Message 06-17-07

 

Series:            Seven Serious Mistakes

Scripture:            Romans 6:5-14

 

Title:                                        A Thirst that Aches for Salt

 

I heard a story recently that touched me both as a parent and as a follower of Jesus. I hope it touches you in one of those ways or maybe both as you hear it. It’s a true story, not my story, but true.

 

There was this Dad who had an eight year old daughter and on the Christmas of her 8^th year she rushed into the room where the tree was as most 8 year-olds might. But instead of looking for presents for herself she rushed to the tree and pulled off a little gift that was sitting on the branches. She ran to her father and said, “Here Daddy, open my gift first. I made it for you.”

The father said she was clearly as excited about his opening it as if it was a gift for her. The gift was a little tube of wrapping paper, just rolled up Christmas wrapping paper with a string tied around it. And he untied it and thanked her for it, unrolled it, thanked her again and went on with the morning.

Later when he carried his gifts to his room he set his things on top of his dresser and the little roll of paper rolled off and went fell behind it. Some time later, some weeks or months, the dad had the responsibility to talk with some children in the church and he realized he needed some wrapping paper to illustrate his talk. He remembered the little roll behind the dresser and took the time to fish it out, blow the dust off and brought it to church.

Later the paper got tossed in the back seat of his minivan with some other stuff that needed to be thrown away. As he was driving home from church he looked into the rearview mirror and his daughter had big tears coming down her cheeks. He couldn’t think of anything that had happened and asked her what was wrong. “You didn’t like my gift,” she said.

When they got home he pulled the wrapping paper tube, that was a little crushed now, out of pile of stuff and smoothed it out and for the first time, as he was trying to get the wrinkles out he turned the paper over.  There on the plain side of the paper the little girl had written “I love you” in about every crayon color she could find. The entire underside of the paper was covered with her love for him.

As you might guess this paper has been laminated and it has hung in the man’s office for almost a couple of decades now.

 

I’m telling you this story because sometimes God is like an 8 year-old girl and the gifts of God are deceptively simple. They come in the course of life and there doesn’t seem to be much to them, but underneath them is the explosion of God expressing his love to us. There is much of life that is like that. We have this great tendency to not take the time to investigate or consider just what we’ve been given and so we can make the mistake of neglecting or mistreating what we’ve been given.

 

For the next several weeks we’re going to look at several different, serious mistakes we can make. You may recognize them as what used to be called “the seven deadly sins.” The reason they were called “deadly” is because these were sins that were seen as harder for God to forgive. Venial sins were those the church spoke of as simpler more common sins, but the seven deadly sins were those that led you to the brink of hell.

 

People don’t really think about sin this way anymore. Sometimes, especially for Christians who believe that sin is forgiven through Jesus, it’s easy to think that sin isn’t that big a deal. But if it cost Jesus his life, if it claimed Jesus’ time and energy in his life to teach us about how to avoid it, then we have to realize that God doesn’t “wink” at sin. Sin is a significant thing to God. Sin is deadly as God understands it and as he tries to explain it to us.

 

You may remember how Jesus takes things that we think are pretty common – like getting angry and compares it, actually ties it to “murder”. If you call someone a fool or an “empty-head”, you should be sent to hell, Jesus says. Sin is deadly as God understands it and as he tries to explain it to us.

 

And we get that… deep down inside we understand that. Anyone who’s tried to hold a grudge gets that. Something inside us “dies” when we try to hold a grudge. Something takes on a coolness inside us, a coldness develops. It’s the same with lying. When we lie we create a separation from what’s real and what’s living. If someone commits adultery, something dies within. Even if it is never found out, even if it’s a secret, something dies in the relationship with a spouse when someone cheats. 

 

There are people who are walking around, breathing and living, but whole parts of their hearts are dead and cold.

 

Jesus said this is the way it works with lust. Lust kills something within us and within someone else.

 

Lust is wanting someone else physically, sexually, without really needing a relationship, without emotions. We just want to satisfy an appetite. It’s not a thing that builds anything. It’s not saying I want you in my life or I need you in my life. It’s saying I just need to use you for a little while.

 

That’s what’s intriguing about what Jesus said about Lust. He didn’t say it was wrong to feel lust. Feelings are feelings. What he said was, literally, when a man looks at a woman to produce lust in her eyes, he’s already committed adultery.

 

Now if you want to know what you can get away with then you can start figuring right from there. I had a friend who heard that seeing a beautiful woman wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t the first look that was a problem it was the second. My friend said he realized what he needed to do was take a really good first look. If what you want is to figure out what you can get away with, then you can start living your life by whatever law you come up with. Because that kind of thinking only amounts to coming up with a legal system.

 

But as our Scripture reminds us we’re not under law any more. We’re under grace and grace produces life. Grace is a real relationship with God and with other people. You see, what Jesus, taught us and what Paul makes explicit to us is that living by the law just produces death. Any teenager who has tried to “work” a curfew knows, and any parent of a teenager who has gone through that conversation knows, that some thing dies inside their relationship. When a teenager tries to get down to exactly what you mean when you say “you need to be home by midnight”, they are killing something in their relationship with their parents. Any parent who says, “12 o’clock, not 12:01, not 12:10…. twelve o’clock” is killing something in their relationship with their children. Sometimes parents will even say, “if you ever do this, I’ll kill you.” Making it quite clear that if you break the law, you’re dead. But Jesus said if you’re just trying to live by the law you’re dead because the law kills the relationship.

 

Any person who has gotten caught in the web of pornography knows that trying to create a law or a boundary or a separation between what is going on in their relationship with their spouse and what is coming on the screen of his or her computer is just killing themselves. It is only defeating. It is only destruction and to think that we can toe a line, if we say to ourselves that we’re just keeping it to this amount or this level and “that’s okay,” we’re killing ourselves and our relationships. We’re producing areas where we can’t talk and where we can’t tell the truth. And we needn’t be married for this destruction to take place. Pornography is a practiced separation, removing us from society, friendships, community. It’s not just a private thing, like most sexual intimacy, and that’s because it isn’t an intimate thing. It is a separate thing. And it seeks to master our sexuality by making us respond in certain ways.

 

But in coming to Jesus we give up trying to live a law. Sin is not going to master us anymore. 

 

 

How do we do this? How do we give up sinning? How do we not only commit ourselves to God in our minds, but move our bodies to serve him. 

The first thing we do is admit that you can’t do this alone. No one can. This is why Jesus gave us each other. Our recovery community knows all about this and have produced small communities of support in order to share grace and not to be mastered by their addictions or appetites any more. They go to each other in order to get the strength they need to deal with this stuff.

 

You see lust is a thirst that aches for salt. It just wants to thirst more. It doesn’t want to be quenched.

 

When we want to break free we need to realize “the authority we can have over our fantasies.” Our imaginations can be disciplined. I am referring at this point to the work of Richard Foster, the author of Money, Sex and Power. We need a small group who can pray with us and for us and encourage us to grow stronger. We can seek out life giving expressions of our natures rather than destructive ones. We can pray for Christ to “enter into our sexual fantasies and fill them with light”. This is incredibly important right now, in our time and day.

 

Men are creating affairs of the mind – pulling themselves away from their families, work, and future – flooding their minds with separation. There’s a TV show produced by Hugh Hefner called “the Girls Next Door”. It’s a semi-reality show that focuses on his three girl friends who live in a house next door to the Playboy mansion. Seventy percent of the audience who watches this show is young women, women in their 20’s. There is a whole community of young women who are learning their sexuality and how to make sexual choices by watching this show. This is a very, very important time for believers in Jesus to discover and live out healthy, life-giving, life-affirming expressions of sexuality.

 

God knows exactly where our weaknesses lie and how we struggle with them, but he also knows how we can grow past them. We can end up using the most colorful, exciting and wonderful gifts of God as trivial, meaningless and boring. But God calls us to stronger, deeper healthier ways. We can admit our weaknesses to each other and when they become overwhelming we can teach each other how to escape their grip. Because you see they no longer master us. They may be able to win a bit, but they will not win forever if we accept help and give help to each other, if we build a community of support and encouragement with each other.

 

Chastity for some people means restraint, abstinence and withdrawal. Chastity should be an expression of engagement, involvement with life and of participation in the wholeness of life. It means deciding to build safety and security for our children and significant others. It means deciding to build depth into our relationships and to explore them allowing them to teach us how life works within them. It means learning how to be intimate. Chastity is giving ourselves over to God’s grace and seeking to grow into strength and joy and peace.