©1998 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
10/18/98 Evil Within
Phil. 3:8 More than that, I count all things
to be loss in view of the surpassing value
of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for
whom I have suffered the loss of all things,
and count them but rubbish in order that I
may gain Christ...
that I may know Him, and the power of His
resurrection and the fellowship of His
sufferings, being conformed to His death...
This is our forth week
on that one phrase "that I may know Him".
Last week we stopped half way through a thought,
and I want us to pick up where we left off.
Some of you were not here last week,
and all of us have just gone through
seven days of real life
that have driven our minds
and our emotions
miles away from where we were last Sunday,
so a little review will help us
get back into our study.
We began last week
by talking about the connection
between our attitude towards ourselves
and our attitude towards our Creator.
I suggested that
it is impossible for us to like God
any more than we like ourselves.
The degree to which we experience
true peace with God
is determined by the degree to which
we experience true peace with ourselves.
God is both our Creator
and our Redeemer.
If we find ourselves displeased
either with the way in which
He has created us
or with the way He has handled
our whole process of deliverance from evil
or the effects of evil in our lives,
it is going to be very hard
for us to like Him
or to trust Him.
In other words,
if we look at ourselves
and find ourselves feeling like God goofed,
or feeling like He doesn't care,
it will have a devastating impact
on our relationship with Him.
Then, last week I also suggested
that there are at least three great forces
used by Satan
to keep us from finding peace with ourselves.
1. The first is our preconceived idea
of who we think we are.
2. The second is our preconceived idea
of who we think we should be.
3. And the last are the lies we believe
about the way God views
both our sinful impulses
and the effects of sin in our lives.
Last week we spent our time
talking about 1 and 2 on that list.
We saw that God's first step
in bringing us to a place of peace with ourselves
is bringing us to an accurate understanding
of who we are.
That means guiding us through
the maze of lies we have believed
about ourselves -
restoring to us a true sense of value
and dignity,
bring us an awareness
of our eternal importance
and significance to God.
It also means teaching us
accurate and realistic expectations
of who God wants us to be.
It's sometimes hard for us to realize
that religion is one of Satan's
two most powerful tools
in his attack against
a healthy Christian walk.
Religion, like nothing else in human experience
has the power to subtly, powerfully suck true
freedom
out of our lives
because it keeps our eyes forever focused
on what the group thinks,
and how they respond to us
and whether or not what we said
or what we did
impressed them
or made us look good.
And in the end all true personal identity
is sacrificed to our driving need
for the affirmation
and approval
and acceptance
of the group around us.
Christ alone can break the power of religion
and bring us into true personal freedom,
and He does it
by giving us the calling
and the courage
to take our eyes
off of those around us
and turn them onto Christ alone.
He alone can offer us
a new point of focus - Himself.
In His gentle, yet powerful way
He seeks to take our eyes off
those around us -
what they say, what they think about us,
and He takes our eyes off ourselves
and our intense, minute scrutiny
of every flaw,
and every weakness,
and every strength.
He assures us
that there is only one audience
we need to be concerned with,
and that audience is Himself.
He alone can give us
the kind of personal permission we long for
to be the unique individuals
He designed each of us to be.
I love Paul's comments
to the Corinthian Christians
in I Corinthians chapters 3 and 4.
The Corinthians were up to their ears in religious
games,
playing show-and-tell with their spiritual gifts,
trying so hard to impress their fellow
believers,
while all the time they were being driven
by their own arrogance
and fleshly desires.
I find it fascinating
that the one New Testament church
that was the most overtly "Spirit-filled",
displaying the greatest manifestation
of spiritual gifts,
was also the New Testament Church
that was the most overtly carnal,
and flesh-driven,
and ego-motivated,
and sin-infested.
They were busy playing church games,
while at the same time
shattering their relationships with one
another.
Paul blasted them in I Cor. 3 by saying,
1 Cor. 3:1 And I, brethren, could not
speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to
men of flesh, as to infants in Christ.
1 Cor. 3:2 I gave you milk to drink, not
solid food; for you were not yet able to
receive it. Indeed, even now you are not
yet able,
1 Cor. 3:3 for you are still fleshly. For
since there is jealousy and strife among
you, are you not fleshly, and are you not
walking like mere men?
They even got to the place
where they decided that the Apostle Paul didn't
quite measure up to their standard
or their expectations.
Paul responded to their childish arrogance
by saying simply,
1 Cor. 4:3 But to me it is a very small
thing that I may be examined by you, or by
any human court; in fact, I do not even
examine myself.
1 Cor. 4:4 For I am conscious of nothing
against myself, yet I am not by this
acquitted; but the one who examines me is
the Lord.
1 Cor. 4:5 Therefore do not go on passing
judgment before the time, but wait until the
Lord comes who will both bring to light the
things hidden in the darkness and disclose
the motives of men's hearts; and then each
man's praise will come to him from God.
You see what he's saying, don't you.
He says, "You're playing to the wrong audience.
You're so busy looking at yourself
and at one another,
when the only One who can give you the
affirmation you long for
is your Lord Jesus Christ."
So, when Christ begins His healing process within
us,
bringing us into a true sense of personal
freedom,
He begins that process
by bringing us to an honest perspective
both on who we are,
and on who He designed us to be.
Let me simplify it in two statements.
He seeks to bring us to the place
where we can hear Him saying 2 things:
1. "My child, this is who you are by My design."
2. "And it is a very good design indeed!"
Which brings us to the 3rd great barrier
to that place of peace -
our ongoing battles with evil within us.
Because, you see,
with many of us it is not God's basic design of
us
that we find so hard to accept,
it is what we have done with that design.
We can accept in theory
that who we might have been
had we not mucked things up so badly
might have been really nice,
just as we can accept that
the physical world was a perfect, flawless place
in which to live
before man and man's sin started messing it
up.
But the real problem is not with
what or who we might have been,
but rather with who we have made ourselves into.
And let me tell you the voice you'll hear.
It will say,
"Oh sure, you could have done great things,
you could have been
a tremendous testimony
to the creative and redemptive work of
God.
But, quite honestly,
through you're lack of self-discipline
and continued vulnerability
to all sorts of temptations,
you have made
such a disastrous mess of your life
that you're really a rather pathetic failure."
Every honest Christian who has ever lived
has had to face
the reality of evil within himself
at some point in his walk with God.
EX.
I can remember well
the first time I ever felt an utter sense of horror.
I was in Jr. High School at the time,
living in the north end of Seattle.
A family who lived in one of the oldest houses in
the area
had asked me to stay with their 3 children
while they went out for the night.
They had no television,
so I bought myself a Popular Science magazine,
one of the great big $.10 candy bars,
and a can of pop
so I had something fun to look
forward to
once the children were in bed.
The children went to bed about 8:00 PM
and I settled down in the living room
to eat my treat and read my magazine.
The house was absolutely quiet
except for the breathing of the children
in the next room.
Then suddenly I heard a strange noise
coming from the kitchen.
I looked up from where I was sitting in the living
room
and watched as four or five huge rats
crawled out from a hole under the kitchen
sink.
Two of them were already scurrying around the
kitchen floor
looking for food,
while a third was heading into the children's
bedroom.
I have no way of putting into words
the emotion I felt at that moment.
It was a combination of terror,
shock,
revulsion,
and horror.
Fortunately, as soon as those rats
heard me jumping up and down
and pounding on the floor
they retreated back under the sink.
I share that with you this morning
because, depending upon what we have been led
to expect in the Christian life,
I think it is not uncommon
for many Christians to feel a very similar
emotion
when they first discover
the continued presence of evil within
themselves
following their submission to Christ.
When we come to Christ
He truly does recreate us
into a new, holy creation at the heart level.
We discover within us
a love for God
and a hunger for righteousness
unlike anything we had ever experienced
before.
That is part of what
the presence of the Holy Spirit
accomplishes within the child of God.
It is easy at that point
for us to believe that all past evil
has been removed or subdued forever.
But the day will come
when we glance into the kitchen
and suddenly see our own personal rats
crawling out from under the sink.
How we view those rats,
and how we relate to them
will ultimately determine
the course of our Christian life from
then on.
I am aware of at least 3 common
and highly destructive
incorrect responses
to those rats.
1. The first one I would mention
is to deny that the rats really exist.
This particular approach
often boldly proclaims
what appears to be a strong affirmation of
truth and faith.
The Christian will say to himself
and to others,
"I am a new creation in Christ,
the old things have passed away,
all things have become new.
I know it looked like there were rats
out there in the kitchen,
but it wasn't true.
It can't be true, therefore it isn't."
This "faith" approach
has the appearance of
the bold affirmation of truth
and confidence in Christ
and the truth of His word.
The problem is that
when we deny the existence of the evil within
us
we also slam the door
on the healing program Christ offers us
that can bring us true freedom
from the power of that evil in our lives.
We will either develop a thick protective shell around
our emotions
that keeps everything packed tight inside,
making us insensitive both to ourselves
and to those around us,
or we will reach a point
where we can no longer keep the evil
crammed down inside
and it will explode and consume our life.
2. Then there are those Christians
who handle the evil
by proclaiming to themselves
and to others that it doesn't really matter.
A few rats running around the kitchen
helps keep the floor clean.
The death of Christ paid the price
for all my sin,
and now it just doesn't matter.
Paul talks about the stupidity of this thinking in
Romans chapter 6.
Rom. 6:15 ¶ What then? Shall we sin
because we are not under law but under
grace? May it never be!
Rom. 6:16 Do you not know that when you
present yourselves to someone as slaves for
obedience, you are slaves of the one whom
you obey, either of sin resulting in death,
or of obedience resulting in righteousness?
He states the obvious -
sin produces slavery in the life of the Christian
every bit as much as it does
in the life of the nonchristian.
To proclaim that the evil doesn't matter
is to live forever in the slavery
and bondage it brings into your life.
3. The third wrong answer
to the rats in the kitchen
is to believe that those rats
really tell the truth
about who you still are.
"Obviously nothing really changed
when I came to Christ.
I am still the same old person
with the same old sins
and the same old bondage.
I thought there was hope in Christ,
but obviously I was wrong."
And in so doing,
rather than listening to our God
about our true identity in Him,
we allow the evil
to become the voice
that defines who we are.
And, of course, we never find freedom
from the evil within.
Those are the wrong answers.
Next week
we'll look at Christ's alternative.