©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

07/27/03

Acceptance and Behavior

7/27/03 Acceptance and Behavior

We started something last week that we need to finish,

and I think it will end up taking us 3 weeks to do so.

I know that statement may be frustrating

to some of you who were not here last week

because you have no idea where we were or what we were doing,

but I’ll do my best to quickly catch you up to speed.

We were looking at a statement made by Paul in the 2^nd chapter of Ephesians,

a statement in which he provided us with a powerful one line summery

of what Christ was doing during His few years on this planet.

In Ephesians 2:17 Paul said,

And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near...

Through Jesus Christ

God offered us, His rebellious creation, PEACE -

eternal peace between us and our Creator.

We talked at some length about that peace last week,

and in an effort to help us better understand what it really meant

I shared with you two diagrams

that help me to understand what that peace really means.

The first was a diagram

not of the way things really are,

but of the way so much of our past religious training

conditions us to believe they are.

In this graph

the narrow line represents the changes we see taking place in our lives

beginning at the point where we come to Christ,

and progressing on as long as we are in this world.

As the line represents,

we do not see a constant, unbroken line of change.

What we see,

and what every growing Christian experiences

is forward movement,

yet with times when we seem to slow down or even loose ground,

and then renewed growth and so forth.

The heavier line on the graph

represents our perception of our relationship with our Lord.

And, as the graph indicates,

it is extremely common for us to believe our relationship with our Lord

follows virtually the same pattern as our performance.

When we see ourselves doing well,

performing at whatever level we believe God is requiring from us,

we also see ourselves being closer to God,

more accepted by Him and acceptable to Him.

And when our performance drops

we see Him pulling away from us,

perhaps even rejecting us until we once again bring our performance level up to what we believe to be an acceptable standard.

But that is not peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is a performance based relationship with our Creator

that rests ultimately

not upon the death of Christ for our sins,

but rather upon our ability to generate a level of performance that will merit God’s acceptance of us.

Then I shared with 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 on

our acceptance by God

and our union with Him stay 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 that’s were we ended last week.

Following our time together

I received several excellent questions about what we’d looked at,

and before we move back into our Ephesians study

I want to try to address some of those questions.

You see,

the difficulty with a graph like this

is that it does tend to confront us with the truth

in a way that we may not have allowed ourselves to fully appreciate before.

If I were to read you a verse from the Bible,

something like Romans 3:28 in which Paul says,

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law...,

it is sometimes difficult for us to really hear and understand what God is saying to us.

But when we take that exact same truth

and put it into a graph form that looks like this:

and we see visually

that through Christ our union with God

is in no way tied to our fluctuating performance,

it sometimes has a way of forcing us to face and wrestle with the truth being presented

in a way we would not otherwise have done.

I think that happened for some of you last week

when I shared that graph with you.

Obviously, what that graph tells us

is that our acceptance by God

and our standing with Him

is in no way linked to our performance.

And just my saying that now

may make some of you wonder if perhaps you might have made a terrible mistake

when you walked in the door this morning.

It seems to go directly against everything we have ever been taught

and everything we’ve ever believed

about our relationship with God.

From the first day we enter this world

we seem to understand instinctively

that a righteous God wants and rewards righteous behavior

and judges and condemns immoral behavior,

and the fear of His wrath,

the fear of His judgment for our sins

is a major motivational force keeping us from wrong behaviors.

To remove that fear

by suggesting that there is no direct link between our performance

and God’s acceptance of us

seems as if it is the removal

of the greatest single motivational force for moral living in the human race.

So why in the world would God do that?

Why would He say to us,

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law...?

Why would Paul write to Titus telling him that,

TIT 3:5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,

And why would he tell us in Philippians 3:9 that his life goal is that he ... may be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith...?

Before we end this little side trip from Ephesians

I’m going to take us to some words spoken by Christ Himself

in which He talks with us

about how truly righteous living can become a part of our walk with Him.

But before we look at those words

I want to make just a few observations

that may help keep this whole discussion in perspective.

And let me begin here by clarifying one crucial point.

I did not say last week,

nor have I said this week,

nor have I ever said that our behavior as Christians doesn’t matter.

The truth is

it does matter a great deal for many reasons.

And anyone who has ever listened to or read my teaching

and, on the basis of what they have heard,

has then reached the conclusion that our behavior doesn’t matter

has done so by a highly selective listening process

in which they have heard only what they wanted to hear.

I will admit that I am still a bit naive

about the tremendous force of that selective listening process within us at times,

but I have reached the conclusion

that is simply an unavoidable hazard

of teaching the truth.

A number of years ago now,

shortly after The Grace Exchange was released,

I received an e-mail from a person I’d never met

from a part of the nation I’d never visited,

who wrote in part to tell me how that book had brought tremendous freedom into her life from what she called her legalistic past.

Then, after praising my tremendous contribution to her Christian life,

she went on to ask my advice about an issue going on in her life.

I want to share part of her note to me with you this morning,

along with my response to her,

because I think it may be a valuable ingredient

in this whole discussion of our performance as it affects our Christian walk.

She wrote, in part...

In May my husband and I separated after I admitted to having a week long affair. We could not agree on the kind of things that needed to happen to repair our marriage, so he asked me to leave. Shortly after that time, I reunited with the man I was having the affair with and, to make a long story short, am now living with him and six months pregnant with his baby. My divorce will finally be done at the beginning of July (right when I am due), but he and I are both struggling with the moral compromise we have made by living together. We have talked about getting married (NOT because I am pregnant) and how great it would be to add the sweetness of our relationships
with Christ to the fantastic (by the world's standards) relationship that we have now. Obviously, we couldn't be married until July, at the soonest. I have no family willing to take me in and no money to start on my own, but I'm not sure what I should do! Part of me feels like it would be okay to live in a separate part of the house for three months and then get married, and part of me feels like he would see that as more moral compromise. Do you have an opinion that you would be willing to share with me? Please write back when you can. I appreciate your candor and honesty in your sermons and look forward to hearing from you on this topic!
Thanks so much!

When I read that note,

my first response was a desperate hope

that she would never recommend my book,

and never ever tell anyone

that she viewed me as her mentor and spiritual guide.

After brooding over her comments for several days

I sent her the following response.

Thanks for inviting me into you thinking concerning an obviously very difficult situation. I received your e-mail a couple days ago and chose not to respond to it then because I wanted some time to think about it. The truth is, I find it very difficult to know what to say. If I understand your situation and your moral question correctly, you shared with me that you chose to have an affair leading to separation, you then chose to accept divorce rather than attempting to rebuild your marriage, you then chose to return to the fellow with whom you had the affair, you are now pregnant with his child, and now your moral question concerns whether or not you should continue living with him in a separate room of the house until the divorce is final. I feel a little like trying to advise someone who has just told me that they stole a gun, broke into a store, shot the owner, broke open the safe, and is now struggling with the moral question of whether or not they should take all the money in the safe or leave some of it for the widow of the dead shop owner. All I can do is to share with you what I know to be true and hope it is of some value to you. First of all, I know that whenever we come in contact with the true grace of God it moves us, draws us powerfully, forcefully toward greater practical righteous living in our personal lives, not out of fear, not out of guilt, not out of religious condemnation, but out of a longing to conform our lives more closely to the image of this God who has poured out His grace upon us. Second, I know that, apart from rare situations in which there has been extreme immorality in the life of their former mate, nearly every divorced person I have ever talked with personally has told me that looking back it would have been both far better and far easier to rebuild their troubled marriage than going through what they went through trying to rebuild their lives following divorce. I know that right now you are convinced that this fellow you’re living with seems to have so much more to offer than what you think you had with your husband. That is the lie that always comes with a passion-driven relationship. From what you have told me about this second fellow in your note, it is obvious from his actions that he has no interest in making the hard choices for you that you want and need from the man in your life. If he really cared about you, about protecting you and respecting you, and guarding your dignity, he would never have entered into the affair with you, a married woman, in the first place. What you really want is not a short, intense, emotional fling. What you want is a relationship foundation with a man that will allow you to build for a lifetime. Since you ask my advice, I offer it. If your husband is still open to attempting to rebuild your shredded marriage, I encourage you to rebuild. If he is not, which is likely the case, then I strongly advise you to break off your relationship with the fellow you are now living with and establish a life for yourself independent from him. A man who will sleep with another man’s wife and get her pregnant is in no way a safe bet for a life-time marriage partner. Once those patterns are established in a man, and once he has shown himself willing to violate those moral boundaries with no apparent sense of remorse or conviction, he will do it again. Only next time you will be the wife he is cheating on. I know what I share here does not sound comforting or encouraging. But I know, too, that the freedom you long for will never be found through the path you are taking to either your husband or your lover. God’s morality is not a barrier walling us off from the things we really need to be happy. It is our doorway into true freedom. If you still have a copy of The Grace Exchange around I would encourage you to reread the chapter entitled The Lie that Binds. It will not answer the specifics of your situation, but it will help you see the lie Satan is using to defeat you.

Larry

As you might imagine,

I never did receive a response to my letter.

But I share that with you this morning

because what I said in that letter

is absolutely consistent

with what I shared with you last week,

that there is no link between our behavior

and God’s acceptance of us in Christ.

You see, God has said what He has said to us,

and done what He has done for us through Christ

not because our behavior doesn’t matter,

but because it matters so much

that He was willing to do whatever He had to do

in order to provide us with the only motivation

that will ever be able to bring about true, lasting changes in our lives.

And what is that motivation?

It is our personal, individual discovery

of the true depth and nature of the love of our God for us.

And the first step in that discovery

is our understanding at the spirit level of our being that (TIT 3:5) He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit...

In other words,

it is the discovery that God’s love for us

is of such a nature

that from the very beginning of creation

He put in place a plan

that would give us the freedom to fail utterly,

and then, in the face of that failure,

to see Him reaching out to us in love, in the midst of our failure.

This is jumping ahead in our Ephesians study a little bit,

but when we reach the end of the third chapter

we are going to see Paul drop to his knees for a second time in this letter

and allow us to listen in on his prayer.

In the first three chapters of his letter

he shares with us the magnificent work God has accomplished in us

as He called us to Himself when we were still immersed in rebellion against Him and dead in our sinfulness,

and then recreated us into His holy ones,

and then formed us into His church,

assigning to us the high calling

of being His voice to all of the created world.

And then, in that prayer at the end of the 3^rd chapter

Paul reveals to us the one thing that must happen

in order for us to successfully fulfil this amazing role assigned to us.

He says,

EPH 3:14, 17-19 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father,...

that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fulness of God.

Only the personal discovery of the love of God

can ever provide us with an adequate life motivation

for facing the changes that He needs to make in our lives,

and fulfilling the calling He has given us.

The problem, of course,

is that being loved by God is not something that can be taught.

There is nothing I can do as a Bible teacher

to teach you the love of God.

I can teach you ABOUT the love of God,

but I cannot teach you the living reality of that love.

Only the Spirit of God can do that,

and then, most of the time,

He can do it only in the face of our failure before Him.

Do you know why the Spirit of God brings conviction of sin into our lives?

First of all,

and most of all

it is because that conviction provides us

with our first clear introduction

into the true nature of God’s love for us.

It is not a love because of,

it is a love in spite of.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And the obvious implication of that statement

is that it is impossible for Him to communicate the reality of His love to us

until He has first successfully broken through our defenses

to the point where we will admit to ourselves that we really are sinners.

When we talked last week

about the absolute separation between our performance

and our acceptance by God,

we did so

not because our performance doesn’t matter,

but rather because it does matter a great deal,

and because only our discovery of the true nature of God’s love

will ever provide us with an adequate basis for dealing with our performance.

Now, I planned to take us to a passage in which Christ addresses this whole issue of performance,

but I took so long preparing us for the passage

that we’ll have to leave it until the next time I teach.