Good morning! As you may have noticed, we are trying a different microphone today – not to be cool – but hopefully to get a better sound. Testing, testing, 3, 2, 1 Houston, we have ignition.
How are you doing with our sermon series on Life’s Healing Choices? I know I’ve been learning and growing! Anytime you combine an open heart with the power of God’s Word change happens. God’s Word confronts, convicts, instructs, comforts, and transforms us. This process is often painful, but always healing. Are you ready for the 5th healing choice?
Let’s review. Remember; our choices are only possible because God first chose us. When we were dead in our sins, God made us alive through Christ’s death and resurrection so that we could make some new choices in dealing with the hurts, hang-ups, habits that hold us captive.
1. Reality Choice. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing.
2. Hope Choice. Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to him, and he has the power to help me.
3. Commitment Choice. Consciously choose to commit all of my life and will to Christ’s care and control.
4. Housecleaning Choice. Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, God, and someone I trust.
5. Transformation Choice. Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask him to remove my character defects.
There are some things God wants to change in your life today. Are you willing? Sunday before last I shared how I came to this place of willingness in my own life. I was 23 and it seemed I was achieving all the goals I had set for myself. I’d graduated with a decree in Fish, Wildlife Management. I was accepted for graduate school and I was managing a private aviculture project in southern Montana raising arctic waterfowl. Everything looked great, but something was wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was an emptiness inside me.
Instead of God in here, I attempted to put God over there in a box. I figured if I gave God just enough to keep him happy, the rest of my life was mine to do with as I pleased. What I didn’t know is “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” Prov 14:12
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Lord used the emptiness of that time to lead me through the first 4 healing choices. I owned up to the mess I had made of my life and that I couldn’t fix it. I asked God to help me. I committed myself to letting go of my way and seeking his way. I confessed my faults to God, to myself, and to the Christian community.
God was moving me from claiming to be a Christian to actually becoming a Christian.
Here’s how Paul puts it in Romans 12 “So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life--your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life--and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Recognize what he wants from you, and respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Romans 12:1-2 MSG
My choice to surrender myself to Christ’s care and control led me to enroll in Lutheran Bible Institute in Seattle. I hadn’t been there more than a few weeks when God began bringing up some unfinished business I’d been working hard to forget.
It had to do with a couple dead ducks. Not just any ducks but incredibly valuable arctic brant. You see while I was managing the bird refuge, a friend stopped by to visit. We were sitting in my apartment having lunch. Just outside the back door was a large pen housing 2 dozen brant that my boss had collected on a very expensive expedition to the arctic.
I’d been getting increasingly frustrated with huge flocks of blackbirds eating all the grain out of the bird feeders I used to feed the brant. I always kept a loaded shotgun by the backdoor to deal with skunks, raccoons, fox that were always trying to raid the bird pens.
Suddenly I jumped up, grabbed my shotgun, raced out the door and dropped a half dozen blackbirds with one shot. I also dropped 2 brant that were worth many thousands of dollars!
I was shocked at what I’d done. I’d handled guns all my life and never made a mistake like that. What I’d done was inexcusable. I was ashamed, embarrassed, terrified to face my boss.
So as soon as my friend left, I took the dead ducks down and threw them in the Yellowstone River. A few days later, my boss arrived and it didn’t take long for him to spot the missing birds. When he asked me about them, I lied and said I had no idea why they were missing.
So there I was, nine months later, sitting in chapel at LBI. It was Lent, self examination time – and the Lord brought it up again. “John, what are you going to do about those dead ducks?”
I broke out in a cold sweat. What was it Pastor Ralph taught us last Sunday in the housecleaning choice? “Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.”
AA calls this a fearless moral inventory and its’ never very pretty. I’d betrayed God, my boss, my family, myself. I was an irresponsible liar, coward, and thief – yet there I was, sitting in the pew pretending to be a good Bible School student - a Bible student with some unfinished business. God still isn’t finished with me. I’ll share the rest of the story about the dead ducks next week.
In Isaiah 55, the LORD speaks to his people Israel. They too, had wandered away from Him. They’d done hideous things. They’d tried to put God in a box and leave him at the temple. They’d tried to find their fulfillment in all kinds of things that could never satisfy.
So the LORD says to his messed up people, "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come; buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Isa 55:1-2
It’s amazing what we will try to satisfy the hunger and emptiness in our soul. We know about the addictive power of pornography, drugs, alcohol, gluttony, greed. But how about the drugs of power, or dominating or manipulating others? What about the drugs of lying, cheating, jealousy, envy, bitterness?
What about the drug of compare my strength to some one else’s weakness so I can pump up my ego by finding fault with others? Or comparing my weakness to someone else’s strength so I can put myself down, throw a pity party and excuse myself from responsibility?
We try to fill this God shaped place inside us with possessions, relationships, the approval of others – how often are our destructive choices driven by seeking the approval of others? Some try to fill their emptiness with things like anger, revenge, self-pity, self-sufficiency, detachment. All these ways end in self-despondency, emptiness, and if we’re honest – bondage. Not pretty!
In today’s beatitude Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” Mt 5:6
Righteousness is God’s way, a right relationship with him. We seek his will, not our will. Instead of trying to keep him compartmentalized, stuffed in a box somewhere until we need him, we get on our knees before him. We ask him to reveal those things in us that need to be changed and then we ask him to replace our desires with his desires. This is what the Bible means when it tells us to die to ourselves and become alive in Christ.
The Transformation choice. Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask him to remove my character defects.
So what desires does God want to change in your life? Is it the desire of a chemical addiction? Is it the desire for approval? Is it the desire for power or control? Or the desire to manipulate others through your charm or anger? Is the desire to win at any cost? The desire for revenge? The desire to escape and pretend to be something you are not? What desire do you need to let go of? To walk away from? To repent of? What new choice is God calling you to make?
God certainly knows, and deep in your heart, you know. Are you willing? I’ve placed paper, pens, and a wok up here. If God has been convicting you of a hurt, hang-up, habit, desire that you need to submit to him - you come up as the congregation is singing, you write it down and drop it in the fire.
Don’t write, “O Lord, give me strength to overcome this desire”, trying harder will never save you. Write, “Lord, I am powerless over this desire. It’s controlling/ruining my life and my relationship with you and others. I’ve been trying to fill my hunger with stuff that cannot satisfy. I’m like a man drinking sea water to satisfy his thirst and it’s killing me.
So I’m giving this desire to you, I’m writing it down, confessing it, and I’m giving it to you in this fire. I’m asking you to replace my broken desires with your holy desires. Fill me with yourself and displace the crud in me. Change the hunger in me into a hunger for you. Change the thirst in me into a thirst for you!” AMEN
