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Written by Pastor Darrell Cooper
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Friday, 01 August 2008 14:05 |
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Romans 7:15-25
July 6, 2008 - Lindsborg Cov.
“Which H Are You?”
(Victory over sin)
Sermon
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are a smoker. You have been smoking cigarettes for years. In fact, you have been chain smoking two packs a day for decades. The trouble is that the coughing fits are becoming more and more frequent, and over the last few months you are finding it more and more difficult to even breath. So, you have decided it is time to seek medical help.
You make an appointment with your doctor. The doctor runs some tests and is absolutely alarmed at the condition of your lungs. She issues you a blunt ultimatum: “Quit smoking right now or you will not see Christmas.”
This is not good news for you, because you have tried quitting before. Many times. In fact, you have discovered that the only thing easier than quitting is starting up again. The truth is that you are addicted. You are in complete bondage to cigarettes, and your addiction is stronger than your own willpower. You know, from repeated experience, that there is no way you will ever be able, in your own power, to break this habit. It is bigger than you are. Your only hope is to get help from some external source, and it better be a powerful source at that.
Now, I would like you to think of the doctor’s orders in this illustration as the law. The doctor was laying down the law to her patient. We all know that if we break the law there will be consequences. So, now I invite you to listen as I have an imaginary conversation with an imaginary smoker named Jack. I am going to lay down the law to Jack. And, I am going to explain to him the consequences if he chooses to continue violating the law of smoking.
(Turning to the North to face the imaginary Jack)
“Jack, I noticed that you are lighting up again. Are you sure you want to do that? I mean, it just isn’t good for you. For example, have you noticed what happens to people’s voices when they smoke for a long time? Their voice gets all raspy and gravelly sounding. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you Jack?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“No. Not really.”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good, Jack! So, what are you going to do about it?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway.)
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Hmmm. Ok. Well, Jack, what about your appearance? You know holding those cigarettes between your fingers discolors your fingernails and it also turns your teeth yellow. That is not a good look for you. You don’t want that to happen to you do you?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“No. No, I don’t”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good, Jack! So, what are you going to do about it?
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway.)
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“I see. OK, well then, what about the smell, Jack? That smoke gets into your clothes and it stinks, not to mention the really bad breath. Now that is not very attractive at all, is it? You don’t want that to happen to you, do you?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“No, not at all.”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good, Jack! So, what are you going to do about it?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway.)
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“OK, Jack, forget about those things for a minute. What about the cost? That has got to be a very expensive habit! What do those things cost now, $3/pack? More? That adds up quickly, Jack. I once heard a man testify that if he would have saved up all the money he has spent on cigarettes over the years, he could have bought the house he lives in - twice! Now, think about this for just a minute, Jack. Think about how much extra spending money you would have if you just quit smoking. Wouldn’t you like that?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Yeah! That would be great! It sure would be a huge financial relief!”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good, Jack! Now you’re talking! So, what are you going to do about it?
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway.)
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
(Getting irritated now). “All right, Jack, maybe you don’t care about the money. But surely you care about your health. You have to know that smoking is not good for you, right? For one thing, there is that chronic cough of yours. That isn’t getting any better. And you will catch more colds than I do as a non-smoker. And your risk of losing your teeth is 2-3 times higher than it is for non-smokers.
I have been reading up about this, Jack. Did you know that there are 19 known carcinogens in that cigarette? No wonder you can get lung cancer, heart disease, or have a stroke! Did you know that in the United States alone, over 1,200 people will die today from tobacco related illnesses. And since you are a man, you have a 50% chance of being one of those 1,200 people one day. Cigarettes kill one in two men, Jack. This is life and death we are talking about here, you understand. You don’t want to die, do you, Jack?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“No. Of course not!”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good! That is good! So, what are you going to do about it?”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway.)
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
(Really frustrated now) “All right, maybe you don’t care about your life, Jack, but what about your kids, huh? You still have three kids living at home. You know what second-hand smoke does to them. You are poisoning your kids, Jack. It is toxic to them. You may not care about your life or your health, but do you really want to compromise their . . .”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Very angry now.)
“Of course not! What kind of father do you think I am?!”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation)
“Good, Jack! Get angry! Get really mad now, and tell me what you are going to do about it.”
(Turning to face the other person in the conversation. Reluctantly put fingers to mouth in imitation of smoking to silently communicate that Jack is going to keep smoking anyway, and then turn your back on the other person.)
You see how I laid down the law to Jack? You heard how I warned him of the consequences if he continues to violate the law of smoking? And did you see how effective it was?
Now, why didn’t that work? Why wasn’t I able to convince Jack to quit smoking? What I said was all true, wasn’t it? Yes, all true. So, why was Jack not willing to listen, willing to change?
Well, the law can make it abundantly clear that smoking is a foolish and risky behavior. But the law does not give Jack the power to obey it, does it? The law has the ability to inform, and sometimes it can even motivate, but the law does not have the power to transform.
This, by the way, is one of the problems with the philosophy of education in our culture. When it comes to guiding and protecting our children we tend to assume that all our children need is more information. There are so many dangerous and risky behaviors that we want to keep them away from: drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, suicide, gangs, etc. The dominant philosophy is that education is the key. If we can just get them the right amount of information early enough, it will prevent bad behavior. If we can feed them enough facts, teach them enough information and offer them powerful motivators, then they will automatically choose the good, wise, and right course of action. How is that working for us? I think it should be fairly obvious to us by now that human nature simply does not work that way. Information alone is not enough.
For example, how many of you know someone who smokes? Please raise your hand. Do you know someone who smokes? (Pause for response) OK, and how many smokers do you know who honestly believe it is good for them? (Pause for response) None, right. You don’t know any smoker who really believes that, do you? Everyone knows that nicotine is dangerous and addictive. In fact, I think most smokers probably know this better than non-smokers. In fact, I have known of many doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to smoke. And you can’t tell me that they just didn’t know! I have even heard smokers refer to their own cigarettes as “cancer sticks” or “coffin nails”.
They already know the truth. They are all well-aware of the “law of smoking”. But this knowledge, this “law”, so to speak, does not give them the power to quit. Knowledge of the law provides information, and perhaps even motivation, but it cannot create transformation.
Does that mean that the law is bad? Does that mean that the doctor was evil or mean to tell her patient to quit smoking? No. The law of smoking is true and therefore good. It is right and good for a physician to warn her patients of the consequences of such unhealthy behavior. It is just that the “law” the doctor lays down is not strong enough (in many cases) to change the patient’s behavior because it is weakened by the habit. The power of the law is compromised by the addiction to nicotine. The smoker is, in a sense, enslaved to his own cigarettes. He cannot quit even if he wants to, at least not by his own willpower. So, it is not that the law is evil, it is just that the right and good law is powerless to effect a healthy change of lifestyle because it is weakened by the addiction.
That might be a fairly good analogy of our lives as well, because we too are under a law. God has laid down the law to us and His law is essentially this: love God and love people. God says He wants us to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And the way we love God is by obeying His commands.
There is also a serious consequence for violating this law: death. Again, the biblical understanding of death is separation. So, God is saying, “I want you to love Me with all that is within you. And I want you to love each other too. You will do this by obeying all of My commands. If you fail to keep this law you will no longer be in relationship with Me.”
That is the law of God which He has given to us. The problem is that we simply cannot do it. Even if we want to, we can’t. Even if we agree with God’s law, even if we love it and long to do it all the time, we will fail. We simply cannot keep and obey His law, so at the end of the day the law condemns us to death.
Does this mean that God’s law is sinful or evil? No. It means we are. The law of God is a reflection of His character and nature and is therefore good. But the law of God is weakened by our own sinful nature. The power of God’s law is compromised by our own addiction to sin. So, it does us virtually no good to know the law because we lack the power to obey it. We are enslaved to sin and under its power and dominion. We cannot keep the law even when we want to, even when we try our hardest.
So, the law is not evil, but it does show us just how evil we are. Paul talks about this in Romans chapter seven. He says that without the law we may have had a vague sense that we occasionally do some bad things, but if it were not for God’s law we would have no clear sense of just how thoroughly wicked and depraved our hearts really are. So, the law of God acts as a yardstick, if you will, and as we measure ourselves against His standard we begin to see very clearly just how short we have all fallen from His glory.
The truth is that we cannot save ourselves. No matter how hard we try, we cannot change our own hearts or alter our own behavior. Our only hope, like the smoker, is to find help from an external source. We need someone or something much more powerful than we are to save us. We need a Savior. This brings us to Romans 7-8, our passage for today.
If you would like to turn there, you may, and you might also like to locate the sermon outline in your bulletin and fill it out as we go along. I borrowed this outline from Colin Smith. He is the Senior Pastor at Arlington Heights Evangelical Free Church in Illinois.
What I would like to do now is introduce you to three people we meet in these two chapters of Romans. These are types of people. In other words, everyone in this room falls into one of these three categories. So, as I describe these three people to you I would like you to listen and try to decide which one of these three types most accurately describes you today. Ready? OK.
The first person we meet in Romans 8:7. It says, “The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” The first person we will call Hostile. There are two things we need to understand about Hostile. First of all, Hostile is not even trying to keep God’s law. He does not have the desire to honor or obey God. He doesn’t care. Hostile wants nothing to do with God or His law. He is not living his life to please God, he is living his life to please himself. He is going his own way and he is quite happy ignoring or rejecting God, thank you very much. Hostile does not have the desire to honor or obey God, and even if he did, he does not have the ability to honor or obey God.
Perhaps you are Hostile today. You are here in church this morning, but you are not living for God. You want nothing to do with God or His ways or His word or His people. You may be intentionally and adamantly opposed to God, or you may simply ignore Him as irrelevant, but either way, you are quite happy going your own way and God has little or no part in your life. You are Hostile.
The second person we meet in these chapters is Helpless. Chapter seven is mostly about Helpless. Listen to the voice of Helpless. “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. (Rom 7:18)
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)
Unlike Hostile, helpless loves God. Helpless wants to please God. He wants to avoid evil and embrace virtue. And he tries. He tries hard. But he fails. The problem with Helpless is that while he has the desire to honor and obey God, he does not have the ability to honor or obey God. This is where we read the famous passage where Paul says, “The things I want to do I don’t end up doing. The things I hate are what I end up doing! It is like my will is broken! It is so frustrating! I want to do good, but I can’t seem to pull it off! I don’t want to sin, but I always end up doing the things I hate the most!”
Maybe you can relate to Helpless today. Maybe you are here and you are feeling really frustrated because you really do love God and you want to honor Him and you want to do the right thing and obey His word, but you cannot seem to do it. You have tried, and you failed.
Maybe there is some specific sin in your life, some habitual sin that seems to have a stranglehold on you and you can’t seem to shake it. You have tried. You have tried everything you can think of. You have prayed. You have fasted. You have studied the Bible, read Christian books, gone to conferences, or sought out counseling. No matter how hard you try you cannot seem to shake this thing! Maybe you are ready to give up. Maybe you are ready to just chuck the whole thing and just say, “I just can’t do it.” You are frustrated. You are Helpless.
Well, there is a third person in this passage, and we will call him Hopeful. We meet Hopeful in chapter eight, particularly in verses five and 13. Listen carefully to this description of Hopeful: “Those who live in accordance with the Spirit” and that, by the way, is the key word in this passage: Spirit, “Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. (Rom 8:5b) If by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. (Rom 8:13b)
So now we meet Hopeful. And Hopeful, like Helpless, loves God. He does have the desire to honor and obey God. Unlike Helpless, he also has the ability to honor and obey God. He can actually pull it off. But notice that it is not under his own power. Again, it says, “If by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.” So Hopeful has tapped into an external source (who has now become an internal source), a source more powerful than himself to accomplish what he could not do on his own, and now he can - through the Spirit.’
Colin Smith uses an illustration here that I find helpful, so I want to share it with you. Colin used to be a pastor in England. While he was living in England, one day he was in a used bookstore and he found a six-volume set of books that turned out to be the personal memoirs of Winston Churchill. Being a bit of a history buff, he bought the books and took them home.
Smith was particularly interested to see what Churchill may have written in his diary on December 7, 1941. That was, of course, the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. I know that some of you remember that day very well. Colin Smith was curious what it was like from Winston Churchill’s perspective, so he turned to that passage of the memoirs and this is what he learned.
On that day Churchill was with a colleague and some friends at his country retreat called “Checkers”. That evening they were all tired and listening to the 9:00 news on the radio when they heard a report about an attack on American shipping in Hawaii. The report was sketchy and a bit confusing, and Churchill admits that he did not pay much attention to it.
What did get his attention was the butler. The butler’s name was Sawyers. Sawyers come rushing into the room exclaiming, “It is true! We just heard it outside. The Americans have been attacked!”
Now this was very serious. It represented a major shift in world events at that time. Churchill walked through the hall to the office that was always busy working and placed a call to the White House. In a few minutes he had President Roosevelt on the phone and asked,
“Mr. President, what is this we hear about an attack on the American people?”
President Roosevelt confirmed the report saying, “Yes, it is true. The United States has been attacked at Pearl Harbor.”
Then he told the Prime Minister, “We are all in the same boat now.”
So, this is what Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs about that night:
“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was, to me, the greatest joy. We had won after all!”
Now, remember, this journal entry was dated December 7, 1941. The war would not end for four more years, and yet on the night that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill wrote in his diary,
“We had won after all. Yes, after Dunkirk, after the fall of France, after 17 months of lonely fighting and 19 months of my responsibility alone in dire distress, we had won the war! How long the war would last, or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at that moment care. Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no doubt about the end. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”
In his last line in his diary about that night, he says, “I went to bed and I slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful.”
What made the difference? Churchill said that for 19 lonely months he felt all alone and in dire distress, but on this night he went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful. What made the difference? The difference, of course, was the new involvement of an overwhelming force.
And that is the difference between Helpless and Hopeful. Helpless knows that he is beaten. He knows that the enemy is stronger than he is. He knows that he is going to lose his war with sin. But Hopeful knows that the key to victory in the Christian life is the proper application of overwhelming force. This overwhelming force is, of course, the power of the Holy Spirit, who is with you and in you if you are a follower of Jesus Christ.
Now, Hopeful is not naive. He knows that the war is not yet over. He knows that many battles lie ahead, and he knows that they will be fierce and that he may lose a few. But he also knows how the war will end. He knows that in the end he will be on the winning side. The victory is assured because of his new ally who provides an overwhelming force.
Smith puts it this way: “If you are Helpless, come to Christ. If you have come to Christ, you are not Helpless. You are Hopeful, for the Spirit of God lives in you. If the Spirit of God lives in you, you are in the position to fight!”
Perhaps I could summarize it this way. Jesus Christ came to earth to save us. But He did not come merely to save us from the penalty of sin, which is separation from God in this life and the next, but He also came to save us from the power of sin, from bondage to sin. He came to liberate us from our enslavement under the dominion of sin’s power.
So, if you are a follower of Jesus, then the Holy Spirit dwells within you. If the Holy Spirit is within you then you have a powerful ally. All that remains is the proper application of overwhelming force.
Now, if you are like me, I know what you are thinking right now. You are thinking, “OK, that is all fine and good, preacher. That is a nice theory, but what does it really mean? I agree that the key to victory over sin and temptation is to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit, but how exactly do I do that? What does that mean? What does it look like to abide in Christ and walk in the Spirit and tap into His power? How do I do that?
If that is your question, then I want to invite you back next week. Next week Pastor Jeff is going to pick up where I left off. He is going to go deeper into Romans chapter eight and describe and explain to us what it means to walk in the Spirit and how we tap into His power in our lives to apply an overwhelming force.
Let’s pray.
Communion
“In The Light” - DC Talk
I keep trying to find a life On my own, apart from You
I am the king of excuses I've got one for every selfish thing I do
What's going on inside of me? I despise my own behavior
This only serves to confirm my suspicions That I'm still a man in need of a Savior
(chorus)
I wanna be in the Light As You are in the Light
I wanna shine like the stars in the heavens
Oh, Lord be my Light and be my salvation
Cause all I want is to be in the Light
All I want is to be in the Light
The disease of self runs through my blood It's a cancer fatal to my soul
Every attempt on my behalf has failed To bring this sickness under control
Tell me, what's going on inside of me? I despise my own behavior
This only serves to confirm my suspicions That I'm still a man in need of a Savior
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