[Author's note: This is another sermon I gave.]
Introduction:
Hi.
My name is still Tom. Christina asked me to speak again today. So here I am.
Last week we talked about walls, both walls of brick and mortar and walls of love and hope. Now, I don’t know if any of you noticed last week, but I’m not a professional public speaker. I was a bit nervous and skipped through some bits faster than I intended. I also didn’t have time to cover some of the stuff I wanted to talk about. Which is cool, in a way, because now I get to talk about that stuff today.
I have three things I want to talk about today. The first two I talked about last week, but I want to be more specific as to how to do them. The last thing I want to talk about I hinted at, but didn’t get to say too much.
The three things are:
1. How to find the holes in your wall.
2. How to fix the holes you find.
3. How to deal with the fact that not everybody will be happy with the construction work.
Unfortunately, when I sat down to write this, I filled up a whole sermon with just the first one. So… that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Finding holes in your wall.
Finding the draft:
I moved into an apartment about four years ago. It was a little one bedroom place that seemed nice enough during the summer. It was newish, was reasonably quiet, and had covered parking. The problem with the apartment didn’t show up until winter. The apartment had a tiny wall mounted heater that was as effective at heating up the apartment as a BIC is at lighting up a dark gym. In other words, you could tell it was doing something, but whatever it was doing, it wasn’t doing it that well.
So it was with a sense of mild horror that one day, while reading a book on the couch in my living room, I felt a cold draft. The tiny wall heater was barely capable of heating the room up without a draft. It didn’t have near the BTUs it would take to overcome the chilling effect of new cold air constantly trickling into the apartment. I was not about to spend the entire winter wearing my snowboarding gear in my own apartment. So I went on a draft hunt. My high school chemistry teacher taught me that the most heat sensitive part of your body is your wrist. (Now, there are more heat sensitive parts of your body. Anybody who has walked into a cold lake knows that. Since the conversation in question revolved around seeing whether a ceramic dish was still scalding hot, he figured nobody would use those parts.)
Anyway, I went through the whole apartment holding my wrist up to all sorts of things. I ran it along window seams. I ran it under the vent for the oven. I went around the front door and the sliding door. And then I went to the fireplace. I didn’t start with the fireplace because I assumed that it had a flue and that said flue was closed. I was wrong on both counts. My apartment had a fireplace with no flue. Just a gaping hole that ran straight up to the wild outdoors. And by “wild” I mean cold and drafty. So I did what any bachelor would do. I closed the glass doors in front of the fireplace (you know, the accordion kind) and duct taped it shut. I duct taped it but good. Deana and Rachel were there. They saw it and can testify to its awesomeness. It’s a miracle I ever got married.
Some of you are probably wondering what drafty fireplaces have to do with Christ-injuring sins. The answer is simple. Absolutely nothing. Heat sensitive wrists, on the other hand, are related in a deeply meaningful way. You see, my heat sensitive wrists let me detect the draft. And since I’m supposed to be talking about finding out where we’re sinning, it would make sense for me to use my heat sensitive wrist story as an analogy for whatever it is that helps us find sins in our lives. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Ready?
Heat sensitive wrists are very similar to your conscience (or moral compass, if you prefer). The major difference here is that where heat sensitive wrists detect heat (or the lack thereof), your conscience detects sin (or the lack thereof). So just use your conscience and all will be well. After all, my heat sensitive wrists worked out okay for me.
Why all will not be well if you just use your conscience:
As many of you have probably noticed, we don’t live in a perfect world. There is a lot of stuff out there that is well and truly screwed up. Can I say “screwed up?” Do I need to say, “messed up?” Regardless, the metaphorical poo has hit the metaphorical fan and made a big metaphorical mess of everything. So, the question is, how do you separate the good from the poo when your own conscience is covered with poo… metaphorically speaking, of course.
Can someone read 1 Timothy 4:1-3?
Paul was a classy guy. When he wrote a letter to his friend Timothy, he didn’t use words like “poo.” The way Paul put it was that in the messed up latter days (those are today, by the way), people would be walking around with their consciences seared with hot irons. It’s a significantly cleaner metaphor that I would have used if the word “poo” weren’t so funny to me. But enough about poo, let’s talk about wrists again.
Wrists are sensitive to heat because there are a bunch of nerves in the wrist that are sensitive to heat. If I were to take a scalding hot iron and burn them but good, my wrists would no longer be heat sensitive. I would have killed the nerves, thus killing my ability to find drafts in fireplaces. Or, in the case of my conscience, I would have lost the ability to tell right from wrong.
If you spend enough time in the world without the love and support of Christians around you, your consciences slowly goes numb. It doesn’t feel like someone slapping a hot iron on your wrist. If it did, we’d realize something was wrong. Instead, it happens bit by bit. You conscience gets scarred over one tiny cut at a time.
You go to school and your friends are gossiping about someone. You know that’s wrong but you don’t say anything. You rationalize or ignore it. After a while, it just seems like the way things are done. Your conscience bleeds a little bit.
You flip on the TV at night and watch another sitcom about attractive people have sex with other attractive people. None of them are married, at least, not married to the people they’re having sex with. You watch, knowing what they’re doing is wrong. But, eventually, it doesn’t seem as wrong as it used to. It just seems like how things are done. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.
Every time your dad has a bad day at work, he comes home and yells at you. You know that it’s wrong at first. But, after years of it, you start to think that having a bad day gives you the right to be cruel. It would seem strange to be nice to people when you didn’t feel like it. Like you were faking niceness or something. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.
After years and years of cutting and scarring and cutting and scarring, you start to lose feeling in the places that matter. You start to feel numb all over. Sure, you don’t act like you’re feeling numb. You act angry or sad of super happy or a seemingly random combination of them all. But deep inside, there’s this numb spot that you have a faint memory of not always being numb. If someone were to come along and tell you to search yourself for your faults and give them to Christ so that you could be made whole, you wouldn’t know where to start. You wouldn’t see faults. You wouldn’t see merit either. You wouldn’t see much of anything.
I realize I’m talking to Accelerate Youth Ministries, so some of you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about when I talk about that numbness. But I also realize I’m talking to high school students in the twenty first century. If modern society is good at anything, it’s good at crushing a healthy conscience. So I’m pretty sure that on one level or another, some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. And for the people who don’t know, it’s likely that at some point or another in your life, you will. The world is a hard place. Good people get hurt. It happens.
So, if you’re so numb you have no idea what’s wrong inside, or if you’re so perfect that you’re pretty sure that nothing is wrong inside, allow me to offer some hope. Christ can heal you. He said so himself.
Can someone read Luke 4:16-21?
This is part of what I talked about last week. Jesus didn’t just come to save your souls. He came to set you free, to give you sight, and to release you from oppression. Which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty sweet.
Waking up: Unsticking your Moral Compass
As with all things in Christianity, if you don’t know where to start, you should pray. As a Christian, you should always be in a state of prayer. Paul said that we should pray continually. Which sounds good, and I hear it is good, but it’s also hard. So let’s start with praying regularly. Pray when you get up. Pray before you eat. Pray before class. Pray after class. Pray before sleeping. Pray and pray and pray. Those of you doing the 60/60 Challenge with your running partners are doing this or trying to do this. And, if your compass is broken, your heat sensitive wrist if burnt to a crisp, and your conscience is a scarred over mess, start by praying to get those things fixed.
Can someone read Romans 8:26-28?
As a side note, you may have noticed that we read past one of those section headings. Those things always make me stop, or pause, or change gears. When you’re reading through the Bible, it’s important to know that those section headings weren’t in the original text. They were added to make the books easier to handle by breaking things up into logical sections. It’s okay to ignore them sometimes.
But back to praying. Paul says that the Spirit (which is part of God) intercedes for us. God is really, really smart. So smart, in fact, that he knows what you need to pray for even if you don’t. He knows what’s right for you even if you don’t know that you don’t know… if that makes sense. What he’s looking for from you isn’t a well worded request, what he’s looking for is intent.
Let me put that another way. You commit sins by doing and thinking. That is, you commit sin by willfully opposing yourself to God (even if you don’t realize you’re opposing anything). Your actions, thoughts, and words are things that come from you but they aren’t you. Sound comes from a drum, but the sound isn’t the drum. Light comes from a light bulb, but the light isn’t the light bulb.
I need someone to read Mathew 12:33-34
God doesn’t just want your thoughts or words or actions. God wants the source. He wants your heart. So when you pray to God, it’s okay to groan some times. It’s okay to speak without words. It’s okay to just… emote. To feel toward God. Give him all you have, even if it’s just a series of grunts, sighs, and other strange noises.
He understands. Remember, he knows what you need to ask before you ask. He just wants you to make the first step. It’s not an easy step, but it’s an important one.
Not only does God understand, he does something else. He sends his Holy Spirit to live in you and act as something of a surrogate conscience. He recognized that yours is broken, and being a loving and caring God, will provide you one to use while you heal.
You see, the sad truth is that your conscience will not heal overnight. You will not wake up tomorrow with all your internal scars magically swept away. God could do this for you, but he probably won’t. There wouldn’t be so many verses in the Bible talking about how enduring hard times well helps to make you stronger if God went around and started magically making life easy for Christians. The people who wrote the Bible knew God didn’t do that. What’s more, they knew that God uses hard situations to make you stronger.
This surrogate, this Holy Spirit, speaks to you. The Spirit does not whisper in your ear, at least not audibly. The Holy Spirit speaks to the part of you that everything else flows from, your heart. It is the heart that is the root of your actions and thoughts, and it is the heart that needs to heal first.
To re-cap: the world is a poo-hit-the-fan scale mess, if you want to get closer to God you need to know what’s keeping you separated (which is sin), and if you want to know what sin is you need God’s help.
Getting to know God: from Heart to Head
Paul the Apostle says it’s good to know God with your heart, but it’s also good to know him with your head. I agree, and that’s not just because Paul’s an apostle and I’m not. I agree because he’s right. The apostles were wrong sometimes. Further proof that you and I have a shot at this Christianity thing.
The question is, how do we get to know God better? Well, we pray. But we talked about that earlier. We’re doing that, at least we’re trying to do that. We’ll just say that it’s in the works. Anyway, there’s something else we can do. It’s even something we should do.
This is complicated, so I want to make sure you’re ready for it. Ready? Okay. Here it is.
Read your Bible.
Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
The reason you want to read your Bible is simple. It’s about God, and it’s inspired by him. Since we’re trying to get to know God better, it makes sense to read a book inspired by him.
Some of you may be confused right now. First I was talking about seared consciences, and now all of a sudden I’m talking about getting to know God. I have an explanation. Your conscience is what tells you right from wrong. God, being perfect, has a perfect knowledge of right and wrong. Thus, getting to know God is getting to know what is right and wrong.
To put it differently, living in the world will blind you to the truth. Following Christ will open your eyes to the truth. There are a whole bunch of verses in the Bible that talk about how Christ coming into the world is like a giant light was turned on. Before Christ we were blind to the truth. With Christ, we can see the truth.
So, I’m going to say it again. Read your Bible. I’ve talked to people before who didn’t much care for the Bible. They wanted to know God in their heart, but they didn’t think the Bible would help them there. And the Bible by itself, and by that I mean without prayer and Christian fellowship, won’t. They had that part right. But reading the Bible is an important part of maturing as Christians. We have to start our journey with Christ down here, in the heart. But it can’t get very far unless we involve our heads as well.
By the way, because the act of maturing as Christians is a process of getting closer to God, you can replace the phrase “maturing as Christians” with “spiritually healing.” Remember that. Spiritual maturity is a process of spiritual healing.
Back to the Bible. The Bible was written by a bunch of different people over a really long time period. When you read it, you’ll notice something. Each author has a slightly different take on God. They use different analogies, and they emphasize different characteristics. Take the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four books are about the life and times of Jesus Christ. And while each book has some of the same events, they all include something different. They all have a slightly different take on who Christ was.
Has everyone heard the story about the four blind monks and the elephant? The four monks all ran into an elephant and each tried to explain the experience to the others. The first monk said it was a giant serpent. That monk was holding the elephant’s trunk. The second monk said the elephant was like a giant column. That monk was touching the elephant’s leg. The third monk said the elephant was a giant leathery wall. That monk was touching the elephant’s side. The fourth monk said the elephant was a huge four legged creature with big ears and a snake-like nose. At which point the other three monks realized that the fourth monk was lying about being blind.
The point is, the three blind monks were experiencing the same elephant. But they couldn’t experience the whole elephant all at once. The elephant was too big for their powers of perception. God is like that. He’s too big to see all at once. He’s too big to take in within one life time.
Which is where the Bible comes into play for us. You see, all those different books in the Bible written by all those different authors gives you access to life times of experience getting to know God. All those different people look at God differently. And comparing those different viewpoints gives you a bigger picture.
There’s this photo program out there called Photosynth. For all the nerds here today, you need to check it out. It’s amazingly cool. What it does is simple. It gathers together a whole bunch of pictures of the same object, say the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower. Well, all those photos are going to be taken from different angles and directions. Some are going to be taken from the east, some from the south, some from the middle looking straight up. The program takes all those pictures and combines them into a three dimensional environment you can move around in virtually. You see, the sum total of the information in all those pictures has enough information to digitally recreate the place in question.
That’s kind of what the Bible is doing. It’s giving you a whole bunch of different vantage points that you can use to get a bigger, better, more complete picture of who God is. And, by getting to know who God is, you get to know what right is and what wrong is.
Why We Care
Remember, the reason we care about knowing the difference between right and wrong is that sin keeps us from God. At least, sin keeps us from experiencing the love that God wants us to experience. In other words, sin keeps us from being whole.
We were designed for union with God. We were made in his image. He calls us his children. But we live in a world of crud. We’re surrounded by it. Sometimes it feels like we’re filled with it. So he sent his son to die on a cross. It is that sacrifice that will wash the crud from us if we ask. And more than that, more than brushing off the dirt, if we don’t stop there, Christ will do something beautiful. He’ll make us in his image again. He’s restore what was tainted. And then all sorts of cool stuff will happen. Then we’ll start truly living.
Introduction:
Hi.
My name is still Tom. Christina asked me to speak again today. So here I am.
Last week we talked about walls, both walls of brick and mortar and walls of love and hope. Now, I don’t know if any of you noticed last week, but I’m not a professional public speaker. I was a bit nervous and skipped through some bits faster than I intended. I also didn’t have time to cover some of the stuff I wanted to talk about. Which is cool, in a way, because now I get to talk about that stuff today.
I have three things I want to talk about today. The first two I talked about last week, but I want to be more specific as to how to do them. The last thing I want to talk about I hinted at, but didn’t get to say too much.
The three things are:
1. How to find the holes in your wall.
2. How to fix the holes you find.
3. How to deal with the fact that not everybody will be happy with the construction work.
Unfortunately, when I sat down to write this, I filled up a whole sermon with just the first one. So… that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Finding holes in your wall.
Finding the draft:
I moved into an apartment about four years ago. It was a little one bedroom place that seemed nice enough during the summer. It was newish, was reasonably quiet, and had covered parking. The problem with the apartment didn’t show up until winter. The apartment had a tiny wall mounted heater that was as effective at heating up the apartment as a BIC is at lighting up a dark gym. In other words, you could tell it was doing something, but whatever it was doing, it wasn’t doing it that well.
So it was with a sense of mild horror that one day, while reading a book on the couch in my living room, I felt a cold draft. The tiny wall heater was barely capable of heating the room up without a draft. It didn’t have near the BTUs it would take to overcome the chilling effect of new cold air constantly trickling into the apartment. I was not about to spend the entire winter wearing my snowboarding gear in my own apartment. So I went on a draft hunt. My high school chemistry teacher taught me that the most heat sensitive part of your body is your wrist. (Now, there are more heat sensitive parts of your body. Anybody who has walked into a cold lake knows that. Since the conversation in question revolved around seeing whether a ceramic dish was still scalding hot, he figured nobody would use those parts.)
Anyway, I went through the whole apartment holding my wrist up to all sorts of things. I ran it along window seams. I ran it under the vent for the oven. I went around the front door and the sliding door. And then I went to the fireplace. I didn’t start with the fireplace because I assumed that it had a flue and that said flue was closed. I was wrong on both counts. My apartment had a fireplace with no flue. Just a gaping hole that ran straight up to the wild outdoors. And by “wild” I mean cold and drafty. So I did what any bachelor would do. I closed the glass doors in front of the fireplace (you know, the accordion kind) and duct taped it shut. I duct taped it but good. Deana and Rachel were there. They saw it and can testify to its awesomeness. It’s a miracle I ever got married.
Some of you are probably wondering what drafty fireplaces have to do with Christ-injuring sins. The answer is simple. Absolutely nothing. Heat sensitive wrists, on the other hand, are related in a deeply meaningful way. You see, my heat sensitive wrists let me detect the draft. And since I’m supposed to be talking about finding out where we’re sinning, it would make sense for me to use my heat sensitive wrist story as an analogy for whatever it is that helps us find sins in our lives. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Ready?
Heat sensitive wrists are very similar to your conscience (or moral compass, if you prefer). The major difference here is that where heat sensitive wrists detect heat (or the lack thereof), your conscience detects sin (or the lack thereof). So just use your conscience and all will be well. After all, my heat sensitive wrists worked out okay for me.
Why all will not be well if you just use your conscience:
As many of you have probably noticed, we don’t live in a perfect world. There is a lot of stuff out there that is well and truly screwed up. Can I say “screwed up?” Do I need to say, “messed up?” Regardless, the metaphorical poo has hit the metaphorical fan and made a big metaphorical mess of everything. So, the question is, how do you separate the good from the poo when your own conscience is covered with poo… metaphorically speaking, of course.
Can someone read 1 Timothy 4:1-3?
Paul was a classy guy. When he wrote a letter to his friend Timothy, he didn’t use words like “poo.” The way Paul put it was that in the messed up latter days (those are today, by the way), people would be walking around with their consciences seared with hot irons. It’s a significantly cleaner metaphor that I would have used if the word “poo” weren’t so funny to me. But enough about poo, let’s talk about wrists again.
Wrists are sensitive to heat because there are a bunch of nerves in the wrist that are sensitive to heat. If I were to take a scalding hot iron and burn them but good, my wrists would no longer be heat sensitive. I would have killed the nerves, thus killing my ability to find drafts in fireplaces. Or, in the case of my conscience, I would have lost the ability to tell right from wrong.
If you spend enough time in the world without the love and support of Christians around you, your consciences slowly goes numb. It doesn’t feel like someone slapping a hot iron on your wrist. If it did, we’d realize something was wrong. Instead, it happens bit by bit. You conscience gets scarred over one tiny cut at a time.
You go to school and your friends are gossiping about someone. You know that’s wrong but you don’t say anything. You rationalize or ignore it. After a while, it just seems like the way things are done. Your conscience bleeds a little bit.
You flip on the TV at night and watch another sitcom about attractive people have sex with other attractive people. None of them are married, at least, not married to the people they’re having sex with. You watch, knowing what they’re doing is wrong. But, eventually, it doesn’t seem as wrong as it used to. It just seems like how things are done. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.
Every time your dad has a bad day at work, he comes home and yells at you. You know that it’s wrong at first. But, after years of it, you start to think that having a bad day gives you the right to be cruel. It would seem strange to be nice to people when you didn’t feel like it. Like you were faking niceness or something. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.
After years and years of cutting and scarring and cutting and scarring, you start to lose feeling in the places that matter. You start to feel numb all over. Sure, you don’t act like you’re feeling numb. You act angry or sad of super happy or a seemingly random combination of them all. But deep inside, there’s this numb spot that you have a faint memory of not always being numb. If someone were to come along and tell you to search yourself for your faults and give them to Christ so that you could be made whole, you wouldn’t know where to start. You wouldn’t see faults. You wouldn’t see merit either. You wouldn’t see much of anything.
I realize I’m talking to Accelerate Youth Ministries, so some of you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about when I talk about that numbness. But I also realize I’m talking to high school students in the twenty first century. If modern society is good at anything, it’s good at crushing a healthy conscience. So I’m pretty sure that on one level or another, some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. And for the people who don’t know, it’s likely that at some point or another in your life, you will. The world is a hard place. Good people get hurt. It happens.
So, if you’re so numb you have no idea what’s wrong inside, or if you’re so perfect that you’re pretty sure that nothing is wrong inside, allow me to offer some hope. Christ can heal you. He said so himself.
Can someone read Luke 4:16-21?
This is part of what I talked about last week. Jesus didn’t just come to save your souls. He came to set you free, to give you sight, and to release you from oppression. Which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty sweet.
Waking up: Unsticking your Moral Compass
As with all things in Christianity, if you don’t know where to start, you should pray. As a Christian, you should always be in a state of prayer. Paul said that we should pray continually. Which sounds good, and I hear it is good, but it’s also hard. So let’s start with praying regularly. Pray when you get up. Pray before you eat. Pray before class. Pray after class. Pray before sleeping. Pray and pray and pray. Those of you doing the 60/60 Challenge with your running partners are doing this or trying to do this. And, if your compass is broken, your heat sensitive wrist if burnt to a crisp, and your conscience is a scarred over mess, start by praying to get those things fixed.
Can someone read Romans 8:26-28?
As a side note, you may have noticed that we read past one of those section headings. Those things always make me stop, or pause, or change gears. When you’re reading through the Bible, it’s important to know that those section headings weren’t in the original text. They were added to make the books easier to handle by breaking things up into logical sections. It’s okay to ignore them sometimes.
But back to praying. Paul says that the Spirit (which is part of God) intercedes for us. God is really, really smart. So smart, in fact, that he knows what you need to pray for even if you don’t. He knows what’s right for you even if you don’t know that you don’t know… if that makes sense. What he’s looking for from you isn’t a well worded request, what he’s looking for is intent.
Let me put that another way. You commit sins by doing and thinking. That is, you commit sin by willfully opposing yourself to God (even if you don’t realize you’re opposing anything). Your actions, thoughts, and words are things that come from you but they aren’t you. Sound comes from a drum, but the sound isn’t the drum. Light comes from a light bulb, but the light isn’t the light bulb.
I need someone to read Mathew 12:33-34
God doesn’t just want your thoughts or words or actions. God wants the source. He wants your heart. So when you pray to God, it’s okay to groan some times. It’s okay to speak without words. It’s okay to just… emote. To feel toward God. Give him all you have, even if it’s just a series of grunts, sighs, and other strange noises.
He understands. Remember, he knows what you need to ask before you ask. He just wants you to make the first step. It’s not an easy step, but it’s an important one.
Not only does God understand, he does something else. He sends his Holy Spirit to live in you and act as something of a surrogate conscience. He recognized that yours is broken, and being a loving and caring God, will provide you one to use while you heal.
You see, the sad truth is that your conscience will not heal overnight. You will not wake up tomorrow with all your internal scars magically swept away. God could do this for you, but he probably won’t. There wouldn’t be so many verses in the Bible talking about how enduring hard times well helps to make you stronger if God went around and started magically making life easy for Christians. The people who wrote the Bible knew God didn’t do that. What’s more, they knew that God uses hard situations to make you stronger.
This surrogate, this Holy Spirit, speaks to you. The Spirit does not whisper in your ear, at least not audibly. The Holy Spirit speaks to the part of you that everything else flows from, your heart. It is the heart that is the root of your actions and thoughts, and it is the heart that needs to heal first.
To re-cap: the world is a poo-hit-the-fan scale mess, if you want to get closer to God you need to know what’s keeping you separated (which is sin), and if you want to know what sin is you need God’s help.
Getting to know God: from Heart to Head
Paul the Apostle says it’s good to know God with your heart, but it’s also good to know him with your head. I agree, and that’s not just because Paul’s an apostle and I’m not. I agree because he’s right. The apostles were wrong sometimes. Further proof that you and I have a shot at this Christianity thing.
The question is, how do we get to know God better? Well, we pray. But we talked about that earlier. We’re doing that, at least we’re trying to do that. We’ll just say that it’s in the works. Anyway, there’s something else we can do. It’s even something we should do.
This is complicated, so I want to make sure you’re ready for it. Ready? Okay. Here it is.
Read your Bible.
Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
The reason you want to read your Bible is simple. It’s about God, and it’s inspired by him. Since we’re trying to get to know God better, it makes sense to read a book inspired by him.
Some of you may be confused right now. First I was talking about seared consciences, and now all of a sudden I’m talking about getting to know God. I have an explanation. Your conscience is what tells you right from wrong. God, being perfect, has a perfect knowledge of right and wrong. Thus, getting to know God is getting to know what is right and wrong.
To put it differently, living in the world will blind you to the truth. Following Christ will open your eyes to the truth. There are a whole bunch of verses in the Bible that talk about how Christ coming into the world is like a giant light was turned on. Before Christ we were blind to the truth. With Christ, we can see the truth.
So, I’m going to say it again. Read your Bible. I’ve talked to people before who didn’t much care for the Bible. They wanted to know God in their heart, but they didn’t think the Bible would help them there. And the Bible by itself, and by that I mean without prayer and Christian fellowship, won’t. They had that part right. But reading the Bible is an important part of maturing as Christians. We have to start our journey with Christ down here, in the heart. But it can’t get very far unless we involve our heads as well.
By the way, because the act of maturing as Christians is a process of getting closer to God, you can replace the phrase “maturing as Christians” with “spiritually healing.” Remember that. Spiritual maturity is a process of spiritual healing.
Back to the Bible. The Bible was written by a bunch of different people over a really long time period. When you read it, you’ll notice something. Each author has a slightly different take on God. They use different analogies, and they emphasize different characteristics. Take the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four books are about the life and times of Jesus Christ. And while each book has some of the same events, they all include something different. They all have a slightly different take on who Christ was.
Has everyone heard the story about the four blind monks and the elephant? The four monks all ran into an elephant and each tried to explain the experience to the others. The first monk said it was a giant serpent. That monk was holding the elephant’s trunk. The second monk said the elephant was like a giant column. That monk was touching the elephant’s leg. The third monk said the elephant was a giant leathery wall. That monk was touching the elephant’s side. The fourth monk said the elephant was a huge four legged creature with big ears and a snake-like nose. At which point the other three monks realized that the fourth monk was lying about being blind.
The point is, the three blind monks were experiencing the same elephant. But they couldn’t experience the whole elephant all at once. The elephant was too big for their powers of perception. God is like that. He’s too big to see all at once. He’s too big to take in within one life time.
Which is where the Bible comes into play for us. You see, all those different books in the Bible written by all those different authors gives you access to life times of experience getting to know God. All those different people look at God differently. And comparing those different viewpoints gives you a bigger picture.
There’s this photo program out there called Photosynth. For all the nerds here today, you need to check it out. It’s amazingly cool. What it does is simple. It gathers together a whole bunch of pictures of the same object, say the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower. Well, all those photos are going to be taken from different angles and directions. Some are going to be taken from the east, some from the south, some from the middle looking straight up. The program takes all those pictures and combines them into a three dimensional environment you can move around in virtually. You see, the sum total of the information in all those pictures has enough information to digitally recreate the place in question.
That’s kind of what the Bible is doing. It’s giving you a whole bunch of different vantage points that you can use to get a bigger, better, more complete picture of who God is. And, by getting to know who God is, you get to know what right is and what wrong is.
Why We Care
Remember, the reason we care about knowing the difference between right and wrong is that sin keeps us from God. At least, sin keeps us from experiencing the love that God wants us to experience. In other words, sin keeps us from being whole.
We were designed for union with God. We were made in his image. He calls us his children. But we live in a world of crud. We’re surrounded by it. Sometimes it feels like we’re filled with it. So he sent his son to die on a cross. It is that sacrifice that will wash the crud from us if we ask. And more than that, more than brushing off the dirt, if we don’t stop there, Christ will do something beautiful. He’ll make us in his image again. He’s restore what was tainted. And then all sorts of cool stuff will happen. Then we’ll start truly living.
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