Chris Howlett

More Heart Exam Metrics

Today's message spoke of the default-mode of the human heart, which is religion. Generally, we all live a certain way and make the choices we make in order to understand ourselves as good people and out of a desire to be acceptable to God.

In Ezekiel 36, God declares that he wants to give us a heart transplant, replacing our heart of stone with a heart of flesh that desires to obey Him. This heart of flesh is the heart that has an absolute assurance of the love of God and God's acceptance. My desire to please God, to live a new life, is not a desire to make myself acceptable to God, that's impossible. Only Jesus can make me acceptable through his life, death, and resurrection. My desire to please God and live a new life is a response to the reality of my acceptance by God. Very different motivation.

So, we need a heart transplant.

In my message, today, I offered several "heart exam metrics" so we can diagnose our need for God's intervention of grace. Here are a couple more:

1. Why Obey God?

If I have a religious heart: I obey God because I want to get things from Him.

If I have a heart of faith: I obey God because I want to resemble God and be like God.

2. Source of Hope?

If I have a religious heart: My talents, my moral uprightness, my personal discipline, my social status, etc. are all absolutely necessary, and serve as my source of hope, meaning, security, and significance.

If I have a heart of faith: I may have many good things in my life: family, work, spiritual disciplines, etc., but none of these things are ultimate to me. I place my hope in none of them. I certainly may enjoy them, but if they are threatened I will be okay because my hope is placed solidly on the grace of God. Jesus Christ is my source of hope, meaning, security, and significance.

Religion is pernicious and pervasive. It's sneaky. The religious mindset is truly the mindset of the whole world. Unfortunately, many churches and countless Christians are not fully aware of it's sneakiness. We fall prey to the works-righteousness mindset. Works-righteousness says that you must work to earn your righteousness, your right standing with God. But the Gospel teaches a very different approach.

The way of the Gospel is the way of absolute dependence on the grace of God, being fully aware that I am a sinner in need of saving, and that the way to salvation is not a religion, but a relationship with Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

God wants to give us new hearts, hearts of flesh, hearts that are assured of the grace of God, hearts that are free for joyful obedience. How's your heart?

Billy G.

Check out this post: http://www.aseaofblue.com/2009/3/27/812841/the-gillispie-era-at-uk-is

Have a Happy Lent!

“What do you do when it comes home to you that the field of dry bones is yourself? That the abomination of desolation is you? That Lazarus, three days dead in the tomb and stinking is not Lazarus at all, but a man with your name? What do you do, in other words, when you learn you are not real, and that the relation between you and the place you live in and the clothes you wear and the things you do, is no relation at all? When it suddenly dawns on you: I am a resident of Desolation Row? What do you do?? Why, you thank God and you sing out for joy that liberation has come, that the day of redemption is at hand!” – Matthew Kelty, monk of Gethsemani

Have a Happy Lent!

That’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? I mean, wishing someone to have a Happy Lent is like wishing they enjoy their wisdom tooth extraction, or hoping their divorce is fun, or their stint in traffic school is pleasant. Just doesn’t seem right.

But Lent can be happy, indeed. Lent is a season of self-examination, originating in the early church as a period of preparation for those nearing the time of baptism. Baptism was a sacrament, but it was also a political act, declaring in a public way that Jesus is Lord, not the temporal powers of the world, and this act could be quite costly, so early church leaders wanted to make sure people were serious and ready. Self-examination meant being honest about one’s sinfulness and rebellion against God.

Well, that does seem a bit dismal, on the surface. But as we gaze a little bit deeper, as Matthew Kelty does in his sermon entitled Desolation Row, we learn that self-examination is a truly joyful experience. Desolation Row is the title of a Bob Dylan song written in the mid 1960s, which Kelty used as a metaphor for sinful human existence in a sermon of the same name. The above quote is taken from that sermon.

We are all pretenders, hoping no one will discover the real us, so we build up a false self to present to the world, to God, and really, even to ourselves. We become deluded by the amazing efforts of the false self to be when it is merely a figment of our imagination. We want to believe we’re good enough, we hope our fellow church members don’t know who we really are, we especially hope God doesn’t find out!

Lent is about liberation. So it is happy! Lent reminds us that the false self we’ve been propping up isn’t real at all. We’re not nearly as good as we’ve been trying to convince others and ourselves we are. We can stop pretending and start trusting in the grace of God.

Have a happy Lent! You live on Desolation Row. That’s a good thing, because people who live on Desolation Row are the target audience of Jesus’ ministry.

The Freedom of the Gospel

"So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36 ESV).

Jesus Christ came to set us free and he can set us free from both religion and irreligion. Religion is a means of making oneself acceptable to God by following rules, living by the right morals. Irreligion is a reaction to religion, believing that whatever one does is fine, no matter what, truth is relative. Religion/moralism enslaves you to a god that can never be pleased. Irreligion/relativism enslaves you to the power of sin and brokeness that infects all of humanity.

Then there's the Third Way, the Way of the Gospel. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that you can be free.

Let's look at these various approaches through the lens of discouragement:

The moralist, or religious person, says that you are depressed because you have broken the rules and you are being punished. The relativist says, "Hey, don't worry! God loves you." Assuming the depression is mild and there are no physiological reasons for the depression, the Gospel frees you by helping you make an assessment of your life and discovering that you have set up something in the place of God, a psuedo-savior, some form of works-righteousness. You're trying to be worthy on your own, to prove your acceptability to God. The Gospel leads us to repent of this way of thinking and living. The Gospel teaches that we are accepted based solely on the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. There's nothing I can do to make myself acceptable to God. I am accepted because of Jesus. This is incredibly freeing because I can cease from my personal program of self-redemption, and live in the power of the Gospel. My good works can flow out of the incredible sense of thanksgiving I feel because of forgiveness and the sense of love that God offers, instead of out of my sense of poverty of love. The Gospel teaches the truth that we are all sinners and offers the grace of forgiveness and relationship, freeing us to live differently in the power of the Spirit.

Freedom to live according to the law of love is a benefit of the Gospel. Jesus Christ came not only to redeem us but also to revive us so that we live out the ramifications of being created in the image of God. Religion can never express the image of God because it is all about the image of the false self. Irreligion is not even that interested in the image of God because it teaches that there's really no sin to interfere in the first place.

Come back later in the week for more on the Freedom of Christ.

Forgiveness

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A big part of Lent is self-examination. We need to examine ourselves to uncover those sins we have committed and are committing that we tend to hide from others and, even more, that we hide from ourselves. One of those sins that seems to hang on, beneath the surface and undetected, is unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness is like a cancer. It starts small, but grows and metastasizes, infecting more and more of our lives. Unforgiveness does not necessarily hurt the one whom we refuse to forgive, though it can, it always hurts us. Unforgiveness rears it’s ugly head in many ways: a critical spirit, depression, and the lack of an ability for intimacy, among others. It eats away at our joy and even interferes with our relationship with God.

The first step to forgiveness is seeking forgiveness from God. The second is to ask God to help you develop a sense of empathy for the one who hurt you. You need to be able to see them from God’s perspective. Believe it or not, God loves them, and you, in spite of sin. His heart is a heart of forgiveness. Oftentimes the motives we attribute to those who have hurt us are not the actual motives. They acted out of ignorance or out of their own brokenness and pain. Now, this is not making excuses, but it is gaining a healthier perspective from which you can choose to say, “I forgive. I release you from responsibility. I am turning over my pain to our Lord, who suffered for us all.”

Is there hidden brokenness in you? Have you been hurt by someone? Do you need to cross the great divide of forgiveness? Turn to the Lord. Forgiveness is his business.

Soul Purpose: How to Be Single and Happy

Everyone is a part of a family, no matter who you are. At the very least, you do have two parents, whether they are living or dead, a part of your daily life or estranged, every person on earth is part of a family.

We've been talking about Family Life in our series at Christ Church, titled Family Guys & Gals, and today, the subject is the single life. There are all kinds of biases and prejudices against single people in our society. They are stigmatized and villianized. People who are single, past a certain age, are believed to have some kind of character flaw or moral defect. They are considered strange, weird, and out of the mainstream.

In a way, they are out of the mainstream because statisticians tell us that 9 out of 10 of us will be married at some point during our adult life. So, the 1 out of 10 is viewed with suspicion just because they are in the minority. I'm afraid our world does not have the greatest track record with minorities.

However, no matter what the world says, the Single Life can be as a fulfilling and content a life as any other. The world doesn't value singleness, but God certainly does. One of the Scriptures I quoted in my message was:

“Sometimes I wish everyone were single like me – a simpler life in many ways! But celibacy is not for everyone any more than marriage is.  God gives the gift of single life to some and the gift of married life to others.” 1 Corinthians 7:7 (Msg)  

This is the Apostle Paul, a man who more than likely understood both the married life and the single life. Because of his advancement in the Jewish leadership of his day, he was almost certainly married. However, because of statements like this in 1 Corinthians, during Paul's Christian ministry, which was the vast majority of his adult life, he was single, most likely widowed.

Singleness is seen as a gift from God. Single people enjoy certain freedoms that married people simply cannot, if they did, they wouldn't stay married very long! Paul says here that he wishes everyone were single and able to devote more of their time to the mission of God. But Paul was a pragmatist and realized that sexual temptation is just too strong for most people to endure a lifetime of celibacy.

It's really unfortunate that even some in the church elevate marriage far beyond what the Scripture does, to the point of ostracizing, whether intentionally or not, those who do not fit into the traditional nuclear family. Jesus said, "who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" Then he answered his own question by saying, "whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother." (see Matthew 12:48-50).

You've heard the saying, "Blood is thicker than water." Jesus' changed it, "The blood of Christ is thicker than blood." The ultimate familial relations are not found in marriage, but in the household of God. Marriage doesn't exist in eternity, but the Church does.

This is opening a bunch of cans of worms! More than I can write about, now. Needless to say, the values of the world have infiltrated church life. We need to get back to the Bible, so to speak, and learn God's values. Family is huge. Marriage is vital. But it is not for everyone. Those who are single are just as valuable as anyone. We, who have been blessed by God in so many ways, need to recognize and celebrate this diversity of human experience. Single people need to feel like they matter, that they are important, that they have a contribution to make, and be free within the Church to express their giftedness and strengths for the glory of the Kingdom of God.

Everyone is a part of a family. We're all a part of an earthly family, and some of those are better than others. But, we are also all a part of the family of God. We belong to him. We are all his children. So, let's honor this reality in our relationships with one another, no matter how different we might think we are!