempts to communicate content and attitude.

Did you notice what he did?

When he sought to communicate content

what did he do?

He just told us!

He simply laid out the facts,

gave us the truth in words and terms we could intellectually chew on.

Communicating content is relatively simple.

But when it came to the attitude thing

what did he do?

EPH 3:14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father...

He dropped to his knees and prayed.

He didn’t try to teach us into the discovery of the reality of God’s love for us,

he prayed that the Spirit of God would do that within us.

Why?

Because even though there is nothing in all of human experience

that has the power to more profoundly alter our lives than love,

it is not something that can be taught,

or learned,

or communicated on an intellectual basis.

The intellect can help.

The facts can help.

Knowing intellectually that Christ loved us so much

that He chose to allow Himself to be nailed to a cross

as payment for our sins helps.

But the facts alone can never bring us into the personal, living reality of His love.

Only God’s Spirit

can communicate that reality to our spirits

in a way that makes it real.

I came across a statement recently by Donald Miller

in his book, Blue Like Jazz that I want to share with you.

He was describing his own personal transition

into the discovery of the reality of God’s love for him

and he put it like this.

“Of course, I’d always known (that God was there), but this time I felt it, I realized it the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her. I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife.”

Do those words trouble you?

Does it seem strange for you to think of God as being hopelessly in love with you, drunk with love for you?

And yet isn’t that the very discovery

that we hear Paul crying out to God for in our lives?

“...that you would be able to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpassing knowledge...”

And how does He do that in our lives?

How does He communicate to our spirits

the true nature of His love?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how He accomplishes that communication within us.

I do know that we all enter this world

with a deep fear of that truth

because we know deep within our spirits

that the discovery of His love will alter our lives more profoundly

than any other discovery we will ever make.

It will affect our priorities,

it will alter our values, our concept of morality,

it will impact our goals.

It changes everything.

And I also know where it begins.

It begins with God giving us the courage and the ability

to see the corruption within ourselves.

Until we can see ourselves honestly,

and especially to see our own sin honestly

we cannot correctly hear what He is saying

when He tells us He loves us.

Until we hear those words

in the context of our own personal moral sewage

we just simply don’t get it.

We will always assume that there is a “because” in His love.

“I love you because you came to Me.”

“I love you because you obeyed Me.”

We will just naturally assume

that God likes “nice” people

more than he likes “bad” people,

and that certainly somehow our performance must have something to do with our value to Him.

And so, our ability to hear His love

begins with His ability to show us how He loves -

just as we are,

right where we are,

simply because we are who we are.

That’s just the beginning, of course.

From there we then enter into a life-long daily process

in which His Spirit seeks to deepen our understanding of His love

through virtually every aspect of our lives.

But it is no surprise to me

that, when Paul reached that point in his letter

at which He wanted to talk with us about God’s love for us,

all he could do

is to drop to his knees

and pray that God would give us eyes to see the way things really are.

Well, it was my intention

to take us back to the sixth chapter of Ephesians this morning,

and to offer one additional comment

about that “sword of the Spirit” thing we were looking at the last time we were in this passage.

But my introductory comments once again got away from me

so I’ll save what I have to say about that

until we return to Ephesians after the first of the year.

Next week,

being our last week together before Christmas,

I think we will probably do something a little more seasonal.