Larry Craig
First Congregational Church
September 25, 2011
Change (Part 1)
1.
If you could change your life, what would you change?
2.
When I ask that, I know that some of you will say, I
wouldn’t change a thing. And, in
general, I would say that is a good thing to say. It means that you have essentially made peace
with your life. You appreciate and value
the life that you have.
3. Yet looking
at life in another way, humans have a tendency to settle for too little in
life.
It is common for people to fill
their lives with entertainment, amusements, new toys, things that provide some
kind of immediate gratification or joy, and they seek nothing more for their
lives. We eat food that is not good for
us, because it tastes good and makes us happy for the moment. And we need to feel happy now. We spend hours a day watching or playing
games (I mean sports). We watch hours of
movies and television, watching other people act out lives that we can lose
ourselves into. We listen to music or
television or radio just for noise, so we don’t have to be alone with our own
thoughts in silence.
4. But imagine
your child comes home from school with their report card, and they are happy
because they passed their grade. What is
that, all D’s? You want to keep a positive attitude with your child, yet would
you not subtly and tenderly and tactfully inquire whether they were doing their
best, whether they knew the importance of learning? And growth?
5. Imagine you
met a woman with a child in a stroller, and you said, How cute! How old is he? And she said, 36. All of a sudden he’s not cute anymore. When we are born into this world, we all
start out as cute babies, but we are not meant to stay that way. With growth comes change. Not all change is growth or good. But all growth involves change.
6. God looks at
your life and says: I made you in my
image. You are made for something.
7. Theologians
may argue about all that it means to be created in God’s image, but they seem
to agree that, whatever else it means, it means that humans have a mind,
emotions, and a will.
8. We will
probably never know all that that means until after we are dead, but whatever
else it means, it means that you are important, important to God, and hopefully
important to each other.
9. It means
that your life has purpose and meaning.
You may not know what all that is right now, but you may never look for
it until you know first that you have it.
10. The Bible
describes some of the changes that will occur if we are to fulfill our purpose
in life. Over the next two weeks, I
would like to look at six of these changes.
11. When I say this, I am well aware that I may
be encouraging some people to go somewhere they would rather not go. Probably the biggest single thing in life
that humans need to learn is to come to see and believe that God really wants
what is best for us and that to live our life with God’s complete direction is
a life that we would find far more fulfilling than what we could think up on
our own. Maybe I should have preached on
that this morning. Maybe another time. Hopefully as we look at each of these
changes, you will see that these indeed are changes highly to be desired.
I. The change
of a new beginning John
3:1-8
The first is the change of a new beginning. Have you ever worked on something for a long
time and then realized that you were better off starting all over again? Life is like that in some ways.
The Bible says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom. That means that
when or if you finally acknowledge God’s place in your life, everything
changes. We can go our whole lives,
reading, learning, thinking, planning, but then God comes along and you find
that everything changes. And everything
changes in at least three ways.
A. A new set of
values
I saw this in my own life when I was thirteen. I was attending confirmation classes in my Lutheran Church
Once you realize that you believe in God, nothing is the
same anymore. God automatically becomes
the most important thing in life.
Everything else is seen as temporary.
Only God is everlasting and unchangeable. Friends, family, jobs, schools - One day these will all be gone, and it will
be just you and God face to face. This
changes everything.
Everything you thought you knew, everything that was
important before, everything you lived for before is now different.
B. A new nature
Another reason you get new values is that you receive a new
nature from God. In John 3 , one of the leading Jewish
religious leaders came to Jesus, and Jesus told him he needed to be born
again.
This word translated ‘again’ is ambiguous. It means literally ‘from above’, but it can
also mean simply ‘again’ or ‘from the beginning,’ which was how Nicodemus apparently
understood it when he asks: Can a man be born all over again?
But apart from this new birth, a person cannot see the Kingdom of God
Our lives can be filled with noise and music and television
and computers and concrete and buildings so that we can think that what we see
and touch and hear is all there is. But
as Jesus said: that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit. Paul said
it another way in I
Corinthians 2:7-16 : The
natural man does not receive the things of God neither can he know them,
because they require the Spirit to discern them. .
Without being born from above, we are like a television set with no
receiver or antenna.
Jesus then explains to Nicodemus how this new beginning is
to take place. He draws on a story from
the Old Testament, where the people began grumbling for the umpteenth time about
God’s care and help for them, and they began to be bitten by poisonous snakes. Great numbers of the people began dying. Moses was told by God to make a serpent out
of bronze and put it on a pole in the middle of the camp. Anyone who was bitten by a snake could look
at the serpent and be healed.
Jesus said that this was a picture of what happens when a
person comes to Christ for salvation.
They recognize the sentence of death on their life, and they see Jesus
dying on their behalf on the cross. And
these then receive eternal life.
But don’t make the mistake of just thinking of this as a
ticket to heaven when you die. John 1:13 says that this person
is born of God. Do you realize what that
means? Do you have children of your
own? Do you know why God created life in
such a way that people have children? So
you can understand in some small way the relationship that God desires to have
with you, so you can feel a little of the kind of love that God has for
you. It’s possibly the hardest thing in
life to do. This is why families are so
important in life. .
You get at least two chances to get it right. First you all had parents. That doesn’t always work out, so then you get
another chance when you have your own children.
And even that doesn’t always work out.
Then maybe you just have to take God’s word for it.
C. A new direction:
Imagine we are all lost in a deep dark forest. Someone says that it’s OK: they have a
map. But there are two problems. We don’t know where we are on the map, and we
don’t know which way is north.
For life on this planet, either there is a program and a
plan, or there is nothing, and everyone is on their own. You can’t go to a store and buy anything
without receiving a hundred page book telling you how this thing works. And life is like that as well. If our Manufacturer, God, doesn’t tell us how
this thing works, then everything is trial and error, and we end up wasting our
whole life on the trial, and we won’t know all the results until after we are
dead.
This is where science is making its big mistake today. Science cannot prove or disprove the
existence of God, but what it does do is that it ASSUMES that there is no God,
and then it tries to explain life, the origins of life, and everything in it in
a way that doesn’t require a God, even though their explanations are contrary
to reason and all the known laws of science.
If you were to go to the moon and find a computer buried in the dust,
you would not say that this developed naturally over millions of years through
natural means. You would say that
someone had been there before. Yet the
human mind is far more complex and magnificent than any computer. Yet they say that it developed through random
mutations over billions of years. And
they have cold days in hell too.
II. The second change
is the change of a new life. I Samuel 10:1 ,5-7 ,9
This passage in the Old Testament is unusual for two
reasons. First, it describes something
that we usually only associate with the New Testament, but also because it is
the only passage like this in the whole Bible.
But what it describes is meant to be a common experience for all those
who name the name of Christ.
There are three elements to this change of a new life.
1) It is caused by
the presence of the Holy Spirit in one’s life.
The details surrounding this work of the Holy Spirit are debated among
believers, but the outcome should not be.
What happened occasionally in the Old Testament at critical times is
meant to be normative for believers today.
In John 4 ,
it is drinking water such that which you will never thirst again.
In John 7 ,
it is rivers of living water from which we are to drink and which many
understand as flowing though our lives
In Romans 15 ,
it is being filled with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in
hope through the power of the Holy Spirit
In I
Corinthians 12 , it is having the manifestation of the Spirit in us
for the common good.
In II
Corinthians 5 , it is becoming a new creature in Christ, Old things have passed way, and all things
have become new.
In Galatians 5 ,
it is the fruit of the Spirit producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faith, meekness, and self-control in our lives
In Ephesians 3 ,
it is God doing exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think
according to the power that is at work within us.
In Philippians 4 ,
it is being able to do all things through Christ who strengthens us.
But you get the point.
The Holy Spirit will change how we see and how we experience
life. He gives us power to overcome
habits, addictions, and weaknesses and to fill us with hope and strength for
whatever task lies ahead.
Does this all sound like pie in the sky and ‘wishful
thinking? It’s not, but we can’t solve
all of life’s problems in one sermon, so if I can at least whet your appetite,
it can get you started in the right direction.
2) The second element
is that the Holy Spirit will work through us in demonstration of the power of
God. We won’t all prophesy, but you can
expect to see God at work. We already
touched on some of that already.
In I
Corinthians 12 , Paul says that to each of us is given the manifestation
of the Spirit for the common good. If
you are not seeing it, know that it is for you.
Find it. Ask God for it, and be
open to whatever it might be.
3) The third element
is God’s direction in our lives. The
prophet told Saul to do literally what his hand finds to do, for God is with
him. In the Bible, when it talks about
God being with someone, it is rarely talking about God’s location. It is talking about God’s help. Or to put it another way, if God is with
somebody, He is there to help that person..
Help what? As we said
before, He is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we can ask or
think. And again, when Paul says that
God is able, it also means that He is quite willing to do it as well.
III. The change
of a new purpose (mind) Romans 12:1 ,2
Christians are sometimes defined by their behavior, things
that we either do or don’t do. But it
goes much deeper than that. It’s a new
way of thinking in contrast with the thinking of the age. And the age that Paul was living in and the
age in which we live are quite similar.
In Paul’s day, there were many gods.
In our day, there are either many gods or no gods. But ultimately it comes down to the same
thing.
Where there are many gods, you basically decide which god to
follow, essentially deciding for yourself what you believe about life and
everything in it. If there is no god,
you essentially decide for yourself what you believe about life and everything
in it.
Years ago, Christians used to object to Hollywood
movies for objectionable material, like nudity and foul language. But there is something far more insidious at
work here: the portrayal of ungodly thinking as normal and common.
Paul says that, as we understand God’s compassion for us and
all that He has done for us, we give out lives in service to God, and that
involves a new way of thinking about life.
We are not to pretend, like the ungodly, that we are on our own, that we
decide ultimately how we should live our lives, that we don’t have to give an
account to anyone for the decisions we make, apart, of course, from those in
our lives who are directly affected by them.
The Christian has a different attitude. A Christian knows that, just as you buy
something from the store and you receive a printed manual telling you how the
thing works, so God, our Creator and manufacturer, has provided us with the
instruction manual, telling us how all this works. We can’t understand everything, but He has
given us the information we need to lead a good and fruitful life.
We transform our thinking when we learn to see things and
life from God’s perspective. He
describes these things in three ways:
good, well-pleasing, and perfect (or complete). Some translations read: that you may prove
what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God, as though there is
another kind of God’s will. But that
which is good, acceptable, and perfect IS the will of God.
A. But what is
good? Our modern age has lost the
meaning of ‘good,’ When we say that a
book is good, we generally mean only that we like it. We may insist that someone else read the same
book, because we expect that they will like it too. We may even think the book is important to
that other person. But in the end, there
is no binding standard by which we can call the book good.
A rich man once called Jesus ‘Good teacher,’ and Jesus’
reply was that There is no one good but God.
In the rest of chapter 12 here, Paul tells us what the good
is, what it looks like in real life. But
it still doesn’t answer what makes something good.
There are two distinct but overlapping qualities that make
something good. The first is that
something corresponds most closely to what it is intended to do or be. This may be well and good for washing
machines and computers, things that humans make, but what about the rest of
life.
The good corresponds to what and how God intended things to
be. When God gives commands in the
Bible, it is not an arbitrary exertion of His power and authority, but a
description of how things are, how they are meant to be.
When you see the Ten Commandments telling you not to steal,
lie, or commit adultery, don’t think of God making up a bunch of rules to test
you, to make your life hard. Think of it
as the manufacturer telling you how this thing called human life is made to
work.
B. To say that
something has to be well pleasing to God in order to be God’s will seems to be
tautological, kind of a circular reasoning.
Could God’s will not be pleasing to Him?
But there is something noteworthy about this Greek
word. Nine times in the Old Testament it
is used to translate the Hebrew word for somebody walking with or before
God. And then twice in the Apocrypha,
this word is used to describe Enoch in the same way it was used in the Old
Testament. So where the Hebrew Bible
says that Enoch walked with God, the Greek translation says that Enoch pleased
God. Hebrews 11:5 used this Greek expression of Enoch pleasing
God, and then verse 6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God.
Paul no doubt was aware of all this.
I believe there is something else going on here. Two people can have the exact same behavior,
but because one person is precious to you, everything they do pleases you. It brings joy to your heart, not from the
particular acts in themselves, but because of what this person means to
you. A person who loves God wants to
please God, and God is pleased both by this person’s actions as well as by the
fact that this person loves Him and wants to please Him. I believe this word well-pleasing says as
much about God as it says about the person.
The same outward actions from a person who cares nothing
about God would not be well-pleasing to God.
What makes this person’s actions well-pleasing to God is primarily due
to the relationship that this person has with God.
C. The third
word that describes the will of God is often translated as ‘perfect.’ Which can be disheartening to a believer,
because it pictures something unattainable in this life. How can anyone suppose they could do anything
that would be regarded as perfect?
But that is the modern understanding of perfection. When used in reference to God, indeed God is
perfect in every sense. But the word is
often applied to human beings. This word
was applied to Noah. God commands His
people to be ‘perfect’ in Deuteronomy
18:13 , and Jesus does the same in Matthew 5:48 . So something else must be involved here.
The word when applied to believers describes a state of
maturity, a spiritual condition where one’s heart is fully set on knowing and
serving God. This person understands and
believes that God knows and wants what is best for him, and he pursues this
with a whole heart.
So when God’s will is described as that which is perfect, it
speaks of a course of life joyfully intent on doing things consistent with a
knowledge of the revelation of God.
Conclusion:
Next week we will look at three more changes that will occur
as we look to have God fill more and more of our lives.
For now, know that you are created in God’s image. Your life is important, and your life is
important to God. Your life has purpose,
and your life has meaning.
Pursue God with all your heart, because this is where your
life really begins, and this is where you will find what you were made to be.
Let us pray.
Prayer:
Our Father, our Creator
You have made us and this thing called life and the world we
live in.
Life is short, and too soon we come to the end of our
days. We ask that you show us the things
that matter and how best to lives the lives you have given us. Let us not be content with or while away our
lives on things of little importance.
When we grow physically, we have some picture or image of
what growing up should look like. We
often don’t have a picture of what we would look like if we fully grow up
spiritually.
We prayed that you would open our eyes, Lord. Amen.
Open our eyes, in Jesus’ name.
Now GO. in
peace, EXPECTING, that God will SPEAK to you and show you what great things He wants to
do IN and THROUGH your life.
Amen.
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