The Incarnation is aimed at man’s transformation through the Cross and to the new corporeality of the Resurrection. God seeks us where we are, not so that we stay there, but so that we may come to be where he is, so that we may get beyond ourselves. That is why to reduce the visible appearance of Christ to a “historical Jesus” belonging to the past misses the point of his visible appearance, misses the point of the Incarnation…

Iconoclasm rests ultimately on a one-sided apophatic theology, which recognizes only the Wholly Other-ness of the God beyond all images and words, a theology that in the final analysis regards revelation as the inadequate human reflection of what is eternally imperceptible. But if this is the case, faith collapses. Our current form of sensibility, which can no longer apprehend the transparency of the spirit in the senses, almost inevitably brings with it a flight into a purely “negative” (apophatic) theology. God is beyond all thought, and therefore all propositions about him and every kind of image of God are in equal proportions valid and invalid. What seems like the highest humility toward God turns into pride, allowing God no word and permitting him no real entry into history.

–Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp 123-124

In other words, God is not unknowable, He has revealed Himself, not only in history, but through all time and desires that we worship Him in the fullness of all of our senses, not merely the internal workings of our thought life.

In just a few paragraphs, Ratzinger takes down those theologians who spend their lives trying to reconstruct the “historical Jesus” which leads ultimately to reducing or minimizing worship of the living Son of God, Jesus Christ; as well as those who spend their lives trying to raise Christ to such an exalted position that we cannot know Him or experience Him in this age unless that knowledge or experience is subjective. It seems for both, worship becomes mere rational exercises in restating propositions already known.

Sitting through a worship service where the deconstruction of the Gospels in the hunt for the “historical Jesus” is the attempt to communicate the Gospel to the 21st century or a worship service that is all singing or preaching in a standard-issue, multi-purpose assembly room are apparently not all that far apart in Ratzinger’s thinking.

This may help explain why mainline denominations such as The Episcopal Church are withering while at the same time evangelicals are often observed in worship with their eyes closed. Too much rationality and not enough aesthetic will send us looking for the aesthetic, even if it is only behind our closed eyes.

“If we don’t start paying attention to the realities … by the year 2030, we will be proud to have 20,000 rather than 44,000 Southern Baptist churches.” That’s a quote from outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page recently.

“You’ve got massive numbers,” he said, “maybe not a majority but massive numbers of evangelical churches out there, yes, Southern Baptists also, who are small groups of older white people holding on till they die.”

Ed Stetzer, head of Southern Baptist affiliated LifeWay Research, says that growth rate has slowed in recent years.

Now, he says, the convention has started a downhill slide.

“If you look at the demographics, the trends are not positive,” Stetzer said…

“It’s hard to kill off a church,” he said. “I do think the convention will be smaller in the future. My hope is that we will be smaller and stronger.”

From here.

“Smaller and stronger.” These guys might want to be careful. They are starting to sound like some of the things leaders of The Episcopal Church have said about the glorious future of that church.

HT: BHT

Just to let the six people know who actually read this blog last year what’s up…

My family and I were sent home last October by the government of the island we were living on due to immigration laws on their island.  We had about 30 days notice to pack up our lives, end ministry and clear the island.  We arrived home with no work or ministry in sight just in time for one of the worst winters the locals can remember.

While I plan on getting back to this blog as quick as I can, finding long-term work, feeding my family and keeping them living indoors comes first.  Someday, maybe I’ll write about the things we’ve experienced in the past 6 months.  They have been both a testimony to God’s faithfulness and yet a testimony to the strength He gives to His children in adversity as well.

In the meantime, has anyone read Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy or Dom Dix’ The Shape of the Liturgy?  If so, what was your reaction to them?

I’ve been reading both off and on with any free time I’ve had on deep, cold nights this past winter.  I’m interested in sorting through the places where I agree with both and might disagree.

Revelation 21:1-4 

Aren’t weddings great?

I’ve never been to a wedding where people don’t wander around smiling.  Sometimes they smile so much that by the end of the day it hurts to lift the corners of your mouth.

The joy of the day just overflows to everyone involved.  All who are there are filled with joy and happiness.  Its one of those exciting days that sticks in our memories forever.  The perfection of the day remains no matter what happens later.

I can remember thinking that my wedding day would never arrive.  I can remember Kris thinking the same thing.  Even the night before at our rehearsal we were making jokes about it not happening because God would intervene to close out history.

That morning was filled with anticipation.  I knew that by that evening my life would be drastically changed for the better.

When we stand in front of God at the altar, none of us realizes everything that is in front of us.  The commitment to stay with each other in sickness and health, for better or worse, till death do us part is only a bunch of words, that don’t yet mean anything to us.  They aren’t really real yet.

None of us sees into the future the nights we would spend staying up with each other when we or the kids are sick.  None of us sees the financial struggles we will face over the years.  We don’t see the many kinds of pain that life brings and all the tears we will shed because of it.

And even right now, we can’t see what tomorrow will bring.  It could be joy.  It could be sorrow.  But we land right in the middle of this passage that says that God sees it all and will wipe away every tear and sorrow from His beloved Bride.  That is a promise to those of us who have heard Him call and followed Him with our whole lives.

It is hard for any couple standing at the altar to realize the gravity of that commitment in the joy of the moment.  The wedding day is such a perfect day for the couple that bad news usually only creeps in when the couple’s friends play practical jokes on them.

When we stand at the altar to get married, ,we aren’t thinking about the bills to be paid.  We don’t think about the car needing to get fixed.  We’re aren’t worried about to fix for dinner or about our next doctor’s appointment.  It is hard not to think that the happiness we are feeling is not all there is to married life.

In the same way, it is hard for us to imagine that what we experience in life is all that there is to experience.  We think this is it and we forget that life is more than what experience every day.

We work so hard to survive, to make ends meet because nothing it seems comes easy in this life.  Then we see the news every night on TV or in the mornings in our papers and we’re left with the impression that this world is tough place to live.  People do nasty things to each other.  We struggle against nature, floods, storms, forest fires, drought, famine, too much food in one place and not enough in others.

Then there’s our own lives.  We are never ready for the doctor to say, “I’m sorry.”  Sickness and disease devastate us and rob us of the joy of living.  They steal our joy and hope for the future and make us afraid of what tomorrow might bring our way.

But this life isn’t all that there is to life.  Verse 1 of this passage in Revelation 21 says,  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” (Rev. 21:1, ESV)

The old earth and heaven had passed away.  They have been wiped out.  Look at chapter 20, verse 11 and see that John, who is recording this vision, has seen God sitting on the throne.  He rules supreme over the universe and heaven and earth flee from His presence.  They cannot stand to be in God’s sight because they are imperfect.  So God replaced them with something better.

We forget that God did not design this world to be like this.  He wanted something better, but we humans, the ones God put in charge of this paradise, have mucked it up so badly that there’s nothing for God to do but erase it and start over.

Although God designed everything to be good, we humans made a mess of things and suddenly it wasn’t so good any more.  Adam and Eve knew right away that things weren’t right.  When God threw them out of the garden they suddenly had to struggle to live.  The command to be fruitful and multiply became a chore and pain.

Sometime after that horrible event mankind gave up on the whole concept of God after all.  People no longer thought the world was made by God.  They gave the credit to someone or something else.  In the ancient world, they thought it the great dragon built the world.  Today some scientists tell us that it was just an accident that happened in the just the right sequence at the right time and suddenly the world and the universe existed.  Given enough time, life would then appear by accident as well.

People didn’t think they needed God then.  They don’t think they need Him today.  We can manage the process of evolution just fine thank you.  We’ve made this much progress, we will certainly make more in the future.

But then we look around and wonder what kind of progress are we making?  If this life is the epitome, the height, the very best of life in this universe, who wants to be a part of it?

So God steps in and reveals Himself once again in human history and this time says enough.  He says “Y’all have made a big enough mess out my garden, I’m going to start over.”  And He does.

And what He makes new is holy.  It is perfect, no blemishes, nothing to mess up the picture of what God has done.  Right at the point when we begin to think that this world is all there and the processes of Darwinism, whether scientific or social, are all that there is, God re-creates the whole thing.

He makes it all new!  God demonstrates that He is the creator of everything we see in this world and He is the creator who will take care of every problem in this world.  We must see Him for who He is—the Creator of our past, our present and  our future.

But He is not just the creator, He’s the proud groom as well.  Verse 2 of chapter 21 says,  “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Rev 21:2, TNIV)

God is standing there waiting at the altar for the new city to be made ready!  He is longing for her as any red blooded husband longs for his wife to meet him at the altar to begin their life together.

We often don’t think about God as a husband waiting for His bride when it comes our own lives.  We think of the all powerful God who speaks and it happens.  We think of the king of the universe who calls the stars by name and tells them go here or go there.  We think of the God who knows more about us that we will ever know.  He knows the number of hairs on our heads and even our words before we speak.

We think of God as being so completely other than us that we agree with God when He says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55:8, ESV)  He is the God who is completely sovereign over the universe.  Nothing happens without His say so.

But He is also the great lover.  He is the One who pursues us in all of our ugly sins and says to each one He calls to Himself, “I will make you my beautiful bride.  I will lavish my love on you forever.  Come be my Bride.”

God says to each of us who have been steeped in sin from birth, “I will make you acceptable to me.  I will make you holy as I am holy and I will take you as my wife and love you like no other.”  He wipes out all the transgressions we have done and clothes us in white garments like a bride entering the sanctuary.

We are spotless in His eyes if we follow Him. If we trust in His payment for us to be His bride through His Son Jesus Christ, our sin stained clothes are washed clean.  We all come to Him completely dirty and dressed in grubby clothes, but He cleans us up and adorns us with the beauty of a bride.

Can you imagine such great love?  No price is too high to have the one He loves.  Nothing will keep Him from His appointment to come and take the one He has sought so earnestly, with a deep abiding love, and have her for Himself.  Brothers and sisters that is us!  His Church.  Everyone who places their hope and trust in Him alone is destined to be that bride.

If we read on chapter 21 in verses 15-21, we see that the bride is a city big enough to cover the eastern half of the United States and just as tall.  She shines with the brilliance of jewels, gold like clear glass.  The crown jewels of England have nothing on the beauty of this bride that God has chosen for Himself.  She reflects the incredible glory of God in all of His brilliance.

That is our future as God’s people.  This life may not be all its cracked up to be but we have a future and a hope in God that things will some day be different.  In that day we will no longer struggle to be holy the way we do now.  Holiness will be as natural to us as our breathing is today.  We will see the truth that sin has no hold on us.  We will see the chains have been completely broken off of us.

But there’s more.  We will have a joy that cannot be wiped out.  God’s love for us will overflow to us so that we become His bride.  Like all brides we will go to live with Him, but not till death takes us out of this world.  Even death does not part us and separate us from God.

Verse 3 says, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and He will dwell with them.  They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God.” (Rev 21:3, TNIV)

From the very throne, God announces that He will live with His people.  No longer will we run around looking for Him and what He is doing in our lives.  We will not have any questions about what to do next or what His will for our lives is; He will be right there living among us.

When we turn to Him and offer our lives to Him we get a taste of what this will be like in our lives.  God says that when we trust Him and accept His payment on our behalf for our sins that He comes to live in us.  Our bodies become the temple of God.  The Holy Spirit came at that moment to dwell in us as the seal guaranteeing that what God promises for our future inheritance will actually happen.

But now God is saying the seal can be broken.  The guarantee is fulfilled.  He will dwell among us the way a groom lives with His bride.  He will make His home with us.

And by making His home with us, He will make our joy complete.  Notice verse 4,  “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4, ESV)

Remember the old song?  “No more crying there, we’re going to see the king, no more dying there, we’re going to see the king, hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the King!”

Imagine all the pains you have experienced in life.  Imagine all the hurts others have thrown at you.  Imagine every wound you’ve have felt from those you loved.  Now imagine them all gone.

The child who told you off and never talked to you again, the pain wiped clear.  The tears brushed off your cheek as a lover brushes them off the cheek of the one He loves.  The business partner who dealt with you like dirt and left you in financial pain, all of it taken away.  The parent who wasn’t there for you growing up and left a gaping hole in your life, God says that wound is healed by His touch.

Think of the comfort this brings to us when we are wracked by deep sobs of grief when a parent or brother or sister dies.  Or even a child.  God says it is all taken care of for His bride, He will wipe away every tear, comfort every sorrow, heal every broken desire because He loves us.

That is how great His love for us really is.  He will no longer let the worst enemy everyone of us faces ever touch us again.  Death will have no hold on us, because as His people, God wants us forever.  He will not allow anything or anyone to take us from Him if we are His.

He will make all things new by re-creating them, but He will also make all things right by healing them.  That is our future as His children.

It is a future filled with holiness.  Remember the Bible says, “without holiness no one will see the Lord.” (Heb 12:14 TNIV)  We must be holy as He is holy.  That has been the premise of this series of messages.  But we must not only be holy, we must allow Him to work in our lives to make us holy so that we can be presented to Him pure and spotless without the slightest blemish as His bride for all of eternity.

It is also a future filled with joy.  Today we search for joy even in the midst of hard times and trials.  Then the joy will be ours and it will overflow from God to us.  We will see His great love for us face-to-face and be overwhelmed to the point of rejoicing  as at our own weddings.  The smiles will not be wiped off our faces, but they will be made greater and they last longer.

If we have accepted His grace through Jesus Christ, We have been offered joy as well.  One day, His joy will be made complete as He brings you, me, and everyone who follows His Son Jesus into His house to be with Him forever.  On that day “No longer will there be any curse.  The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and His servants will serve Him.  They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.  There will be no more night.  They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light.  And they will reign for ever and ever.” (Rev 22:3-5, TNIV)

1 Chronicles 16:23-29 

If someone were to come up to you this coming week and ask you what has God been doing in your life lately?  What would you say?  How would you answer them?  What would be on the tip of your tongue?  Just what would we tell that person who wants to know what God is doing in our lives?

This evening’s passage I think gives us a clue as to how to go about answering that question.  I don’t think the people who were present when this psalm was first sung had any doubt on how they would answer that question.

I don’t know about you, but this is one of those scenes in the Bible that sometimes I just I wish I was present for.  Reading it seems so dry and distant, it would be better to have experienced it and then be able to read about it to refresh my memory at a later point in time and reawaken all those emotions that must have been churning inside at the time.

To get a feel for this great psalm of praise and thanksgiving we have to understand what it was that God had done in the lives of His people to set them to singing like this.  To get that understanding, we have to go back and look at the context of this psalm and see the scene.

King David, the greatest king in Israel’s history, wrote this praise song in response to the great work of God in the people of Israel.

He had been made king by God’s hand through the anointing of oil by the prophet Samuel.  God had called David to unite the land under his kingship and drive out the nations that didn’t belong there.  Hundreds of years earlier, the people had crossed the Jordan and lived in the land of Canaan, yet they had not finished doing what God said they needed to do.  They were supposed to get rid of all the peoples who did not worship God and God alone.  This led them to have many problems in surviving in the area.  Often it looked as if the nation of Israel would be swallowed up by the great nations around her.

But God never let it happen.  First, He raised judges up to lead the people in battle and to make wise decisions for them.  But the people didn’t like judges, they wanted a king.  So God gave them a king named Saul.

At first King Saul, experienced God’s great blessing in driving out the other nations from the Promised Land.  It was obvious God was with Saul.  There was nothing that he couldn’t do.  But then Saul became puffed up in his own eyes and actually thought of himself as being someone great to whom the nation must naturally follow.  He got the idea that he was indispensable to God’s plan God for Israel.

That led to Saul’s downfall and David being chosen as king.  Saul didn’t like that idea and tried to eliminate David, the way godfathers in the mob eliminate their problems.  Fortunately God’s hand rescued David every time Saul tried to kill him.

Now Saul is gone, having been killed in battle.  David has consolidated the twelve tribes of Israel under his rule and begun to successfully drive out the nations, from the Promised Land just as God had commanded so many, many years before.

When we know that history, we begin to understand why David sang this great psalm of thanksgiving.  David had learned through his many trials, whether it fighting off wild animals as young boy tending his sheep, or fighting off wild kings as an adult, that God wins battles.

That is why in his greatest battle, the one on one combat with Goliath that ugly giant, he announces that God will win the fight, though it is he who carries the slingshot.  He tells Goliath that though it is he, David, who slings the stones, it is God who will deliver Goliath to be killed.

That is why we can read the Psalms David writes and we discover that if there was nothing else that marked his life, he was completely dependent on God.  There was no one else to whom he could cry out for help.  There was no one who could deliver him from his enemies.  There was no one else who deserved the shouts of praise or the celebration of thanksgiving that David records.

A people who will be called by God and be holy to Him, must be completely dependent on Him.

Each one of us was created to be dependent on God.  All through human history, we see people who tried to express their dependence on God in some form of worship.  They may have worshipped the sun, a golden calf, a set of trees, the river that flowed through town, it doesn’t matter.  Every object of worship showed that knew Something greater than them existed and they were dependent on it.

We even see the same thing today when we look around our world.  No matter where we live we find people depend on someone or something that is greater than they are and they bow down to worship it.

God has wired us to worship Him.  But when we ignore Him or choose to not pay attention to Him, we cannot help but replace the hole that makes in our lives with something else.   Because He has made us to worship Him it is no surprise that He goes looking for a people who will worship Him.

He finds them in the ancient nation of Israel.  He establishes an eternal covenant with them, if they will only worship Him and follow no other God.  He gives them the Ten Commandments and says obey these and the covenant will never be broken.

But we all know the commandments are impossible to keep perfectly as God requires.  He makes it possible for everyone to experience a new and fresh start by coming to Him seeking forgiveness.  In ancient Israel, this required offering a sacrifice while the High Priest stood before God asking for mercy.

When God called His people to worship Him, He told them to make a small box out of hard wood and gold called the ark of the testimony or the Ark of the Covenant as we know it today.  That small box had a lid on it that was decorated with cherubim, angels, where God sat to dispense mercy according to His covenant with ancient Israel when they came to worship Him.

The Ten Commandments were kept in the Ark of the Covenant.  So when the High Priest stood before God, all the commandments that the people could not keep and the seat of mercy were right there where God forgave His people for not living up to the terms of the covenant.  It was only natural that this little box became central to the worship of God’s people.

It didn’t take too long before the people started making up their own ideas about how to worship God.  The reality of their commitment to God began to lose its luster.  They hadn’t seen God the way the people who wandered in the desert had seen Him.  The pillar of fire and column of smoke weren’t there any more, so the people began to do their own thing.

They became superstitious about worshipping God.  If I just do these things in just the right way God will bless me.  If the nation does these things at the just right time, God will bless the nation.  The worship that God desired from His people became a system of cold formality, where the same things happened every day, every week and sooner or later they meant nothing to the people.  They forgot the reality behind what they were doing.

At one point in 1 Samuel 4, the people find themselves in a fight with another nation and lose the battle.  They run for the ark and carry it off to the battle thinking that it will bring them good luck.  But the nation they fought against proved stronger and 30,000 men were killed as they fled.  And as they fled they dropped the ark, their good luck charm and it was captured and carried off by the victors as spoils of war.

The victors knew they had captured the testimony of God’s being for the Israelites.  They brought the ark of testimony into their own temple and sat it down next to their own god.  They weren’t just superstitious; they would blend anything and everything together to get that peaceful easy feeling of having been dependent on God.  They didn’t realize that God ruled over all the other gods and would not tolerate being made equal to some lesser thing.

Thus the next morning the people found their own god, an ugly creature named Dagon, face down in the temple in front of the ark.  They set the thing back up and sure enough the next day it was tipped over on its face again only this time its arms had broken off to show that it couldn’t defend itself against God who sat on the mercy seat. (1 Sam 4)

This was enough for the Philistine people.  They whipped up a cart and donkey and sent the ark out of town on a one way ride back to the Israelites.  But the Israelites could not have cared less.  By this time they had forgotten their God and their covenant with Him and were living lives as if He didn’t exist.  They neither made time to worship Him nor remembered Him for all He had done for them.

Thus, 1 Samuel 7:1-2 says nobody really wanted the Ark of the Covenant so it got stuck out back of somebody’s barn and was forgotten.  God didn’t matter any more.  He was inconsequential in the scheme of things as the people saw it.  They could live successfully without Him, thank you.  We don’t need to be bothered by that crazy God worship stuff.  Indeed the whole concept of God became replaced in their lives by what they could accomplish on their own.  They wanted to be like the nations around them so God let them become like the nations around them, complete with a king who would lead them to the brink of disaster.

That’s where this passage in 1 Chronicles 16 picks up.  David realizes that his battles have been won by the hand of God.  God has helped the nation of Israel and not forgotten them, as they have forgotten Him.  So he sends for the ark.

Some of David’s people find it still stuck behind the barn where it was dropped off and put it on a cart and begin carrying it to Jerusalem.  But God said this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen and His rules will be followed or there will be problems.  Worshipping God must be done His way or it doesn’t happen.

Sure enough, 1 Samuel 13 says a man named Uzzah reached out to steady the box and is killed instantly.  You don’t mess with God by treating Him casually.  Now David goes back finds the instructions on how to move the ark according to what God told His people a long time ago and gets it done right.  And the ark ultimately comes to Jerusalem, the capital of God’s people, Israel in 1 Samuel 15.

It sets off a celebration like they had never seen before.  David offers sacrifices to God before the ark.  He gets the high priests and tells them to consecrate themselves, make themselves holy, because the ark where God sits is coming to town.  David does not want to be unprepared to worship God the right way.

He finds the temple servants, the people who assist the priests and tells them to warm up their voices, because they are going to sing.  He tells others to get their instruments in tune, the ark is coming!  They run and put together a jazz band to come and worship God.  They’ve got horns, stringed instruments, and a percussion section.  All to “raise sounds of joy” according to chapter 15 verse 16.  (1 Sam 15:16, ESV)

And as they take off for Jerusalem and come into the city the whole people began to celebrate.  David couldn’t contain it any longer and began to dance before the whole crowd.  The celebration of God’s being with His people was on in full swing.

It was here that the singers sang this great psalm that we read a few moments ago.  Recounting all the things God had done in the past and praising Him for it.  Remembering all the promises He gave that He is still fulfilling in their lives and all the things they have seen Him accomplish through King David.  They see everything God has done and cannot help but give Him the glory and honor and praise that is due to Him.  Indeed they expect the whole of creation from sea to shining sea and everything in between to exult and sing for joy to the Lord of the universe.  I do not think they would have been surprised if the trees gained a voice and the rocks shouted God’s praise.

Isn’t that what worship is supposed to be all about?  Everyone who is dependent on God singing His praises and shouting for joy over all that He has done?

Today we no longer worship before the Ark of the Covenant.  It has been lost to history and that is a good thing.  We might be tempted to believe that God is only there on the lid on the ark.  But the Scriptures make it plain that God dwells in our lives if we have trusted in Jesus Christ.

The book of Hebrews chapters 9-10 tells us that every one of the sacrifices the Israelites were required to make were completed in the one time sacrifice of God’s own Son Jesus of Nazareth to be the complete payment for our breaking the commandments of God.  He took on Himself a payment that we could never fully make on our own.

  God declared us to be His children, and never again would the laws of God be written on stone and hidden in a box to be lost, but rather the commandments of God would be written on our hearts and He would come to live in us through the presence of His Holy Spirit in our lives.

Where the people of King David’s day could only look to His rescue of them from slavery in Egypt we can look to the freedom from wickedness He has brought us who have placed our whole confidence in Him.  By rescuing us He makes a claim on our lives that cannot be so easily dismissed if we would be a holy people, worshipping Him in all of Holy splendor.

We cannot afford to become superstitious people like the ancient Israelites thinking that if we just do things in the right way we have access to God.  It is not the style of our worship that brings us into God’s presence—it is His grace.  We have done nothing to earn our way into His presence this morning or any other day.  He owes us nothing but welcomes us freely if we come on His terms.

We cannot afford to mix our worship of God with any other desire of our lives.  God will certainly knock that other thing over just as he knocked over that ugly idol named Dagon.  When we enter God’s presence here on Sunday morning or Sunday evening, we come only to meet Him, no one else.  He blesses us with the fellowship of others who have grace and hope in Him, but that is not why we come.  We cannot come just because it’s the right thing to do in our neighborhood.  We only come because we must meet with God.

And I would argue that it must be that way every other day of the week as well.  We must meet with God and truly concentrate our minds on Him and Him alone, or we will mix the worship of God with the things that surround us.  Worship of God must take place in our lives every day of our lives or we have effectively placed Him behind the barn to be brought out when we feel like we need Him again.

Not only must we concentrate on Him, but we must also celebrate Him and what He has done.  If all we have are memories and good thoughts about God then we have not quite gotten to the point of worshipping in holiness.  King David demonstrated that worship is emotional, not just intellectual.  We must be touched emotionally by what we say is important or it might not be all that important.  To worship in holiness means we must worship in wholeness as well.

King David didn’t care what others thought of Him worshipping God as He danced and sang his way into <
Jerusalem; all he thought about was how great God is.  Look at the passage we read and notice all the emotion-filled words.  Fear, trembling, joy, rejoicing, beauty, gladness, exulting, thanksgiving.  Can we really worship God without feeling something?

If we are not feeling something we must wonder if the information we have heard has really touched us.  It seems that the more important the information, the greater the emotional response to it.  Maybe not in every case, but all the same there are still emotions.  If we have to ask whether emotions are appropriate in church we deny the importance of the great information we have been told.

When our team wins a match, we know how to react; we know what we feel.  I didn’t have to ask myself what I what I was supposed to be feeling when my kids were born, I knew it automatically.  When I stood next to my dad and held his hand as he died, I didn’t check what the right thing to feel was, the bottom dropped out of my life in overwhelming sadness and grief.

Shouldn’t those be appropriate emotions to experience as we worship God alone in the beauty of His holiness?  Should we not feel grief over our sins and continued wickedness?  Should we not rejoice and shout and sing for His great mercy that rescued us from that wickedness?  Shouldn’t there be a sense of excitement that God is doing great things in our midst?

That is part of what it means to worship in holiness depending on God alone.  We must involve our minds by remembering all that He has done for us.  The great things He has accomplished in the past that tell us of the great God we follow.  We must involve our emotions as we respond to that greatness of what he has done.

God has designed to be completely dependent on Him and no one else and nothing else.  Only He will fill the gap in our lives of knowing that there is someone greater than us who can take of our needs.  He has called us to sing His praises and celebrate His goodness to us everywhere we go.

I’m convinced that’s part of how revival happens in a nation.  God’s people begin to sing His praise wherever they go and they draw others to God to join them in worshipping Him.  We must sing and invite others to sing with us, we must worship and invite others to worship with us every day of our lives and then one day we will be part of a celebration as great as the one that had King David dancing in the streets.

Sorry I’ve been missing in action and haven’t posted much.  My keyboard was broken (no kidding!) which made typing tough.  I’m one of those people who can’t along without the letters “a”, “h”, “n”, “j” and “s” not to mention the comma key.  Those broken letters made writing sermons about three times as long as normal.  Type letter, replace key, type letter, replace key, type several letters, replace key.  And you just don’t run down to WalMart or OfficeMax to get a new keyboard around here.  It takes weeks (and even then it was the wrong one that arrived).

This comes as we are increasingly concerned that we will be forced to leave our church and island in the next 90 days due to some new restrictions in the immigration and labor laws.  This has caused the usual vocational angst, fretting, anxiety and worry as my future suddenly looks very cloudy.  What free time I have had is increasingly drifting towards praying and seeking God’s direction for our future.

If you don’t see me often, I’m still here.  But your prayers would be appreciated.

And yes, I’m still intending to post the sermon series from 1 John. 

Romans 12:1-2

For most of us this might be one of the most familiar passages in all of the Bible.  We have heard so it so often that we can hear it and finish it in our minds before the speaker finishes saying it.

The apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, has been making some important points about what it means to be a follower of Christ.

He begins his letter with the bad news.  We who were made in the image of God have exchanged that image for something less than God’s best.  We have found ourselves too easily pleased with pleasures that do not last.  We have not sought the pleasure in God that lasts forever.

As a result God gives us our desires and we become utterly foolish in our thinking.  We exchange the joyful goodness God offered us for a swim in a cesspool of stuff that makes our lives worse, not better.  Our minds become filled with trash so that  we can’t help but act it out in our lives.

We tell ourselves this is not who I am.  My mind is not filled with trash.  But God says this is the way it is in our lives.  Paul writes in Romans 2 that all the wickedness of our lives was piling up behind a great dam that could not be contained forever.  Sooner or later the dam would break.

And it did.  Romans 3 tells us God poured out all of His wrath on Jesus Christ.  The dam didn’t hold forever but only until the right time that God determined.  Right in the midst of that cesspool we were swimming in, God called to us to get out of the muck.  He said, “I will come rescue you.  I will send Jesus to pull you out of the cesspool.”

We who were lost in inky darkness, were sent a light in the form of the person of Jesus of Nazareth who became the payment for the all the things we had done to offend God.  Every time we chose pleasure by doing something less than God’s best, we offended God and Christ paid the price for it.

When we continue reading through the book of Romans, we discover that we really had no choice in whether or not we offended God, we were born to do so.  Our human nature was such that we were born dead to the life God wanted us to have.  We couldn’t have done right if we wanted to.

But because of the payment that Christ made for us we can now experience a new life.  We have been literally taken from certain death to certain life by the power of God working through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection on the cross.  Just as death has no more power over Jesus Christ, so also it has no power over us who are following Him.

Once we were slaves to doing wrong; now we must consider ourselves as slaves to righteousness.  We are to offer ourselves as if we are enslaved by God to His righteousness.  We are able to do this because as chapter 8 so wonderfully points out we have been given a new life through the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.

The Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus to empower His disciples to holy living, has now become the very seal of our eternal life.  He guarantees that what God has promised will happen in our lives.  While we were once the home to complete unrighteousness, now we are the very Temple of God as His Holy Spirit comes to live and dwell in us.

Because He lives in us, we are God’s own children, adopted into His heavenly family with nothing that can possibly ever rip us away from the love of our heavenly Father.  Experiencing the Holy Spirit at work in our lives is a sure sign that we will be given the greatest inheritance of all from our heavenly Father, eternal life in His eternal kingdom in heaven.

If God would do all of this for us, sending His Son, Jesus, to die in our place, adopting us into His family and promising us the great inheritance he promised to His Son Jesus, if He would do all this “how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?”  (Rom 8:32, TNIV)  So that whatever happens in our life, it will be for our good and His glory?

That might be the most powerful promise in all of Scripture.  If God would not spare His Son for our benefit, would He not follow through on that commitment and give us everything we need to live a life that is pleasing to Him?  Nothing will be able to take us away from the joy that is ours in God if Christ has died for us to redeem us from the certain death and destruction that were ours apart from His work in our lives.

I am convinced that this promise in chapter 8 is the keystone, the foundation to Paul’s statement at the beginning of chapter 12, in the passage we read a few minutes ago.  “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1, ESV)

In light of the great mercies of God, we are to present ourselves as holy and living sacrifices back to Him who purchased us.  If we would be holy as God is holy, we must present our bodies as being holy to Him who is holy.  There are no options in this.

God calls us to be holy in all we do.  Our bodies and our minds must be holy, if we would receive the great reward of eternal life that He has promised to us.

Often the first sign of whether or not we are holy and set apart for the glory of God is whether or not we are holy in all that we do.  We are in many ways like an orange tree.  We may think we have an orange tree growing in our yard.  We can look at the bark, the leaves, the shape of the tree or any of the other characteristics of an orange tree, but until we see that blossom and the fruit begin to grow we don’t know if it really is an orange tree.

That’s our life.  We may look like we’re followers of Christ.  We do all the right things, we read the Bible, we go to church, we pray on from time to time, but unless there is more of a Christ-likeness in our words and actions and less of our old nature, we don’t have any proof that we are who we say are.  Our words and actions are often the proof to the world around us that we are what we say we are.

That’s why we’re commanded to give our bodies as living sacrifices that are holy and pleasing to God.  It is the proof of the new life that has been given to us.  It will only be natural to want to give ourselves up to the One who gave us such a great gift.  Our affection for Him will naturally overflow to the rest of our life.

The problem is that we don’t like that word SACRIFICE.  It sounds nasty.  We don’t want to give up something that might be fun or pleasurable for the purpose of making ourselves holy.  We get the idea that being holy means never having any fun.  We think holiness is all those old pictures and paintings of people who wear dark clothes and never smile.

Every time I hear someone say something like that, I want to scream with disagreement.  It seems to me that if God did not spare His Son, He will also give us all things which includes the pleasures of following Him in holiness.  But we must turn to Him for it.  In fact, it seems to me that turning to follow Christ makes us more likely to have fun that to be driven by the search for whatever might fill our pleasure bucket inside or lives.  It is as the Psalmist said, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” (Psalm 16:11, ESV)

So how can we be holy in our bodies, in our actions?

May I suggest two ways to start making our bodies the holy sacrifice God desires of us?

The first is to kill our old way of life dead.  Colossians 3:5 says it best:  “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” (Col 3:5, TNIV)

When we chase after holiness, we need to kill off all forms of sexual immorality.  We cannot indulge ourselves in the indiscriminate use of our sexual natures.  This may be an overt act of immorality or may be the indulgence of something to which we are a mere spectator.  The movies and TV we watch, the books we read, they can all cause us to cross this line.

We need to kill off all forms of impurity.  Men, what kind of talk comes out of our mouths when we are alone with the guys?  What kind of gossip and backbiting occurs when the ladies get together?  How many of us here could actually say we pass the purity test every day?  Is all that we do really that good?

We need to kill off all forms of lust and evil desires.  Not just the lust for sexual stuff that’s outside of God’s boundaries, but the lusts that drive our daily living.  We need to kill of the lust that says, “I’ve got to have more_____.”  Fill in the blank.  It could be food, it could be cars, it could be toys, you name it.  The idea that says “I gotta have it.”  No matter what it is.  That’s a desire that could be filled with evil if God is not in it.

This is closely related to the greed which we need to kill off as well.  That greed which controls us so that we have to acquire more money, or more of anything, even power, is idolatry.  We no longer trust God or believe in Him in to provide for our needs, we are merely searching to have our own out of control needs met in our out of control way.

These are all areas of our appetites.  What are we indulging ourselves in?  What areas of our lives are out of control because we haven’t brought them under the authority of God’s Word and the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives?

It does not matter whether the appetite that we indulging is good or not, if we cannot control it, we will not be holy.  We give in to the physical urge once and then we discover that we have got have more of it, because it felt so good the first time.  Then we’ve lost control.

That’s why I’m convinced the Bible gives us a second way to be holy in our bodies.  The apostle Paul gives it to us in his first letter to the church in Corinth:  “But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.” (1 Cor. 9:27, ESV)We may not think of ourselves as being preachers, but everyone of us in this room is a preacher of some sort.  Our lives are all the preaching that some of the people we run into every day ever get to hear.  They don’t want the words we say, they want to see the actions we do.  We must kill off our old desires.  Then we must discipline our bodies to be holy and acceptable, living sacrifices.

If we do the wrong things with our bodies, if we take the wrong actions, it is almost guaranteed that we will have disqualified ourselves as preachers.  How many times have we said something wrong about someone or trashed them to another person, only to find out later that they came to Christ?  Or wanted to grow deeper in their relationship to God?  How many times have we acted like we didn’t know Christ in front of one group of people only to have a friend start talking with us about our church activities in front of them later?  And then have to explain that situation to both sets of friends?

It is embarrassing to get caught like that isn’t it?  If we want to avoid that kind of embarrassment, we must learn to discipline ourselves.  We must learn to deny our bodies’ desires when they begin to sweep out of control.  Our bodies must serve us, not the other way around.  The desires of our bodies are not the reason for our existence.

Lacking discipline in the physical arena of life guarantees we will be disqualified in the spiritual arena.  Stop and think about how shocking it is that God says those who are adulterers, thieves, and liars, not just unbelievers have no place in heaven. (Rev. 21:8)  Consider what that means for our own personal discipline of our bodies and actions.

Verse 2 of Romans chapter 12 says:  “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2, ESV)

Don’t be conformed to the world around, but we must be transformed in our minds.  Have you ever noticed that our actions never just happen?  They never pop up out of thin air.  There is always first some kind of thought that justifies what we want to do.  If my actions are unholy, chances are my thoughts were unholy, long before I did anything about them.  Every action we take begins as a thought in our minds before it comes to bear fruit in action.

That’s why James says it so well, “No one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’  For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone; but each of you is tempted when you are dragged away by your own evil desire and enticed.  Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” (James 1:13-15, TNIV)

Brothers and sisters, it all starts in the mind!  Once it takes root inside our heads, it’s only a matter of time before it pops up somewhere in our lives.

David’s sin with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his best warriors, was not done in a second.  It started with David being where He shouldn’t have been justifying that he wasn’t needed on the battlefield, and then looking where he shouldn’t have looked.  Instead of running like Joseph, he walked right into the temptation and got trapped.  And it would cost him dearly in his own family and the kingdom that God had given to him.

That’s why I’m convinced Paul said these words in a different letter to the church in Corinth, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Cor 10:5, TNIV)

Even our thoughts must be brought under the obedience to Christ that leads to holiness.  Paul was addressing spiritual warfare in the context of this passage.  If we are to fight the good fight of faith in Christ and not be disqualified, we must turn our minds to follow after God just like we discipline our bodies.

It takes discipline to keep our thoughts under control.  I am convinced that it takes more effort to control our thoughts than it takes to control our actions.  To some extent our actions are controlled by the culture around us.  We don’t want others to think we’re not good people so we don’t commit murder, but we think nothing of breathing threats against them in our thoughts.

Our minds, our thoughts must be transformed.  We must, by the power of the Holy Spirit living in us destroy the speculations that fill our minds.  God has revealed Himself in our very real world in a very real way, through His word and through His actions.  We have no room for speculating on this thing or that thing when we have a real spiritual battle to fight between our ears.  We must bring our minds under control so that our thoughts are holy as God is holy.

The battle for our minds begins with a demonstration that God is who He says He is in our lives.  We must daily find the food we need to nourish our thoughts in His higher ways by feeding from His word.  If we do not fill our minds Scripture, our minds will be filled with something else.

That something else will not be what is true, what is honorable, what is right, what is pure, what is lovely, what is admirable.  It will not have anything of excellence or that is worthy of praise, as we are commanded to think about.  It will be the stuff of the world around us filling our minds, not the commands of Philippians 4:8.

Our minds will fill with the degrading thoughts of what we see on TV, what hear on the radio, what we read in our books and papers every day.  It will be the words of anger that replay themselves over and over again in our minds when think of the wrong others have done to us.  It will be the words that wounded us so deeply playing back time and again in our heads.

The world is pushing us into its mold, shaping us to be like them in both actions and thoughts.  They think we’re crazy when we don’t join them in their ways of living that dishonor and offend God.  To the world around us it is strange that we want to follow Christ and don’t follow to their ways of thinking about the world and what is right or wrong.

Jesus said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  (Matt 7:13, TNIV)  By taking our thoughts captive, by allowing the Holy Spirit to transform our minds through the power of God’s Word, we choose the difficult path.

That path may lead to struggles over doing right, it may cost us some short-term pleasure in this life that is here today and gone tomorrow needing to be re-filled every day like any other addiction.  But the hard path always leads to more joy and more peace when we choose to obey in thought and deed the words God said through Paul, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39, ESV)

Our minds and bodies must be brought under the control of Jesus Christ.  It is to Him that we owe our obedience.  Everyone of us here tonight will either bow willingly to Him or be forced to our knees in His presence.  We can present ourselves as His servants, bought and paid for by His blood or we can resist Him and be taken prisoner and ultimately destroyed by Him.

If we would be holy people, we must begin with our minds, our thoughts. When we do our actions will follow.  We must set Christ apart as King in our hearts and minds.  We must choose this day to follow Him.  He will not settle for a lesser place in our lives.  Nor will He settle for only having part of us.  He wants all of our lives to be transformed by the power of His Holy Spirit so that we might be His and His alone.

Remember the old cigarette brand  that had the the tag line at the end which said something like, “I’d rather fight than switch?”

The people in the ad would always be shown with a black eye because someone would offer them the wrong kind of cigarette and they would rather fight it out than switch.  It had a bit of humor when they would show some beautiful actress with a black eye and a bent or broken cigarette in her mouth saying the same thing.  But then the real humor was, who really picks a fight over the kind of cigarette they are offered?

The idea was that people were so devoted to a particular brand of tar and nicotine that they would  fight to get it rather than light up some supposedly inferior tobacco product.  The advertising campaign was selling the message that when you’re as “good” as we are, our customers would fight to have this product than have to choose a lesser brand.  It’s probably politically incorrect to even mention the word good and cigarettes in the same sentence these days.  It might be worse to mention smoking in a sermon.<

But when you think about it, the whole campaign flew in the face of our culture’s chief characteristic.  Instant gratification.  We don’t want to work or fight for anything any more.  Microwaves and fast food restaurants tell us that we don’t want to wait things out anymore.  We won’t fight for what we desire.

Unfortunately, instant gratification has also come home to roost in our lives as God’s children as well.  We may resist that idea at first, but stop and think for a moment; how many of us in the last week or month have heard someone say they wish Jesus would come back and put an end to the horrors we encounter on the news every day?  Or the U.S. political campaign ads on TV?

How many of us have had to say to some other follower of Christ, “Please be patient with me, because God isn’t done with me yet?”  And then immediately feeling guilty because we know we need to live up to a higher standard than the one we choose to live out every day?

If the truth be known down deep in our hearts many of us would be more willing to switch than fight.  If there’s going to be struggle, our first inclination is to run.  Fly away, vamos, get out of there.  We don’t want anything to do with fighting, even if it’s for a good cause.

We tell ourselves that life is too short be so stressed out.  Why fight?  Why go through all the hassle and fuss of fighting when we can find an easier path to take through life?  That’s a good question.  After all, wouldn’t life be easier if we all just stopped struggling and trying so hard?  Just go with the flow?

We need to fight becasue we know the Nike T-shirt is right, “No pain, no gain.”  If we are not willing to suffer hardship or fight for what we want, it might not be all that valuable to us.  The principle is the same no matter what we’re pursuing.

That same principle also applies to our lives as God’s people.  If we will not put in the work necessary to become holy, we might not ever become holy.  It is true that God declares us holy when we trust in Christ.  But it is also true that God expects to see some fruit from the vineyard He has planted.  He wants to see holy lives in His children whom He has adopted so freely into His family.

If we will not fight, we will not be holy.  We must fight a long, hard war to be holy.

That’s the point of this passage in Romans 7:7-25 this evening.  If we have truly come to Christ and sought the forgiveness that He offers us and the new life that comes from Him, we are going to find a war going on inside of our lives.  We are going to discover that it is absolutely normal to think and feel one way while living another.

We want what God offers us right away and when it doesn’t happen we feel that there’s something wrong with our lives.  Which leads us to beat ourselves up for not doing better, which leads us right back to the war inside of us, which leads right back to feeling there’s something wrong with our Christian life, which leads us back to beating ourselves up.  It’s a vicious circle.

This letter Paul wrote 2000 years ago tells us that it is perfectly normal to feel this way.  The normal state of the Christian life is to be at war, not with other Christians, but with our own selves.  If we will not fight the war, we will not be holy and without holiness, none of us sees the inside of heaven.

Verse 14 of chapter 7 says, “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.” (Rom 7:14, TNIV)  Just like Paul, we have been sold into bondage to sin.  We’re slaves to sin, because we are unspiritual.  We live our life in the flesh.  The Bible is clear in many places all we had to do was be born into the human race and we became slaves to sin and unrighteousness.

What is easy for some of us to forget is that slaves have no control of their future.  In fact they don’t control anything about their lives.  Hollywood once made a movie called Spartacus, about the slave uprising in Rome 60 years before Christ was born.  In the movie, the chief character, Spartacus, played by Burt Lancaster (?), said that the slaves rebel against Rome because they no longer fear death.  They live with it every day.  Death can happen at a moments notice for them with nothing they can say about it.  Only their master controls their future.

Because they don’t have any control over their circumstances, slaves often don’t know what’s going on.  The average every day slave didn’t run things and wasn’t in charge of anything.  They often found themselves doing things they didn’t understand because it was the will of their master.  Their master wanted such and such done and it happened.

Sin runs our lives the same way.  We almost never understand the whole process.  We weren’t actually there when Adam and Eve chose to rebel against God.  We don’t know what life was like before they messed up the whole garden that God had created.  All we know is that somehow because of what they did, our lives are messed up as well.

We just naturally do wrong.  Think of the greatest and best inventions of humanity.  At some point, everything we make gets turned into a tool for doing evil.  It’s just the way of the human race.  Our master is sin and sin is looking to run things the way it wants to run things and the slaves, us, carry it out.

But what about us who have trusted in Christ and put hope in Him to receive His new life?  What happens to us?  Hasn’t Christ put away our sin?  Yes He has, but we still find that we do what we don’t understand, only now we recognize that it is evil.  We know what we are supposed to do but we do what we don’t want to do.

Consider for moment how powerful the set of controls sin has built into our lives really is.  That control is so powerful so that we do things even when we know it’s wrong and want to do otherwise.  We read God’s word and it says don’t hate your neighbor, love him or her and we run right into the problem that most of us have, our neighbors bug us.  They play music too late at night, their kids run around with no parental control; they start pounding on their house too early the morning, or they let their dog or cat run through our yard.  Some times its worse when their kids beat up on our kids or lead them astray.

So instead of doing the thing we know would make life easier, we do the very thing that makes it harder.  The thing we know that is good is not the thing we do.  Instead we do the thing we say we hate.  And then we hate ourselves for doing it!

Why?  Why does this happen?

Verses 17 through 21 tell us quite plainly it is no longer we who do evil, but the sin which dwells in us.

If we have believed in Christ, we no longer live the way we once lived.  We have been changed from one lifestyle to another, one family to a new family, a body of death to a living body and all the other ways God moves and changes us.  All of that can only be done by God’s power working in us.  We are powerless on our own to change ourselves.  We were slaves to sin.

Slaves only get bought and sold, they never free themselves without some outside help.  The law is against them gaining freedom without their master officially giving up control or being replaced.

If we have come to know Jesus Christ, we have been bought out of slavery to sin by His blood.  We have then been placed in slavery to righteousness.  To be a slave to righteousness means we should now find our joy in doing what is right in God’s eyes and obeying His commands.  That can only happen if we have been given a new life through Jesus Christ.

The Bible says quite clearly, that when we turn and follow Christ in His power, He gives us a new life.  When He was crucified on the Cross, in a great mystery we also died with Him.  When He rose from the dead, we rose with Him.  So now our old way of life is gone and the life we now have is from Christ.  We have been given a new life to live.

That means the old way of life must be dead, at the very least it must reckoned to be dead by us so that we no longer chase its evil desires.  Therefore when we sin, it is no longer us doing it.  But rather it is sin in us trying hard to drag us back to the kingdom of darkness and the way of death.

Let’s not misunderstand these verses.  We are still responsible for that sin because we indulged in it.  But it is not who we really are any more.  We are acting in a way that is contrary to the new nature that God has given to us.  We are acting against His command to be holy and against His desire that we clothe ourselves in righteousness.  Nevertheless it is sin, the dead man inside of us who does it and not us.

Thus it should not be a surprise that we find ourselves doing what we don’t want to do.  There is going to be a war inside of us as one side or the other tries to assert control.  We must rely on the fact that God has said if we are truly His, if we truly belong to Him, we have been given a new life that will bear fruit that will match that new life.

Whenever we want to do good, evil is right there with us trying to mess it up.  It is like weeds trying to take over the garden and ruin the good things that have been planted.  What a messed up life!  We know what we want to do; we want to do good.  But we don’t do it, this other nature inside of us is doing it and we are supposed to get rid of that nature by making sure it is put to death.

But we have a problem with that old nature.  It doesn’t want to die.  Evil doesn’t want to let go of us even though we have bought by a new master.  So it will fight to keep us and so we must, WE MUST, fight back or we will lose the battle for our holiness.

This is why verses 22-24 say that we are at war within ourselves every day.  Verse 23 says that we agree with God that His commands are good for us but we find ourselves in the fight of our lives every time we try to obey them.  If you don’t believe that you’re in that kind of fight, just check out your feelings the next time God prompts you to talk about Him or share your testimony with someone you know doesn’t care about God.  You’ll want to quit and it will become a battle to obey God’s voice.

Evil goes to war against us seeking to capture us and take us prisoner for life though we know God’s commands are good and useful for making us more like God every day of our lives.  It seeks to poison us when we try to feed on God’s word which the Bible calls sweeter than honey (Psalm 19:9-10, TNIV).  Evil wants to hide our hearts FROM God’s word rather than hiding God’s word IN our hearts.  Every time it wins that battle, we lose the luster, the bright shine of holiness God wants us to have.

With that kind of war going on inside of us and the high stakes of our eternal future being decided, where can we go to find help?  Aren’t we who claim to follow the Most High God the most miserable creatures on earth?  We never get free from this battle.  What we want to do, we can’t do, what we don’t want to do, we can’t get away from, we always do it.

Wherever we turn we find that it is as if we have an alien living inside of us like some creepy horror flick on late night TV.  Who is going to get that ugly thing out of us so it stops sucking out the marrow of our desire to follow Christ?

Verse 25 says it all.  “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:25, ESV)

Only He can rescue us.  It was His power that gave everything we need for godliness and contentment in this life.  It was His power that took us, right when we thought we could save ourselves, and actually saved us.  It was His power who gave us a new life, when the old one was dying and even dead in its tracks.

If He gave us all that and more when He called us to follow Him, won’t He give us even more by adding to it the strength to fight the battle inside us?  How will we ever be good enough to stop sinning when evil continues to run wherever we run?  Only God can stop the reign of evil in our lives and He does through Jesus Christ.

The battle for our holiness is won, if only we would believe what God says is true about us.  We have been given a new life!  God took the old covenant of all those rules and regulations away.  Verse 10 says that we thought they would give us life, but we were betrayed by them. Those rules and regulations proved to be death. Everything that we thought would give us some help with God didn’t help at all.  But now God has removbed all of those things from our lives.  In place of that old covenant, He gave us a new covenant which gives us life so now we can keep His commands and obey Him.

If we will not fight to be holy, it may mean that the new life that God offers us is not alive and well in our lives.  Failing to fight for our holiness may be an indication that we need to start at square one and figure out whether or not we are truly changed at the core of our being.  Have we received the new life promised by Jesus to everyone who believes in Him?

If there is no growing love for doing right and less love for doing evil, then it might not be so easy to get away with saying we are God’s children.  God gives freely to all who would ask Him for a new life and the strength to live it.  In His great mercy He has given us everything we need for godliness, if we come to Him in humility accepting that our best efforts are helpless and feeble.  Our best efforts cannot withstand the attack of evil in our lives.  We must call on Christ.

That is why Jesus of Nazareth went to the Cross.  He paved the path to heaven for us so that we might have an open door to call on God and ask for help in our time of trouble.  Every day, when we are too weak to live holy lives, the door is open for us to say, “Lord, help me to live as you want me to live.  Give me the strength to live according to your precious word that I might not sin against you.”

God in His great mercy did not leave us to fend for ourselves.  He sent Jesus of Nazareth to guide us and help us and ultimately to save us.  That was the message Jesus gave His disciples the night He was betrayed.  If He did not go to the Father in the way that God had set up and planned from eternity past, we all would still be lost.  It would be a struggle for Jesus.  It would be painful beyond our imagination.  There would be war in heaven over His death on the Cross, but God would win.  Just as He guarantees that He will win the war within us.

ALMIGHTY and eternal God, who have given us, your servants, grace, by the confession of a true Faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity; we humbly pray that you will keep us firm in the confession of this Faith and always defend us from all adversities; who live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2

Do you ever look around as you come into church?  What do you see?  Do you see a building or do you see people?  Is the building done?  Are the people finished?  Do you see progress and changes being made or do you see only the things that need to be done?

When we look at the building, we need to be aware that this building is not going to heaven.  There will never come a day when we will gather before God’s great throne and see this building occupying a place of glory and prominence in God’s kingdom.  God’s plan for this world is not to save concrete, wood and tile and turn them into church buildings so they can go to heaven.

His plan for this world, brothers and sisters, is to redeem for Himself a people, some of whom have lived all their lives in rum shops, while others lived in churches. His plan is to call them His own people, holy and beloved by God.  The purposes of God never involve things, except to use those things in the lives of His people to make them more like Him.

God is most concerned that we reflect who He is to this world.  He has told us to be holy as He is holy.  We are to be like Him in His perfection all of His perfection.  We cannot concentrate only on one area or another that we will work on in our lives.

God demands that we be totally set apart for Him.  There can be nothing else in front of Him or held in higher honor by us as if He is served by our doing that thing.  It does not matter whether that is a building, a program or a Bible Study method.

Holiness is not an option for us if we desire to go to heaven.  The Bible is quite clear that without holiness we do not enter heaven because God will not allow imperfections into His presence.  This building is not going to heaven, because it cannot be holy in the same way that God is holy.  But if we are holy people we will certainly arrive in God’s great eternal kingdom.

Most of us however I think struggle a great deal with this concept.  We probably do not wake up and say to ourselves in the mirror in our best Robin, the Boy Wonder voice saying, “Holy of Holies, Batman, I wish I could be set apart, sanctified and pure just like Peter, James, John and Paul in my Bible!”

We look at our own lives and we see just how far we are from being holy.  For some of us, the more we live, the longer we live, the more unrighteous we will seem in our own eyes.  Yet for others of us, it may be the opposite reaction, other people seem more unrighteous in our eyes.  We feel that we have somehow achieved a higher plane by virtue of living longer.

But for most of us I think there is a struggle that occurs in our lives.  We know we are to live a certain way.  We know God doesn’t like some of the things we do.  Yet we do them anyway.

We know that God doesn’t like some of our thoughts.  We discover that we think some mighty nasty things if we really examine what happens between our ears.  Yet we still continue to think those things all the time.  We know full well that the thought is just as bad as the actual act according Jesus.

We also know that God has told us that all we have to do is mess up in one small area and we have messed up the whole thing, as if we pounded a nail into a pane of glass.  Life isn’t a paint by the numbers picture where we can screw up and put the wrong color on the wrong number and if its small enough nobody will notice.  No, life is more like the cutting of a fine diamond, one small mistake, one tiny chip against the grain and all that’s left is dust.

We know God wants us to live a certain way and yet we never feel we measure up.  For a while we may think that we’re doing ok, but the more of life we experience, the more honest we are with ourselves, the greater the gap between what we know we ought to do and what we actually do becomes.

What’s up with that?  Why does that happen?

I’m convinced it happens because God has designed us to be perfect as He is perfect and there is a perfect hole in our lives that we cannot fill with any amount of things, activities or thoughts.  The more effort we put into being good the more we will realize that we are not good.

For those who follow Christ this all the more apparent because we have been made alive.  God has given us a new birth through Jesus Christ and we are now supposed to live for Him with everything we’ve got.  Yet the same struggles still occur.

I wish I could say this is something completely foreign to the life of those who follow Christ but I can’t.  The greatest example of a man who would follow Christ and experience his life change from being a God hater to being a God lover is Paul, the very man who wrote the passage of the Bible we read a few moments ago.

As he sought to describe his life to a group of people who did not yet know him, all he could say was the good that I want to do, I do not do.  The evil that I do not want to do, that I do.  When I want to do good, I do evil.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will save me from this tormented life?

His answer was Jesus Christ.  Only through Him can we truly be freed from the bondage to do wrong in God’s eyes.  Without Him, our best efforts are as one man called them merely “splendid sins.”  They are good works with nothing truly good about them.

If we are to be holy we need Jesus Christ to accomplish something we can’t do on our own.  Be perfect.

If we have come to Christ, if we have heard His call to follow Him wherever He may go, the same call that He gave His first twelve disciples in the gospels, and if we have responded to that call, then something has happened to us that is too amazing to ignore, yet almost too difficult to describe.

God has made us holy, because Christ is holy.  God accepted us through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His subsequent resurrection three days later.  He not only accepted us, but He declared us to be complete in Christ.  Because Christ is holy, everyone who commits their life to Him and follows Him is also holy in God’s eyes.

That is the key point of this message because it is the point of this passage in 2 Corinthians.  Verse 21 of chapter 5 says, “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21, ESV)

That’s a pretty remarkable statement!  The man Jesus knew no sin.  He was sinless!  He was holy!  He didn’t do anything wrong , not even once in His all too short life.  There was never a day that He broke the law of God and so deserved the death that came to Him on the cross.  That is simply amazing!

Jesus Himself knew that He was sinless.  At one point in His life He was confronted by the religious leaders of His day about His teaching and whether or not is right to follow these men as they taught God’s law.  Jesus turns them on their heads and calls them devils, not saints, even though they are devoted to the Law of Moses.  He tells them, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires.” (John 8:44, TNIV)

This is not a Dale Carnegie course in how to win friends and influence people.  You don’t make friends this way.  Yet, right after saying this, He asks His enemies an amazing question, “Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?” (John 8:46, TNIV)

I doubt there is a single person in this sanctuary who would get away with asking that question to those who love us, let alone to our enemies.  Yet, Jesus says it straight to His enemies.  He says it to those who are looking for the slightest point of weakness in keeping the law of God to prove He was unrighteous.

He also says it in front of those who are closest to Him.  He challenges those who live with Him day in and day out.  He asks the question in front of the people who see Him as He really is, not just His public persona.  Not one of us could stand up under that scrutiny.  We may get our act together in public, but at home with the kids or our spouses, forget it.  The imperfection is too easily seen.  They know we’re not holy.

But neither those who stood against Jesus, nor those who were on His side, ever had any occasion to think that Jesus was anything less than holy.

That perfect life that He lived is now ours because He died in our place.  As verse 21 says,  “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21, ESV)

The one who knew no sin became sin on our behalf.  He stood in our place to take on all the punishment that God in His infinite fury at our rebellion could pour out. The perfection of Christ takes away our imperfection in God’s eyes.  He is holy where we could only dream about it on our best days.

Think for a moment just how mad, just how absolutely angry, we get at those whom we love the most when they fail to live up to our standards.  Now multiply that anger we feel by an infinitely greater God.  God who is so far above us that we cannot understand His ways, yet in His absolute infinite perfection pours out His absolute infinite anger on Jesus who didn’t do anything wrong.

In that way God pays the price that we could never hope to pay.  The one who was infinitely perfect becomes infinitely sinful, if only for a season in God’s eyes, so that full force of God’s wrath would not fall on us.  Instead of wrath, we experience the full force of God’s tender-hearted mercy.

We need to see that the holiness of Jesus, was not just confined to His being without sin.  We also need to see that He perfectly conformed to the will of His heavenly Father.  Jesus said, “I always do what pleases Him,” (John 8:29, TNIV) meaning His Father.

Could any of us here make that comment with relation to our earthly fathers let alone our Father in heaven?  We know the answer don’t we?  None of us here could make that statement for either our earthly fathers or our heavenly Father.

Jesus’ holiness was such that He could not walk away from His father’s will.  He loved to do it.  It pleased God and so it pleased Him.  Jesus was fully human in all ways of life, and just like us, He always sought His own pleasure, and the best pleasure He could find was to please God with His life.

Imagine having that kind of outlook on life.  We find our greatest pleasure in pleasing God.  We find that living the way God wants us to live brings us great joy and pleasure.  We WANT to do what God says, not because we are compelled to do but because we want to please Him with our whole lives.

Isn’t there something inside of us that says, even longs to hear “Well done”?  “Good job”?  “Nice work”?  We want praise from our fellow employees, from our friends, from our parents, even from our employers.  We live to be praised.  What could be greater than to hear God say to us as He said to Jesus, “This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:17, TNIV)

The only way to do that is to live the way Christ lived.  Always looking to please His father.  That is the kind of holiness that God is calling us to this evening.  That is the kind of holiness that Jesus lived every day.  He sought to perfectly conform Himself to the will of His heavenly father so that He would hear the words of praise from God, “Well done.”

He becomes our example in holy living.  What He did, ought to be what we do.  The holiness of Christ is our example, our way of life.

What did He do?  What example did He give us?  We could look at the miracles, the signs and wonders that great things happened around Him.  Too often we focus on those things exclusively; the healings, the forgiveness and mercy He gave to those who were down and out.  The kindness He exhibited to children.  But all those things and more, believe it or not, were sideshows to His real purpose.

He came to bring reconciliation between us and God.  Verses 18 and 19 say, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself…that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” (2 Cor 5:18-19, ESV)  We could not do this for ourselves.  We were enemies of God from birth.  So God sent Jesus to live perfectly according to His will, completely without sin so that we might be reconciled to God.

Paul makes the big point that we, who now follow Christ, have been given a new life and a ministry of reconciliation that matches that new life.  We have new life because Christ in His perfection died for our sins and was resurrected from the dead on the third day.  When He came out of the tomb, God said we who follow Christ also came up from the dead with Him.  All God sees in us now is Christ.  We are declared holy by God because Christ our savior is holy.

But we have been given the ministry of reconciliation because that’s what Christ did for us.  We are not only declared holy, but now we are to live holy lives.  We are to be reconciled to God so that we simply do what He wants us to do.

Paul also says that God had a reason to reconcile us to Himself.  Verse 19 says, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Cor 5:19 ESV)

We have been reconciled to God so we might bring reconciliation to others as well.  If God has made it possible for us to enter His kingdom, do we think we are so good that we deserve it and others don’t?  We must bring the good news that God desires to be reconciled with all of His enemies, to those who have not heard it or do not understand it.  We must be messengers of reconciliation with God because we were once His enemies ourselves.

This is why Paul says in verse 20 “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” (2 Cor 5:20, ESV)  God did not give us this ministry to have it sit on the shelf collecting dust until we meet just the right person who seems ok and then let them in on the ultimate secret.  We must tell everyone we can about this good news, “I was an enemy of God’s and He was going to destroy me, but now He has said I’m His child, would you like to hear about how He changed His mind towards me?”

But, I have to go further, the reconciliation God has called us to in holy living is not just a reconciliation between God and us human beings.  It is also a reconciliation between people as well.  For those who are in Christ “there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” (Col 3:11, TNIV)

When Christ brought reconciliation to us, He made it clear that the walls that separate human beings must come down as well.  It may be across racial lines, economic lines, across even the hardest lines of all to cross, denominational lines.  None of us holds a corner in righteousness.  We all have someone with whom we must be reconciled.

If God is putting names in your mind right now, I would not be so quick as to dismiss them.  Our ministry of reconciliation to a world that doesn’t know God often begins with how well we are reconciled with those whom we have disagreements or have broken from.  If God has laid someone on your heart with whom you need to go patch up your relationship, do not harden your heart and risk losing the reconciliation that God offers to you.

Holiness is more than trusting Christ.  Holiness is living the way Christ lives as He gives us new life.  Being holy means recognizing that God has declared us holy if we have trusted in Christ for our whole lives, holding nothing back from Him.

Look around again.  What do you see?  Or rather, who do you see?  Do you see people who need to get better?  Or do you see people who have been declared holy by God?

The way we look at people can make a huge difference in how we relate to them.  We may see needs for growth, but unless we see their needs with God’s eyes first, we will never be the ambassadors for reconciliation that God desires us to be.

It may be this evening that you realized that you have never trusted in Christ for His holy perfect sacrifice on your behalf.  You have never thought of Him standing in your place taking the punishment that you so richly deserved at the hands of God.  This would be a great day to receive the reconciliation that God is offering.

Verse 6:2 tells us that God says  “‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’  Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor 6:2, ESV).  It cannot say it any plainer than it does:  Now is the acceptable time to speak to God, today, right now is the day of salvation.

What will we do with the offer of reconciliation?  Reject it or accept it with all of its implications for our lives?