©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
|
04/13/03 |
The Lies That Bind |
Ephesians 2:1-10 |
4/13/03 The Lies That Bind
Our study last week of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
took us into several parallel verses in Colossians
and, on thinking about it this past week,
I’ve decided it might be of value for us to spend a little more time
with some of what we were looking at.
If you were with us you’ll remember that we were studing a statement Paul makes in Ephesians 2:6
in which he tells
us that God “... raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus...”.
He is describing for us
the way in which God united our spirits
with Himself in an eternal protective union
at the time we came to Him through faith in Christ’s death for our sins.
In that parallel passage in Colossians 3:3
Paul describes us as being “... hidden with Christ in God.”
The words used by Paul are carefully chosen
both to communicate the truth
and to create for us the mental picture of an inseparable and eternal love union
between us and our God.
There’s one phrase we skipped over in this Ephesians passage
that I want to emphasis now
because it is a crucial part of the overall message Paul wants to communicate,
a phrase found in Ephesians 2:4 where Paul says,
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love
with which He loved us...
When I read that phrase I see Paul reaching for just the right words
to correctly and powerfully present to us
the truth about this God who has called us to Himself.
He isn’t just a merciful God,
He is a God RICH in mercy.
God’s heart of mercy is the foundation upon which His every action toward us is based.
And it isn’t just that He loves us,
but it is because of His GREAT love with which He loved us...
Our Lord knows that when we come to Him
we come with our minds filled with reservations,
and doubts,
and concerns about what we can really expect from our God.
We know that, if He chooses too,
there’s a whole bunch of stuff in our lives
that He can pull out and confront us with,
things that, when we are honest about them,
cause us a sense of shame,
and failure,
and helplessness.
We may have created a reasonably good image before our fellow human beings,
but the thought of standing before our Creator
is a whole different matter.
Obviously He knows the truth,
and the possibility of Him buying into any of our excuses
just doesn’t seem real hopeful.
It’s no wonder we all spend so much energy
playing mental games with our God,
pretending He’s not there,
or pretending He grades on the curve and we are surely somewhere in the middle,
or pretending one good act erases one bad act so we’re probably safe,
or maybe just telling ourselves
that His moral standards are utterly unreasonable,
and impractical,
and incapable of providing us with an approach to life in which our needs can truly be met.
Nothing has really changed, you know,
since Adam and Eve first tried to hide from God in the Garden of Eden.
We may look at that account in the book of Genesis
and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Here is the Garden God Himself created,
in the world He alone brought into existence,
and here are Adam and Eve
hiding behind a little bush
saying to one another, “Keep real still...maybe He won’t see us...”
And yet every one of us do exactly the same thing.
We find our own little bush to hide behind.
“There’s so many other people in the world,
I’ll bet He doesn’t even know I’m here.”
Or maybe we hide behind a frantic schedule
that just simply doesn’t allow for any time
to worry about that God thing.
Or we hide behind a nice big bush of religion,
telling ourselves that our good works,
and religious devotion,
and faithful church involvement
will surely put us in good standing with God.
Or maybe we hide behind our keen intellect,
skillfully unmasking what we believe to be the “flaws”
in either the Christian message
or, more likely, in the Christians who claim to believe that message.
Or we find one of the countless other bushes in our world,
crouching,
hiding,
hoping He’ll just walk on by.
But you remember what happened with Adam and Eve, don’t you?
The Lord called their names.
And He’s been doing the same thing
with every one of us ever since.
That’s why some of you are here this morning...
because God has been calling your name
and, the truth is, you don’t know what to do about it.
Right now you probably think it’s you reaching out to God.
But it’s not.
It’s God reaching out to you.
He’s the One who has created within you
that hunger for Him,
that curiosity to find out a little more,
that desire you’ve found within yourself
to get things straightened out between you and Him.
That’s Him calling your name.
That’s Him making you aware
that He knows exactly where you are,
and who you are.
That’s Him creating within you
the courage to stand up
and step out from behind your hiding place.
And these words here in Ephesians 2:4
are written to prepare us for that interview
between us and our God
that will follow if we respond to His calling our name.
EPH 2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His
great love with which He loved us...
Do you know why He’s been calling your name?
Do you know why He stopped right in front of that bush you’ve been hiding behind?
Do you know why He’s been coaxing you out into His light?
I can tell you why in a single sentence.
Or rather, I can let the Apostle John tell you.
JOH 3:17
"For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but
that the world might be saved through Him.
There it is again,
the same message.
EPH 2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us...
And just so we see this whole thing correctly,
just so that we don’t deceive ourselves into believing
that maybe He didn’t notice all those things in our lives
that drove us into hiding in the first place,
let’s continue on and see how Paul completes that sentence.
EPH 2:4-5 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions...
I think that’s God’s way of saying,
“You’re really quite a little mess, aren’t you, my child?”
But that isn’t where the sentence stops.
You see, there’s no verb yet.
Do you remember all that stuff from back in your school days?
Do you remember how every sentence has to have both a subject and a verb?
The subject is the person or the thing doing whatever it is that’s being done,
and the verb
tells us what the subject did.
Now, I don’t want to turn this into a high school English class,
but sometimes it helps us to grasp what’s really going on in some passage of Scripture
if we see the structure of the sentence.
And this particular sentence
is carefully constructed to communicate a remarkable message.
Now, so far we’ve seen the subject - But God...
God Himself is the One doing whatever it is that’s being done.
We don’t know what it is He’s doing, yet,
but we know He’s the One doing it.
But then, before we are told what it is that God has done,
we are given three powerful clarifying phrases
that set the stage for what God has done.
It’s a little bit like this.
Here is a basic sentence:
Larry ran into the house.
The subject is “Larry”
and the verb is “ran”,
and then we’re told where Larry ran...into the house.
Big deal!
But now, let’s put some modifying and defining phrases into that sentence.
Larry, being courageous beyond measure, because of the overwhelming strength of his love, even though the building was a blazing inferno, ran into the house so that he could rescue his beloved Sandee.
And you can see how all of those added phrases
provide crucial information about the subject and the verb.
Now, we have a similar thing happening in this sentence spoken to us by God through Paul.
We know what the subject is - GOD.
And we have been given three key phrases about that subject:
The first one tells us what this God is like-
being rich in mercy...
The second one tells us what motivated Him to do what He has done -
because of His great love with which He loved us...
And the third tells us what it is He had to overcome in us in order to do what He did -
even when we were dead in our transgressions...
And then, after using those phrases to prepare us for what He’s done,
we finally get to the verb,
or, in this case the verbs
describing for us what this God of ours has done -
God...made us alive together with Christ,
and raised us
up with Him,
and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus...
And the sentence doesn’t stop there.
God’s communication to us goes one step farther,
revealing to us the goal God wanted to accomplish
as a result of what He has done -
... so that in the ages to come He might show the
surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
If you’ve been looking for a single sentence in Scripture
that states for us everything we most need to understand
about ourselves,
about our God,
and about what He has accomplished for us through Jesus Christ,
I would offer you this one.
But I don’t want to leave this
without taking the application of this truth
that we were looking at last week
and clarifying it a little more.
We were using that parallel passage in Colossians
where Paul is talking with the Colossians about this same truth.
He says, COL 3:1 Therefore if you have been raised up
with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right
hand of God.
With the Colossians, though,
Paul doesn’t just state the truth - that we have been raised up with Christ -
but he goes on to explain
how we can take this truth
and apply it to our lives on a daily basis.
He goes on to say,
COL 3:2 Set your mind on the things above, not on the
things that are on earth.
And toward the close of our time together last week
I suggested that when Paul tells us to,
“Set your mind on the things
above, not on the things that are on earth”,
he is telling us
that our most effective weapon against the lies that bombard our reasoning and our emotions each day
is the weapon of choosing to turn our minds once again onto the truth
and then telling ourselves that truth,
no matter what we may be feeling at the moment.
I want to say some more about that
to help us better appreciate what’s really going on here.
But, before I go any farther this morning,
I need to take a little side-track
and share something with you
that, quite honestly, I should have mentioned when I first began.
If you were with us last week,
you may remember that at one point I was joking about a cold I’d picked up two weeks ago,
and that during one particularly rough night
I woke up terrified that I’d contracted that deadly severe acute respiratory syndrom that’s entered the U.S.
Well, last Sunday evening my “cold” took a terrible turn for the worse,
and late Sunday night I was having so much trouble breathing
that Sandee finally took me into the Emergency Room.
They strapped an oxygen mask onto me
and ran all sorts of tests,
and, though the final lab reports are still not back,
it does now appear as though,
when Sandee and I were in Hawaii several weeks ago,
I did indeed contract the virus.
Obviously, I’ve made quite a remarkable recovery during the past six days,
and I have been assured that I am no longer contagious,
but I share this with you all this morning
because any of you who were in direct contact with me last week should get tested.
There is no known cure for the thing,
but large doses of vitamin C do seem to help.
It’s also strongly suggested that,
until you know whether or not you have contracted the disease,
you should avoid all close contact with others.
OK, now, what are you going to do with what I’ve just shared with you?
You’ve got several options.
You can go out right now
and buy massive quantities of Vitamin C.
You can check yourself into the hospital
and demand that they test you for the SARS virus.
You can do nothing
and worry yourself sick over whether you were close enough to me to get infected.
You can contact a lawyer
and begin a lawsuit against me
and against the church
for our failure to notify you of this until today.
Or, you can listen to me right now
when I tell you that everything I’ve just shared with you during the past few minutes is a lie
and all I ever had was an irritating little cold.
But only one of those options
is going to give you the freedom
and the true sense of security you need.
Now what in the world
does all of that have to do
with Paul’s instructions to us to, “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.”?
Virtually everything in our lives
that has the power to cause us fear,
or a sense of stress,
or anxiety
does so because it feeds off of some lie being told to us
by either our mind
or our emotions,
some lie that we have accepted as truth
and are now trying to deal with in our lives.
When Paul talks about “things above”
and “things that are on the earth”
he is using those two phrases
to describe for us
the root source of the information we’re building our lives on.
The “things above” are all those things
that our God has told us are true,
those things that are consistent with the truth that comes to us from Him,
things like the peace we now have with God through Christ,
things like His assurance that He will never, ever leave us or forsake us,
things
like His promise that He has already made us adequate as servants of a new
covenant,
things like His affirmation that no created
thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord,
and, of course, things like His assurance that we are right now seated ... with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
And that’s just the tiny tip of the iceberg.
The “things that are on the earth”, by contrast,
are the things that just naturally flow from all of those reasoning processes
and all of those emotional memories
that were imbedded into us in that life we have lived outside of our union with Christ.
OK, now, here’s the trap we so often get ourselves pulled into.
We begin by accepting as truth
the message that grows out of “the things that are on the earth”.
In other words,
we accept without question
the conclusions our human reasoning processes lead us to
or the emotional responses we feel.
And then we turn to our Lord
and attempt to get Him to supply us with the resources we need
to face and fight the enemy we are convinced we must defeat.
In my virus lie
that is the equivalent of running out and buying cases of vitamin C
and checking yourself into the hospital.
And then, when God doesn’t supply us with the money we need
for the 40 cases of vitamin C we just ordered,
or when we find that the hospital refuses to test us for the virus,
we see Him as having failed us once again.
The simple truth is
God does not supply us with the strength to fight battles He has not given us to fight.
What He does give us
is the truth we need
to recognize the lies that keep us bound,
and the strength we need
to fight and win the battles He has chosen to fight through us.
Now, let me see if I can pull this together in a few simple statements.
1. When we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed,
or fearful,
or filled with anxiety,
begin by looking at the underlying lie we have believed that’s feeding those feelings.
Now, how do I know there’s a lie within us when those feelings are present?
I know that
because I know that we are right now seated with Christ in heavenly places,
and that our life is hidden with Christ in God.
Now honestly, can you imagine a person physically sitting next to God Himself,
filled with all sorts of fears and anxieties
over terrifying things that might happen to him?
If we are feeling those things,
underlying those feelings is usually a belief system that is rooted in a lie.
Last week I shared with you how I went through several weeks
in which my entire outlook on the future
rose and fell on the basis of a sales number posted on amazon.com.
Underlying those emotional responses was a lie within me
that was telling me
that my future happiness,
and certainly any hope I would ever have
for any kind of realistic retirement in the years ahead
depended upon the sales success of that book.
But even that was not the real lie.
The real lie was the belief that,
even though my God has shown Himself to me in amazing faithfulness for more than 30 years.
I really couldn’t trust Him to continue that faithfulness
for the next phase of my life.
1. So, recognize the lie exists.
2. Then, ask God’s Spirit to give you eyes to see the lie,
and to put it into words.
3. Then, finally, set your mind on things above.
Tell yourself the truth,
the truth about your God,
the truth about your union with Him,
the truth about His sufficiency within you for whatever He allows you to face,
the truth about His mercy and His grace poured out upon you,
the truth about His great love with which He loves you.
I am certainly not suggesting here
that all the hard times we face
are simply products of our imagination brought about by lies we have believed.
Every one of us face very real
and sometimes very difficult battles in life.
But I am suggesting
that we have a remarkable ability to drain ourselves of the energy we need for those battles
by cluttering our lives up with countless other battles
that God never called us to fight
because they are rooted in lies we have believed.
We know with certainty
that whenever our God gives us a battle to fight
He will also give us the grace and the strength we need to fight it.
And at those times when we find ourselves feeling utterly overwhelmed,
it is a healthy process for us to step back
and ask ourselves honestly
if we have begun fighting viruses we’ve never been exposed to.