“So then, brothers and sisters, we are not obligated to the flesh to live according to the flesh, because if you live according to the flesh, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever met somebody who somewhat slavishly sought to live up to the expectations of others? It almost didn’t matter who the other person was, if this person felt like she might have an expectation on her, she just about killed herself trying to meet it. In truth, though, the real expectation she was often trying to meet was to herself. In many such cases, this person had been shaped by a potent blend of personality and life experiences to have a need to please other people. This need, understandable as it might be, was making her sick. Obligations can be a heavy thing, especially when they aren’t good. Let’s talk about it.
“Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
When Jesus was talking with Nicodemus about the new life God was preparing to introduce to the world through the work He was going to do, He used the language of being born again. Nicodemus had a lot of trouble wrapping his mind around this, but Jesus wanted him to understand that the transformation this new life would work in a person would be like they were born entirely anew and starting life over again. In other words, it’s a pretty extreme transformation. Paul here uses another analogy to make the same point. This one is even more graphic. Let’s take a look.
“You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
How does someone know she is saved? What kind of assurance do we have that we are bound for God’s kingdom when this life ends and the next one begins? That is a very important question, and one whose answer has variously troubled or even eluded not a few people over the centuries. The promises of Christ and from the various New Testament authors are pretty amazing. They are definitely something we want access to if we can get it. So, again, how do we know we have it? Paul offers us an important piece of the puzzle here as he continues to unpack the new life available to followers of Jesus.
We’ve all been there before. You were going along, enjoying life, and all of a sudden, tragedy strikes. There’s no good explanation for it. There’s no justification for it. There’s nothing obviously good that could possibly come from it. It’s just evil. Right in your lap. The problem of evil has been one of the most vexing plaguing humans since time immemorial. Something in us knows the world isn’t like it should be, and we’ve long since struggled to explain why it’s not. Evil, though, tends to be something experienced personally, not academically. So, academic answers won’t often do. Personal ones are best. In the Scriptures, we find just such a personal answer in the story of Job. For the next three weeks, we are going to take a look at his remarkable…and remarkably hard story to see what wisdom we can glean for our own hard experiences. Let’s get started.
What to Do When the Wheels Fall Off
Several years ago, I saw a movie called The End of the Spear. The movie is about a group of missionaries who were martyred in the course of their efforts to advance the Gospel. Most famous among this group were two men named Jim Elliott and Nate Saint. In 1955, Jim, Nate, and three other missionaries were attempting to make contact with the Huaorani tribe deep in the jungles of Ecuador. The tribe was known to be very aggressive toward others, especially outsiders. After making several initial peace offerings by lowering various goodies for the tribe down in a bucket from their plane, the team finally decided that it was time to make personal contact with the tribe. On the morning of January 3, 1956, they landed and met some of the tribe members for the very first time. This was one of the first times the tribe had had any contacts with outsiders. They were received with excitement and hospitality. It was looking like things were going to go smoothly. This road for advancing the Gospel was appearing most promising. But just five days later, everything fell apart.
It’s graduation season and this past Sunday we honored our graduates and scholarship recipients. With that in mind, the sermon this week was aimed right in their direction. We live in a culture that prioritizes happiness above just about everything else. We live in a culture that also tells us all the time that the best way to find that happiness is to follow our heart. But is that really how we get there? King Solomon didn’t think so. Let’s take a look at one of his more famous proverbs and talk about how to experience real happiness.
How to Be Happy
A couple of weeks ago, our youth participated in a kickball tournament. Actually, let’s correct that: they won a kickball tournament. The event was a fundraiser for a great local ministry called Faith Alive Ministries. They are driven by the idea that when Jesus’ brother, James, said that true religion is to take care of orphans and widows, that he meant it. Jordan and Taylor do an awesome job seeking out opportunities to do just that in practical ways both locally and globally.
In any event, a few weeks before the tournament, they emailed out a set of rules by which the games were going to be governed. The morning of the tournament, they had a meeting with all of the coaches to go over the rules one last time and emphasize that they would be followed carefully. The reason was pretty obvious: they wanted the whole thing to run smoothly instead of devolving into little more than an endless series of arguments about rules. That’s how kickball worked on the playground when I was in elementary school. We’d spent 20 minutes debating the rules, and about five minutes playing most days because while there were a few broadly agreed upon basics, everything else was choose-your-own-adventure…and we all tended to choose the adventure that worked best for us rather than working to make sure we had all chosen the same adventure. As long as we were committed to living as we pleased, chaos tended to be the result. The Faith Alive folks understood this and planned accordingly. On the playground…not so much. In life more generally, the same basic principle is in operation. Today, I want to reflect for just a few minutes with you on what this means for us, and how we can avoid the chaos.
The Nexus 