Keeping Your Hands Clean

I want to begin this morning by telling you two stories and you'll see soon enough as
I relate those to you what the connection is between them.
The first story relates to the infamous Mount Casual Orphanage in St. John's Newfoundland.
You may have heard of it, Mount Casual exploded into the news about 15 or 16 years ago because
of significant scandals related to physical and sexual abuse.
Let me give you a little bit of the history.
Mount Casual was founded in 1898 and it was founded by the Christian brothers.
The Christian brothers are a lay Catholic organization that have their origin in Ireland.
It was founded originally as a school and eventually became an orphanage.
And by the 1930s, wards of the state were being placed in this orphanage.
And for many years things went well until 1975 and 1982 allegations began to surface of
significant physical and sexual abuse of students in this school and in this orphanage.
Those allegations were handled very discreetly.
And two people who were connected to that were taken out of that situation, placed in
other situations and the scandal was hushed up until 1989.
At that point in time, one of the Newfoundland newspapers related the story of the previous
scandal cover up and a commission was appointed to investigate the ongoing rumors of a scandal.
And by the time the dust settled, the allegations were serious indeed.
Hundreds and hundreds of former students came forward.
The figure that I have seen is anywhere from 300 to 450 who alleged physical and sexual
abuse at the hands of the brothers and others who were instrumental in running this orphanage.
And again by the time the cycle had run its course, 14 men had been charged with a total
of 88 counts of sexual and physical abuse.
Nine of these were Christian brothers, five were civilians.
Most of them were found guilty and convicted and most of them served jail terms anywhere
from one to 13 years.
As a result, in 1990 the orphanage was closed and torn down.
The land was sold and in 1996 the Newfoundland government paid out 11 and a half million dollars
in compensation to victims of sexual abuse and sexual assault.
As well, charges have been laid against the Christian brother movement and the last figure
that I heard was somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 million dollars that they were looking
for to them for compensation.
Now what was particularly tragic about this event of course is that not only were many
of these kids abused but they were abused at the hands of people who not only were Christians
but who were charged with the responsibility for them.
More than that, the abuse was covered up by the police, originally, by the government
and by the church.
And so you can understand that by the time this thing surfaced the anger exploded.
And of course we know since then Mount Casual hasn't been the only institution where
trouble has been happening, sexual abuse is not uncommon in the church even today.
As a matter of fact, just this past week, Calvin Christian Reform Church in Ottawa has
been in the news because they have gone to an unprecedented degree together with their
insurance company of laying charges or seeking restitution from one of their former
youth pastors who earlier pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a teed-ager in their congregation.
That's one story that I want to share with you this morning.
The second story of a similar, though somewhat different nature, relates to a very good
friend of mine who for many years served as an elder in his church.
He said to be one of the pillars of the church and really had a heart for the down and
the outers.
And so in the course of time, a woman, a very needy woman with two children came to the
congregation.
She did have a husband, but he was an alcoholic and quite violent when he was drinking
and not very supportive in terms of what her needs were.
So this man, my friend and his wife, together with the whole congregation, took this woman
into their hearts and into their lawyers.
As time went on, it became clear that an inappropriate relationship was developing between my friend
and this woman.
They saw an opportunity to be together when they had no reason to be together.
On his way home, he would stop by at her house.
He was very handy. Her husband wasn't looking after the house and so he'd repair and fixed
things.
They'd spend hours on the telephone in inappropriate, emotionally connected kinds of conversations
and soon his own marriage began to be threatened by this relationship.
Now in the early stages, he was involved with the blessing of the church, but then because
of the intimacy between the two of them, rumors began to circulate and those rumors were
not appropriately addressed.
At this point in time, other than an emotional entanglement, there wasn't a lot else that
was taking place, but because the rumors were not handled properly, friends that he had
known all his life, people that he thought knew his heart turned against him.
And one thing led to another became a huge scandal in the church and to make a long story
short, he and his wife ended up leaving the church.
He then increasingly threw himself into a relationship with this woman.
If you're going to be blamed for it anyway, why not step into it, almost destroyed his
own marriage and in fact ended up contributing to the dissolution of the church one year later,
the church fell apart and everybody went their own direction because remember, he was
one of the pillars of the church and the church couldn't handle the fallout that came along.
Why do I tell you these two stories of this morning?
Because they illustrate a dilemma that God's people face constantly if they take seriously
the challenge to roll up your sleeves and become involved in the lives of the broken
and the vulnerable.
And the question is this, how do we take care of widows and orphans and yet keep our
hands clean?
In other words, how do we take the most vulnerable and the most broken elements of society
into our hearts, which is the heart of God, which he calls us to do?
We can just step back and say, well, I could get infected by dirty people or by broken
people.
I want nothing to do with them.
How can we take them into our hearts?
How can we take them into our homes?
How can we take them into our churches?
And yet not cross a line of entanglement that can be destructive not only to our own lives
and to our own relationships, but to the church as well.
Very practical question.
And a very important question, even this past week in the news, there's the story of
a family in Toronto, perhaps you have followed yet.
They took a lady and her children from the Congo into their homes.
Have you seen that story?
Well, it turns out that that story that was pictured so ideally in newspapers a little
while ago has now a very unhappy ending.
The woman turns out to be pregnant, and I don't know what the details are, but there
is something that happened in this home that has broken off this relationship and the woman
and her children are now in a woman's shelter.
How do you engage a broken world and yet keep your hands clean?
I wonder, and that's all I can do about it.
I can wonder if that's what James has in mind.
When in verse 27 of chapter one of his book, he links looking after widows and orphans
in their distress with remaining unpolluted from the world.
Notice again how he puts it, "Religion, that God our Father accepts us pure and faultless
is this to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world."
Now let me say right at the outset there's a lot more to being polluted by the world than
getting entangled with widows and orphans and all that they represent.
But I wonder, is there a connection between the two of them, is there a linkage?
And so since we've already looked together at what it is to look after orphans and widows
in their distress, we're going to spend some time this week in Lord willing also next
week at what it means then to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
How can we be in the world and not of it?
How can we rub shoulders with things that are broken and often sinful and far removed
from God and not got sucked in to its brokenness?
Well I think it begins by understanding what the Bible means by the word world.
The word world in the original Greek is the word cosmos and you've often heard that
because it translates into the English word cosmos.
And the original meaning of the word cosmos is really quite fascinating because it means
order or an harmonious arrangement.
Here on when Peter talks about how wives are to show their beauty not by outward adorning
but by an inner and a quiet spirit, interestingly enough the word is cosmos.
It means things are in an harmonious order.
And so when the word cosmos is used in scripture is used in a variety of ways.
Most commonly it refers to the physical universe, the stars, the earth, what we know of as
the world.
When for example Acts chapter 1724 tells us the God who made the world and everything
in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands, the
reference is clearly to the physical universe we talk about the world in that way.
The word cosmos is also used to describe the human race in its entirety.
And so John 1219 the Pharisees said to one another, "See this is getting us nowhere.
Look how the whole world has gone after him, that is after Jesus, clearly the reference
there is to the whole human population is following after Jesus."
So it can mean the universe, it can mean the human race but most commonly the word cosmos
or world refers to the human race as it is organized in opposition and rebellion against
God if the world hates you says Jesus in John 1518, keep in mind that it hated me first.
The world is a fallen humanity that doesn't want to look to God for life, that doesn't
want to obey God, it wants to take matters into its own hands and it organizes its institutions
and its organizations and its powers to stand in opposition against God and in opposition
to the coming of his kingdom.
And all you have to do is listen to the news, all you have to do is listen to political
campaigns and campaign speeches and you see how anti-God the world really is.
It doesn't want to bend the knee before God, it wants to go its own way.
Now this world of which we are speaking, this collective organization of humanity in
its institutions that is opposed to God because it is ruled by the spirit of this age
is characterized as Scripture by three qualities that are very important to understand and I'll
tell you why.
The tendency for us as Christians is to think the world is out there somewhere.
The tendency for us to think is sort of stereotypically there are certain things that are worldly
that we ought not to be engaging in, we don't engage in them and so we are not worldly,
it's not that easy because the world isn't just a place, the world is a mindset.
The world is an attitude, the world is a spirit that is fed from below.
And the first characteristic of the world is what the Bible calls in earlier translations
of Scripture, the Revised Standard Version, for example, the pride of life.
And the pride of life is the confidence that fallen man has in his own ability and accomplishments
apart from God, let me say it one more time.
It is the confidence that fallen man has in his own ability and in his own accomplishments
apart from God.
And its surfaces and things like this are refusal to bend the knee before God, a determination
to do what I want, when I want and where I want, a preoccupation with their own looks,
talents and accomplishments.
Anytime we stand in front of a mirror and we admire and are proud of who we are and
what we have accomplished, we're tying in to the pride of life.
The reverse of that is true too.
Every time I stand there and turn negatively against myself because I don't measure up
to some perceived standard of measurement that makes me feel insecure and inferior means
that I am tasting of the pride of life.
Anytime we strut around, emotionally and internally, if not physically and proclaim
like Kinebuchadnezzar did many years ago, behold a mighty Babylon that I have built.
We are participating in what the Bible calls the pride of life.
It is the arrogance of a fallen human race that makes us think that we can do something
outside of and apart from God.
Understand it's not wrong to feel good about things.
Understand it's not wrong to be happy with our accomplishments.
The difference is, is it rooted in God in Christ, does he get the credit or do we take
the credit?
That's where the difference lies, the pride of life.
There isn't one of us even as God's children who is totally immune to this thing called the
pride of life.
Then there is what the Bible calls the lust of the eye and the lust of the eye is more
than sexual, it is more than being smitten by sexual imagery.
It refers to our inclination or our propensity to appeal to the eye, to motivate us to a
particular course of action.
Again, let me say that one more time.
It is our propensity, our inclination, to appeal to the visual, to appeal to the eye,
to get us to move into a particular course of action at surfaces and things like this,
and emphasis on outward appearance, often at the expense of inward beauty.
A preoccupation with worldly glitz in glamour, being overly impressed by how somebody looks,
what they have or what they have accumulated, and you only need to look at the advertising
industry or the entertainment industry.
And you see the role that the visual plays in trying to propel us into a course of action.
Hamburgers never look as good in the real world as they do on late night television when
you're hungry.
That's why they pay the big bucks, and all you have to do is look at an advertisement
and to see how the visual appeal, whether it's the car or the woman next to the car, is
used to try to draw you into buying that particular product.
And see, the purpose of that in the world is never to satisfy a legitimate need in a
legitimate way.
Now, it's to stir up a latent hunger in you.
It is to stir a longing for beauty, a longing for possession, a longing for control.
And it hopes to be able to draw on your need in that area to get you to do what they
want you to do, so that it's not about you being loved in that process.
But it's about knowing how to manipulate you, to get you to where we want you to be.
And again, there's nothing wrong with beauty, and there's nothing wrong with the admiration
of beauty.
God made it all, and He made it beautiful, where it crosses the line, is when it no longer
leads us to God and to honoring God and obeying God, but where it becomes a manipulative tool
to stir up in us desires that God says are worldly desires that cannot fully and legitimately
be met and the need to be put to death.
There's the pride of life, there's the lust of the eye, and then there is what the Bible
calls the lust of the flesh.
And flesh in Scripture is often used to describe fallen human nature.
When God first created us, He created us to have our needs met in relationship with
Him.
When we fell into sinter and are back upon Him, cut ourselves off from the source of
life, we ended up with deep hunger.
The Bible calls that hunger, particularly as it is located in our humanity, the flesh.
And the lust of the flesh then refers to the hunger that we have for paradise lost.
It refers to the longing that we have in our physical and emotional and spiritual being
for safety and security outside of God.
And so again, it surfaces, particularly in physical appetites, it surfaces in physical
hunger.
It surfaces in overeating, it surfaces in addictive behavior, it surfaces in an inordinate
sex drive, it surfaces in a recognition for fame and power, it surfaces in a recognition
for riches and a preoccupation with a hear in the now.
And you see that greed and how the world knows how to play on that greed in the popularity
of lottery tickets, for example, and also what people put themselves through to gain
the prize in reality shows.
I don't know how many of those you watch every so often, my wife and I will watch Fear
Factor and Monday night.
I see some of you do too.
And I probably shouldn't be admitting that to you here, but hey, it's the reality.
And when I see people eat on that show what they eat for the grand prize of $50,000, I
say people, you're absolutely crazy.
Maybe a million dollars, but not 50,000.
The lust of the flesh.
And again, there is nothing wrong with natural appetite.
There is nothing wrong with natural desire.
As long as the fire is placed in the fireplace and under the control of the Holy Spirit,
but caught off from God in the world, our needs become the tool of Satan.
And all you have to do is look at the world's preoccupation with comfort and feeling good
and the pursuit of pleasure, and you understand the power of the lust of the flesh.
Important to understand this, because as we'll see later on, you can be in the middle of
the most holy activity and experience the pride of life, the lust of the eye, and the lust
of the flesh, all of which are characteristics of what the Bible calls a world system.
And here's what's really important for us to understand, that God in heaven really
hates those worldly values.
He hates the pride of life and what it does to people into the world.
He hates the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and how it has broken and corrupted
the world.
And because he hates it, he wants his children to hate it as passionately as he hates it.
But if we don't, then instead of being the friends of God, we become the enemy of God.
Notice how James goes on, later on in chapter four, verse four, to put it.
This is addressed to Christians, he says, you adulterous people.
Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God and anyone who chooses
to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God, pretty clear cut.
Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God and anyone who chooses
to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
And John in 1 John chapter two, the verses 15, 16, and 17, puts it equally strongly when
he says, do not love the world or anything in the world.
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not eaten.
For everything that is in the world, the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and
the boasting of what he has and does, that's the pride of life, comes not from the Father,
but from the world.
The world and its desires pass away, but the man or the woman who does the will of God
lives forever.
The world, as we'll see later on in more detail, has in it inherently the seeds of self-destruction.
Because it is all about me and my bottomless needs, the more I cater to that, the bigger
a trail of destruction I leave behind, which is why one day God is going to judge the world
and He's going to establish His own kingdom.
And if in Christ Jesus we belong to He, then Scripture makes it very clear that He wants
us to stay away from the world.
Here's how Paul puts it, 2 Corinthians 6, 14, "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.
What do righteousness and wickedness have in common?
Our what fellowship can light have with darkness, and later on he goes on to say, "Coding from
the Old Testament, therefore come out from them and be separate," says the Lord, "touch
no unclean thing, and I will receive you, I will be a father to you, and you will be
my sons and daughters," says the Lord Almighty.
And that's also why James says then that true religion is not only looking after orphans
and widows in their distress, but to keep ourselves from being polluted by the world.
And the big question, of course, is how do we do this?
How can we be in the world and yet not of the world?
You can't just escape it, you can't just avoid having relationships with unbelievers.
How do we avoid being polluted by the world?
Well, there are four things I want to share with you. We'll only have time for the first
of those of this morning, and Lord willing, we'll come back to the other three next week
if we can.
How do we avoid being polluted by the world?
Well James says it begins by taking personal responsibility.
For notice, again, how he puts it, he says true religion is not only taking care of
widows and orphans in their affliction or in their distress, but to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world.
The Onus of Responsibility lies with you and with me in Christ to appropriate, as we'll
see later, all the benefits that he has accrued for us, nobody is going to do it for us.
We must keep ourselves from being polluted by the world.
Think of the world as a place with a toxic environment.
Breathe it in for any amount of time and it will kill you.
Well anybody with a sound mind and a love for his or her life is going to do what?
You're going to try to protect yourself from the toxicity of your environment.
And that may mean, first of all, that you avoid people and places that are toxic.
There are people in situations to stay away from if they are going to hinder our walk and
our relationships with the Lord.
What do believers have in common with unbelievers?
As I said a moment ago, that doesn't mean that you can't hang around with non-Christians.
Doesn't mean you can do relationships or business relationships with non-Christians.
Paul talks about that.
He said you'd have to leave the world.
If you're going to leave that kind of life, there are people who have tried it, but we'll
see later on wherever they go, the world goes with them because the world lives inside
them too.
Now it means you don't treat as equals or share equal friendship with those whose values
are essentially non-Christian values because all it takes is one rotten apple to spoil the
whole bearer.
And a lot of us, we think, well, just our presence will win them over nine times out of ten.
I see it going the other way because there is a natural pull downward that pulls you
into places that you want to stay away from outside of and apart from the amazing grace
of Jesus Christ.
Gary McDonald at our last B.C.M.
Devil Christian Ministries shared a little bit of his story, how he had been raised
in a Roman Catholic background but really didn't know the Lord and ran around with a lot
of his friends who also were not Christians.
And periodically when one of their groups or one of the kids that they knew gave their lives
to Christ, they knew exactly how to undermine their faith and pulled them back into their
own sphere of influence and all they did was remain friends with them and they knew that
sooner or later in the context of that friendship they would leave the Lord and fall back into
their own ways.
And he said with a rare exception, they were successful almost every time.
Bad company ruins good morals.
And so when he became a Christian he counted the cost and he understood that tactic probably
more clear than most people did and he said to his old friends, "Listen, I'm going to
follow Jesus and that means I can't hang around with you in the way that we used to hang
around because we're on a different path."
All through Scripture, God's people are the Ecclesia, they are the cold out ones, Abraham
was called out from her the coldest, the nation of Israel was called out from the nations
of the world.
The church is called out from the nations of the world to be a holy possession of God,
not to prove that they're more superior, not to be holier than thou, but because it is
only in our walk with God and in our relationship with God that we have enough light that we
can actually be of service to the world because otherwise, if we're sucked into their world,
we cannot help them out of what they're into for the glory of God.
So ask yourself the question, who do I hang around with?
And are there people in my life that I need to learn how to avoid because I'm not strong
enough to stand up for my faith when I'm in their presence?
And ask yourself the question, are there places that I need to avoid?
Because you see there are places where the pride of life, the lust of the flesh and the
lust of the eye, is particularly made manifest.
That may be the place where you work.
It may be the place where you hang out for entertainment, it may be the strip club down
the road.
It certainly will be the strip club down the road.
It will be the bar down the road, it will be any number of places.
It can even be good Christian organizations, so called, where the pride of life reigns,
where the lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh is predominant.
And you get into that environment and it's toxic.
It eats away at you.
Oh, and you won't wake up one morning saying, "Oh, I'm no longer a Christian, I'm not going
to follow Jesus," but you'll wake up one morning and you wonder where God went.
You'll wake up one morning and you decide you don't really want to go to church because
it doesn't draw you in the way that it used to draw you.
How many of us don't find yourselves waking up in a given Sunday morning, unwilling and
unwanted to go to church because we've either partied too hard or too long the night before,
or we have spent our minds being filled with the latest, racy entertainment that has put
us in a place where no longer we share in the passion for God.
See, there's in the one of us in this room that's perfectly innocent in all these matters
because the world is always around us and it's always trying to draw us in those places
where we can be grabbed.
You know, it used to be, not that many years ago, that Christians as a whole were far
more concerned about not being conformed to the world than we are today.
I mean, years ago in our own denomination, when the issue of worldly entertainment came
up, our synod, and this is quite a few decades ago, decided that there were three activities
that Christians ought not to be participating in.
Dancing, going to movies, and playing cards.
Now maybe that was too legalistic and maybe that's one of the reasons that's all fallen
by the wayside.
But you know, and I'm not at all legalistically inclined, trust me, but I wonder sometimes
if we haven't swung too far the other way.
And if we haven't become so confident of our own ability to interface with the world
and that it won't pull us down, that in fact we are being poisoned by the values of the
world in ways that our forefathers would have rolled over in their graves if they knew
the reality of it.
I mean, it used to be that if you wanted to associate with the world, at least you had
a go someplace and you had to make a positive choice.
Now all you have to do is turn it on the TV and the sewers of the world flow right into
your living room, all 450 channels in living color.
All you have to do is click on the internet.
And it's available to you in the privacy of your own home in ways that are unprecedented
in previous generations.
And then we wonder sometimes how we can live in a culture where we have so many people
who say to the Christians, so many people who go to church who have so blooming little
impact in our society, I'll tell you why.
Because at heart and at core, very often, we're just as caught up in the pride of life,
just as caught up in the lust of the eye, just as caught up in the lust of the flesh, as
is all the rest of the world and the salt has lost its saver.
And the light has been dim to the degree that it barely shines out of the darkness of
the world.
And when I read Scripture and I get us convicted about this and talking about this as any of
you might sitting where you are, trust me, when I read Scripture and I see how God hates
those values of the world and how He calls us away from that and how He invites us to
keep ourselves from being polluted by the world.
Then I cry out from within me and I say, oh God, do the work in me.
Do the work in the church where we are so passionately in love with you, so passionately
in love with your purposes.
So passionately devoted to you that all the glories of this world grow faintly dim in
the light of your glory and grace.
And I'm going to stop here in just a moment, but before I do, I want to leave with you
this challenge.
Ask yourself this week, this question, are there places where I have become entangled
with the world?
Are there places where the pride of life has grabbed hold of my heart and it has alienated
me from a quiet and a humble dependence on the light?
Ask yourself the question, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, are there places
where I am catering to the flesh in ways that are making me stronger in my attraction
to the world and weaker in my attraction to God?
Are there people that I have in my life that I know the Holy Spirit is speaking to me
about where at the very least I need to take a stand uncompromisingly for Jesus Christ
and then let the chips fall where they may?
Are there places where I hang out?
Are there activities that I participate in?
Are there things that my eyes and my heart are glued to you?
That not only do not help my journey with the Lord, but that slowly but surely fill
me with toxicity and that make my heart cold to the things of God.
Ask yourself the question, the love that I had for Jesus when I first came to know
Him, how has that deemed and if it has, why has it, then ask the Lord for grace to take
up your cross and to follow Jesus and to cry out to Him and to invite Him into those
places where alone we can be separated from the world and yielded to the kingdom of God.
That's where we're going to leave it this morning.
We're going to pick it up from there next week and we're going to see that ultimately
the only remedy to this is our relationship with the Lord Jesus because He's the only one
who has defeated all of this and who by His power at work with in us can help us to stand
successfully in the midst of incredible temptations.
To follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning
back, no turning back, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
will you decide now to follow Jesus will you decide now to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back