Sermon Sunday, November 5th, 2006 "All these Guidelines!!!!"

Source Scriptures: Romans 12: 9-16

You know, if I’m gonna be honest here, I really struggle with reading the Bible and especially with reading the letters to the churches that Paul and a few other early church leaders like James and Peter and John write, because, and I’ll use Romans as an example, the letters are just LOADED with things I’m supposed to do. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal if the things I’m supposed to do are EASY to do, NATURAL to do, MAKE SENSE to do. But the problem here is many of the things I see in these letters are HARD to do, UNNATURAL to do, MAKE NO SENSE at all according to how I see reality. I could be tempted to think following Jesus is a checklist, a hopelessly complex system where I know what God wants, but I’m either too confused or too weak to ever make progress in achieving the goals he carries for those who have submitted their lives to him.

So I have several options here for how to deal with the fact that God asks of me things that are HARD, and seem UNNATURAL:

1) I could not read the Bible because it makes me uncomfortable and lays bare my often self-centered lifestyle.

2) I could read the Bible, but come up with all kinds of justifications for not doing what God commands me to do and be

3) I could read the Bible and give others the image that I’m following what God is asking of me, but that requires that I’m a part of a church that only meets once a week, where I can scoot in and grab a seat and scoot out when things get a little too close for comfort, or

4) I can try to figure out why these expectations of God seem so unnatural to me, maybe try to figure out what they’re pointing me to, and do my level best to pursue that direction. In other words, I know lots of people write off these expectations from the beginning because WE HATE BOUNDARIES. They limit us, imprison us, stifle us. But if I want to be honest and authentic in figuring out what God expects, I gotta give letters like Romans a fair shake.

And I think a good image for us to work with is one that many people see Christianity as. The boundaries are a fence that God has set up around our lives as followers of Jesus. The rest of the world either knows they exist and doesn’t care or doesn’t know that those boundaries exist, but we have to be honest and say “Yes” they exist..

Now the problem with this is that so often we focus on the fences, thinking UHHHH, why are those fences there, why does God ask of these things from me, they’re HARD, and every now and again in our thoughts and actions we catch a glimpse of the other side and for some reason we long for that grass and say, “But, it’s so GREEN over there, and I can be whoever I want to be over there.” So we OBSESS over the fences and feel SO ATTRACTED to the other side because we’re hammered with messages and people tempting us to climb that fence and define our lives ourselves. This was the sin of Adam that began in his MIND and showed in his eventual ACTIONS, and we find after Genesis 3 and the fall of Adam and Eve that the chapters following all the way to 11 show increasing immorality and violence and existence…the reality of existence outside those fences.

But what Paul is calling us to here in Romans 12 is the RENEWAL of the mind of the community of God’s people, and all of these boundaries shown here point us towards the ABUNDANT life found within the fences. Because if we consciously and habitually and daily flip this around, and take our attention OFF the fences and OFF longing for the other side and inside turn around and recognize that we as followers of Jesus within these boundaries have the most full, most awe-inspiring, most beautiful Garden around us INSIDE these walls, we instead appreciate the fences as a boundary that enables us to cultivate, appreciate, and revel in the beauty contained within.

Knowing this, it might be time here to suggest some biblical thoughts about how to read the Bible in a way that changes us deeply. This applies ESPECIALLY to today, where the eight verses from verse 9 to verse 16 contain 20, count it, 20 guidelines for our lives.

1) Love must be sincere 2) Hate what is evil; 3) cling to what is good. 4) Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. 5) Honor one another above yourselves. 6) do not be lacking in zeal, 7) maintain your spiritual fervor, 8) serve the Lord. 9) be joyful in hope, 10) patient in affliction, 11) faithful in prayer. 12) share with God’s people in need 13) practice hospitality. 14) Bless those who persecute you 15) Do not curse those who persecute you 16)Rejoice with those who rejoice, 17)Mourn with those who mourn 18)Live in harmony with one another 19)Do not be proud 20)Do not be conceited

Knowing that we’re tempted to be shallow, overly busy people in our society, I would suggest we may feel like throwing up our hands and saying, “God, I quit. This is too complex for me!”

Suppose you get up in the morning and have committed yourself to read several chapters of the Bible before you enter the day. And suppose that one of them is Romans 12. So you read through the chapter. Now what do you remember from those 20 guidelines? What will you remember in two hours? And what effect did they have? After three minutes reading this chapter, how are you changed in your love of others, and hate of evil, and brotherly affection, and honoring others, and zeal, and fervency, and service, and hope, and joy, and patience, and prayer, and generosity, and hospitality? Did simply mentioning these 20 guidelines in your mind for a total of about 15 seconds transform your heart and mind so that all 20 of them are fired up and growing? No, it doesn’t work that way. Reading over texts like this once, and quickly, has little effect to produce all these beautiful things in our lives. So what are we to do? What would make these things happen?

We slow down. One guy I know said it like this: “We don’t just fly at 560 miles an hour in our 747, miles above a grove of fruit trees and look down and say, “My, what an impressive grove of fruit trees.” Instead, we land the plane and walk through the grove of trees and stop here and there and linger, inhale and smell the fruit, pick the fruit and eat it and savor the beauty and the sweetness of the grove. In other words, we meditate on these words. We don’t rush over them.

And we find if we meditate on them that these verses are calling us beyond seeing ourselves as isolated individuals starring in our own Broadway show to recognize we are a part of a larger community, and after verses 1-3 called the community to transformation, called the community to offer all of their lives in worship, after verses 4-8 tell us what role we are commanded to play in this community, then verses 9-16 hammer home the point that whatever the role is we play in this community that we are a part of, we are to do it with all of our hearts, all of our minds, and all of our strength; we recognize that Middle River is intended to be a kingdom center, a launching pad for us to go out and show the world what this abundant life is all about, and we have a role to play. And IF Middle River is THAT kingdom center, IF Middle River has a unique mission and calling in the surrounding community, then we need to linger on these words and ask ourselves if we are showing the world around us in our thoughts, our words, our priorities, and our actions that our role in THIS thing bigger than ourselves is the center of our lives.

THEN, and only THEN, does this take on a new character. As verse 9 so clearly say, we are called to do battle with, to HATE the part of us that stares longingly at the fence and at the pastures beyond, because we know where that leads and can pull up in a matter of a minutes countless stories from these pages of what happens when folks do that. And we don’t have to go far to see a modern example: If you’ve followed the news at all this week, you have been exposed to the story of Ted Haggard, an evangelical church leader and lead pastor of a large church in Colorado who has been accused of hypocrisy by a male prostitute for preaching in favor of a marriage amendment excluding homosexuals from marriage while having a physical relationship with this prostitute on a regular basis. And instead of coming clean, Haggard pulled the same move Bill Clinton did with the whole Lewinsky scandal in the last few days moving from saying, “I don’t know the man,” and “I never did drugs” to admitting he bought drugs from the man and received a massage from the man to being removed from his leadership role just last evening for “sexually immoral conduct”. I have been deeply saddened by this situation, and think that the very last thing we should do is to point our finger at Haggard and say “hypocrite” I would suggest this situation should reveal some things here:

1) This should illustrate for us the terrible danger of giving off an external picture that we are one person while living an entirely different reality behind the scenes, and

2) It should remind us of the places of greatest weakness in our lives, and drive us to commit or recommit ourselves to the hard road of transformation…should drive us to flee from hypocrisy, to find someone to be accountable to, and to be transparent and honest about our lives.

3) This should illustrate for us plain and simple human weakness that we are all held to the same standard and find ourselves failing. I am 100% positive that there is no person sitting in this room that has lived 100% up to his or her own standards for morality at all times. This is a fact of life. Does that make us all hypocrites? On some level, yes. I think more accurately, though, we’ve gotta be honest with our friends (especially those who don’t know Christ) that as followers of Jesus, we’re always seeking to grow, we get it right sometimes, fall flat on our face other times, and because we refuse to sit down and quit, our hearts, our thoughts, and our lives are being transformed. This is honesty in the pursuit of transformation.

We lose the looking down our nose and others, and we choose to humbly bend our knee before God and sit at his feet, listen, and alter our lives according to the boundaries he has set up for us.

When Paul says, “HATE what is evil; cling to what is good,” he is rejecting the idea that evil is defined by what I naturally hate; and he is rejecting the idea that good is defined by what I naturally think is good. We were created to naturally listen to God first, but we’ve been hammered since our childhood with the message that God has no idea what He’s talking about and the other way is better. But what God is shouting to us in the Bible through his love and justice and Jesus is that the priorities and thoughts and life of the world surrounding us have turned everything upside-down, and we’re confused and wandering and numb; blind leading the blind off a cliff. As Anne Lamott so famously said, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

You see, following Jesus means recognizing that good and evil don’t change, we change. We get honest about the evil inside of us and learn what we are called to hate in the world…now listen carefully there…WHAT we are called to hate, not WHO. We’re going to talk deeper about that reality two weeks from now, but our calling as Christians is to love and give our lives for others. The enemy does not exist on the other side of the globe, the enemy is evil itself; and we have a lifetime to confront it and the systems and the people it twists and destroys, starting with ourselves.

Hypocrisy is falling into the same trap Haggard did—an external picture of holiness without an internal reality. Don’t just avoid evil, HATE evil. Don’t just choose good, EMBRACE the good. CLING TO the good. The battle of Christian living is a battle to transform our entire existence, not just our behavior or our emotions.

If we want to live into the reality that when we commit our lives to Jesus that “the old has passed away and the new has come, “we must submit ourselves to see the world the way he sees it and feel the way he feels it, we must go on fighting for daily transformation:

And that’s where Paul gives the old one-two punch to lackadaisical, lukewarm, disconnected faith. “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor”

The word “fervor” in the original Greek means “boiling.” It’s the opposite of the prevailing approach in our society of growing boredom and apathy. A news story came out just last week that the productivity of the American worker continues to drop as hours continue to rise…in this situation of little to no relaxation or life outside of work, many are coping through choosing simply to go through the motions. And in this situation of boredom, we don’t have to look far in our culture to find the areas where we can vicariously live through the exciting lives of others, whether that be sports, or movies, or video games to inspire some sense of excitement and adventure and strong feeling in a workaday world that is just plain boring. This pursuit almost suggests we were made for adventure and exertion and passion and risk-taking in some great cause, and instead what we do all day is sit in front of a computer or shuffle papers or make deliveries or drive a bus or clean a room or sell a product or fix gadgets. Life in the real world seems to fall so far short of what our hearts cry out for that the best we can do is create substitute, artificial exploits—football, basketball, hockey, explosive movies, shocking video games—anything to transport us out of the boredom of the real world, and give us a little taste of passion and zeal and daring and energy and strategy and courage—even if it is an artificial world or EVEN if certain things that promise adventure are unfaithful for us to participate in.

We look like we are having a great time as we go from one entertainment event and program and mall and movie to another, but it is all artificial. We are not excited with real life. We are desperately waiting for the weekend when we can play, because real life is just not connected with any great cause. We wonder why our relationships are so feeble and thin and fragile, and yet, in the place of this deep need, we as the church allow our message to be simply emotional or a checklist of chores to do. (not knocking movies, music, entertainment in general b/c those can be life-giving...but a dependence on them to deliver us from boredom and provide adventure in place of pursuing this relationship with God (this adventure) we were called to pursue)

If Middle River wants to be a kingdom center, a place of change, we must be willing to commit ourselves to making this a place where relationships go deep, where we link arms in the greatest cause this world has ever seen.

Boil for Christ. This is a rebuke to passivity and laziness and lethargy and apathy and boredom. Paul assumes that if you see this in yourself you can do something about it. We have been given the Holy Spirit and the Word of God and the power of prayer precisely to fight against the boredom and apathy in our own hearts. So he speaks this word directly to us this morning: don't lag, don't float, don't drift, don't waste your life sitting mindlessly in front of TV, don't have only little dreams of playing on the weekend. Don’t put the place God has sacrificed for, empowered, and equipped to be a center of change in the dust heap of your life…about as important as the used oil jug in your garage. Stir up zeal for God and for the cause of God and truth and life. There are great things worth living for

That is his will for you this morning. If you have it—this "boiling in the Spirit"—you will find ways to pour your life out in the cause of truth and life. I will not deny that it is HARD to maintain this boiling, because there is so much in our world that tries to suck that energy right out of us and destroy our willingness to live this purposeful life… but God expects from us (doesn’t wish, EXPECTS) a conscious, disciplined, habitual commitment to growing deeper in relationship, in love with God and with others)

So let’s not forget this as we head home today: meditate on these things, talk about these things, let them sink into your heart, pursue these things