PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “SIN:  Refine Our Sins or Remove Them?”

     In the First Epistle of John, the Aged Apostle is writing to his little children in the faith, seeking to teach them to experience the Word of Life, just as he and the other Apostles did during “the days of His flesh”.  He encourages them to join in the partnership and fellowship that enables them to follow Jesus, just as they did, letting His Eternal Life be manifest in their lives.  Jesus, the Eternal Life who existed in the beginning with the Father, and became flesh and dwelt among us, walking a divine life, as the Sinless Righteous Son of God, is our Example and Enabler.  Jesus choose the Vine and the branches as the metaphor of life and fruitfulness for the Christian life.  Being in Him, as the branches are to the vine, shows how His life can flow through us, producing fruit, more fruit, and much fruit. (See John 15).  John calls this kind of relationship as a Walk in Life.  It is also a Walk in Light.  Jesus was light, and in Him was no darkness at all.  When we are empowered by His Person, Presence, and Power, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we can walk as He did.  Just a real as when Jesus commanded Peter to walk on water (Matt. 14:28-29), and He miraculously empowered him to do so, so with us!  Jesus said, “He that commits sin is a slave to sin, but those who know Him, intimately, knowing the Truth, is set free” (John 8:34-36).  Such a relationship makes one “free indeed!”  John in I John chapters 1 and 2 indicates that knowing Him as “life” and “light” results in waling in “Liberty” from sin.  This is a subject that needs to be emphasized to Christians today!  It is true that our sins have been “removed from us as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12); and that “our sins have been cast into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19); and that they have been “cast behind God’s back” (literally “between His shoulder blades” Isaiah 38:17; and that they are “remembered against us no more” (Isaiah 43:25/Heb. 8:12), every Christian knows that in daily practice, that sin is still our besetting issue.  Even the great Apostle Paul called himself “as miserable wretched man” and asked “who will deliver me from this body of death” (Rom. 7:24).  Every Christian can identify with Paul’s confessed dilemma.  Josh Billings vividly describes the catch-22 that describes most Christians when it comes to their battle with daily sin.  He says, “The hardest sinner of the whole lot is one who spends half his time sinning and the other half in repentance!”  Most Christian find themselves praying like the Ancient Roman writer Seneca, who prayed “Oh that a hand would come down out of heaven and deliver me from my besetting sin!” The writer Goethe, described this dilemma when he wrote the following poem- “Two spirits dwell at odds within my heart; And each from the other would gladly part; One seems with a single urge possessed; To keep the friendly earth within my heart; The other draws me forth in a willful quest; Of visions to an inner world apart!”  We live our lives like Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass, describes the Lock running around looking for the right key, asking “won’t someone please unlock me?”  That unlocking key is to be found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.   Jerry Bridges, in his book Disciplines of Grace, says “Preach the Gospel to yourself.  Face up to your own sinfulness, then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and Righteousness”. But just knowing Jesus, through saving faith in His work on the Cross, though the basis of forgiveness, is not enough for victory alone, it must be applied to daily life, availing ourselves to His Person, His Presence, and His Power through a divine incarnation of Christ in us, our only “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Paul calls this a mystery!  That is the only answer to the failure of Christianity to deal with the sin problem in a practical way.

     A.W. Tozer addresses the failure of modern Christianity to provide relief for the Christian today.  He wrote, “Religion today is not transforming people, rather it is being transformed.  It is not raising the moral level of society, it is descending to society’s own level, and rationalizing that it has scored a victory, because society smiling accepted its surrender!” “Christian Liberty is freedom from sin, not freedom to sin. The abuse of the harmless thing is the essence of sin!  A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which is on earth that is most like God.  This is MAN’S GREATEST TRAGEDY AND GOD’S HEAVIEST GRIEF!”  When the Angels announced Jesus birth, they said, “You shall call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).  That is what the Hebrew name Jesus means- “Yahweh saves”.  But Jesus did not come to just save us from the” penalty of sin”.  He came to save us from the “power of sin”, and eventually from the very “presence of sin”.  We live in the reality of the first mission of Jesus.  That is our justification.  “If any man be in Christ, there is therefore now no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1). But Paul asks, “Since Grace abounds, should we let sin abound too?”  He answers quite clearly, “God Forbid!” (Romans 6:1) In the Greek it is “me genito”- “may it never be so!”  Tozer says that we as Christians need to take a long look at this situation to resolve it.  He writes, “We Christians must look sharply at our Christianity.  We must make sure we do not refine our sins, without removing them!” Maybe that is what we as Christians are most guilty of- “refining our sins” but not “removing our sins!”  On one occasion Charles Spurgeon was visiting Cambridge College.  He was shown a bust of Lord Byron on display in the University Library. From one side all the glory of Lord Byron was so apparent.  Spurgeon said, “what a man!” The librarian told him to view the bust from the opposite side.  Spurgeon gasped, “What a demon!”  By design the sculptor has so made the bust.  He wanted to show, not only the two faces that resided in Lord Byron, but the two faces that reside in each one of us!  Eugene Peterson, author of The Message paraphrase of the Bible, was given a portrait, painted by his Church custodian.  It was horrible.  Peterson asked why the painter had painted him that way.  His response was, “I wanted you to be reminded of what you could look like is the grace of God was not active in your life!”  Peterson put it on the wall of his office as a daily reminder.  We all need such a portrait!  Adrian Rogers described the difference between sin in the life of the sinner and the saint.  He said, “The sinner leaps into sin and loves it!  The saint lapses into sin and loathes it!”  Basically, that is true.  Sin takes a toll in every way on the life of the Christian. The Bible says, “The way of the transgressor is hard!” (Proverbs 13:15).  David, after committing adultery and covering it up with murder, talks about how he suffered because of it.  He wrote “When I kept silent about my sin, my bones wasted away in groaning all day long.  Day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped from me!” (Psalm 32:3).  Solomon, the wisest man in the world, chose to follow a life of idolatry and immorality.  His evaluation was what he wrote in Ecclesiastes.  Lesson learned!

     The only help for the Christian is to face his sin truthfully and with sincerity.  The best book I have ever read on the Psychology of Growth in the Christian life is in a book by W. Curry Mavis.  He was professor of Psychology at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.  He wrote a great book titled The Psychology of Christian Experience.  In it he says that for a Christian to have any progress toward maturity and victory over sin daily, he must be truthful and sincere about his choices and life.  He quotes Joseph Goldbrunn, from his work Holiness is Wholeness, “When the soul does not live up to its own truth, the vision of God’s truth becomes clouded.  Spiritual wholeness involves our whole thinking, our whole emotions, and our whole will.  Without full involvement we have no accurate spiritual perception!”  J. R. Sealy concurs.  He says, “The one incurable vice is insincerity!” that is not being truthful with ourselves! J.B. Mozley puts it even more succinctly…” The victim of passion may be converted.  The thoughtless may be converted.  The ambitious may be converted…anyone of these.  But who will convert the hypocrite?  He does not know that he is a hypocrite.  The greater the hypocrite that he is, the more sincere he must think himself to be!” That is the dilemma that the Christian who has blinders to his sin has!  Wearing a mask as to who we are, hides the truth from others, but also hides the truth from ourselves, therefore cutting us off from any of God’s daily remedies to our sin problem. Anne Morrow Lindberg dealt with this issue clearly.  In her book Gift From the Sea, she writes, “I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships.  What a rest that will be!  The most exhausting thing in my life, I have discovered is to be insincere.  That is why so much social life is exhausting: one is wearing a mask.  I have shed my mask!”  Christians could avoid a lot of spiritual exhaustion by heeding her advice. Shed the masks! My favorite poet of all time, Thomas Stearns Eliot, called this insincerity “the hell of make believe”. In his poem, Murder In The Cathedral, he writes “In the small circle of pain within the skull; You shall travel and tread the endless round; of thought to justify your actions to yourselves; weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave; pacing forever THE HELL OF MAKE BELIEVE; WHICH NEVER IS BELIEF!”  The wisest man in the world, Solomon saw this clearly.  He wrote, “Keep your heart in all diligence-out of it flows the issues of life!” (Proverbs 4:232).  Again, he admitted, “He that covers his sins shall not prosper!” (Proverbs28:13).  T.T. Munger agrees- “God has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something God and high. A purpose is the eternal condition of progress and success!”  The Christian that longs for a higher purpose and aim than struggling daily with his sin, and trying desperately to cover it up can find help and hope! The story by Max Bearborn, The Happy Hypocrite, tells of a man who falls in love with a beautiful lady.  To win her he put on a beautiful mask to hide his hideous nature.  He succeeds and she marries him.  But eventually his past catches up with him.  He is forced to take the mask off and reveal his true nature.  But in the interim, due to his love and relationship with his new wife, when he removes the mask, everyone is surprised to find out that his ugly features have been transformed to the beauty of the mask!  He therefore becomes the Happy Hypocrite.  Paul tells us if we will keep on beholding the unveiled face of our Savior Jesus.  Love Him daily.  This intimate relationship with Him with transform us from glory to glory, (II Corinthians 3:18).  That is what the Apostle John is telling his little Children. Jesus is your answer not only to the penalty of sin, but also the power of sin, and someday the very presence of sin.  You have an Advocate with the Father. Jesus Christ The Righteous One!  Let Him transform you-daily!

Sermon: LOSING THE BATTLE THAT MUST BE WON

 I KINGS 5:15

I, THE CAUSE OF HIS FAILURE

II. THE COST OF HIS FAILURE

III. THE CONFRONTATION OF HIS FAILURE

IV. THE CONCLUSION OF HIS FAILURE

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “LAST DAY BATTLEFIELD-THE HEART OF MAN”

     In his book, The Brother’s Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky poignantly states, “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.  God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man”.  That battle involves recognizing truth-God’s truth.  The devil is, and always has been, in the business of perverting God’s truth into a lie, and getting man to believe it, and thus choose the path of error and destruction.  He is a master of deception and his lies are passing for truth quite successfully in our Post-Christian world.  Paul warned us that in the last days we would be inundated with “doctrines of demons”(   I Tim. 4:1), and that God would let the world “believe a lie, because they believed not the truth” (II Thes. 2:11).  Man’s problem today is not knowing the truth, but “suppressing” and “rejecting” the truth in exchange for a lie.  Dostoevsky warned about that too.  He wrote, “Above all don’t lie to yourself.  The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies comes to the point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others, and having no respect he ceases to know love”.  That I believe is a very accurate description of the very condition modern man finds himself in.  David Roper, in his book A Beacon in the Darkness, hits the nail on the head, when he writes, “We live in a world of cosmic deceit, hidden agendas, treacherous motivations, illusions, and lies.  And Satan is behind it all.  His strategy is to deceive.  His objective is to destroy.  His shrewd cruel mind is behind the lies that buffet us all day long, the media messages that encourage us to ‘find ourselves’ in something other than the living God, to go for the gusto, but to leave the Savior out.  The lie comes into the world in the guise of beauty and good, (our minds are repelled by ugliness and obvious evil), but the deceit inevitably sickens the soul and it begins to die.  For when Satan has accomplished his purpose and separated men and women from God, what can they do but wither and die eternally?”  That is why Isaiah warned, “Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that call darkness light, and light darkness” ( Isaiah 5:20).  Denis deRougement, in a book entitled The Devil’s Share, clarifies the plight of our modern world with more clarity than anyone I have ever read.  He says the problem today is compounded by the difference between a lie and a pure lie.  This is what he says, “There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving a customer.  If a scale registers 15 ounces, you can say, ‘it is a pound’.  Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If the customer checks it he can see that he is being robbed, and he knows by how much you are robbing him; a truth remains as a judge between you.  But if you tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the truth which is denatured; there is no longer any possible control.  And little by little you will forget that you are cheating.  You may even bet that you will exercise all your scruples in giving exact weight, perhaps by adding a few pinches for ‘good measure’, for the smile of the buyer and the satisfaction of your virtue.  That is ‘pure lying’, the moment you falsify the scale of truth itself, all your virtues are at the service of evil and are accomplices in its contagion”.  The devil has tampered with the scale.  He has caused us to throw out the accurate scale of God’s inspired Word, and receive his counterfeit scale.  When the standard is corrupted, even honorable people become agents of evil.  They believe they are doing right when in fact what they are doing is dead wrong, and they unwittingly foist their wrong-doing on others.  That is what has happened today.  Satan has moved the parameters so that even ‘principled people’ have been brought into the service of evil.  Their lack of a fixed reference point has led them into profound moral confusion and deep sense of insecurity.  I saw a cartoon once depicting two people talking.  One said to the other, “I still believe in evil-I just don’t know what qualifies!”  People still believe in good and evil, it’s just that no one knows where the parameters are anymore-and that makes for a very dangerous and uncertain world!  Black is white; white is black; up is down, and down is up;  we are turned loose, without an anchor, of a raging sea helplessly tossed about by whichever way the cultural wind blows.  We will end up destroyed on the rocks unless we turn back to the Word that transcends culture and circumstance, and is older than time!

     It seems to me that Norman Maclean raises that question in his book A River Runs Through It.  His book and Robert Redford’s movie about how A Presbyterian minister tries to teach his sons about life through fly fishing and spiritual wisdom.  One son seems to find the truth, while the other refuses the guidance and help and remains a free-spirited son who drinks too much, lives too fast, and eventually loses his life in a back-alley brawl.  The father tries, through the medium of fly fishing, to pass on to his sons the underlying, unchanging values of his life.  Maclean recalls one streamside exchange with his father:  “‘What have you been reading?’I asked.  ‘A book’, my father replied.  It was on the ground on the other side of him.  So I would not have to bother to look over his knees to see it, he said, ‘A good Book’.  Then he told me, ‘in the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that’s right.  I used to think that water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear the words underneath the water’.  ‘That’s because you’re a preacher first and then a fisherman’, I told him.  ‘No’, my father said, ‘You are not listening carefully.  The water runs over the words.  Paul will tell you the same thing.’ I looked to see where the book was left open and knew just enough Greek to recognize ‘logos’ as the Word.  I guessed from it and from the argument that I was looking at the first verse of John’ “.  Mclean emphasizes that we can take the truth and try to help but it has to be received, not rejected.    Mclean writes, “Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question:  We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed?  For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us.  Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted.  And so it is those we live with and should know are the ones who elude us.  But we can still love them-we can love completely without complete understanding”. 

SERMON:  THE ROYAL MEASURE OF GREATNESS

1 Samuel 16:18

I.     THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD

II.     HIS PASSION FOR GOD

III.    HIS POWER FROM THE SPIRIT OF GOD

IV.    HIS PARDON OF SIN