that much of this divisiveness is driven by our longing for doctrinal purity,
but I personally believe most of it is rooted in a much more basic problem.
I think it grows out of the extreme difficulty that we always have
with accepting a salvation given to us by God
on the basis of nothing more than our simple faith in Christ’s payment of our sins through His death on the cross.
We are just so much more comfortable
if we have a sky hook to supplement the truth.
When I was a very little boy
I can remember my mom reading me a story
about a little duck who was afraid to swim.
He was just certain that
if he got into the water
he would sink like a rock and be drowned in an instant.
He watched the other little ducks out on the pond,
swimming and playing and having fun
as he waddled around in fear and anxiety on the shore.
And then one day someone offered him a sky hook.
It was a special stick with a little curve at the end.
The little duck was told that,
if he always carried this sky hook with him when he swam
it would hold him up
and he would never have to be afraid of sinking.
He took his sky hook
and cautiously waded into the pond,
and to his amazement and delight,
it worked!!
He swam on out into the pond,
clutching his sky hook,
secure in the assurance it gave him.
As I recall,
the story then went on to describe a crisis situation
in which the little duck lost his sky hook
and had to swim anyway
and discovered in the end that he didn’t really need his sky hook.
I think the Christian world is filled with sky hooks -
critical doctrines,
special experiences,
certain groups with carefully defined performance lists
that claim exclusive access to the truth and unique insight into the mind of God.
And they are all designed to provide the believer
with something they can hang onto
that makes it easier for them to believe God has really granted them salvation.
A total, and complete, and eternal salvation
given to us by our Creator
on the basis on nothing more than our willingness
to acknowledge our sinfulness before God
and our need for His salvation simply does not make any sense to us.
There has to be something else.
There has to be a sky hook.
There has to be something I can and must do
to help supplement.
And so we come up with all of our little groups,
each one offering it’s own subtle or blatant supplement to faith alone.
But the truth is
there is only one New Man.
There is only one salvation being offered by God,
and it comes to every person on exactly the same basis - through faith alone.
Paul said it so beautifully in that single statement in Romans chapter 3...
ROM 3:24, 28 ...being justified as a gift by His grace
through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; For we maintain that a man is
justified by faith apart from works of the Law.
I get such fun reminders occasionally
of how easily I slip back into our sky hook thinking if I’m not careful.
Some of you may have noticed
that on the last page of The Fisherman
the publisher included my mailing address.
As a result,
every once in a while I get letters from appreciative readers.
I received one this past week that I want to share with you
just because it was such a fun reminder to me
of the tremendous diversity within the true body of Christ.
When I receive these letters
I just automatically assume
that those who write are coming from similar church backgrounds to that of my own.
This past week I received a letter from Chris in Anaheim, California.
The letter read,
“Dear Mr. Huntsperger,
I’m writing to tell you how much I enjoyed your novel, “The Fisherman” about Peter. I found great hope and comfort in that through all his stumbling and bumbling, and that he just didn’t get it sometimes, yet Jesus loved him. And that’s all Peter had to do, was accept that and follow Jesus. Jesus forgave him, as he does us, over and over.
I found it poignant, though I knew this, penned by Peter, that he was crucified in the same manner as His Lord, yet upside down. Huge love!
I hope you will continue to write more great books like this one. I will look forward to them. I wish I could let everyone I know read it...”
Now, up to that point I would have assumed
that Chris and I share very similar church backgrounds.
Clearly Chris understood the heart of what I was trying to say in the book
and strongly identified with it.
But there was one more sentence to the letter.
Chris ended by saying,
“I just can’t stop telling everyone I know about it, including my perish priest!”
Sincerely,
Chris
Isn’t that great!
The truth is
Chris and I share radically different church experiences,
but there is no difference whatsoever
in the spirit union and the spirit response we share with our Lord.
As Paul says it in Ephesians,
EPH 2:18“... for through Christ we both have our access
in one Spirit to the Father.”
Now, what I’d like to do with the rest of our time this morning
is to stay with this last half of the second chapter of Ephesians
just long enough to pick up a few of the treasures we skipped over
when we were doing our whirlwind survey of the passage in past weeks.
There are some comments made by Paul in this passage,
both about Christ
and about us and our relationship to the God through Christ
that are intended to establish crucial attitudes within us.
For a number of years now
I have realized that if we do not understand and accept the basics in our relationship with God through Christ
there is no way our walk with Him will ever develop as it should.
If the foundation isn’t right,
everything that is built upon it will have problems.
Paul refers to one of those basics in this passage.
It’s found in Ephesians 2:17 where,
talking about Jesus Christ,
Paul says,
And He came and preached peace to you who were far away,
and peace to those who were near;
Peace!
Peace between God and us, His creation.
I want to draw our attention to this verse especially
because it is one of those statements in Scripture
that, in just a few words,
brings a great deal of what our God has said and done into focus.
I had a phone call this past week from a friend of mine
who was churning over some of the words spoken by Christ when He was here.
In one of our teaching times a few weeks ago
we were talking about how there sometimes seemed to be
such a difference between the words of Christ
as compared to the relationships Christ developed with His disciples.
There were so many things happening during those three or four years when Christ was here.
There was a constant, intense tension between Christ and those who felt threatened by Him.
There was a nation that believed they really had made themselves righteous through their own actions,
a nation that the Lord had to push into an honesty about their desperate need for a Savior.
There were some who held positions of leadership
that had to be driven into such fear and rage against Jesus
that they would fulfill their appointed role
of publicly executing the Son of God.
And, of course, there were countless individuals
who needed first-hand, personal, in depth exposure to the heart of God Himself
and to the depth of His love for each of them.
And unless we have a clear understanding of what is happening in each situation,
and why,
we can easily get confused at times with what we read.
That’s why I love statements like this one made by Paul in Ephesians 2:17.
And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near;
Such statements area given to us as a sort of litmus test
of the correctness of our interpretation of any given passage.
It is God’s way of saying to us,
“My child, this one thing you must understand - My Son came to offer the human race peace...
peace first of all with Me, your Creator,
and then peace with yourselves and with one another.
If you interpret His words and actions correctly,
it will lead you into that peace.”
There are other such defining statements about Christ given to us in Scripture as well.
Some came from the mouth of Christ Himself.
JOH 10:10 "...I came that they might have life, and
might have it abundantly.”
JOH 7:37-38 ..., "If any man is thirsty, let him
come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his
innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.'"
MAT 11:28-30 "Come to Me, all who are weary and
heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from
Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your
souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light."
Such statements are the chalk lines
that tell us when we’re getting all the little pieces lined up right...
and when we are not.
This past week Mitch Mesa and I were putting shingles on my garage.
I lined up the first few rows of shingles so that they looked right to my eye,
and then we took a measurement from the peak
and discovered that within about six rows
I’d already gotten us two and a half inches off.
From then on we took regular measurements
and each time ran chalk lines
to keep us lined up correctly.
Such statements as these
are the chalk lines for the life of Christ.
If what we understand about Him when we read the gospels
lines up perfectly with these statements,
then we know we have understood correctly.
If what we have understood
does not line up with these statements,
then somewhere we got it wrong.
And one of those chalk lines is found right here in this
Ephesians passage:
And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near...
Paul presented the same truth in slightly different words in his letter to the Roman Christians.
In Romans 5:1-2 he said,
Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand...
The problem with such statements, however,
is not that they are not clear and understandable,
the problem with them
is that, unless we are extremely careful,
we will corrupt what’s being said
by viewing it through all of our flawed and distorted religious preconceptions.
The offer of Christ is clear and simple -
He offers eternal peace with God
to all those who come to Him in faith,
choosing to believe that He really did pay the full price for all of our immorality
through dying in our place for our sins on the cross.
The message of religion is also clear.
The voice of religion tells us
that we can pursue the hope of peace with God
by diligently performing up to a certain standard
that will then give us a basis for finding peace with God.
And one of the greatest tragedies in the family of God
is that most of us
live most of our lives
never believing or accepting the peace with God
that we have already been granted through our Lord Jesus Christ.
I have a little graph I shared with you years ago
that helped me to realize this truth in my own life.
The
vertical line represents our progress in improvement.
1 represents the beginning of our life in Christ,
with 10 being absolute perfection.
The horizontal line represents the length of time we have known Christ.
The narrow line shows our behavior or performance as God's child.
This includes both the degree to which our life conforms to God's moral laws
and also our growth in all of those areas we typically think of as Christian service or outreach.
Simply stated, this line represents
the progress in our ability to stop doing the bad things
and start doing the good things.
Each one of us comes into the family of God with many changes that need to be made.
Our habits, behavior patterns, and conditioned responses are far from Christlike.
As we begin walking with our Lord, we gradually see growth taking place.
Of course, as represented by the narrow line on the graph,
our progress is not a constant, unbroken upward climb.
We have times of lapsing back into old behaviors, but still we do see definite progress.
Now I want you to look at the heavier line which represents our relationship with Christ.
It is quite common for us to perceive our relationship with Christ
as following virtually the same pattern as our performance.
At those times when we are performing well,
when we are fulfilling all of the things we feel the Lord is requiring
and avoiding all of the things we feel He has forbidden,
do we find ourselves feeling closer to Christ and more accepted by Him?
And during those times when our performance drops,
perhaps when we fall back into an old sin pattern,
do we see Christ pulling away from us
and find our relationship with Him dropping in direct proportion to our performance?
Now, here is the crucial question -
is that really peace with God through Christ?
We may believe in our doctrine
that we have been given peace with God through Christ,
but in practical reality
we are living as though peace with God
is not something we have been given by God,
but rather something we must earn daily through our own performance.
And let me tell you, my friend,
that is not peace.
Now let me show you the way that graph should be drawn.
When we come to Christ through faith
all of our sins for all time really, truly are placed onto the account of Christ,
and He has paid the price for them in full forever.
From that time one
our acceptance by God
and our union with Him stays at a perfect 10.
As Paul puts it in the last verse of Romans chapter 8,
nothing and no one will ever again “...be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near...
And our daily rediscovery of the reality of that truth
is the first step in everything else that God seeks to accomplish
both in us and through us in this life.