©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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1/16/00
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The Lie That Binds
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1/16/00 The Lie That Binds
We are involved in an ongoing study
about the freedom Christ offers His people.
Our study began several months ago
with a statement made by Christ
to His people
recorded for us in John 8:32,
...and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
That single statement
set the foundation for everything we have done since then.
Through that statement
we came to understand the kind of freedom Christ offers us -
not the false freedom offered by our culture giving us the "right"
to live out our bondage,
but the promise,
and hope,
and growing reality of the true freedom that breaks the power of that bondage in our lives.
And through that statement of Christ's
we also saw the crucial link
between freedom and truth.
Our freedom becomes a reality in our lives
to the degree we understand
and accept
and build our lives upon the truth.
From there our study moved on
to the 6th chapter of Romans
where Paul has been revealing to us
some of those areas of truth
we need to understand
in order for us to experience the freedom we long for.
The passage we have been studying is Romans 6:11-14,
Rom. 6:11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Rom. 6:12 ¶ Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,
Rom. 6:13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of
unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your
members as instruments of righteousness to God.
Rom. 6:14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
And the very first statement we encountered in that passage
has confronted us with how far from the truth our thinking really is.
Paul says, Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
A few weeks ago
we spent a whole morning
talking about why it is so difficult
for us to hear that truth.
We look at our inconsistent behavior,
we look at our ongoing battles with sin,
we look at so many of the attitudes
and the emotions
and the actions that are so much less than what we long for,
and a statement that says, Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in
Christ Jesus seems ridiculous to us.
And because we continue to define our true identity
on the basis what we experience
rather than on the basis
of what our God says about us
we continue to live out
the reality of those lies in our lives.
In the course of our study two weeks ago
I mentioned that the Christian who continues to live
in bondage to sin in some area of his life does so
because he has allowed two powerful lies
to go unchallenged in his thinking.
#1. He believes his sin is consistent with who he really is -
he believes it fits with his perception of his true identity.
He looks at himself and says,
"This is who I am.
It may not be consistent with what God says,
but I can't change who I am
and He understands and takes me just the way I am."
And #2, he believes that his sin
is necessary in order for his needs to be met.
Using a severely twisted concept of grace
he believes that one of God's primary goals through Christ
is to free us as Christians to do
whatever we think we need to do
in order to attempt to meet
whatever needs we have
in whatever ways we think will be effective.
Now, we have spent quite a bit of time so far on the first of those lies.
We have talked about the way in which
God not only forgives our sins when we come to Him through Christ,
but He actually recreates us at the deepest level of our being,
placing within us a totally new identity
in the form of an inner spirit
that is righteous,
and pure,
and absolutely and eternally holy.
You've heard me talk frequently
about they way in which God addresses us as His "holy ones".
Through His Word
and through His Spirit
He then seeks to reshape our perception of ourselves
in order to bring it into conformity
with the change that has already taken place within us.
And the foundation of God's whole program for freeing us
from the power of sin in our lives
is a foundation that rests upon our accepting the reality of our new identity in Christ.
It does not mean we deny the reality
of our ongoing battles with the evil in our lives,
but it does mean we begin those battles
by allowing not the evil
but our God to shape our perception of ourselves.
When Paul allowed us to listen in
on his own discovery of this truth
as he recorded it for us in Romans 7,
when he finally came to a clear understanding
of the way things really are for the Christian,
he said in Rom. 7:21 "I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who
wants to do good."
I consider that to be among the most remarkable statements in all of Scripture.
Paul does not deny the existence
of the ongoing evil impulses within him,
but neither does he allow that evil
to shape his self-concept.
Paul describes Himself in Christ as
... the one who wants to do good.
That is who Paul is at the deepest level.
He is holy.
He loves righteousness.
He longs constantly, perfectly for the reality of that righteousness in his life.
That is what He was talking about
in the passage we've been studying
where he calls us to consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Paul says, "The real me is the one who wants to do good."
But at the same time he honestly acknowledges
that evil is still present within his physical body,
fighting against his true new identity.
Now, we're not done with this concept yet,
but I want us to spend the rest of this morning looking at the second of those two lies,
the lie of believing that our sin is necessary
in order for our needs to be met.
Those of you who have read The Grace Exchange
will recognize where we're going from here on,
but any discussion of Christ's efforts
to break the bondage of sin in our lives would be incomplete
without our talking about
a powerful
and remarkable lie Satan uses in the lives of Christians.
In fact, when it comes to our battle for moral purity
I believe this one lie
has more power to defeat the Christian
than anything else Satan has ever used against the people of God.
You may not have become fully aware of it,
but a dramatic change takes place in our attitude toward sin
and in our battle with sin
at the time we enter the family of God through our faith in Christ.
Before we knew our Lord
there were times when we would fight against Him
and against what He said to us about morality
simply because our spirits were in rebellion against Him
and we resented His intrusion into our lives.
But once that recreative process took place within us,
and once He placed within us
a new heart,
a new inner spirit,
along with that new heart
came a love for righteousness
and a longing to live a life pleasing to our Lord.
Before we come to Christ
we think we should be good.
After we come to Christ
we wish we could be good.
Some of the most miserable,
unhappy people in the world
are not the non-Christians
who are living out their full-blown,
self-centered rebellion against God.
Certainly they reap the ongoing consequences of their rebellion,
which will make life more difficult for them.
But there is no great tension between their inner spirit
and the way in which they are living.
No.
Some of the most unhappy people in the world
are Christians
who have been pulled back into old patterns of sinful behavior.
They live with a recreated spirit within them
that continues to hunger for purity,
and righteousness,
and a life pleasing to God.
And the tension created between
how they are living
and what their spirit longs for
creates tremendous emotional,
mental,
psychological,
and even physical stress within them.
But why in the world would a Christian
who has discovered the reality of God's love,
and tasted of the joys of righteous living,
ever return again to those old patterns?
What kind of attack could Satan use
that would have sufficient power
to motivate the child of God to go against his own heart longings for righteousness?
EX. A number of years ago I was in a conversation with a young lady
who was just beginning a new career,
a career she was very excited about.
She was a Christian.
She was married,
she and her husband had children,
and her husband was also involved in his own career.
As I talked with her
I could see that her new career
was something she enjoyed very much.
In fact, for several months
she had been pouring herself into it
at least six and often seven days a week.
But the stress of husband, children, and career was becoming intense.
She couldn't do it all.
No one could.
Then she made a statement that
when I heard it
made me fear for her.
She said, "I have decided to take Saturdays off because my husband needs me."
On the surface it seemed like it was just the right sort of choice
for a Christian wife to make.
But when she said it
I feared that perhaps THE LIE
had taken root in her
and was already bearing fruit.
A few months later
I heard she was filing for divorce.
Now, before I share with you
what this powerful lie is
and explain why it's so powerful in the lives of Christians,
I need to first offer a little background on human needs.
And the easiest way for me to do this
is through 5 statements.
#1. When God created us
He designed us with a wide variety of human needs.
We have physical needs.
We need food, water, shelter, air, warmth.
We have emotional and psychological needs.
We need to feel safe.
We need to know we are loved.
We need to know we have purpose and significance and value.
We need to feel productive,
we need to be able to play, etc, etc.
We have intellectual needs to learn
and use what we learn productively.
We have social needs,
and spiritual needs.
#2. The needs themselves are not sinful,
nor are they the result of sin.
If we took the time
we could look at Adam's life before he sinned
as it is presented in Genesis 2
and we would see him needing food, water, shelter, work, and love relationships with both God and Eve.
None of his basic needs were the result of his sin.
They were simply a "given" of God's design for him.
#3. Our sin did not make us more needy,
it only separated us from the One who can meet those needs or show us how to meet them.
That separation created two major problems.
a. It left us with only ourselves as a resource for figuring out how life works
and how our needs can be met.
b. It left us with both a fundamental distrust of God
and a hostility toward Him
that drives us to reject the very answers we long for.
#4. There is no Biblical basis
for a Christian to feel guilty
because he still faces intense needs within himself after becoming a Christian.
And here again,
if we took the time we could look at passages that make it clear
that even Christ Himself
when He was on this earth
needed rest, and food, and companionship.
The big change that takes place in our relationship to our needs when we come to Christ
is not that our needs change,
but rather that we enter into a love relationship with the only One who knows perfectly
how all of those needs can be met.
He even talks to us about this in Philippians 4:19.
And my God shall supply all your needs
according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
#5.The only thing right or wrong in our relationship to our needs is found in how we seek to meet those needs.
And the problem, of course,
is that each of us bring with us
into our relationship with Christ
some destructive need-meeting techniques,
techniques that didn't work very well for us in the past,
but techniques that are now firmly established in our memories,
and minds,
and emotions.
EX. God designed us with a need for love.
But apart from the input of our God
we can only guess at how
strong, durable love relationships are built.
So we charge in, armed only with flawed patterns of relationships
modeled for us from our childhood.
Did you know that a high percentage
of children who have been abused
grow up to be parents
who then abuse their own children?
The very thing they most hated about their own childhood
they then live out in their adult relationships with their own children.
Apart from the input of our God
we don't know how to meet our needs
and so we simply live out those patterns
that have been recorded in us through experience.
And we could spend the rest of the morning
talking about the flawed approaches we bring
to the process of attempting to meet our needs.
How do we handle loneliness?
How do we handle fear?
How do we handle failure?
How do we handle guilt?
How do we handle success?
How do we handle our sexual needs?
And on and on.
With some of them
we may have learned patterns
that are consistent with truth,
and we find them working well in our lives.
With others, however, the patterns we have learned from the past
are doing us far more damage than they are good.
Now,
when God presents His moral framework to us,
implied in that presentation
is the understanding that He is offering us a blueprint
for the only way in which our human needs can be met effectively.
And now for THE LIE.
Perhaps the single most effective tool
Satan has in his efforts to deceive Christians into moral self-destruction
is found in his attempt to convince us
that God's moral framework
is not a protection for us,
but rather a barrier to keep us
from the things we feel we must have
in order to meet our needs.
He seeks to convince us that we must choose:
And the great power of this lie
comes from the fact that
once we buy into it
either way we choose, we loose.
If we choose to follow after what we think we must have in order to meet our needs,
the result will be bondage,
damaged relationships,
a sense of guilt and shame,
fear of discovery,
and continued unmet needs.
But if we choose obedience to what God says,
believing we do so at the cost of meeting our needs,
it will create an underlying resentment and distrust of God.
This is where that young lady I told you about earlier was at.
She was going to obey what God required of her -
choosing her husband over her career.
But she was going to do it
believing that her obedience to God
would deprive her of the career success she needed
in order to find real fulfillment in life.
She made what appeared to be the "Christian" choice,
but it was a choice that reinforced in her
a distrust in a God who appeared to be demanding that she deny her own needs
for the sake of blind obedience.
Now, I know this is a difficult place to stop this study,
but we're out of time.
Next week I'll pick it up here
and we'll look at the 3 essential elements
that help to disarm the power of this lie in our lives.