How to Make Good Habits

Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalm 130; I Timothy 4; Luke 18:1-15

This is the eighth sermon in this ten-sermon series. It seems that we mostly know what to do to live a Christian life. But we don’t live that way. We don’t live that way because we have trouble with the How of living like a Christian should. And so in this series, we are trying to cover the HOW of what we do, since most of us get more hung up on HOW than What.

This week, we’ll cover how to make good habits.

How many of you read your bible every day this week? How many of you prayed over every meal? How many prayed before bedtime? How many spent an hour with just God every morning this week? How many of you praised God to your friends, neighbors, and family in your conversations this week? Here’s something easier – how many people brushed your teeth once in the last 24 hours?

OH, good habits. If we all did what we are supposed to do, then we would be such a wonderful, godly, growing group of people.

Habits are what routines are made of, and I for one am a man of routine. There are certain things you can count on with me.

At night, before I turn off my light, my cell phone and Kindle are plugged in and on the nightstand beside my bed. My alarms are set.

Whenever I leave my house, I pat my pocket for my key. The same thing when I leave my car.

When I arrive home after services today, I will let the dog out for a walk and check telephone messages. At some point today, I’ll check what the sermon plan is for next Sunday and read the scripture that I’ll be using.

I began my sermon on Monday, getting very in-depth with the scripture and research, mostly writing the sermon, finished it on Tuesday – ten type-written pages, Romans 14 point font for most, six or seven pages for Communion Sundays, On Tuesday, I prepared overhead images and started the bulletin on Wednesday.

At some point this week, probably on Thursday, I finished the bulletin, made copies, and folded it. I printed out my sermon and emailed it and the bulletin to Ethel, AJ, and Brian Nichols so Ethel could make copies for those who need it, AJ could prepare the Monroe Chapel bulletin, and Brian could prepare the overhead slides for presentation.

This morning, I arrived at Quiet Dell about 9 am, I prepared my hymnal with paperclips, arranged my sermon package in order, and made a copy of the third reading for whoever would read today.

Routine, you see, is nice because I don’t have to figure out what to do. I have my routine and my habits. In fact, almost everyone already has developed some good habits. For example, almost everyone here brushed their teeth this morning. So we already have experience with this – we just need to extend it to more of our lives.

So how do we develop new, good habits?

Well, the world has some methods, and mature Christianity has additional methods. Let’s talk about worldly methods first, because these are simpler – and amazingly enough – they often work.

First, we have to decide what habits we will adopt. Pick a habit you'd like to adopt, like reading your Bible daily or praying daily. Don’t try to adopt more than one or two at a time, or you won’t adopt any.

Now that you have decided what habits you will adopt, begin this way:

First of all, assign a place for every THING you have. Perhaps the best habit we can adopt is to put everything in its place. For example, my keys are in my right pants pocket, my phone in my shirt pocket if I have one, or else it is in my left pants pocket. At night, my phone and keys are one my night stand. That way, I know exactly where they are when I need them.

In the same way, my shirt pocket has a pen – or it is in the right pants pocket if my shirt doesn’t have a pocket. The pen also goes on the night stand at night.

If you give every item in your house a home, you have just reduced all that thinking and searching effort that’s needed if you put things in many different places. The habit of putting things in the same place is the single most valuable secular habit you can have. Those who have looked for your keys or phone, can I get an “amen”?

Second, we have to develop habits for activities. And this is trickier. But we can take advantage of the fact that our life is so structured around the clock – most of our activities happen at the same time on particular days.

Perhaps the best way to develop the habits in our modern world is with the calendar. I use my phone’s calendar to schedule events which repeat every week or every month. For example, my calendar is set to show UM Women on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 6:30 pm. I get a notification email a day ahead of time and my phone beeps with a notification a half-hour before the meeting.

At 8:55 this morning, my phone began to play the theme from the Lone Ranger, just as it does every Sunday morning, so that I will remember to stop what I’m doing and go to church.

And you know, after I’ve done these activities for a year, I can usually remember them without help.

And you know, you can set alarms on your phone for taking medicine, for birthdays, for turning on the television to watch a great pastor like Dr. Charles Stanley, for calling your mother – and for reading scripture or praying.

When the Quiet Dell bells ring on Sunday mornings at 9:30 am, about a half-dozen women head to my office to pray for the success of the worship service. You can join them if you wish. The bells trigger them to remember, just as in the old days before everyone had clocks, the bells told the people in the community that it was time to worship.

Now for some of you, I’ve already given you enough to run with. You’ll simply put a time to pray on your daily schedule with an alarm and that will be it. You’ll begin praying at that time every day. And you’ll add a time to read your Bible with a notification and a block of time and that will be enough.

But there is something we’ve all noticed. There are certain good habits we simply don’t start. We may do them for two or three days and then we stop. The exercise centers of the world have noticed that huge numbers of adults like to join exercise centers like the YMCA, Planet Fitness, etc during September and January. Attendance peaks for a couple of weeks, and then attendance drops off. That’s why they set up a monthly debit to your account which keeps charging you even during the months you only attend once or twice…if at all. If everyone who started at a fitness center in January attended the fitness center every day, there wouldn’t be nearly enough machines to go around. But we can’t hold onto that habit and so the fitness centers this time of year have very few people on the machines.

Other good habits we all know about include saving money, reading your bible, praying, attending Sunday School and mid-week studies, writing cards of encouragement to people on the prayer list or telephoning them, giving tithes to the church. We start out with great plans, but we stop after a few days or weeks. Why?

Sometimes the will is there but the memory is not. That’s why I have my donations to the church sent automatically from my checking account – I could never remember to write the check out in the business of Sunday morning. If you want to do that, the church address is in the bulletin. I have money automatically put into a retirement savings account by the church; I have additional money automatically transferred to another account each month to pay my income taxes with, since clergy must pay both sides of the Social Security and Medicare, and the church isn’t allowed to withhold for us. I fix my bad memory by setting up automatic payments and automatic transfers through my bank.

Other times…let’s be honest? The will simply isn’t there. You had a teacher in elementary school who made you feel stupid in reading class and so you have never liked to read since then and besides, the Bible is complicated to read. Two answers – Modern translations of the Bible like the NIV – New International Version, the New King James Version NKJV, the Common English Bible CEB, or the Holman Christian Standard Bible are much easier to read than the old King James Version, which was written at the same time as Shakespeare. And secondly, audio versions of these are available for your telephone so you can listen to them.

But maybe you consider reading the Bible to be dull and boring. Maybe when I use the word “class” about a Bible study class, you think – “I hated the classroom when I was in school”. For this habit, we need to learn more about what is actually involved in the habit. What is a modern Bible study class like, after all?

Most of our classes are actually groups of people who are discussing the Bible passages. We read a section of the bible, then we start talking back and forth. Sometimes we start talking about Peter and John in prison and someone asks what a prison was like in those days. Another person talks about visiting a prison with a prison ministry, and a third person wonders what prisons of the mind we put ourselves in, and then we all talk about how Christ gets us out of those prisons of sadness, prisons of loneliness, prisons of bad habits, and someone who has been sad for a month tells of their journey and others gather around him or her and hug the sad person and suddenly, we all feel that the Body of Christ has done just what the Body of Christ was supposed to do. That’s what we do in our classes. And that’s why these good habits are so important, because some weeks you are the one who hugs and some weeks you are the one who needs and gets the hugs, but the good habit of being with other people who are positive and focused upon Christ is necessary for our well-being.

Jesus told a story about a woman who had a good habit. She begged a certain judge for help. She begged him every time he came to town, every week or so. It was her habit to ask for justice. At first, the judge told her “NO!”, but over time, he began to crack and finally he gave into her, heard her case, and granted her request. Jesus makes the point that this judge was not particularly good, but gave in because of the woman’s persistent habit. And in the same way, God – who is good and just – will hear our prayers. The persistent good habit of prayer is important. But do we do this? No. We pray once or twice and then give up. The point of this parable is that we are to continue in our prayers. Habitual prayer is important.

The Apostle Paul also liked a good habit. In our reading from Timothy, Paul compared good Christian habits that lead toward holiness and godliness to an athlete training for competition. He wrote:

Rather, train yourself in godliness, for
the training of the body has a limited benefit,
but godliness is beneficial in every way,
since it holds promise for the present life
and also for the life to come.

Godliness and holiness “is beneficial in every way.” So what habits lead to godliness?

Paul tells Timothy and us:

Command and teach these things. Let no one despise your youth; instead, you should be an example to the believers…

Holiness does not depend upon us being old. We can become holy while we are still young if we practice, so we can be an example to others.

Paul said:

“…you should be an example to the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.

There are habits of action that we are to practice. Our speech should be pure and clean and uplifting. Our conduct should be a good example. We should show others examples of self-sacrificing love – the Greek word used here for love is agape. Our faith should set a high standard, and we should remain pure and not be vulgar or low. (Perhaps we can stop watching Presidential debates!) Each of these good things is a habit which needs to be built every day – a way of acting which develops best when we are constantly reading our Scripture, in conversation with God and the Holy Spirit throughout the day.

Here’s a tip I picked up a while back. Several hundred years ago, St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was a military man before he became a Catholic priest, developed a training system for his group of priests, the Jesuits. Part of the training is teaching trainees that whenever we recognize a sin in our actions, words, or thoughts, we should take our hand and make a subtle, quiet, and private movement, such as touching our heart. In this way, we begin to notice our sins more and this leads us to a better recognition when we are doing wrong. We can then better work on what we are doing wrong, removing the bad habits and focusing on developing good habits. Having a way to call our own attention to our bad habits can led to good habits.

Paul continues:

Until I come, give your attention to public reading, exhortation, and teaching.

Paul means that we are to read scripture publically – in our world this means Bible study with others and quoting scripture. Do you read scripture in your family with your children or grandchildren, with your husband or wife? Make it a habit and see what happens in your family. Perhaps when the extended family comes over, you can read a paragraph of scripture before you say grace for the meal. Simple enough. Make it a tradition.

Scripture traditions can become important. In our family, we have a tradition that on Christmas Eve, we read Luke 2 before the presents are opened. Because of the help of Biblegateway.com, we are able to have Luke 2 printed out in any language, and our tradition says that Luke 2 is read in the native language of every person present by a native speaker of that language. We began this when we were ministering to the International students at Marietta College. We’d read Luke 2 in English, another would read in Chinese, another in Portuguese and another in Korean or Japanese. You can get any language on biblegateway.com. If you visit my home on Christmas Eve, you’ll hear Luke 2.

Paul says we are to give attention to exhortation – encouraging one another to do good. We point people to God – not to their sins. Remember, if you are pointing toward another’s sin, you are not pointing toward God. We are to point the way to God. Practice pointing in the right direction.

And Paul says we are to be teaching. Did you ever teach a child anything? How to tie shoe laces, how to brush teeth, how to hold fishing pole, how to sew? Teaching involves much more than standing in a classroom and lecturing. We teach all the time when we sit with children or adults and tell them stories of God, of Jesus, of the Old Testament, of what we’ve learned of God’s love, what we know about how deep in sin we were but how Christ and God helped us come out of that sin. We are to teach – it is a habit. Practice it.

Paul continues:

Do not neglect the gift that is in you;

God has given each of us one or more gifts – almost superpowers – which we are not to neglect. Each of these gifts helps the Body of Christ. One person may be a great singer – then practice singing as a habit! You may not like a particular person in the choir – consider: Will you turn down the gift of singing for God because of one person’s attitude or action?

Another person may be able to lay on hands and heal people. Get in the habit of doing this – even if God didn’t heal everybody every time. Heal those whom God will choose to heal.

Still another may have the gift of organizing – then organize things – you can start with my office!

You may have still another gift, but whatever your gift is, use your gift regularly – get in the habit of using that gift which God has given you for God’s glory!

Paul finishes with a general request to practice these habits:

Practice these things; be committed to them, so that your progress may be evident to all. Pay close attention to your life and your teaching; persevere in these things, for by doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers.

When you practice godly habits, you will save both yourself and your hearers – those people near you. Persevere in these things. Keep at it.

But what advice does the Bible give which will help us to practice these habits and make them part of our lives?

Most importantly, we must recognize becoming godly as an important goal. If we don’t care to become godly, we won’t care about habits that lead to godliness. And that is difficult, for so many people believe that “I’m going to heaven, so I’m ok.” Why practice becoming godly if this is your position?

Yes, you believe that Jesus Christ was and is the Son of God. Yes, you believe He died for your sins and that His resurrection proved He was and is divine. Yes, you were even baptized. But are you truly following Christ? Do you see and understand that Jesus set an example for us that we are to follow? Are we trying each day to become more and more Christ-like in our thoughts, our actions, and our words?

When you sign up for the army, that is not the end. Every week there is further training so that you aren’t just a soldier, but you become a better and better soldier every week. The sergeant with 20 years experience is a much better soldier than the raw recruit. And so it is with the Army of God.

If you have been a Christian for twenty years, are you more godly than you were 15 years ago? Or did you sort of plateau, like the runner who works up to running a mile a day and then, three years later, can still only run a mile a day? Or are you the type who practiced and after three years, you can now run five miles a day and plan to run a marathon in three more years?

Godliness doesn’t require our bodies to be in great shape. It is a matter of practicing so our souls are well-trained, so we have traded in our bad habits for our new, good, godly habits. Godliness means, as Paul says, that we “pay close attention to our lives and our teaching; and persevere in these things, for by doing this we will save both ourselves and our hearers.”

One of the things I plan to do over the next year is to remind us of something, something most of us have forgotten. The apostles, Peter, John, Paul and all the rest, the second generation that included Timothy, Titus, Phoebe and others – they accomplished great things. That original group of about 120 people changed the world completely.

They did not do it because they were great men and women. They were not particularly educated or great speakers or wise or wealthy – although some were, most were not. Those early disciples did not have special advantages over the rest of the people in the world. Except this one overwhelming advantage.

They were possessed of the Holy Spirit, listened to the Holy Spirit, and did without fear what the Holy Spirit asked them to do. And they changed the world!
I need to remind you of something. If you’ve been baptized – you have that very same Holy Spirit, which has not gone away or changed. That Holy Spirit will speak to you on behalf of Christ and the Father, neither of whom have changed or gone away. God the Father has every bit as much power as He did 2000 years ago. Jesus Christ has every bit as much love as He did 2000 years ago. The Holy Spirit has a voice just as loud as 2000 years ago. The same wisdom is still there.

So what has changed?

Only our willingness to listen to that Spirit, to trust in Christ, and to ask the Father to do great things. My wife Saundra calls it the “Jesus is in the pews” problem. Instead of trusting in Jesus, we began to trust in our earthly leaders, giving them the trust we are supposed to give Jesus. We trusted in Ed Tutweiler, in Mary Ellen Finegan, in Kermit Auvil, in George Bramble, in Bob King, in Brian Boley, in AJ King. We trusted in our ability to give, in our ability to do things, in our ability to evangelize, in our ability to put on a great show. And we stopped listening to the Spirit, we stopped trusting in Christ, we stopped asking the Father to do the great things.

For we need to remember that in this building, there is a potential Paul, a John, a Simon Peter, a Phoebe, a Pricilla, an Aquila, a Timothy, an Augustine, a St Francis, a Mother Theresa, a John Wesley, another great saint ready to change the world for God, another great saint – or twenty – who are ready to listen to the Spirit, to trust in Christ, to ask the Father to do great things. When we trusted in our leaders and our own abilities, we limited ourselves, because we forgot that God is ready to kick down doors and make roads to our goals with His almighty power behind His projects. Each of us are princes and princesses of the Kingdom, and our Father is the King of the Universe. Don’t ask how we can possibly do something. Ask yourself - and God – what should we do?

To reclaim our position as God’s heirs, God requires us to do only a few things really, a very few things. Only three good habits are critical – but they, they make all the difference in the world.

First, we must fall in love with God by reading His love letter to us, the Holy Bible, opening our eyes and ears to the God who is here with us this morning and every day and night.

Second, we must learn to listen to God’s gentle voice by two-way prayer, by listening for the speaking of the Holy Spirit, the voice that leads us to give life to ourselves and to others, never harming, never scolding, but gently guiding us toward godliness.

Third, we must learn to trust, to have faith, to have courage that what the Holy Spirit tells us to do is actually the right, the just, the correct thing to do, and then we must do what we are asked to do and say, even if the people around us may look at us with wide, frightened eyes. For we ultimately have to decide – will we do as the men and women around us would tell us to do - or as God asks?

And if we make these few good habits, if we let becoming godly rule our lives, then we will begin to change the world, saving ourselves and those who watch and listen to us.

How to Stop Gossiping

Proverbs 26:17-28; Psalm 15; Romans 1:28-32; Matthew 15:1-20

Once upon a time, in a small, but prosperous Russian village, there were several shopkeepers. One of them was known for being a very, very, VERY nice man. Everyone loved him, because when the people visited his shop, he always told them the news of the village. He told them who was sick and how many new calves the farmers had each year. He told his customers who had a new baby and who was getting married. He always knew who the new people in the village were, and where they had lived before, and he also knew what was happening in the outside world, who was fighting which wars, and whether or not the price of flour was going to be high or low this year. Plus, he always had entertaining stories about famous people and fabulous places and he could tell a joke in that special way, with that special timing that makes you laugh even if the joke isn’t all that funny.

One day, the very nice shopkeeper saw something happen with a friend of his who owned a shop down the street. It was very entertaining, so he told several of his customers that day and the next. But by the end of the week, his friend had noticed that nobody was coming to his store anymore. He asked a few questions and found out why – it was because everyone had heard about what he had done. But he didn’t find out where the story began.

So the second shopkeeper went to the rabbi in town and he sat and cried in the synagogue with the rabbi. “My business is destroyed! I’ll have to move or retire!”The rabbi promised to find out what had happened.

The next day, which was a windy fall day, the rabbi went to visit the very nice shopkeeper that everyone liked. As he walked up the street, the leaves were whissing all around him. Although the rabbi really had no idea where the story had started, he knew that the very nice shopkeeper would almost surely be able to tell him where he had heard the story.

When the rabbi got to the shop, he told the very nice shopkeeper about the visit from the second shopkeeper and how his business was failing because of the story going around town. And because the very nice shopkeeper was indeed very nice, he immediately told the rabbi that it was his fault about the story, apologized, and asked the rabbi what he could do to make it right.

The rabbi saw that the very nice man was sincere, so he asked him. “Do you have a feather pillow?”

“Of course I have feather pillows. I’m the most prosperous shopkeeper in town. I probably have ten feather pillows!”

The rabbi continued. “Just run home and bring me one of them.”

The very nice shopkeeper ran home and came back a few minutes later with a nice feather pillow. Standing in the doorway to the shop, with the wind and leaves blowing around his feet the rabbi took out his knife, cut a big slice into the feather pillow and dumped out all the feathers, which the wind quickly began blowing around with the leaves on that windy fall day.

“Now, put all the feathers back into the pillow and you will be right with your friend.”

“But….that’s impossible! I could get the feathers that fell in my shop, but those on the street – I’ll never catch them all!”

“And so it is with gossip, my friend. Once it is poured out, it can never all be recovered. And pretty soon, the feathers are being poured out all over town.”

(The above story adapted from http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/812861/jewish/A-Pillow-Full-of-Feathers.htm  .)
...
Gossip and slander are spoken of quite negatively in Holy Scripture. The Proverbs 26 reading includes this verse:

20 Without wood a fire goes out;
without a gossip a quarrel dies down.
It speaks to the ability of those people who stand around gossiping to keep fights going. “I heard Bill say this… or I head that Gladys said that.” And the fight goes another round.

And can we have harmless gossip? No, because gossip is remembered. As the Proverb says:

22 The words of a gossip are like choice morsels;
they go down to the inmost parts.

I’m sure most of you have heard the story of the revival that shrank the congregation by half? It happened this way: 

The preacher preached a beautiful, passionate sermon for three nights, for two hours each evening, and on the fourth night, he preached for twenty minutes and gave an altar call. A beautiful, yet somewhat overly made-up woman came up to the altar and kneeled in prayer. The preacher went to her and asked her, “Have you accepted JE-SUS?” in a loud voice and handed her the microphone.

“Yes, yes I have. “

“Praise the Lord!” The preacher exclaimed. “Are you ready to confess your sin before God and this congregation?”

“Yes, yes I am.”

“Tell us your sin!”

“Well, I’ve committed adultery.”

“Adultery? Where?”

She turned to the congregation and began pointing. “At his house…and his house…and his house…and his house…."

And you know…for some reason, nobody could remember the sermon, but everybody remembered that list of houses….Gossip is INDEED like choice morsels, like wonderful pieces of chocolate - gossip is remembered.

Jesus even took up the subject of gossip and slander one day in a different situation, as told in Matthew 15:

It was a frustrating day for Jesus, He’d been up the night before walking on the water with Peter – and you’ve gotta know that walking on waves must be exhausting, with the water moving back and forth under your feet, and then He spent the morning healing people, listening to their complaints, their aches and pains, and dealing with their ailments.

Then, some of the Pharisees came down from Jerusalem and began complaining that Jesus’ disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate. And let me be delicate, but I have to make this point…this was in a time before toilet paper and similar ways for people to stay clean. Remember, ancient Israel was largely desert, a land without leaves or Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

And so, the enemies were implying that the disciples were terribly dirty and nasty. And Jesus had had enough complaints for the day.

Jesus’ response was like bolt of lightning on a clear, sunny day. “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” and then He quoted from Isaiah and really burned them.  "You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.'”

Then, speaking to crowd, he said:

"What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”

Jesus was saying that it isn’t what you eat that makes you impure before God, but how you speak that makes the difference.

Naturally, Peter didn’t get it. Peter never got it. Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”

"Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

(The Bible records that Peter still didn’t get the message…in the Book of Acts, God has to send Peter a dream to get across the idea. See Acts 10 and 11 for when Peter finally understood.).

Why do we gossip? Jesus tells us that evil thoughts, like false testimony, and slander come from our heart.

We gossip because our hearts are not right. And the root of this is when we don’t truly accept that our friend is an image of God, just as we are. You would never think of destroying a real photograph or painting of Jesus or God, would you? You would protect it as the priceless piece of art that it is. Yet when we thoughtlessly gossip or slander, we are like little children drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa, like little boys throwing baseball at the church’s stained glass windows, like the men who rode into ancient cities and cut off the noses and arms of beautiful sculptures.

Gossiping is like putting water glasses on finely varnished walnut furniture, like sticking pins into burgundy leather chairs, like juggling fine crystal stemware. It is like taking a knife and carving your initials into a marble altar, like scratching the CD that holds every photograph and video from your wedding, like letting a herd of hungry deer loose in a beautiful flower garden.

"But Pastor, aren’t you making a bit much of a little gossip?" No, not according to Scripture.

Paul has the harshest words for gossips. In the first chapter of Romans, starting at verse 28, Paul writes:

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Harsh words! According to Paul, gossips have depraved minds, and are filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. And even though they know they deserve death, they actually approve of other gossips.

So how do we stop gossiping?

First, we need to turn to God. Like all the other things Paul listed, the root cause of all these evils is when we turn away from God. And so the solution is to turn back to God, recognizing that God actually cares about gossiping and the evil that it is a symptom of.

As with every other sin we are guilty of, we need to bow the knee to God and ask forgiveness. This is the beginning of our recovery – as with every other sin.

So how do we keep from gossiping after we've asked for forgiveness?

First, look around this room. Remember the halos that the old painters put over the saints? I want you to try something. As you look around the room, imagine that everyone here is a beautiful painting in a beautiful frame – an image of God. Halos glowing. Priceless. And everyday, as you greet your friends, perhaps for coffee or tea, as you sit in the kitchen, as you stand in the garage and talk to your friends, as you look at your fellow students or workers, look around the room at the most valuable thing there and understand that it is not a tenth as valuable as your worst enemy is to God. Look around your room again and see the gold of your friend’s hair or cheeks, the diamonds that are their eyes, the rubies that are their lips, the ivory that forms their fingernails and teeth. Imagine how valuable a piece of artwork they are – and how valuable to God the person you want to talk about is.

But what about necessary information? Is it gossip to say that so-and-so is in the hospital?

No. But consider what your friend would say if he or she were here. If what you are saying would embarrass you or your friend if you said it in front of your friend, then don’t say it at all. It is ok to say “June was in a car wreck and is in Ruby.” It is not ok to say, “June was drinking the other night and wrecked her car.”

This is where Jesus would say, “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” Many of us have developed the tradition of gossiping under the justification of sharing necessary information for praying. But don’t we often share more than we need to share?

I actually attended a church in Atlanta of a couple hundred people who had a very strong “No Gossip” policy. One of my teenage daughter’s friends who attended the church was more than six months pregnant before my daughter or us found out. All we had heard was to pray for the teen’s mother, because “she is having a difficult time.” That was all that was necessary - and that was all that was shared.

Part of the way they controlled the gossip was an understanding among the people. When one person would begin to move from useful prayer information into gossip, one of the people would almost always say, “I think we’re moving into gossip” and the conversation would be changed to another subject. For you see, gossip is like adultery – it takes at least two people to commit this sin.

And as soon as I wrote that comment, my mind turned to Facebook. All the rules of face-to-face gossip apply to Facebook. If it would embarrass you or your friend in public, don’t write it. And if you see gossip on Facebook, the appropriate way to respond is always in private – never in public - with a politely worded request to reconsider the post. Not a demand. Not an accusation. A politely worded private request to “please reconsider if our mutual friend would want this posted.” As Paul writes in I Corinthians chapter four, ” When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly.” This is how Christians are to respond.

And what is perhaps the most single important way to remember not to gossip? Consider this: When you gossip, you almost always are giving a judgment on another person’s behavior or actions or speech. And there seems to be a law of the Universe: Those who gossip will be gossiped about, just as those who judge will be judged by the same standard that they judged another by.

As Christians, we live in the sure knowledge that there is another much wiser than we are who is ready to judge each one of us at the end of time. I’ve noticed in my life, that as soon as I condemn another person for an action, a situation, a weakness, or a sin, I will find myself with that same action, situation, weakness or sin within days, often within hours. God is jealous of His right to judge each one of us for our actions. And gossip usually contains a judgement.

We, on the other hand, are to focus upon our own transgressions, our own sins, our own shortfalls in holiness, working to improve ourselves and give others assistance – practical assistance to others in trouble. Gossip is never that assistance.

Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are fully able to make any person aware of when they are stuck in sin. The drug user, for instance, knows better than you do just how badly he or she is addicted to the drug. The man who cannot keep the four-letter words from flowing from his mouth is fully aware of his speech pattern. Even the liar knows just how difficult it is to keep lying. Yet because they do not have the Holy Spirit – or do not listen to the Spirit if they have the Spirit – they do not change for the better. No condemnation we give them will help with that change. Only our love and positive suggestions to find and listen to God, and our help in pointing out the direction to God will make a difference. And pointing towards sin is not pointing towards God.

Our job is to connect people with the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. Our job is to introduce people to Jesus Christ and together with Jesus, help our friends come to listen to the Holy Spirit. No one who is truly listening to the Holy Spirit will gossip for long – or continue in any particular sin. The difficulty is that we don’t like to listen to the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit speaks to us and focuses upon our issues. The Spirit doesn’t gossip about other people.

If we want to listen to the Holy Spirit, we first must accept the Holy Spirit, which is done through baptism. And then, we must make time for two-way prayer, finding a place of quiet to speak to God our wants and needs, and asking questions – and then listening for the still, small voice inside us that speaks back to us. And finally, we must do what the Spirit asks, knowing that the Spirit will never contradict Holy Scripture.

So instead of letting the feathers of gossip escape from our pillow of sin, let us send out feathers of love, feathers that lift up others, feathers that encourage other people, feathers that float off and touch other people with a gentle, wonderful touch, like the gentle touch of the Holy Spirit when the Spirit guides us to all things bright and beautiful. Let our words be the words of the Holy Spirit, the words of Christ, the words that give life to our friends and neighbors and family. When we are tempted to gossip or to listen to gossip, let us simply change the subject: “Let me tell you what God did for me yesterday…” Turn your gossip into praise!

And so we come back once again to God. Our solution to escaping the sin of gossip is to listen closer to the Holy Spirit, to read the Word of God more often, to always keep our connection with the Holy Spirit active during the day. And if we do that – listen to the Holy Spirit and read the Word of God more often – we will find that we will rarely be the subject of gossip, but will become the subject of a quiet praise from our friends, a good example to be pointed to, a holy saint that God will commend one day: "Well done, good and faithful servant."

How to Trade Fear for Hope - Getting Through the Crashes in our Lives

Job 6; Psalm 25; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 12:9-21

“Well, we’re lost!” The young pilot looked over at the older man on the secret mission who was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat. “We’ve only about 15 more minutes worth of fuel, so I’m taking us down so we’ll have a chance when the engines stop.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.” The older man was wearing a business suit and a fedora hat, but there was something that marked him as a pilot, too. Maybe it was the confidence, maybe the way his still sharp eyes scanned the horizon.

There were eight on the B-17. There were the two businessmen and another passenger returning to his unit in Australia, and there were the five crew members. They had taken off from Hawaii about 13 hours earlier and had flown some 1800 miles, but they were lost in the South Pacific, and they’d been lost for the last couple of hours. And now they were going to crash into the cold water without any sign of land visible.

As they descended, the crew put blankets and pillows around them to handle the shock of the landing. Three rafts were stashed, ready to be deployed. Emergency rations were put at the ready. The older man grabbed some handkerchiefs and about 60 feet of rope. They sent out one final message and then they crashed into heavy waves. They were in the ocean, with a thousand feet of deep water below them and no land in sight.

Almost immediately, water began pouring into the plane. Everyone quickly climbed out on a wing, got the rafts into the water and then looked around for the emergency rations they had piled up. They were gone, lost in the crash, deep in the water. They climbed into the rafts and watched the plane sink away into the dark depths.

They took inventory. Most of them had been injured in the crash. They had five oranges. They had bailing buckets, a bible, a map, some pencils and knives and pistols, the clothes on the their backs, three fish hooks, but no bait, and they used most of the 60 foot of rope to tie the three rafts together.

It was October of 1942, and the weather at night was cold, while the days were hot and dry. They ate an orange every day – a small orange shared between eight adult men. Sharks swam just below the surface, and small fish followed the rafts, but they wouldn’t touch the unbaited hooks, nor were the fish the least bit interested in bits of oranges used as bait. The men were sunburned and salt covered their bodies. There was nothing to drink, because you can’t drink salt water, and now there were no more oranges. They tried shooting at seagulls, but those gulls stayed too far away and finally the guns were too rusty to use because of the salt. The men were depressed and sad, they were afraid – almost certainly they were going to die – and they still had no idea where they were or which direction to try to travel. They were tired, hungry, thirsty, sunburned, and itchy. They were lost with nothing but the ocean around them. Their fear had turned into hopelessness.

Finally on morning of the eighth day, the men resorted to discussing how they might cut off one man’s toes and use those toes as bait. The older man changed the subject and had one man read some scripture, and then they prayed for a miracle. And then, they settled back to nap in the hot mid-day sun. The older man pulled his fedora hat over his face.

And suddenly, he felt something on his head that weighed more than that hat. As he looked out from under the hat, he could see the other men had frozen in place and they were looking at whatever was on his hat. The older man slowly, ever so slowly moved his hand carefully up by his ear and then in a flash, he grabbed the seagull by the feet and with his other hand he wrung its neck. That seagull quickly was plucked and became a meal for those men and its guts became bait that allowed them to catch a couple of small fish.

And that evening, rain came and the men captured enough water for several days.

They weren’t out of the ocean yet – it would be more than two weeks more before planes flew by, they would wave to the planes, and they would be found and rescued, but God had rescued them already.

And the older man?

He’d been in tight places before – he’d even been critically injured in a plane crash a year earlier. His body was so badly injured then that ambulance drivers took away dead bodies from the crash before they took him to the hospital. But he recovered then and he had many years to live onward, living until 1973 when he was 83 years old.

He lost 40 pounds during those weeks at sea – he never really liked the sea – for he was one of the most famous pilots in American history, the man who had shot down more enemy planes than any other American in the first World War, a man who became the president of Eastern Airlines, the man known as Eddie Rickenbacher.

Eddie survived because he had hope. He had crashed before and lived, and He knew that his government would be looking for him. He knew his government had enough power – ships, planes, men – to find him. He had faith in his government – and he had faith in his God, for he knew his God truly owned all of those ships, planes, and men, and his God controlled the government – and the seagulls.

Rickenbacher’s original secret mission was to visit several American bases and then make recommendations to the generals and admirals in Washington. When he returned from his time on board the rafts, he had some very specific recommendations about the emergency equipment, water, and food that should be stored INSIDE every raft, recommendations that saved countless lives during the war. And the government was able to use the good news of Eddie’s rescue to lift everyone’s spirits. It had an effect which was much stronger than the original plan made by the men in Washington. God used this crash to save countless other men as the war went on.

And a legend grew up how in Eddie’s later years, every Friday night, Eddie went down to the pier near his home in California and he took a bucket of shrimp and fed the sea gulls, saying, “Thank you. Thank you.” to the sea gulls… and to God.

In our lives, we have many times when we are filled with fear. Sometimes, it is a fun-type of fear, like when you come to the top of the roller coaster and it begins to head down the other side. Sometimes, you know the fear can be handled because you have a wonderful protector around, like a child being tossed up and down by his dad.

But then, there are other times. As Job said,

“If only my anguish could be weighed
and all my misery be placed on the scales!
 It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—
no wonder my words have been impetuous.
(Job 6:2-3)

There are times when all you have is a mind-numbing fear, a fear that everything bad is going to happen, a fear that the world is collapsing in around you, a fear that there is nothing you can do to keep the evil away and you know you are going to be hurt, injured, and it is the end of everything good.

It may be like the Friday I saw people being fired and laid off at one company I worked for. In fact, I was asked to help fire and lay off a couple of people and then I walked back into my office and saw that the company president had returned to my desk a book I had lent him some weeks before and at that moment I knew that my name would also be called for me to come into the personnel department. And very soon, my name was called and I was laid off.

I’ve seen this sort of fear on family members faces at the emergency rooms. I’ve seen it in people’s eyes when they’ve been told by their spouse that their marriage is over. I’ve seen it in the faces of people I’ve had to lay off when my business could no longer afford to pay them. Eddie Rickenbacher saw this fear in the faces of the men on those rafts in the South Pacific.

But there is a way to trade fear away and put hope in its place.

The first thing is to realize that the world around us is indeed an evil and frightening place. It surrounds us like a huge ocean and there is nothing visible except that world ocean, that ocean of murky trouble, that world where dangerous sharks swim just out of sight, an ocean filled with salty corrosion that gradually destroys our souls and bodies, a place where a huge dangerous creature might suddenly come up out of the depths and destroy us or our family.

But none of that really matters, because, like the men on the raft, we-who-know-Christ are not truly part of that ocean of despair, but we sail on top of that world, floating in the bright sunshine because we are creatures of the air and the light. Like a lighthouse, the Lord will lead us to safety. David understood this when he wrote our Psalm, particularly this verse:

My eyes are ever on the Lord,
for only he will release my feet from the snare.
(Psalm 25:15)

Just as the seagull was caught by Rickenbacher, our feet are often caught. Will we be dragged down, torn apart and destroyed? It will happen if we are left to our own strength, for the evil one who has caught us is much stronger than we are.

But we don’t have to worry. We are not seagulls caught by men. Instead, we have the LORD, who can and will release our feet from the one who snares us. As Paul wrote to the Romans, “we boast in the hope of the glory of God.”

No, while the world is like a big ocean that can swallow us up, we know that our Lord is looking for us and He will find us if we will do our part and wave Him over to our rafts floating on that terrible ocean.

But are we important enough to be searched for? How do we know we are good enough for Jesus to rescue us?

Jesus went into a synagogue one Sabbath day. The Jews of the day considered that you could not work on the Sabbath, and healing people was considered work.

On that Sabbath morning, Jesus found a man with a shriveled up hand. It was not regular size, it was damaged, it was twisted together, it looked dried up. If Jesus healed this man, it would get Jesus in trouble – big trouble. And this man with his shriveled up hand wasn’t anyone special. He was like all people – he had done some good in his life – and he had done some bad in his life. Yet he couldn't work well with his damaged hand. But he had two things going for him that day…Jesus was there…and the man believed that Jesus could help him.

Jesus cares about all people, not just the very good people. So that morning He healed the man’s hand. And Jesus got into big trouble. Matthew tells us that “…The Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.” Pretty rough stuff for helping another person.

But Jesus cares about everyone. He went so far as to sacrifice His life for us. And Jesus’ Father controls the entire Universe. Jesus’ Father controls absolutely everything He wants to control. And so: “I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”

What are your fears? What fears would you like to toss deep into the ocean and replace with the hope that comes from knowing that Jesus loves you and will protect you?

Now there is one very important thing we have to remember. Jesus doesn’t always act as quickly as we want – Eddie Rickenbacher and his men were stuck on those life rafts for 24 days. Jesus doesn’t always do things the way we would like – one of the men on the rafts died while they waited to be rescued. Sometimes losing a loved one provides us with lessons we need to learn. But Jesus does have our best interests at heart. The difficult thing is that sometimes our best interests require us to stay on our own rafts, drifting lost on the ocean of the world, without rescue, without hope until we turn to Jesus for help - and even for many days afterwards.

And then, Jesus will use the entire situation for our good and the good of the people around us, just as Rickenbacker's ordeal lead to many other lives being saved. Sometimes we won’t understand what good was served by the troubles we go through. Sometimes we find out many years later. Sometimes we won’t find out until we reach Heaven and talk with Jesus face-to-face. But you can be sure that Jesus is ready to move in and help you when you find yourself drifting alone on that ocean of despair – and you ask for help from Him.

Remember this, though. Jesus is polite. He will not step in until you ask Him to step in. He won’t send you a seagull until you ask Him for help. But when you ask, admitting that you aren’t nearly as capable as He is, He will show up for you. When you need Him…not necessarily when you want Him. For trading fear for hope means that you haven’t been rescued yet. Hope is a state of looking toward the future. Hope is when we believe that the rescue will come someday. We have no need of hope once we've been rescued.

But we still float on the world's ocean, waiting to die. And we have hope because of this. Rest in God alone. Jesus has already told us that we who follow Him have eternal life. Jesus died for us…and came back to life, showing the entire world that it can be done when God wants it to be done. Our fate lies in the hands of God – not in the hands of Fate or Luck or ourselves.

So when you are floating on the world’s ocean, surrounded by sharks, dying of thirst and hunger…remember that it is a loving God who gives us rain…and airplanes….and seagulls….and that is how to turn your fear into hope.

Jesus wanted us to remember a few things after He left us. He wanted us to remember His teachings. He wanted us to remember His Resurrection. And just as that seagull's body was broken up and eaten uncooked by Eddie and his friends, just as the seagull's blood was dripping on the rafts that day - Jesus wants us to remember that He gave up His body and blood for us. For each of us.

And so He told us, that as often as we eat bread and as often as we drink wine or grape juice, we are to remember Him. "This is My body, which is broken for you...This is My blood, which is shed for you."

How to Control Our Tongues - The Most Common Sin

Proverbs 10:10-21, 31-32; Psalm 52; James 3:1-12; Mark 7:31-37

Well, there were three pastors, a Pentecostal, a Baptist, and a Methodist, who all were pastors in the same small town and they went deep-sea fishing together. They rented a boat at Myrtle Beach and they went out to the Gulf Stream and they began fishing. They had a great day, caught several big fish and decided it was time to call it a day, but the motor wouldn’t start, and a storm was headed their way.

The Pentecostal pastor got a bit scared, and he told the others. “Guys, in case things go wrong here, I’ve got to confess to you that I have sinful behavior. I’ve been having an affair with a woman in my congregation.”

The other pastors acknowledged the depth of the sin, forgave him in the name of Jesus and they watched the storm get closer.

The Baptist pastor told the others, “Well, I’m getting worried. That storm looks pretty bad and I don’t swim, so I’ve got to confess to you guys that I also am deep in sin. I’ve been taking a twenty-dollar bill from the collection plate every Sunday for the last two years. “

The other pastors acknowledged his sin, forgave him in the name of Jesus and they watched the storm get closer. The waves were starting to get pretty high now, and were breaking over the sides of the boat.

The Methodist pastor said, “Well, I’m glad you guys have been so open. I have to admit that I am also deep in sin, and I pray that if I confess my sin to you the Lord will let us survive so we can get home. I really want to get home badly, for I can see the joy I will have when we get back home.”

The other pastors asked, “Well, what’s your sin?”

The Methodist pastor looked back at them in anguish and said, “I’m addicted to passing on gossip!”

History does not record whether that pastor made it home safely or not…

This is the fourth of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.

That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life. We’ve covered kindness, developing patience, loving deeply, and breaking addictions. These sermons are now posted online at the sermon blog listed on the front page of the bulletin.

Today, we’re going to cover how control our tongues.

As we heard our readings this morning, we find that there are considerable parts of the Bible devoted to the control of our tongues and our lips. Just putting the word “tongue” into a search turns up over 130 verses. And that doesn’t include all the verses that mention gossip, back-biting, and passing on rumors.

So once again, we know that Christians – indeed all people – are to control what we say and when we say it, but this is perhaps the most difficult and common sin that we all struggle with – speaking in ways that don’t honor God or lift up people.

Our culture encourages trash-talking and verbal conflict. What used to be limited to Muhammed Ali and his pre-fight promotional talks, what moved to the World Wrestling Federation is now common practice before games of all types. Our comedy shows glorify gossip and out-of-control speech. Jerry Springer specializes in people fighting on-air. Even our news shows have degenerated into loud arguments as the networks have found that on-air arguments generate better ratings. There is something deep inside us that makes us look toward any argument and quickly decide which side we’ll take, perhaps because we humans have developed in societies where verbal arguments so quickly have escalated into physical fights. And so any television drama today will have on-screen arguments.

I heard a Star Trek writer talking about writing for the Next Generation show – that’s the one with Captain Picard. The first season, you see, everyone on the crew were friends. But they found when the writers created some conflict within the crew, some arguments, some fights between crew members, the ratings went up. So they learned that conflict is what generates interest. And that is what you see on almost every television show, in almost every movie, even in our comedies.

And because there are still limits to the violence that most people will watch, most of the conflict is verbal – wars of the tongue – especially in shows targeted towards children. Children’s comedies emphasize and glorify children who are brats, children who make rude comments, children who talk back to adults. And children are naturally attracted to those characters, and then they imitate those characters, and now, 28 years after Bart Simpson first appeared on television, we have grandparents who were in their early teens when Bart first began his rude comments. Is it any wonder that our conversations are no longer civil and uplifting? Is it any wonder that our political candidates are rude to each other – and it is a disease that has infected more than just one particular presidential candidate, it has infected almost all who run for office.

And so how do we control our tongues? How do we avoid gossip and insult, hateful speech and angry speech? How do we avoid saying things we will regret later?

Our Proverbs selection has some useful advice:

Proverbs 10:10 Whoever winks maliciously causes grief,
and a chattering fool comes to ruin.

Do you chatter? Perhaps the best way to avoid saying the wrong thing is to say less. If a boy throws a baseball at a house, even if he is trying to avoid hitting the windows, every throw is a chance to break a window. So the boy who throws only three pitches is less likely to crash a window than the boy who throws 30 pitches. Say less, and you will say less things you will regret.

Have you noticed that most good, older, wise pastors have recognized this? When they are not in the pulpit, they listen rather than talk. They would rather take the risk of being seen as distant rather than shatter the window to someone’s soul by speaking without thought.

The human resources profession and the sales profession have also learned this. Both teach that the person who says less and listens more actually controls the job interview or the sales meeting. Our stereotype of the loud, used-car salesman who is always talking is an incorrect stereotype. The best salespeople ask a few questions, keep the customer talking, and listen. And then, when they know exactly what the customer is really looking for, they speak directly to what the customer wants and they make the sale.

So perhaps we should simply learn to say less and listen more by practicing our listening skills in life.

The writer of Proverbs continues:

11 The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life,
but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.

12 Hatred stirs up conflict,
but love covers over all wrongs.

13 Wisdom is found on the lips of the discerning,
but a rod is for the back of one who has no sense.

When a wise, righteous Christian speaks, when a mature saint talks, that mature leader of the faith concentrates on speaking wisdom and on giving life-giving advice. Most of them have passed on now, but the generation that came of age in the depression and during World War II often had learned many sound lessons. Those wise men and women often spoke little about their experiences – especially the men who fought during the War, but when they spoke, it was with the benefit of their wisdom and they gave us wisdom. I’m sure you have met people like this.

It is our turn to begin to pass on our wisdom to those younger than us. And the first rule of getting a message through is that you have to shut out the noise. Just as you find it hard to hear when loud music is playing in the background, it is hard for people to hear you when most of what you speak is simply meaningless noise. Be alert that what you speak isn’t noise, but is instead something worth listening to.

There is much more in Proverbs 10, but we have little time. Take time this afternoon to sit down and carefully read each verse of Proverbs chapter ten, thinking through what is there. It will be well worth your while.

But unfortunately, most of us already realize that we need to speak less and speak more wisely. But how do we do this?

Perhaps one way is to understand why we chatter and why we speak in ways that lead to trouble.

Ultimately, a Christian is supposed to trust in the Lord to protect us. Yet, while we may trust that the Lord will protect us from a permanent death and bring us home to eternal life, we often forget to remember that the Lord has said He will always be with us, to the end of the age. And if Christ is with us – always – what can harm us? Obviously, the answer is “nothing”.

Yet we often forget that Christ is with us and when we forget that Christ is with us, we grow fearful. We focus on the loud person yelling in front of us instead of the very quiet Holy Spirit that is whispering inside us. And so our ears hear the argument, our adrenaline begins to flow, our hearts and lungs work faster, our muscles get prepared to fight or run, and from our mouth comes trash-talk that we will one day regret because it harmed the person in front of us and that harmed our reputation. More people have given up on Christianity because of our angry or hurtful reactions to their comments or actions than for any other reasons.

You see, non-Christians understand very well that we are supposed to be nicer than other people. They understand that we are to have our tongues under control. And because they have not accepted the graceful presents of God, they find it very difficult to give us grace. It is much the same way that you rightly expect clergy to be better behaved than the average church-going person. For the more grace we have accepted from God, the better able we are to give other people grace.

Here’s how this works. ..

When we accept God’s grace, a bit of our fear goes away with that grace. Usually, the first thing to go is that intense fear of death that we all are born with. As we grow closer to God perhaps by reading more scripture, by attending more bible studies, by practicing two-way prayer more, we begin to believe that God really has our best interests at heart. We learn to rely more and more upon God’s promises of protection – and our fears begin to go away. We lose our fear of worthlessness as we understand that we are truly God’s children. You know what the fear of worthlessness is, don’t you? For some, it is that fear that strikes us when someone suggests we hand over what we are doing in the church to someone else. But if we understand truly what it means to be God’s children, then we will never feel worthless.

We lose our fear of poverty when we accept that God’s grace-filled promises of giving us what we need, are truly promises of God just like the way He feeds the sparrows and those promises are backed up by God’s wonderful integrity. When that happens, we lose that fear that came when someone threatened our job, our home, our bank account.

And this losing of our fears continues every time we accept more of God’s grace and truly believe that God is giving us all these gifts. Every time we accept more of God’s grace, another fear goes away. And every time a fear goes away, another way for Satan to make us angry goes away, because anger, you see, comes from fear. We fear we aren’t respected, we fear we may lose our position, we fear another may get more attention. If you have spoken angrily to someone recently, consider what you were fearful of? What were you afraid of? Did you forget another of God’s promises? Or did you forget completely about God?

As our anger and fears go away, we are better able to control our tongue and not slash back at another with our tongue. We don’t want to hurt them in an attempt to protect ourselves. Because we are secure and standing strong in God’s protection, we can afford to let others say and do things that would previously have sent us into an angry rant. And what starts all of this is an understanding that God has sworn to protect those of us who follow Jesus from any harm. If God is for us, who can be against us?

And so we must learn to keep God’s Holy Spirit active with us so we will remember that God is always with us. And how do we keep the Holy Spirit active?

It’s sort of like our computer. Over the course of a day, I’ll open and close probably ten or twelve windows on my computer. Some, like my email, I’ll keep active all day. But to keep it active in my mind, every hour or so I need to click on the email window. I need to look and see if there is a new email waiting for me.

Or perhaps your computer, like mine, is set to go to sleep if no one touches the keyboard or mouse for an hour. Every hour, then, you'll need to simply move the mouse to keep the computer active.

And so it is with the Holy Spirit. The best way to keep your relationship with the Holy Spirit active is to practice two-way prayer regularly through the day, especially when you are alone or in a stressful situation. Two-way prayer is where you speak to God and listen for the answer from the Holy Spirit. It is intentionally listening for an answer from God.

If you keep the Holy Spirit active by touching base regularly through the day, then you will remember that God is with you and you will better be able to control your fears – and your anger – and your tongue.

But what about the things we stupidly say? What about the things we say that were just because we were chattering on – no anger – just our own stupidity?

If we work through this, most of the time, we chatter when we are nervous or we chatter when we are afraid that we are not important. And so we say things to make us feel important, or we chatter because speaking keeps us from facing the real causes of our nervousness. Nervousness, you see, is just another word for fear – usually fear that we don’t know what is going to happen, or fear that something bad is going to happen. So we chatter to keep from looking at our fears.

And why don’t we feel important? Why do we feel the need to tell everyone about the drama in our lives? Why do we find it necessary to talk about “almost” being hit by a tractor-trailer? Why do we find it vital to post rants on Facebook and go on and on telling others about how we stood up to the nurse at the hospital, about how we told off our son’s teacher, about how we told the waitress how bad the food was?

Now there is a difference between telling a story that friends have asked for because your stories are entertaining, and telling a story because you need sympathy and attention and importance. So why don’t we fell important?

Isn’t it because we haven’t yet accepted that we have been created in God’s image, that we are God’s sons and daughters, that we are a special portrait of God who is unique in the Universe and of infinite value to God our Father? Brothers and sisters, the Universe was created because of you! There is no need to feel worthless, or meaningless, or overlooked. Accept that God loves you and that you are priceless and unique, more valuable than the Mona Lisa, more beautiful than a Michelangelo painting, worth far more than any Rembrandt, for you are a portrait and child of God!

And this is also the key to understanding the unthoughtful comments that we make where we insult a friend accidentally, because we make those comments when we have forgotten that all the people in the room are also priceless and unique portraits of God, fragile and beautiful in their own ways. (Back in the days of duels, few people insulted others by accident because of the possible consequences. Insults were well-thought-out, planned beforehand, and devastating, for people recognized the life-and-death possibilities of those insults.) Of course, today, insulting people accidentally is something our culture appears to encourage, for many of these insults happen when we try to play the “blame game”.

You know the blame game. A tree falls on a highway, a car hits it, a woman passenger is injured, and someone begins the game with the announcement “Whoever owned that tree should have cut it down ages ago.” And another responds, “The tree was down for an entire hour before the accident, the state road should have cleaned it up sooner.” And still another says, “If the airbag would have worked right, the woman wouldn’t have been injured.” And another says, “I heard her husband had been drinking and he was driving.” And pretty soon, reputations are damaged, lawsuits are filed, and someone is fired.

But the actual fact was that God sent an exceptional burst of wind to knock down the tree which had been hollowed out by termites, the state road crew was cleaning up three other trees on the way to the scene which had also been knocked down by God, the sober driver dodged a huge buck deer sent by God and thus hit the tree at an angle and a speed so low that the airbag wasn’t supposed to fire, and the woman had just decided at that moment to take a drink of tea from a glass bottle, which shattered and cut her face and hands, and that was how she was injured. But because of the injury, she got a phone call from her sister with whom she had fought twenty years ago and they became friends again. Once again, God has good in mind with everything.

If we don’t play the “blame game” – and remember that God is in control - we will cut back on our accidental insults dramatically.

And a general method of controlling our tongues is to practice courtesy, politeness, and graciousness – what used to be called “being classy”. Let me recommend remembering the classiness of Sean Connery, the stories of Jane Austen and the movies based upon her novels – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, as well as the original Sherlock Holmes books – not the recent movies. In these books you will find a pattern of behavior and speech that will help control the tongue.

Some have read the Bible and all it says about the dangers of a fiery tongue on the loose, and therefore have become silent, almost never speaking. Our reading from Mark’s Gospel appears to be a bit different from the other readings, but it also concerns the tongue.

In this case, the problem is that a man does not have a voice. In this case, a man cannot talk because he is deaf. In this case, Jesus meets the man, opens his ears and loosens his tongue and the man can now speak plainly.

And this, my friends, is the part about the tongue that we do not normally look at. It is God, working through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, who gives us a voice in this world. It was the visit of Christ that started a long chain of events that allows you and I to do anything instead of being locked in as slaves to our rulers. It was Jesus Christ, who through His death and resurrection paid the price to set us free from our bondage to sin and death, who allows us to speak openly and without fear in this world. You will recall that it was Jesus, the Word of God, Who spoke the very Universe into existence. And Jesus loosened our tongues! So speak good things into existence!

How does this work?

If you believe that this life in this world is the total of all existence, if you believe that when you die, you die, if you believe that there is no hope of resurrection, no love of God, no God who will reward and punish in the life to come…no one would ever speak up against injustice, against bad laws, against those who rule over us. 

It is through Jesus Christ that we know that there is life after this life. It is because Jesus showed us His new body and promised us a resurrection that we know we shall also live. It is because Jesus told us that God will protect us that men and women over the last two thousand years have felt secure enough, brave enough, and bold enough to open their mouths and speak open words of defiance against evil, against tyrannical rulers, against the wrongs of this world. This is what has led to our modern Western-style democratic republics, where people may speak up on Facebook, in public, and yes, in pulpits when evils are seen. It is through our words of life that new ideas, new methods, and new good things can come into existence. It is through Christian men and women’s voices that we have hospitals, that we have warm homes, that we have cheap food, that we have good clothing, that we have long lives, that we have a country!

For, as the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, “there is a time for being silent and a time to speak.”

Let your fear disappear as you understand the complete love of God for you, oh child of God. For God can protect you through all things, and this means you can be silent – and God will avenge you. Or, you can speak – for Christ has freed your tongue to change the world for the better and to praise the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As Christians, the body of Christ on earth, our task, our duty, our holiness depends upon us developing the wisdom to know when to speak and when to remain silent. In a very real way, our opinion of a person’s holiness is based largely upon what they say and what they do not say.

We must study scripture diligently to know what to speak when we speak. We must listen carefully to the Holy Spirit so that we only speak words of righteousness when we speak and never words of hatred and destruction.

And free from our fears, secure in the knowledge of God’s love, possessed by and listening to the Holy Spirit, we can do just that. And then, our tongue, that small part of the body that Paul told us is filled with “restless evil and poison”, will be tamed and controlled because of the Holy Spirit which is in you.

How to Break Addictions - Chemicals, Gossip, Anger, and all the rest.

Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; Romans 6:1-23; Luke 16:1-13

This is the fourth of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.

That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life. We’ve covered kindness, developing patience, and loving deeply. These sermons are now posted online at the sermon blog listed on the front page of the bulletin.

Today, we’re going to cover how to break addictions.

Our Romans reading today was written by the Apostle Paul under the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. Paul was soon to head to Rome, to meet with a group of Christians. In Rome, there were already some thirty Christians that Paul knew, and at least three house churches – we know this from Chapter 16 of this letter. With Paul, sending greetings, were many other Christians. And so, Paul was writing this letter to the Roman Christians to help them better understand how salvation occurs, how salvation is available to all men and women, and how Christ’s sacrifice allows people to break free from slavery to sinful behavior and to now be able to live a new, joyful life, free from the bondage that previously held people.

What is sinful behavior?

There are several aspects to this. Sinful behavior is the behavior that takes us away from a relationship with God our Father. Augustine of Hippo defined sin as being lost far, far from home. To a certain extent, sinful behavior is behavior which goes against the Law that Moses brought from God. But Paul points out that even if we are not Jewish, even if we do not know God’s Law that Moses brought, we have our own standards of right and wrong behavior. And we cannot live up to even that standard. So in another way, sinful behavior is that behavior of ourselves that either we consider wrong, perhaps shameful, or it is behavior that harms us and our relationships with other people, and especially our relationship with God.

Do you need a list of sins? I could give you a list, but that list would be my list. And then, you would be free to argue with me over what should be on that list and what should not be on that list. Instead, I will go back to what Paul wrote and point out that you have a list of actions you consider sinful. Some of those things you have never done and probably never will do. But many of those things are actions you have done, often do now, and will likely continue doing tomorrow and next week. It is those actions that you think are sinful that will destroy you. Those recurring actions - those sinful addictions - go far beyond the list of actions that the news media commonly list as addictions, which usually includes alcohol, nicotine, and opium-based painkillers. Sinful addictions include all those actions you would like to stop and that is what I’m going to talk about today. It is those addictions, those bad behaviors that you want to quit doing and yet can’t seem to stop doing that I’m going to talk about today, because these are the addictions that destroy your soul.

I have gone through breaking a host of addictions in my life. For six months almost 30 years ago, I had a recurring kidney stone – the urologist prescribed Tylenol Codeine #4 tablets. I’d feel the stone moving, take two tablets, lay down, and take a nap 6 inches above the covers. Nothing wrong with that, right? But I grew worried that I was getting addicted to the painkillers and that my desire for the painkillers was causing the pain. Thankfully, shortly after becoming worried about that possibility, I passed the stone and poured the pills down the toilet, and since then I’ve taken a single Percoset when I was recovering from surgery about 7 or 8 years ago. I've been wary of painkillers ever since - and this has been born out by recent research that says a person can become physically addicted to opium-derived painkillers in as little as a couple of weeks - even though many doctors will still give a 30-day prescription for them.

It has been much more difficult for me to break other addictions. I have been addicted to video games, to sweet tea – you laugh, but it cost me $10,000. I have been addicted to the feeling of power that you get when you always have the right answer in class before anyone else has a chance to even put up their hand. I have been addicted to various televisions shows and to winning arguments and games at any cost – In college, I once refused to trade any properties in Monopoly because I had the green property set and no one else could make a set, upsetting a half-dozen of my friends. I have been addicted to salty foods, and to Little Debbie Fudge Rounds.

So what is your addiction? What do you deal with that hurts your friends and family and yourself?

How do we break addictions? What you are about to hear comes from four sources. I’ve been to several seminars recently on addition. I’ve learned a lot from the Alcoholics Anonymous organization about how they approach the issue, the twelve-step approach that other addiction organizations have adapted for their addictions. I’ve had my personal experience. And there is the teaching of Holy Scripture.

"So what does this have to do with me, pastor? I’m not an alcoholic and I’m not a drug addict."

What are you struggling with? What do you do daily or weekly that you wish you didn’t do? What do you do daily or weekly or monthly that leads you to break the law? What do you do daily or weekly that has messed up your life or the lives of those around you?

When I was in college, I had a problem with video games keeping me from studying. It may have dropped my GPA by a half-point. When I was single, I had a problem drinking too much Coca-Cola, which meant I was too exhausted in the evenings to keep my apartment any where near neat. My friends made fun of the mess. When I was living in Atlanta, I was so addicted to operating my business that I didn’t take any time off and grew burned out and exhausted and ignored my kids.

Driving too fast, drinking too much sweet tea, eating out too often, buying music CD’s every week, ordering pizza, playing Candy Crush – You name it, I’ve probably had to break the addiction.

The first step to breaking free is that we must recognize that there is a problem. It is a systematic problem in our world and therefore it becomes a systematic problem for each of us.

Our society wants to encourage addictive habits. We all know that alcohol and nicotine are addictive, but do you realize that most large soft drinks have as much caffeine as a cup of coffee? Why? It’s addictive! (The chart is based upon an 8-oz cup size. Soft drinks are sold in 16, 20, or 32 oz bottles.)

Chocolate activates the same receptors as marijuana does in the brain. And while neither is as addictive as opium-based drugs, they are both mildly addictive.

Sugar makes you feel high and that’s why you want sugary drinks and sweets, especially when you are tired. And we know that too much sugar leads to Type II diabetes.

Anger and fear generate adrenaline and for some people this is addictive. That’s why there are thrill-seekers who ride roller-coasters and jump out of airplanes. What you may not realize is that the very same effect is happening in your body when you watch scary movies, when you watch suspenseful crime shows – and when you watch the evening news shows that give you “today’s thing to be scared of”. It’s actually addictive to get angry over politicians and to get fearful about the world. And so we watch more news shows.

If you are stressed, shopping might be relaxing, at least as long as you have money. I used to buy a music CD every Sunday afternoon when I was single. I kept this habit up for about four years. Do the math and see how much money I spent. Some people tell me beer relaxes them, others smoke pot, still others watch football. Some garden and others go running. The runner’s high has been talked about for fifty years.

Our world wants to make sure you fall into addictions. Have you noticed the design of the new game apps, like Candy Crush. I KNOW many of you played the game – you sent me the requests for gifts all the time! Just like a good slot machine, you get small rewards almost constantly and every once in a while you get a big reward - you complete a level. And so you keep playing to get those big rewards. You’ll even pay to keep playing!

"OK, Pastor. So I’ve got some addictions, but are they are problem?"

Your addiction is a problem if participating in the activity endangers yourself or others, or if it is becoming more important in your life than your relationships, than your job, than your relationship with God. If you don’t recognize that your addiction is a problem, you won’t try to break it. So here’s some information you can choose to listen to from the addiction scientists to decide if you have a problem.

First, if you are breaking the law to enjoy your addiction, you are endangering yourself and your family. Breaking the law runs the chance you will be arrested and convicted, leading to possible loss of your job, loss of your children, a significant loss of income. It doesn’t matter if you agree with the laws or not: you have a problem. For example, if you really think pot-smoking is safe or even good for you, move to Colorado. You won’t be arrested there. But in our state, you are endangering your freedom and your family’s livelihood if you smoke pot. And this applies to many different addictions, including gambling, pornography, computer hacking, and especially drinking and driving. If you drink and drive, you are breaking the law, so no matter how safely you drive, you are endangering yourself and others because you may be arrested. If you are underage for the activity that you are doing, you are endangering yourself and others because you may be arrested. This applies to many, many different addictions.

For example, let’s say you like to look at pretty women. That’s fairly normal. Women also like to look at handsome men. People do this all the time at beaches and in other public places. But if you are peeking in windows at night, if you are filming women secretly, if you are you are breaking laws to see women, you have a problem.

Any use of illegal drugs is an addiction, because you are breaking the law and thus endangering yourself and others even if you only use the drug once a year – or even once.

So anytime you indulge your addiction and it breaks the law, you have a problem addiction.

A second way to tell if you have a problem addiction is that you may be exceeding healthy standards. Let’s look at alcohol. We’re going to use alcohol as an example because it is common, a lot of studies have been conducted on alcohol, and the Bible actually talks directly about alcohol. 

The Bible does not teach that drinking alcohol is sinful. Wine was commonly drunk by people in ancient times and Paul even recommends it to Timothy at one point for his regular ailments. However, the Bible does teach that getting drunk leads to problems and often to sinful behavior, and that being a drunkard is a problem strong enough to disqualify a person from church leadership. The original Greek tells us that an overseer in the church should not be a person who “lies down beside a wine jug.” And our science backs this up. A little bit of wine appears to be healthy, but too much alcohol causes all sorts of physical health problems – ask a doctor - in addition to the problems it causes to relationships. So how much alcohol is too much?

According to the seminars I’ve attended, taught by addiction specialists, you are in danger of becoming an alcoholic if any of the following is true:

First, if you binge drink. Binge drinking is considered to be more than 5 drinks (including beers) at a time, more than twice a month. Binge drinking means the alcohol is controlling you rather than you controlling the alcohol.

Second, the addiction specialists say that 14 drinks a week – that’s averaging two a day – is the limit for men and 7 drinks a week – that’s averaging one a day – is the limit for women. If you are drinking more than this, you may have a problem and probably should cut back, if only for health reasons.

In another type of addiction, the doctors tell us it is unhealthy to sit for more than two hours at a time. So if you play video games for four hours solid, if you look at Facebook literally all evening long, if you watch television for more than a couple hours at a stretch – you have a problem. So our second way of knowing that we have a problem is when we go over a healthy line.

The third way you know that you are having a problem is when you declare you won’t perform your addiction and yet you do. You come home on Friday and tell your spouse – “No Facebook this weekend.” An hour later, you’re on Facebook with no good reason – you have a problem. You say you won’t eat chocolate and you eat. You say you aren’t drinking at the party tonight and you drink – you have a problem. I’ve had this problem with several of my addictions – that’s when I know I’ve got a problem. In fact, a good way to check an addiction is to see if you can go two weeks without using. That is a good start – but it isn’t a sure proof that you are free – it’s just a good start. If you can’t stop for two weeks, you’ll know for sure you have a problem.

A fourth way to know you have an addiction is when multiple people tell you that you have an addiction. One person may be off-base, but when multiple people who care for you tell you that you have an addiction – listen.

The fifth way to know you have an addiction is when trouble begins happening in your life because of the addiction. You miss school in order to video game. You miss church because you drank too much last night. You don’t pay the electric bill because you "needed" to buy another set of clothes. You flirted too much with the waitress and it caused a huge fight with your wife. You gossiped too long and too loud and your boss gave you a reprimand because of it. Oh yes, gossip can be an addiction. You had to repair the hole in the wall where you punched it last night because you were angry. And you can’t stop.

The twelve step programs tell us that there are three beginning steps to breaking any addiction:

First, you must recognize that the addiction is a problem. Specifically, you recognize that you are powerless to stop the addiction - that your life has become unmanageable because of the addiction. Take a minute to think about your addictions. Are they controlling you? Are they problem addictions?

Second, you recognize that God has the power to handle the addiction. And this is exactly where our Romans reading steps in….Listen to Paul’s argument.

"Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life."

Paul is saying our baptism unites us in a spiritual way with Christ, so that our old self is dead and we are ready to live a new life in Christ. When we were baptized, we spiritually died and then came back to spiritual life with the Holy Spirit now energizing us.

"For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin."

Paul is saying that with this baptism death-and-resurrection, we are free from the slavery to sin. A dead person can no longer sin. Our new rebirth resets us, we are rebooted, free from the virus of sin.

Skipping down a bit…Paul continues….

"When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

When sin controlled us, sin paid us with death. Now that God controls us, God pays us with eternal life.

In Star Trek, there was an episode where one of the regular characters was possessed by an alien energy being which was slowly killing that character. The doctor figured out that the only was to get rid of the alien was to kill the character. So the crew killed their friend, the character. The alien left the ship quickly. But then, the doctor brought the character back to life, free from the control of the alien.

It is somewhat similar to us with addiction. The only way to remove the slavery of addictive sin from our character is for us to spiritually die. When we voluntarily “die” by giving control of our life to Christ through baptism and the receiving of the Holy Spirit, the slavery to sin chains are broken, the sin leaves, and now God can bring us back to spiritual life and give us an eternal life.

Which leads to the third step in the process…

We must turn our lives over to Christ.

How simple! Yet how difficult!

I love my mother. My mother is now 81 years old. As a state senator covering four counties near Parkersburg, she drives all over the state – last year she also drove to Dallas, TX and back. She regularly logs around 30,000 miles a year. And she drives. Not my dad. No one else. When Mom, Dad, Saundra, and I go out to eat, Mom drives. Total control of the wheel. My dad and I learned many years ago that even if we get to drive, Mom still won’t give up control of the wheel – she’ll just reach out for it if she gets scared.

And that’s how we all are with our lives. Few people want to give up control of the wheel of our lives to Jesus. Fewer still want to really give up control and not reach out to grab the wheel when we get scared.

But that’s why we continue to have problems. That’s why we have addictions. We have addictions because we tell Jesus – "Jesus, you can drive on this street of our lives, but not on that street, and certainly not on the four-lanes." We will always have problems with addictions as long as we don’t employ Jesus as our full-time chauffeur. We really need to move to the back seats of our lives, sitting in the limo in the seat that faces the rear. As long as we insist on driving or even sitting beside Him in the front seat, he’ll never be able to take us away from the bad parts of town, to the truly beautiful spots, to the wonderful roads high in the mountains that we are too inexperienced to drive over, but that He has driven over many times. We need to take the third step – to say, "Jesus, you have total control of my life."
Now the scientists, the doctors, the folks at the rehab centers – they have given us all sorts of good research about what keeps us addicted. They point out that some addictions are addictions which calm us down when we are too excited or tense or stressed. And some people drink or smoke pot or play video games to calm down. I’ve learned to read the Psalms and to pray.

Other research shows us that some addictions are addictive because they give us a wonderfully pleasurable high, and some people will do almost anything to repeat that high. Because of that, today you can go to Mon General Hospital and they will give you a drug which block the receptors in your brain which makes you feel high. Then, you don’t have any wish anymore to drink or shoot heroin or take pain pills because you simply can’t get high off of anything anymore. I prefer to watch someone come to know God, or hear someone tell me of discovering a new, deeper relationship with Christ, or see someone listen to the Holy Spirit and begin to blossom like a huge rosebud opening up.

Still other research shows this: Twelve-step programs only work for about a quarter of people - the quarter of people who truly turn their lives over to God. The spiritual part is not optional. Twelve-step programs are still the most effective thing going, because they are based upon Holy Scripture, they use the power of God – not our own feeble power – and they substitute an eternal life-giving relationship with God for the relationship with Satan that would lead to your early death and eternal demise.

To break free of any addiction, admit it is a problem you are helpless to handle, recognize that God and Christ are ready and able to step in, and turn your life’s control over to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

And you will live abundantly and eternally.

For more information on twelve-step programs nationwide, try this link. For more information in or near Harrison County, WV, come visit us at the Quiet Dell United Methodist Church any Saturday evening at 8 pm. We're located at I-79, exit 115, 50 feet east of the exit. Turn left at the BP-7/11 store and follow the access road back to toward the interstate.

How to Love Deeply - The How of Loving God and Others

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon; Luke 14:25-33

This is the third of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.

That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life. Two weeks ago we covered kindness and last week we covered developing patience. These sermons are now posted online at the sermon blog listed on the front page of the bulletin.

Today, we’re going to cover loving deeply.

Love. To an outsider looking in, modern American culture is about three things: Making money, using firearms, and falling in love.

Look at our movies, our television shows, our popular books. In the last ten years, we have seen a popular book and movie series (Twilight) based upon a teenage girl deciding whether to fall in love with a vampire or a werewolf. We’ve seen another popular book and movie series (The Hunger Games) about a teenage girl who is torn between her boyfriend and destroying an oppressive government. And our popular television detective shows focus more and more on the personal love lives of the detectives than on the crimes.

Of course, the English word “love” covers a lot of territory. Ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament, used four different words to cover what we use a single word for. For example, the intense, passionate physical love between a man and a woman in the Greek language is eros. The love between two brothers is phileos. The affection between grandparents and grandchildren is storge. And the unselfish, freely given love that God and Christ give to us is agape. Today, I’m going to focus upon agape, because that is the love that is most difficult for us and at the same time, most important for the Christian to develop. Agape – self-sacrificing love.

Christians are to agape each other, just as Christ agaped us.

We all know that Jesus told us that we are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We also know that we are to love our neighbor as ourself.

But both of these loves, both of these agapes, are very difficult for us to get a handle on.

It is easy to fall in love with someone. It is easy for a man to fall in love with a woman, or a woman to fall in love with a man. It is easy to grow up with a brother or sister and love them, because they are so familiar. It is easy for grandparents to love grandchildren because they are so cute when they are born, and every time we see them we remember them when we first held them in our arms. It is easy for grandchildren to love grandparents because Mom and Dad are the enforcers and our grandparents tend to spoil us, at least a little bit.

But how do we love God and Christ, neither of whom we’ve seen? After all, most of us feel we’ve become closer to our favorite movie or television stars than God and Christ. Yet it is essential to our continued life in eternity that we fall in love with God.

In our Deuteronomy reading, Moses tells us: “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

So what are we to do? We are called to love God, but we have great difficulty with this. How shall we then be saved?

Perhaps we can learn some lessons from the world. The world rarely gets it right, but the world can always teach us what is wrong.

The world tells us that love is an emotion, that we are overwhelmed by love, that we are helpless, not having any choice in who we love and who we don’t love. But that is an invention of our time.

In ancient, even medieval times, love was a choice. Love was an act of the will, of the mind. It was when we took our mind and put it in charge, and thus we learned to love the person that our parents had decided was best for us. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells men to love their wives as Christ loves the church. And how does Christ love the church? He chose to lay down His life for the church. Does anyone really think that Christ was caught up by His emotions, and that those emotions had Him come to earth for 30 years, to preach for 3 years, and then to stay on the cross until He died? No. Jesus thought through the consequences of His love before He committed, and then He was and is committed to the love of His eternal life, the Church that is His body, we who follow Him.

As Jesus said in our Luke reading, :

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
Jesus decided the cost before the Universe began, and so He was committed to loving us deeply.

We use our minds to calculate the cost. The man who builds the tower asks the question “can I afford to build a tower?” In the same way, we who look for love often fail to ask the question, “Can I afford to fall in love right now?”

Too many people jump into love with the forethought of the dog that chased the car. What was the dog going to do with the car if he caught the car? If you begin to date, what are you going to do if you fall in love? Or are you just dating because everyone around you is dating, yet you have no job, you live at home, you have no skills, you couldn’t and wouldn’t get married for another ten years even if you fell in love. Only trouble can come from dating before you are ready. You are like a man who decides to build a tower because his neighbor has decided to build a tower.

If we are wise, we look at the cost of love before we take the plunge. A wise young man looks at his own situation before he begins to date a woman. He asks himself, “Can I afford the dates? Can I afford the time? Will this interfere with my studies? If she falls in love with me, is it even conceivable that I’d want to marry her?”

A wise young woman thinks things through. “Do I trust this young man? Am I ready to consider marriage? Do I have other plans? How much time will dating take? Do I have a career plan and what will this do to my studies for that career?”

There is a reason why fifty or a hundred years ago most colleges were limited to either men or women, but not both. Dating takes time and money. Dating takes lots of both that are wasted if we aren’t ready and able to marry.

And so we decide whether or not to love. And that is based upon our calculation of the costs – and the benefits.

The wise person recognizes that life has some easy times and some difficult times. Like a rollercoaster, there are times when we are feeling great – and other times we are scared out of our wits. And so it is with love.

If we believe that love is totally emotion, out of our control, then we will fall in love and fall out of love and never get to the good part, the rich, wonderful time when our love has become deep, the deep, rich love of the man and woman who have been in love for fifty years, who have endured the time the house burned down, the times he lost his job. The months she recovered from the car wreck, the neighbors who cut down their flowerbed, the time the car broke down in Louisiana when the tropical storm came through, the cute blonde secretary at work that always flirted with him, the time their son ended up in jail for drug possession, and the loss of their granddaughter to that awful disease. For that deep love that the couple has makes newlyweds look silly, the confidence they have in each other makes the Marines look like a sandlot pickup team, the meaning that they give a slight touch on the neck, the quietly whispered word “Richmond”, the special reason why every anniversary there is a piece of Colby cheese on the plate cannot be duplicated in any less than decades together.

And the way we get there is through the will. Our will. Our will that we will stay in love. We used our mind to calculate the cost and now we use our will to stay in love through the difficult times. And our love deepens.

And so we come to loving God and Christ…

Is there really a difference between loving God and Christ – and loving another human being?

Michael Buble has a great song. “I just haven’t met you yet”. He talks about the great love of his life and yet he hasn’t met his love. Yet.

It is a great song for those who would fall in love with God and Christ. Listen to it.

Let’s work through the steps…

A wise person calculates the cost. What is the cost of falling in love with God and Christ? The cost is simple – Jesus Himself tells us in our reading from Luke:

“those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”

The cost of falling in love with Christ is that you must give up everything you have. But isn’t this also the cost of falling in love with anyone? In the wedding ceremony, the couple pledges “with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you.”

The couple getting married pledge to give up everything to one another. And truly, the couple that honors that pledge will stay together, while the couple that only partially honors that pledge will soon split. It is a matter of who is more important, our self or our spouse. We have to open up ourselves, to take the chance that we will be hurt deeply, to accept that we are vulnerable if we are to have a chance of finding a deep, lasting love. Those who put invulnerable barriers around themselves will never experience deep love, because love has to flow into our innermost being – and from our innermost being to another, or it remains a surface affection. Invulnerable barriers block the love flow.

Let me give you an example. If you want a puppy to love you, you must pet the puppy. Yet, the puppy might bite you. You must take that risk if you want the love of the puppy.You have to pet the puppy.

C.S. Lewis wrote the deep children’s novels we call the Narnia series. In one of them, a child looks at the Christ figure of the novels, a huge lion known as Aslan with a bit of fear. “Is he safe?” the child asks. The other, wiser person replies, “No, he’s not a tame lion. But he is good.” Jesus, the Son of God, is the same. He is not tame – He and His Father created the Universe and they can destroy the world with a word and if they choose to do so, there is nothing you can do to prevent them from doing exactly what they want to do. But Jesus is good and wise. Supremely good and wise. Always remember that.

And if we are truly to become a disciple of Christ, we must give up everything we have for Jesus. Re-read your Gospels. Multiple times Jesus says that we must give up everything for Him. John 12:25: Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” A couple of weeks ago, you heard Jesus tell the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and follow Jesus.

Why is Jesus so all-consuming? Perhaps there is a family resemblance. Didn’t His Father – our heavenly Father – say, “You shall not worship any other Gods before Me?”

In December, 1941 and into the spring of 1942, hundreds of thousands of young American men walked into Army recruiting stations around the country and said, “I’d like to volunteer for the Army.” And before they joined up, they had to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They understood when they joined that their lives were now the Army’s, to spend and to use as the Army deemed best. That might mean they got a free chance to visit London and Paris – or it might mean they were in charge of a shovel in southern Georgia digging a new latrine for all the troops to use. It might mean they would be flying in the Army Air Force – or it might mean they would be shivering in a cow barn in a place called Bastogne in Belgium, surrounded by German tanks. When they signed up, they surrendered their life to the Army and they went and did what the Army told them to do. Sometimes the Army was wise about this – and sometimes the Army was not very wise. Yet those soldiers still volunteered and went where the Army sent them.

When you choose to follow Christ, unlike the Army, you are turning over your life to the wisest, most loving personality in the Universe. If you listen to the Holy Spirit’s direction, you will always be guided in the manner that is best for you and others. But here’s the rub – it won’t always be easy.

A couple begins dating and they like each other. There are chocolates and roses and movies and dinners. It is all fun and play. But at this point, there is always the understanding that they can stop dating at any moment, they can run away from each other. And then later, they may become engaged. At this point, there is an understanding that only some major event will separate them, will lead them to run away. Today, some couples choose to live together, but the church has historically seen that to be a mistake, because the couple has not really committed to each other. Each still has that lurking fear that the other may choose to run away for almost any reason. That lurking fear creates tension which keeps the couple from truly relaxing in their love for each other. Will you commit or not? Will you overcome your fears?

The next step is marriage.

Now, married, the couple has promised to stay together for the rest of their lives. They now live together and work together, the chocolates and the roses and the movies and the dinners are few and far between.  Instead, they work in the house, they work in their garden, they work together and grow deeper in love. Far deeper in love.

In the old days, this was what happened. But over the last hundred years or so, people have begun to break that promise more and more often, to the point where almost half of marriages end in divorce. Of course, many more couple break up who have chosen to live together. And that is sad, for both people are hurt during a divorce or a break-up. We all know that divorces hurt people. It seems that many people get bored with the marriage when the chocolates and roses and movies and dinners stop.

So knowing all of this, why is it that so many people choose to date Jesus Christ? So many people make the little decisions every day to hold back large parts of their lives from the one person in the Universe who will never hurt them, who will never betray them, the one person who always has their best interests at heart, who is good and wise and loving all the time? Why don’t you give your entire life to Christ?

For some people, it’s because they don’t realize they’re supposed to give everything to Christ. They think that they are to be wooed by Christ and the church, that they are to receive chocolates and roses and movies and dinners. But instead, you see, everything is to be at the call of the Holy Spirit, nothing held back, ready to do what you are asked to do, ready to move if called, ready to step in and do God’s will as the body of Christ on earth. In this, being in the church is similar to being in the Army.

For other people, the issue is that we look at the people around us and see other people dating Jesus, so we think this is what is supposed to happen, like middle school or elementary school students with their first crush, meeting their first love at a school dance or exchanging texts with him or her. Those middle schoolers and elementary students don’t understand the sacrifices and work that real love demands, they don’t understand the difficulties of sticking to a relationship, they operate their relationships like games – and we do the same in our churches, treating our churches like we do our restaurants – how’s the food, how’s the entertainment, how’s the air conditioning today? – not realizing that the church is not a chain store, but it is a family business and we are part of the family, with our part to play, our chores to do, our responsibilities to do the Father’s will.

We are not customers, you see. We are the employees. We cannot really fall in love with the Father unless we work in the business with the Son, for it is when we work together beside Jesus to bring another family out of despair that we learn to love each other and Jesus and we develop that deep understanding of each other, like the couple that has been happily married 50 or 60 years. Are you dating Jesus or are you part of His family?

Deep love, agape, the self-sacrificing love that Jesus gives us flows from Him. We can only love Him because He first chose to love us. For Jesus, love and sacrifice are all tied up together. Jesus is not the suitor who brings chocolates and roses to your door. Jesus is the suitor that says, “Wear your jeans! Let’s spend the day together working in the garden.” As long as you sit here looking for chocolates and roses and movies and dinners, you are just dating Jesus – and He knows it.

When you get serious and choose to work in the garden with Him, to help Him pull weeds and plant seeds and prune the apple trees, to listen to hurting people, to give of your time, talents, and treasures, to tell His story to new people - then He’ll know you are serious about Him. And it is then that He brings out the surprising treasures that He only gives to His friends that are in love with Him. It is as though you’ve worked in the garden all morning and He stops and shows you where the bluebird nest is. It’s like He walks over behind a stump and shows you an amazing set of orange and white mushrooms growing between purple violets and yellow dandelions. It’s as though he calls you into the back room of a shed and there is a refrigerator in which He has hidden a pitcher of ice-cold pink lemonade and a plate of chocolate raspberry brownies.

But He only does this to those who choose to give up their lives to Him, to the people who have decided that the only real purpose of life is to follow Jesus, to those people who are willing to work in the garden with Him. For we must learn to work and learn to sacrifice and learn to stop worry about our self and instead worry about what the other wants if we want to experience deep, deep love.

For, you see, Jesus gave up everything He had for us. He surrendered His life to pay the fines for all the things we have done wrong in our lives. His Father loved Him so much He restored His life to Him. Eternally. But then, Jesus turned around again and said, “Those who follow me shall also have eternal life.” He gave us that eternal life He has. In return, He asks us to follow Him – to join Him in the garden.

And that is how to love deeply. That is how to be a disciple of Christ.