The Person God Uses

SERMON: 2010-08-22--g0810--the-person-god-uses SOURCE DURATION: 00:43:04.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: All provided candidates maintain a continuous theological and narrative flow typical of the conclusion of a sermon (a doxology or final exhortation). Since there is no clear transition to non-sermon material (music, announcement) after candidate 15, I select the final segment as per instructions. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:39:40.460-00:43:03.720 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I want to try to pick up this morning where we left off two weeks ago. We were looking, you will recall, at the biblical commandment to bear one another's burdens. Paul says in Galatians chapter 6 verse 2, "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." And the law of Christ there is the commandment to love one another. And I pointed out two weeks ago that sometimes in life's journey the burdens that we carry are too heavy. And sometimes they're too heavy because the load is simply too heavy. But other times they're too heavy because our internal capability of carrying the load has been compromised. We have been weakened, either physically or emotionally. And the regular load of life that we should be able to carry, we no longer can carry. And the momentum is towards failure. And if that's true for all of us to one degree or another, at one point or another, it is I think especially true for those who come out of unhealthy family situations. Family situations where there has been either neglect or abuse, sometimes both. And one of the reasons for that we saw a number of weeks ago is that families of that nature tend to create two serious distortions in their offspring. The first is families like that create a pathogenic belief system. That is to say they impart lies about who they are, about how the world works, but those lies are centered in the very core of their being. And the second reason then is that families like that create what's known as a faulty relational template. That is to say you learn how to do relationships in a wrong way. For example, if you grow up in a family and the only time you ever get attention is when you get sick or when you throw a hissy fit, then you learn growing up that if you want attention you throw a hissy fit or you plead illness. And just by way of illustration, perhaps you remember this young lady who has been in the news quite a bit, Ashley Kirilow. She's a 23-year-old Burlington native who just Friday got released from a two-week jail stand, charged with three counts of fraud under $5,000 and one count of fraud over $5,000. The reason being she had been diagnosed with a benign breast cyst, but as she told her friends about it, it became breast cancer, then brain cancer, then liver cancer, and pretty soon she was full of cancer and she was dying. She shaved her head, plucked her eyelashes, which we think must be kind of painful business. Maybe women would maybe know more about that. And she starved herself so that she would appear to be a chemo patient. She did it very well because friends online rallied around her. She began a sort of bogus charity called Change for Cancer and people ended up contributing upwards to $20,000 or more, except of course the problem was she didn't have cancer. And so when the story broke, she turned herself in, spent two weeks in jail because nobody wanted to post bail for her, not even her father and her mother. And when she was asked when the story first broke by reporters why she did what she did, here's what she said. She said, "I was trying to be noticed. I was trying to get my family back together. I didn't want to feel like I'm nothing anymore." That would be a pathogenic belief system. That would be a faulty relational template. And the history of course is that when she was two years old, a sibling was born, her parents split up. It was a very contentious divorce. The police were often called in to enforce visitation, and her mother is quoted as saying that she was indeed a sweet child, but desperate for attention. She always wanted to be a princess. That's Ashley, a good example of what happens when the brokenness of one generation gets repeated in the next. And it's very easy, isn't it, for you and me, we're sitting or standing here and we say, "Well, how could she ever do that?" But the reality of course is that apart from God's grace, none of us is incapable. All of us have some belief systems that are in some ways pretty screwed up. We all have some faulty relational templates, and though God in Christ accepts us unconditionally the way that we are, even if we were never to change, He would still love us. Fact of the matter is, as I pointed out two weeks ago, He loves us too much to leave us where we are. And so when we come to Christ, give our lives to Him, He grants us the Holy Spirit, and then He begins that journey of sanctification. His journey whereby He transforms our thinking and where He teaches us what love for God and love for neighbor truly looks like. And as we've been talking about this in recent weeks, I've pointed out to you that that's a very painful process. It's a very painful process because the first thing that God does when He begins to bring us back to the core of where these lies are rooted is He begins to take down for us our coping mechanisms, the places where we have learned to do our work around, the places where we try to get attention, or the places where we use our intimidation so that we can hide our inadequacy and our brokenness. And what happens next is that He takes us back to the places where things went wrong. Ashley is forced in a very painful way, if she's ever going to change, to look at what happened in her family situation when her parents split up acrimoniously and that little girl didn't know where she could go. And then, of course, as we touch the pain, along comes, you know, the shame. And you can imagine how shamed she feels at having the whole world know that she's been a big liar. And as I've pointed out to you before, when you and I, as sometimes we will, find ourselves in those places, very few of us can get through those spots without help from other people. And so God, in His wisdom, raises up brothers and sisters in the family of God who can walk it out with us, people who can provide support in the practical ways to get us out of jail, if you will, a place to live, as was the case for Ashley, because her mom and her dad want nothing more to do with her. In fact, they didn't even show up for any of her court cases because her father said she has lied one time too many and she's got to learn her lesson, empathy, where somebody can resonate with our pain without judgment and condemnation, and a place too where people can love us enough to speak the truth in love so that they can help us get beyond our own places of brokenness to wholeness in the almighty and the saving power of Jesus. Which then brings us this morning to the question, who is the person God uses? In other words, what are the qualifications that are necessary to take somebody by the hand, walk them through their shame, walk them through their pain, walk them through their foolishness, and to help them be plucked out of the miry clay in biblical language and have their feet placed upon a solid rock? And what I love about Galatians chapter 6 is that Paul, in the introduction to this passage, gives us two criteria that he says we must hold to if we're going to successfully walk it out with people who have been overloaded by the burdens of life because of brokenness in their own heart. And in the time that we have this morning, let me try to walk you through that as quickly as we can, and please pay close attention, this is so important if our journey of walking with people is to be a help rather than a hindrance. The first condition that Paul spells out in this particular passage is that we must be spiritual, because listen again to verse 1, "Brothers," and we can add sisters as some translations do, "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently." Now to be spiritual in biblical language is to be led by the Holy Spirit. This passage follows the passage in Galatians chapter 5 where Paul talks about the fruit of the Spirit, and the opposite of being spiritual is, of course, to be what? Unspiritual, and to be unspiritual is to be led by your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own emotions, your own passions, often fueled as they are from down below. And there are many people who are in the helping business who do so not because they are led by the Spirit, but because they are motivated and they are moved by their own natural affections which are often colored by their own sin. Paul says you're going to help somebody in a good and true way. You must first of all yourself be spiritual, that is to say yielded to the Holy Spirit, listening to his whispers, and motivated by his presence and by his power. You need to be, in other language, spiritually mature. The reason I can think of two, the first reason is that only God truly knows the human heart. You and I we so often judge on the basis of externals, but it's God who judges the heart. I love this verse in 1 Corinthians 4, the verses 3 and 4, Paul is talking about himself and he says I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court. Indeed he says I don't even judge myself. He says my conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. Only God knows what is truly living at the core of somebody's heart. Only God knows the pathogenic lies that that person has embraced. Only God knows the faulty relational templates that have gone into that. Only God knows the history. And you and I, we need to walk closely with God lest we rush where angels fear to tread. People's inner world is a very sacred place, and we need the guidance of God's Holy Spirit to help us know when to provide support, when to provide empathy, and when to speak truth. And you can see that again with Ashley, I said a few moments ago, her parents refused to be involved with her in jail. Now is that an act of love? Is it an act of anger and humiliation? It didn't help that she went on the news and told everybody that she thought her parents were drug addicted, told other people they were dead, and many of us as parents, we found ourselves in a quandary like that, even with our own children, or even with our own spouse. Your spouse throws a hissy fit, has a meltdown. What's the loving thing to do? Embrace them, make it all better, or stand firm and say, "Get over yourself." And there are times you got to do the one, and there are times you got to do the other, but I'll tell you, we'll be tied if you're trying to depend on your own wisdom to get there because chances are you'll get it wrong. But the Holy Spirit can help us get it right, and that doesn't mean it's going to be written in the sky. It doesn't mean we have to have a big revelation, but sometimes there is just that quiet conviction on the inside that says this is the time to be quiet, or this is the time to stand firm. This is a time to hug, or this is a time to slug. Do you understand what I'm saying? You can't make, as we'll see in a few minutes, enough rules to cover all the contingencies. You can only learn how to do the dance when the Holy Spirit helps you how to do it. Well that's one reason, only God knows our hearts, but the second reason is that restoration is ultimately God's work. And one verse that we quote around here a lot, Ephesians 2 10, "We are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." God not only knows your heart, God not only knows what kind of gifting lives in your heart, but God is the one who has got your course mapped out for you, and He is constantly at work conforming each one of us to the image of Christ, each one of us to the particular calling that God has for us. And while you and I can facilitate that process, none of us can reach into another soul and make it happen. And again I love the way the Apostle Paul words it in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, the verses 5, 6, and 7. He says, "What after all is Apollos and what is Paul?" This is in the context of the Corinthian church playing favorites, some people like Paul, some people like Apollos, some people like Peter, and some people are really quite proud and arrogant and they say, "We just belong to Jesus." It's really spiritual, but it's very arrogant. And Paul says, "What is Apollos and what is Paul? Only servants through whom you came to believe the Lord as the Lord has assigned to each his task." He says, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it to grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything but only God who makes things grow." Why do we need to be spiritual? We need to be spiritual to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit and we need to be spiritual to be able to come alongside God, do the watering and the sowing and the activity that God blesses and uses for His glory. And the genius of Jesus is that He was so closely in tune with the Father. He knew every time exactly how to do it. I don't know if you've ever noticed this when you read through the Gospels, but you can read through the Gospels, there aren't two miracles that Jesus does in the same way. The one person, he spits in the mud and sticks it in his eyes, and in another case he says, "Have your eyes be opened," and in all kinds of different ways. In modern psychobabble, his ministry is client specific. Why? Because you can't write enough rules to govern it all. You and I, we'd like to come up with ten good steps how to be a spiritual help to somebody else and it'll never work. Instead Jesus walked so closely with the Father that He knew exactly what the Father was doing, and He puts it this way in John 5 verse 19. He says, "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by Himself. He can do only what He sees the Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does." We like to think Jesus is the Son of God, He knew exactly what He was doing, He had the power of God. No, no, He laid it all aside. He was filled with the Holy Spirit. He saw where God was moving, and He stepped into where God told Him to step into. The power of God was there, and that, people, is when the miracles happen. And the miracles happen when you and I, by faith, have discerned, however we're going to discern it, the movement of the Holy Spirit, He gives us faith, He gives us a stirring, He lets us hear a whisper, and we step out in faith, and we discover that God has gone there before. And when God has gone there before, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and the poor have good news proclaimed to them. And as we'll see in a few moments, the beauty of this is that any child of God, yielded to the Holy Spirit, can be caught up in one way or another in this ministry of carrying other people's burdens. You don't have to be some super-duper, well-educated, well-trained hero. You can do it right where you are, because that's the privilege of being a child of God. Are you with me so far? There's a lot to this that we will explore as time goes on, because it focuses on who can do the work of the Lord in the world. Can only dedicated professionals do the work of helping, or can each one of us, filled with the Holy Spirit, find our little place in the body of Christ? So Paul says the first condition that we need to observe is that we must be spiritual, and then he says the second one is this. We must be self-aware. We must be self-aware, for notice how the verse goes on, Galatians 6.1, "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently." And then he goes on to say, "But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted." Watch yourself, and to watch yourself is to keep a good close eye on your heart, on your longings, on your passions, and on your involvement. In my experience in walking with people and trying to encourage people to learn how to walk with people is that there are two extremes that God's people are susceptible to, that they need to learn how to avoid. And the first temptation is always that we have a refusal to get involved in somebody's life. And of course, the clear biblical example of that is the parable of the Good Samaritan. You know this story, man was traveling from Jericho to Jerusalem, and in the story of Jesus he gets attacked by robbers, left for dead, and then along comes a Levite and a priest on the way to the temple. And while later it is the Good Samaritan, a man despised by the Israelites who takes care of this man, the Levite and the priest pass by on the other side. Now Jesus doesn't spell out, as I recall, in that story why they do that, but it's not hard to speculate, is it? Clearly they didn't want to get involved. Perhaps they were afraid that they would be beat up, but more likely than not, the reason they didn't get involved is because they didn't want to get ritually unclean. Because remember, these were servants of the temple, a Levite and a priest. And if they got involved with a dead body or a severely wounded man, not only would their trip to the temple be delayed, but they would be ritually unclean and they wouldn't be able to go about the service of the kingdom. And so in their minds they rationalized that they better just leave him. And I'm not critical when I say this, but it's been my experience in Christian community that every Christian community has a certain type of Christian who identifies more with the priest than the Levite than they do with the good Samaritan. And that's especially true of people who, in some instances, have come out of a lot of brokenness themselves. I used to think that when people came out of brokenness, they would have great compassion for other people who are in brokenness. I've discovered it isn't always that way at all. They're just so glad to leave that old life behind they want nothing more to do with it. And churches that have a lot of rules about good, proper Christian behavior flee messy people and messy situations like the plague, lest they be polluted by it themselves. And of course, Scripture really doesn't give us permission to do that because John, in 1 John 3, 17 and 18, a verse that we often quote around here because it is so pertinent, "If anyone has material possessions, sees his brother in need, but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth." Proverbs 3, 28 says, "Do not say to your neighbor, 'Come back later. I'll give it to you tomorrow when you have it with you.'" And likewise, Proverbs 24, 11 says, "Rescue those being led away to death. Hold back those staggering towards slaughter." God's people are called by the Holy Spirit to step into the messy situations of a broken world, just as Jesus did, as we'll see in a few moments. So that's one danger. We walk by on the other side. But there's an equal and opposite danger, and that is getting involved too deeply. I'm currently working on two new books, one on the story of Joseph, that I hope we'll be able to put into print in the near future, and another one in the book of James, and in the book of James I tell the story of a very close friend of mine, a very godly man, a leader in the church who, out of compassion, got involved in a family that had started coming to his church where the husband was alcoholic, the woman was very needy, and there was something about her neediness that resonated with his desire to help. He was a handyman, and so what the husband wasn't doing for her, he ended up doing. Of course, one thing led to another, and pretty soon they are, at least emotionally, too intensely involved with each other. Rumors begin to circulate, rumors that weren't accurate, but that nevertheless caused a great deal of pain, placed an enormous stress on his marriage, ended up placing an enormous stress on his church. He and his wife ended up leaving their church, their church in some significant ways ended up falling apart because of his over-involvement in this woman's life. And if on the one hand we have to be careful not to stay too far away on the other side, and the other extreme, Scripture says we need to be careful that our own needs don't push us into a situation where we over-identify with somebody's problems. You can see it happening on many different fronts. You have the undercover policeman who ends up becoming participant with the crime element because his soul has been polluted. I read a story a while back, didn't it happen in Kingston? As I recall, a female guard became so overly identified with a male prisoner that she facilitated his escape. Both extremes need to be avoided, and the only way in which we can do that, says Scripture, is to watch ourselves. That is to say, pay close attention to your own heart. Pay close attention to any unresolved needs in your own life, and always ask yourself the question, "Why am I doing what I am doing?" Get input from other brothers and sisters around you who can often see better than you can what is motivating you and what motivates your heart. And not only that, but remain in close union with Jesus because you will notice Paul mentions this in the same breath as being spiritual. You who are spiritual, led by the Holy Spirit, you restore the brother or the sister who has strayed. And the genius of Jesus, again, is that he could hold those two in proper tensions. He leaves the glory of heaven. He's accused of hanging around with sinners and with publicans, and he doesn't mind sitting down to dinner with them, and he doesn't mind spending time with them. But as somebody has said, Jesus can spend time with prostitutes without ever going to bed with them. He can spend time with tax collectors without being polluted by their grade, and he can spend time with the likes of you and me without ever getting sucked in to our dysfunction or to our pain. And as we are joined to Jesus and united with him, then he will give us that ability. He will give us that discernment. We will know how to be involved, and yet how to be involved wisely. Now, why do I make a point of that? Well, I make a point of it for two reasons. And the first reason is that we live in a world that has a tendency to try to keep us all safe by passing more and more rules. Have you ever noticed that? Somebody will have a construction accident. We call it an inquest. The inquest results will come back, thirty-seven recommendations, two or three of which will now get passed into law. Somebody has a traffic accident because they were talking on a cell phone. Now, pretty soon, nobody can talk on a cell phone, driving, at least hands-on, though I would argue that a person fiddling with his radio or holding on to his cup of coffee can be just as distracted. But we live in a world that thinks that if we can pass enough rules, then somehow we can keep everybody safe. And the result of that is not only that we lose our competitive advantage because you can hardly move without getting into trouble, but we make up rules that become crazier and crazier because nobody wants to be held liable for litigation. And so, for your edification, here are some examples of warning labels on commercial products, and you will see how crazy this gets. Here's one of my favorite, Fidel Sassoon hair dryer instructions for use. Do not use while sleeping. I thought this was an amazing insight. I would have thought you women could save yourselves fifteen minutes to half an hour a day if you could learn how to do this while you were asleep, but sorry, no go. Here's another one, warning, never iron clothes on body. Have you ever been tempted? It probably will save time if you could because then you can sort of contour the dress or the shirt to your body. Well here's another really good one, remove child before folding. Always wondered why I cannot fold those things properly. Now I know. Now this one you'll have some trouble reading maybe, but here's what this says, caution, this is a multi-purpose pocket knife, and the caution says this, blade extremely sharp, keep out of children. That could be a real danger that you face. Here's another one, this is a Superman outfit sold for children, wearing this garment does not enable you to fly. I always wondered why I find kids in Spiderman suits lying on the sidewalk all the time. And then this one, shin pads for bicycles cannot protect any body part they do not cover. Now that is brilliant. And then this one, danger, do not hold the wrong end of a chainsaw. You see how difficult it becomes to live in a world where you can no longer do all the good things that you would naturally be tempted to do. Well just very quickly a couple of funny signs, entrance only, do not enter, kind of messes with your head just a little bit I would think. Here's another one, no pets allowed, all pets must be on a leash, well that certainly covers all the territory doesn't it? And then this one, notice, public bar, our public bar presently is not open because it is closed. That is one bright manager. Why do rules not work, and don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that some rules aren't necessary but this over dependence on rules will never work and it will never work for three reasons and I'll tell you those quickly before we quit. Number one, you can never make enough rules to cover every contingency or every stupid mistake that somebody is going to make. The law is for the flesh to keep it in check. Number two, the more rules you make the smarter you teach people to be on how to avoid the rules and you can see that in any construction job where people merrily don't wear their hard hats until they see the inspector coming and everybody is all of a sudden scurrying to abide by regulations that supposedly are for your good but that get in the way of productivity. And the third reason and the most important one for us is that it is opposed to the spirit of the New Testament. Law is for children and in the Old Testament the law goes from here to many and the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers of Jesus' day, they spent a lot of their time expending on the law so that every eventuality was covered. But then along comes Jesus and what does Jesus do? He's asked to summarize the law and he says it really reduces to two. Love for God and love for your neighbor. The New Testament takes all these many different rules and it reduces them simply to the law of love, if you love God above all and if you love your neighbor as you love yourself then you will have all the eventualities covered because love does not do wrong to his neighbor. Listen to how Paul puts it in Romans chapter three, the verses eight, nine and ten. He says, "Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another. For he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law. The commandments do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet and whatever other commandment there may be are summed up in this one rule. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to its neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." If you love your neighbor you're not going to expose him to needless danger. If you love your neighbor you will never take advantage of him for your own personal gain. If you love your neighbor you will never violate his or her integrity to feed your own soul or to satisfy your own needs. And so the antidote to making us safe in a good and healthy society is not regulation upon regulation upon regulation, though there is nothing wrong with a limited number of regulations so that we know what the guidelines are, but it's to produce a spiritual people. And you produce a spiritual people by having people abide in Christ, remain in union with him and learn to walk after this spirit. And that is one of the reasons why in this community we put such an emphasis on helping each of us find our gifts, find our interests and helping us to learn to live out of the core of our being by the power and the strength of God's Holy Spirit. That's where we're going to leave it. When we come back to it next time, Lord willing, we'll be transitioning back to the story of Peter and John in Acts chapter 4, how they get called on the carpet by the religious leaders of their day for healing the crippled man at the beautiful gate. And one of the beautiful aspects of that story is the observation that the religious leaders were astonished at the courage of Peter and John even though they were uneducated, ordinary men. But what stood out for them is they recognized they had been with Jesus. And at the end of the day, that's what counts. Have you been with Jesus? [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:39:40.460; remove through 00:43:04.000] Oh, Church, arise and put your armor on, near the call of Christ our captain, for now the weak can say that they are strong in the strength that God has given. The shield of faith and bount of truth will stand against the devil's lies. And on the fold whose battle cryers love, reaching out to those in darkness, are called to roar, to love the captive soul, but to rage against the captor. And with a sword that makes the wounded whole, we will fight with faith and valor. And place with vows on every side, we know the outcome is secure, and Christ will have the prize for which he died, an inheritance of nature. Come see the cross, where love and mercy meet, as the Son of God is stricken. Then see His clothes, lying crushed beneath His feet, for the conqueror has risen. And as the stone is rolled away, and Christ emerges from the grave, victory march continues till the day every island march shall see Him. So the Spirit God will strengthen every stride, embrace for every hurdle that we may run, with faith to win the prize of a servant good and faithful. As saints of old, still on the way, retelling triumphs of His grace, we hear their call, and hunger for the day, when with Christ we stand in glory. As saints of old, still on the way, retelling triumphs of His grace, we hear their call, and hunger for the day, when with Christ we stand in glory [CUT]. [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:43:04.000; resume after this marked segment]