Freedom With Purpose: Temptation, Passivity and Freedom

All right. Unmuted. Cool. Well, good morning.

Thanks, Hans. I always rely on Hans. Bob was gone, so Hans was like,

I've got to leave him hanging.

Otherwise, you guys would have all just stared at me and said nothing.

That's okay. I appreciate it.

Oh, can we just pray? I just need to pray this morning.

I want us to, as we get into the word here, just to ask the Lord to just speak

to us as we're just digging in, wrapping up this series.

So, Lord, thank you so much. Thank you for your word. God, I thank you that

there's so many surprises in it. I thank you that they're the good kind of surprises, Lord.

They're inviting us deeper in, not just like getting us off the hook from you, Lord.

I want to pray this morning as we'd open our minds and you'd speak to us.

Lord, give us understanding of your word. Give us understanding of your purpose for our lives.

Give us understanding and hope and excitement about what you call us to.

Give us a vision for the life that we have, the life that we've been given,

the grace that we've been given in Christ Jesus, Lord, and the callings that we have.

Holy Spirit, I just invite you into this place. Lord, we need,

we rely, we depend upon you to make your will clear, to make your way known,

to make your heart discernible to us.

So God, we invite you. Holy Spirit, would you come? Would you speak to us us

this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, you might know, I've actually been really negligent, but you might know

that I'm obsessed with Dallas Willard.

If you know me well, he's a theologian and philosopher.

I haven't mentioned him in a while, but I know I am okay. I am okay.

It's funny because I really love Dallas Willard, but I tried reading him right

after college and I was He was 21 or something like that.

And I just couldn't get into his stuff.

But it wasn't for several years until I came across this little quip of his,

which kind of led me into exploring his work more. And I'm just really just appreciating him.

He says this. He says, grace is not opposed to effort. It's opposed to earnings.

He's drawing a distinction there. It's a really important distinction,

and it's one that's been super helpful for me as I think about what does grace mean?

How do I as a person take God's grace seriously?

It sort of goes right into the intersection, the tensions I think that we often feel.

It's helped me navigate the tension that I felt as I've studied the Bible,

because on one level, we are assured, assured that by grace we're saved.

Paul makes that super clear. This is the foundation of Christian doctrine.

We know that salvation, forgiveness, a relationship with God,

these are things that we're given.

We're not given those things on the basis of our performance. We don't earn them.

We're given those. They don't depend on my work or your work.

They depend on Jesus's work on the cross.

So our grace, our relationship with him, the forgiveness that we have as a benefit

of trusting and putting our faith in Jesus Christ, that is a gift from God.

And yet, on the other hand, as we read scripture, if we are serious students

of the Bible, we see and we read and we're told over and over again to do things.

We're called to act. And not just to do things, but to do them urgently,

as if something important depended upon us acting.

I mean, I think about the verses that we ended with last week as we've been

going through 1 Corinthians 8 through 10.

We ended last week with 1 Corinthians 9, 23 through 27. I'll just read them to you again.

If you want to know what to make of them, go back to that other message.

It says this, now I do all this because of the gospel so that I may share in its blessings.

Don't you know that a runner in a stadium, in a stadium, the runners in the

stadium all race, but only one receives the prize, run in such a way as to win the prize.

Now everyone who competes exercises self-control in everything.

They do it to receive a perishable crown, but we an imperishable crown.

So I do not run like one who runs aimlessly or box like one beating the air.

Instead, I discipline my body and I bring it under strict control so that after

preaching to others, I myself will not be disqualified.

See, Paul has a really strong theology of grace.

It's a really well-developed one. It's very nuanced. It's very subtle.

For him, it is not a simple matter of grace, forgiveness.

It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card for us.

That's not its full significance. The forgiveness that we have because of what

Jesus has done is not just like me, oh, I'm done with my sins,

and now I can go do whatever I want.

Grace is forgiveness of your sins. It is freedom from the law.

But part of your calling, part of your purpose is to do something with that grace.

Your calling in your life in Christ consists of you doing something with the

grace that you've been given.

Not to earn it, not to self-justify it, but to make every effort to make much

of the grace that you've been given.

Your performance is not the reason that God has forgiven you.

You don't earn forgiveness. You don't earn grace.

But your calling, your invitation as a Christian is to make much of the gift that you've been given.

And what Paul is doing here in the book of 1 Corinthians is he's taking this

really distinct theology of grace that he's known for, and he's applying it

throughout the book of 1 Corinthians. And here in this little section of chapters

eight through 10, he is mediating a conflict.

I had a little picture illustrating this that we looked at last year.

He's a conflict between two groups of people within the Corinthian church.

And on one side, there's a group of people who believe that,

well, because of grace, because we're forgiven, because we're set free from

the law, we can go ahead and meet each other.

Meat, eat, eat meat, sacrifice to idols, and nobody can tell us otherwise because we have grace.

We have freedom. We're allowed to do that.

And then on the other side, there is a group of people who, you know,

they just, they totally believe all those things. They believe that they have freedom.

They believe that they have grace. They believe they're not under law,

but they just don't feel right about eating meat, sacrifice to idols.

And they don't think the other group should feel right about it either.

They believe in grace, but they don't think that grace can make them free to

do that. It just doesn't sit well with their conscience.

And what Paul is doing throughout these chapters is he's trying to navigate

this conflict, and he, I think we have to say, he is taking his time.

I mean, three chapters in a book that's, I don't know, what is it,

like 15 chapters or something like that?

He's taking a significant amount of time to wade through this discussion.

His answer is not straightforward. It's not just like a decisive sort of thing, but he spreads it out.

And at this point, we are at the end, and at this point, this consummate Bible

teacher, this guy who has so much knowledge and so much understanding about

grace, he's bringing everything to a head, and he is appealing to the Old Testament to make his point.

He's appealed to kind of their love, he's appealed to conscience,

he's appealed to his own example and the way he lives his life,

and now he is making his argument, the same argument, a long drawn out argument,

he's pointing to the Old Testament.

And this is what he goes, this is how he approaches it. So from 1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 10:1

10 verse 1, if you've got a Bible, take it out, look at it.

It says, now I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,

that our ancestors were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea,

and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

They all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink,

for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them since they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things took place as examples for us so that we will not desire evil things as they did.

Do not become idolaters as some of them were.

As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and they got up to party.

Let us not commit sexual immorality as some of them did. And in a single day, 23,000 people died.

Let us not test Christ as some of them did and were destroyed by snakes.

And don't grumble as some of them did and were killed by the destroyer.

These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction

on whom the ends of the ages have come.

The question in the background of this long discussion is, can we eat food sacrificed to idols?

And as Paul attempts to give a response to this question, he takes the long

way around and he points the Corinthians to Israel,

God's children who were called out of slavery, who were called into relationship,

dependence, faith in God.

And he explains, though different, they were not so different.

They saw God moving powerfully among them. He says they were baptized through

the sea into this kind of relationship with God.

They passed through the Red Seas. They were sustained by God with food and drink.

Referencing several Old Testament stories.

The drink, particularly Exodus 17 and Numbers 20, if you want to go back and

research it, where God just brought water out from a rock in a dry place to

sustain the people of Israel as they wandered around.

And what Paul says remarkably, he says, that was Christ. That was Christ.

That was Jesus among them working.

That was God, his faithfulness present with them, sustaining them in the midst of difficult times.

He says it was Christ. He doesn't say it was like Christ. He says it was Christ.

How that works, I don't know.

You should go back and study that question. But Paul does not put a lot of daylight

between them and this Old Testament story.

And in fact, he says, no, no, this was an example for you.

And so the question is like, how did it go with them? Like Paul is asking them

to reflect on their story, reflect on their example.

How did it go with them? He says, well, most of them, with most of them,

those people had known God, who had had a relationship with him,

who knew his faithfulness, whom he sustained.

Most of them, it did not go well with them. God was not pleased with them.

They took their freedom and instead of using it for God's glory.

They used it for evil, for self-indulgence, for selfishness. They worshiped idols.

They partied. They were sexually immoral.

They wanted freedom, but they rejected purpose.

They wanted license, but they didn't want relationship.

They wanted to have God's blessing, but not understand where the blessing come

from, not respond in worship to the one who would bless.

And Paul says these things happened to them as examples and they were written

for our instruction on whom the ends of the ages has come.

Israel was under the law. We're not under the law. We are under grace.

And yet these people are still examples for us.

An example of how easy it is for people who know God, for people among whom

God has just shown himself so faithful and so good.

It is an example for us of how easy it is for people like that to just waste

God's calling and to ignore his faithfulness and to ignore relationship and

to not enter into the real purpose of knowing him.

We've said this over and over again throughout this series. I'm saying it again.

We are free people with a purpose.

Your freedom is not just meant for you to just use however you want.

You could do it. That's the whole thing. Paul never says you can't.

He does not lay down a law, but he says you would be dumb to not do that.

You would be dumb to not to do that. You would be dumb to—I shouldn't say dumb.

My wife always says, don't say dumb, don't say stupid, because I'm a judgy East

Coast person, and we know all this, and I apologize, I apologize.

You're not dumb. You're deeply ignorant.

That's better, right? No, no, no, I'm just joking. I'm just joking.

That's kind. That was kind.

We literally, when we take God's freedom, when we take His gifts,

but we don't understand that they come along with a purpose,

like, we just squander his blessings.

It is not the goal for which God has given us freedom that we should just go and do whatever we want.

In fact, he advises us as he goes along how we should use our freedom.

He says in 1 Corinthians 10, 12, so whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall.

No temptation has come upon you except what is common to humanity.

For God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.

But with the temptation, he will also provide a way out so that you may be able to bear it.

So then, my dear friends, flee from idolatry.

Was anyone else surprised to find 1 Corinthians 13 in this set of verses?

I was. I've had that in my brain for 20 years.

I know the verse, which is, no temptation has come upon you except such as is

common to humanity, but God is faithful.

He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able,

but with temptation, he will also provide a way out that you may be able to bear it.

That's been deep in my brain for a long time, but I'll tell you, not in this context.

I take that verse and I cut and paste it. And this is okay. I don't feel bad about this.

That's my, when things get difficult and I feel tempted in some way,

I can go to this verse. This is a promise from God.

There's definitely content that can apply in all kinds of ways that when I face

temptation, I can be reminded of this, that my God is faithful.

He won't forget about me. He will help me to bear up under it and he will provide

me a way of escape from it, right? Yes and amen.

This is things that I know to be true. It's true for you. But let me tell you,

I have never wanted a steak that bad to be reminded that I have a way of escape.

I will not have to eat this meat sacrifice to idols.

Why is this verse here in this context? Why is this verse showing up here?

It's a strange verse to end up in the midst of this discussion.

So what's up with this? Look, if you, like me, are surprised that this verse is here in this context,

I think it is because, upon some self-reflection, I think it's because it's

really important for me to know that this is really appropriate.

I need to wake up to the reality that Paul was pressing upon these people that he knew really well,

that I often tend to forget, yet, and probably you do too, is that I will be

tempted all day long, every day, to forgo my purpose for the sake of self-indulgence.

And it will just become so normal to me that I won't think of it as temptation at some point.

Because these people were just like, we're free. What's the big deal?

And Paul says, you don't understand.

You're being tempted to take your freedom, which is true, something God has

given to you, and to totally waste it.

And you're at the point where you don't even recognize that it's temptation anymore.

You're at the point where you just said, my life is about my desires.

It's about feeling good all the time.

What's the problem? Aren't I free? Don't I have gifts? He says,

you guys need to run from this idolatry.

You guys don't understand the situation that you're finding yourself in. Your hearts are so dull.

You've grown so accustomed to your own selfishness. Don't you realize what happened to Israel?

Don't you realize how they were?

They had God literally part the sea and you'd think they would realize,

huh, God must be up to something. something, and yet they get there,

and they go to the place where God has said, and they say, oh, why did we come out here?

We were safer. We were better off in Israel, and they complain before God,

and God's just like, what are you talking about?

This is so much better. I'm with you. I'm present with you. Don't you know that I have a plan for you?

I'm going to sustain you, and they're just growing so cold and so dull that

they're saying, I'd rather just be safe. I'd rather just be secure.

I'd rather just do the things that I'm comfortable with. I'd rather just stay

in my comfort zone. I'd rather just do what I want.

Israel had no idea how ignorant they were being, right?

Israel had no idea how mistaken they were getting.

They were being led into temptation.

They had no idea. We need to understand that the most common temptation that you're going to face,

that I'm going to face is passivity to just sit and to settle and not realize

that the great gift of freedom and grace that we have is meant,

we're meant to do something with it.

Dallas Willard says, the enemy of our time is not human capacity or over-activism,

but the enemy is passivity.

The idea that God has done everything and you are essentially left to be a consumer

of grace and that the only thing that you have to do is find out how to do that and do it regularly.

I think this is a terrible mistake.

He's not saying that it's wrong for us to receive grace.

We need grace. We absolutely need grace, but we are not to be passive with it.

We're not to just say, oh, I got it. I can go do whatever I want.

My freedom has led me to a purposeless, self-indulgent kind of life.

He says, that would be a great mistake for us.

That could not be further from Paul's vision of what life with God is like.

Let me read to you from Romans 6.11.

Just think about this for a second. Romans 6.11, because he's dealing with a

lot of the same things there in the early chapters of Romans.

He says, so you to consider Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.

Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies so that you obey its desires.

And do not offer any parts of your sin, any parts of you to sin as weapons for

unrighteousness, but as those who are alive from the dead,

offer yourselves to God and all the parts of yourselves to God as weapons for

righteousness. graciousness.

For sin will not rule over you because you are not under the law, but under grace.

See, Paul's understanding of grace is not, oh, isn't it nice that grace means

that we're forgiven? We don't have to worry about it anymore.

We can go do whatever we want.

He certainly knew that was true. He certainly affirmed freedom,

and he does that consistently throughout this section.

But he also paints a much more vibrant, much more beautiful picture of what

the Christian life looks like.

He says, you're free from sin.

You're free from the old self that just wanted to satisfy its own desires.

And the life of God is now at work in you.

In fact, he is overflowing his grace and his love and his presence and his power through you.

The life of Christ is overflowing from him into you to the point where you can

now offer all of your parts, not as instruments of sin, but as weapons of righteousness.

Every part of you can be turned into, because of the grace of God,

a weapon of righteousness.

Your life can be used to bring about transformation and peace and joy and salvation

and just like the renewal of all things.

You can be an offensive, offensive, not offensive, offensive sort of participant

in what God is doing if you would simply take this grace and jump into the purpose.

You have a part to play and it's not just self-indulgence. It's so much more than that.

No, you're not under law. ah, you don't sit under this set of rules.

And man, if I don't keep up to the rules, then God's going to be mad.

He says, the rules are all gone. I've invited you to something more.

Let righteousness reign in your body. Let the grace of Christ reign in your body.

Be transformed, be a part of something, but don't be passive.

Passivity has no place in grace. I think I've We've got a slide that says that.

Passivity has just no place in grace.

Grace is a gift. You don't earn it. Yes and amen, but we don't get to sit passively

with it and just do nothing with it.

We could, we could, 100%, you could.

Go back and read 1 Corinthians 3.14 sometime and the verses to follow.

I don't have time to go into it. I shouldn't have done that.

Sorry, I'm distracting. Now you're all going to be gone.

1 Corinthians 3.14, it's a really good verse. We can get away with a lot. We shouldn't.

Don't be passive. Don't be passive.

Let's keep going. Back in verse, where are we at? 13, something like that? Yeah, 14.

So then, dear friends, flee from idolatry. I'm speaking to you as sensible people.

People, judge for yourself what I'm saying.

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ?

The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?

Because there's one bread, we who are many are one body, since we all share the one bread.

Consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar?

What am I saying then that food sacrificed to idols is anything or that an idol is anything? No.

But I say that what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be participants with demons.

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

You cannot share in the Lord's table and the table of demons.

Are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we be stronger than he.

And as Paul is beginning to wrap up his argument, he just asked them to consider

things and he appeals to them as reasonable people.

I love that. I love Paul's idea.

And we've talked about this a little bit the last couple of weeks,

that he doesn't treat the people who he's teaching as children.

Paul never treats people as children. He would not teach you as children.

He treats you you as sensible people.

And he asked you to consider things and to sit with God, to reflect on his word,

and to just ask yourself, what's your understanding?

He shows remarkable trust in the power of the Holy Spirit in you and in me and

in the people to whom he was ministering.

I think that's so great. I think we need to recover that in the church.

I'm not going to say anything else because I'll put my foot in my mouth and

say some things I regret.

But his final point in this long drawn out response to this simple question

is to ask them to consider what it is to be eating a food that's sacrificed to idols.

And he asked them to think about the act of worship, both their worship and

in the Old Testament and what it is.

And in the same way that communion is a sharing in Jesus's grace,

sharing in his life, sharing and celebrating and participating in what he's done.

And in the same way that the Israelites, who the priests who would eat the sacrifice

idol, the meat that was sacrificed, left over, they were sharing in God's worship,

and they're sharing at the table, and they're sharing in this whole project of worshiping God.

He says, so too, people who are offering meat sacrifice to idols,

they are maybe in ignorance,

like at least they understand themselves to be participating in something that

is false, and that is against what God reveals to be true.

He says, participating with demons. He says, even if those demons are an illusion,

he says, what you do when you do this, and when you do it knowingly and willfully,

you are, at least even to others' perceptions,

actively doing something that is contrary to the knowledge of God.

He doesn't explain himself in depth, but he just says, just think about it.

You're sensible people. Think about what I'm saying. Isn't it true?

Appeals to their reason. And then he wraps up with these verses,

And we've looked at these already, so we're not going to go extensively into it, right?

But these are just kind of the summary. This is where he lands.

We talked about this in the first week, where he ends up landing.

He says these verses. Just think about what he's saying.

He says, so this is how he concludes and answers their question.

Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.

Everything is permissible, but not everything builds up.

No one is to seek his own good, but the good of the other person.

Eat everything that is sold in the meat market without raising questions for

the sake of conscience, since the earth is the Lord's and all that is in it.

If any of the unbelievers invites you over and you want to go,

eat everything that is set before you without raising questions for the sake of conscience.

But if someone says to you, this is food from a sacrifice, do not eat it out

of consideration for the one who told you and for the sake of conscience.

I do not mean your own conscience, but the other person's. For why is my freedom

judged by another person's conscience?

If I partake with thanksgiving, why am I criticized because of something for which I give thanks?

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

Give no offense fence to the Jews or the Greeks or to the church of God,

just as I also try to please everyone in everything, not seeking my own benefit,

but the benefit of many so that they may all be saved.

So Paul is getting practical, he's getting direct, he's dealing with the instructional

side of what he's telling them to do.

And what he does is he brings together these arguments that he's been making

through the past three chapters that we've been going over.

The question is, you will remember, can we eat food sacrificed to idols?

And here we have a very clear answer. Isn't it so clear? No, it's not. It's not.

It is. Actually, it is. Here's the very clear answer.

The very clear answer is yes, you can, so long as you do it with thanksgiving

and you do it without any potential damage to the conscience of another person.

And I love it. He says, eat everything that's sold in the meat market without

raising questions for the sake of conscience.

He says, what you don't know won't hurt you.

The truth is there's not much there. Yes, God has made everything.

He can sanctify everything.

You take whatever you want with Thanksgiving. That's awesome.

He says, so don't raise any questions.

But if somebody tells you, hey, you want some meat sacrificed to an idol,

you need to say, no, thank you.

Not because I have a problem with it, but I don't want you to go on like violating

your conscience and like rejecting the true God.

It's like such a complicated response, isn't it?

It is not what we were craving. My wife and I were talking last week,

we were talking about this and she's like, I'm really looking forward to the

practical side of things. And I was like, I don't think you are.

I don't think you are because it doesn't, it doesn't get to that level of straightforward,

clean-cut kind of answer.

Instead, we have this matrix of decision-making, right?

I mean, I've got a little thing. We have what we're permitted to do, right?

There's nothing wrong, by the

way. These are all things that are totally allowed in certain contexts.

It is not a bad thing to seek your own good. Not a bad thing.

It is not a bad thing to seek your own benefit. It's different words he used.

It's not a bad thing to exercise your own freedom. You're a free person.

It's not a bad thing to exercise your rights. You have rights.

That's good. God has set you free from law.

You can just go around super excited that you don't have to like sit in your

brain and think, I don't want to like do something to make God mad.

You don't have to do that anymore. If you know of nothing that's going to make

God mad that you're doing, then go about your business and be thankful and live a happy life.

So he says, you're free to do all that stuff. He says, But you need to ask these

other questions that make your life a little bit more complicated and really

force you in to think about what's right and what's wrong in a different kind of way.

It's not according to law, so there's clear-cut rules.

We have to ask ourselves this question, what is beneficial?

Well, I just thought my desires were beneficial. And Paul says,

nah, that's not, that is not beneficial.

What is edifying? What builds you up spiritually?

What is building other people's up? If it's, if it comes down to a conflict

between my good and the good of others, we're called to choose the good of others.

If it comes down to a conflict of my benefit and the benefit of others,

particularly their spiritual benefit, we're called to choose the benefit of others.

If it comes down to a conflict between my freedom and another person's conscience,

we're called to prioritize their conscience and help them walk through those

things without searing their conscience and giving them the indication that

it doesn't matter what they're convicting, what God is convicting them of.

We're supposed to carefully help them handle with care their conscience.

And it's so much more important for us to do that. That's a ministry that we

can have as opposed to exercising our freedom,

we should let our freedom be limited by that purpose of helping other people

come to know God and to have a clean conscience before them because that's how

they're going to be led to repentance and life and salvation.

And if it comes down to a conflict between my rights and God's glory,

we're called to choose God's glory every time.

This is not law, right?

But wouldn't it be so much easier, so much easier to mediate conflicts like

this or the difficult ethical decisions that we face if we just had a bunch of rules?

Wouldn't that be so much easier?

But here's the thing, and it's where we're going to kind of focus on for the

last little bit here, is really I think the reason that I love this passage

so much, I love it because it is complex and it doesn't resolve nice and clean.

Because we think when we read the Bible, it just gives us all the straightforward

easy answers. Wouldn't it be nice?

Actually, no, I don't think it would be. As we get to the end of Paul's discussion

about this issue, I think it's worth stopping here and pointing something out.

This is something that I find fascinating.

That's that Paul, if he wanted to, could have condensed these three chapters.

Mediating this argument into one little word, don't.

He had the vocabulary.

He had the ability to express such a simple and straightforward thing.

Can I eat meat sacrificed to idols? He could have said, nah.

And that would have been clear.

But what does he do instead? He spends three chapters, three long chapters thinking of it. Because...

I mean, don't is pretty close to where he lands. It's not quite where he lands,

but it's pretty close to where he lands.

And in this situation in particular, it is kind of what he's imploring these

people who think they have a tons of freedom to do.

He's saying, no, subject your freedom to God's purpose and to what he's calling you to.

But he does not say don't. He does not lay out a law.

He does not lay out a prohibition. And I think you need to, and I need to take

note of that and then ask yourself this question, why? why wouldn't it have

been simpler for him to just say, don't.

Several years ago, I went to a large pastor's conference at a movement of churches

that I was a part of on the East Coast.

I'm not trying to be evasive. I'll tell you later. I just don't want to mention it.

And at the conference, there was a Q&A with one of the big wigs in the movement,

you know, a guy who I really liked a lot.

And there was a question and answer thing. And the question came came up is

a very straightforward ethical question.

Can pastors drink, right? The sort of thing that pastors talk about amongst

themselves. Fair question.

And this guy referenced this verse, Ephesians 5.18.

He says, well, Ephesians 5.18 says, don't get drunk with wine,

which leads to reckless living, but be filled with the spirit.

And then he said, and so it's clear that pastors cannot drink.

And I walked out of there. I was so mad.

That's not what that verse says. Now, okay, I want to actually clarify something

because I was sitting down with a friend of mine. We have a lot of people in

recovery here, and that's great.

So just one little moment here

for you, for those people in recovery or people who know someone who is.

This friend commented something that I've heard a lot of people in recovery

say, that you can sit down, like I could sit down, or someone who's not in recovery

could sit down and have one drink.

Someone who's in of recovery can't sit down and have one drink.

So if that's you and you're asking yourself, well, am I free to drink? My answer to you is no.

If you don't have that freedom because of the temptations that you have,

then the straightforward answer to you is no.

For others who have freedom, if you want to come up to me and ask you,

well, on the basis of Ephesians 5.18, can I not drink? I'm going to tell you

that's not what that says.

It says you can't get drunk, which is excessive drinking.

And I'm not prescribing drinking, by the way. If you don't drink,

that's fine. God bless you. No, I'm not saying this, but I'm saying this is

that I was super disappointed with that guy because the fact is that Paul had all the words.

He had the vocabulary to say, you can't ever drink.

And yet he did not say that. He said, don't drink to excess,

which will lead to reckless living, but be filled by the spirits.

And the reason I found that so disappointing is because I think Christians in

America have a bit of a problem, and we always have.

It's a problem that Paul knew about, and it's the reason that he takes three

chapters instead of one word to address this little problem.

And that is that we love to turn grace into law because it's simpler,

and it makes it so that we can just benchmark our life and be comfortable knowing

that we're okay with God.

And I just don't see that as an option.

On the one level, and we've been talking about this most of the time,

like we cannot squander grace.

We are foolish if we do, if we give up grace and we forego our purpose,

if we just kind of let it be, that would be silly.

But Paul equally warns us throughout the scriptures that we cannot turn grace

into law because that's the spirit of earning and thinking that simply by keeping

a set of rules, we're pleasing God. And it comes about our performance.

He warns us stringently about that. Christian ethics and Christian living is

so much more complicated than that.

And you might say, well, that's lame. I wish it were straightforward.

And I just want to tell you, no, you don't.

You are invited to something so much better than a simple law chart, a simple set of rules.

You're invited to relationship with God and it's beautiful and it's great and

it's full of freedom and full of invitation.

And if it were just about law, just about finding the line to know that you're

on the right side of it, that would just flatten it out and take all the joy

and all the fun and all the excitement away from you. You don't want that.

And by the way, it would just kill our witness.

We are not preaching, Jesus has a bunch of rules. They're great.

We're preaching Jesus sets people free.

He fills you with righteousness to the point where you're not asking, where's the line, God?

You're just surrendering your life and your heart to him. And he's transforming your desires.

And he's filling you up. He's leading you with his spirit.

He's filling you up in the midst of your heart and your soul.

He's making you love him.

He's not saying love looks like following rules. He's saying love looks like love.

It looks like being set free for what you were created to do,

which is just pursue him and glorify him. He's restoring the capacity in us to do exactly that.

And that is so much better than law. Don't settle for law.

Worship team's going to come up, but I'm just going to close out here.

A little quote by a guy named Christopher Watkins. He's a theologian.

He says, given the choice between two camps or positions in our culture,

the Bible frequently settles for neither and presents us with something richer

than both, a subtler solution that neither position has the resources to imagine,

time and again we see that the Bible's figures cut across the range of options presented to us,

only to find on further inspection that those options were themselves distorted

and dismembered versions of biblical ideas.

Paul does not settle the dispute by saying yes or no to one camp or the other,

because to just create a law would be a distortion and dismemberment of what we're really called to.

We're not called to law, we're called to grace, we're called to relationship,

but we're not, of course, called to the other side, which is relationship and

grace disconnected from purpose.

The biblical vision for your life is that these two things can come together

and it's where all the beauty of the Christian life is.

We live in a world that is just morally confused.

And I don't say that judgmentally. I say that I think anyone out there would

say, yeah, that's true about the world that we live in.

And the answer to that is not a new and better set of rules.

That is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. The answer to that is the Holy Spirit

living in people, sin forgiven,

grace being poured out, and an invitation into a new kind of life with God.

A life where the penalty for your sin is taken care of and you're set free to

love him and to not be worried about messing up and to grow and to be filled with the spirit,

to be transformed in your life, to be an agent for goodness and righteousness in the world.

Not a sanctimonious judger of other people who can go tsk, tsk,

tsk to all the bad people and say good job to all the good people.

Instead, you're a person, and it's so much more beautiful, who just walks with

God, who lets God lead them.

It is such a more beautiful thing.

And this is why Christian morality matters.

It's why we still, as a church, express our views about controversial issues

that the Bible is really clear about.

It's not because we need to have people understand that they need to be on the

right side of some law, it's because we have to understand that as Christians,

we're invited to a particular kind of life. It's a life overflowing with righteousness.

And it does express itself in some do's and don'ts, but it cannot be reduced to do's and don'ts.

It's about relationship. It's about following the Lord.

As I just wrap up here, I just want to leave you with a little image.

I think I maybe used this one once before, but on Thursday night,

night. We had a bonfire and worship night.

It was good. We had a beautiful day. Totally,

rolled the dice and,

It worked out.

No business scheduling a bonfire in May, but it worked out really great. It was beautiful.

But we were getting the fire going, getting the fire going.

And I think, honestly, tending a fire is a much better picture of what the Christian

life is, much better picture of what the life of walking by grace and walking

in relationship with Jesus is like, right?

Because Because the thing about a fire is, number one, like it starts small.

And you got to think about, well, what are the things that I want to put into

this fire that are going to grow it?

And so you start to feed the fire.

It's like God has given us all these things.

He's given us so much freedom. We can build the fire how we want.

But the fact is that the fire is only going to grow if I put the right things in.

If I start my fire, I say, okay, here we go. I got some wood.

I've got some, you got a little paper here. and then I'm going to add some water,

and now I'm going to start the fire, fire ain't going to grow.

Because that's just not how fires work. But if what I do instead is I start

to, you know, I do the little things first.

I start with small things that are going to burn quickly. They're going to burn well.

And then I start to build up, and I start to build up. And eventually,

I've got a fire going, and things are great.

You know, God has given us so many resources, and we're called to live our life

like tending those resources, tending the spiritual resources that he's given to us.

You have grace, you have freedom, but you're meant to do something with that grace.

You're supposed to start a fire and keep it burning for the sake of mission,

for the sake of your own warmth and sustenance and care, because God has provided those things for you.

You can't let the fire go out. Letting the fire go out is not going to be good for you.

Though a fire untended will go out.

And so what is this thing that we're called to? Paul doesn't get down to simple,

a set of rules, a set of do's and don'ts, but he says, no man,

live your life for the glory of God.

Live your life after a vision of seeing the fire and making much of the grace

that you've been given. It's a complicated thing.

It's being in a relationship with a living thing. It's not simple.

The lines don't stay clear all the time. Sometimes conditions change.

Sometimes it starts to rain. Sometimes the wind blows.

Sometimes the smoke is in your face. Sometimes it can be hard.

There are challenges come along with the Christian life, but we are able to

navigate these things and to continue to tend the fire. So guys, that's it.

If you want to have something to take away, and I know Sean does because he

loves the visuals and the images. And so this is all for you, Sean.

You know, like what we're doing as we go out into the world and as we figure

out how do we live our life is that we're saying, I've received all this goodness from God.

I've got all these things before me. I have total freedom to do what I want

with them, but I'm called for the sake of his glory, for the sake of his mission,

for the sake of his church, for my own sake, to take these things,

these gifts, and make much of them, to warm myself,

to warm the world, to light up the world, to be somebody who tends a fire.

So build a fire. I think I have a slide. What does it say? Grace is for fire

building. That's right. Grace is for fire building. Build a fire.

All right. We're going to worship, and then we're going to take some time to

pray and seek the Lord together.

Yeah, so let's do that. Let's worship the Lord.