ARME 2: Canby, OR - May 2010

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ARME Bible Camp

Daniel Vis

The Moral Machinery

Have you been enjoying the meeting so far?

Wow, it's amazing how much you can learn passages you've studied before, just like new insights.

I'm thankful for the Word, and I'm thankful that we have opportunities like this Army Bible Camp to be able to study it together and learn new things that we haven't seen before.

But I have to tell you just on a little personal note that I kind of have a little quirky way of thinking.

That in the Adventist church, it seems like there's A very strong desire or drive to know theological truth.

I think it's partly because we have such a powerful message, a powerful doctrinal message, a powerful prophetic message.

And because we've gotten a taste of that, We want more of it.

And we're driven to understand these things.

But somewhere in the back of my brain, there's been this, and again, I feel like almost from another planet sometimes, in my brain, there's a desire and a drive and a longing for practical truth.

For how to make the Word of God actually work.

Not just more information as beautiful as it is, as much as I love that and value that, but how do we actually make it work?

And this is 1 reason that I enjoy Bible memorization so much.

It's 1 thing to hear new insights, but it's a whole other experience to memorize some verse, and then maybe even weeks later that verse flashes into your mind, and you see new insights into it you've never seen before.

It's like an experience, it's practical, it works.

In the workshop this afternoon I talked about evangelism just a bit, and it was the same kind of question, how do we make evangelism actually work?

Why is it that it just doesn't seem to be working?

What's the New Testament really have to say about how to do it?

Well, that's kind of where I want to go today.

I'm not talking about evangelism, I'm not talking about Bible memorization in this presentation, but I want to talk about something that Ellen White calls the moral machinery.

Have you ever seen that expression in the spirit of prophecy?

She says God would have his servants become acquainted with the moral machinery of their own hearts.

In other words, there are faculties within the heart of man that function and work.

There's pieces and they interact with each other in very specific ways, specific faculties, specific functions.

And what she's saying is that God wants us to understand the machinery, how it works, the practical sides of Christianity.

And I think sometimes we throw around, again, theological terms, but we don't really understand maybe even what we're talking about.

We talk about conversion, we talk about sanctification, we talk about the nature of man or the nature of Christ, if you want to get into a good hot potato, something like that.

And we're throwing around theological terms, character development.

You know the word character is not found in your Bible, at least not in a King James Bible.

And yet, we know how vitally important character development is, but how does it actually work?

What's the process by which we resist and overcome temptation?

Well, we sort of have little cliches, little hints, little suggestions, little tips we tell people, but we don't have a good picture many times of all the moral machinery, how the different parts of the nature of man work, how They interrelate with each other, and as a result, we don't understand what's really happening deep down inside.

Well, I've been studying this for well over 10 years.

This is actually the first time I've ever tried to do this presentation by itself.

It's usually in a longer series of about 20 meetings, 15 or 20 sessions, but I'm going to try and cram down the, or like Ivor said, juice it down to 1 basic presentation at least to cover some major points, okay?

So anyway, let's begin with a word of prayer.

I ask the Holy Spirit to guide and direct our thoughts, and then we're going to dive into this topic.

Father in heaven, we want to thank you that we have opportunities like this to come apart and to study your Word.

We thank you for the knowledge, the information that you're giving us.

But in my heart, and I'm sure many here, we have a longing for even more.

We want practical, life-changing Scripture.

We want your word to be able to come into our heart in such a way that it produces real change, not just more knowledge or information.

We know only your Holy Spirit can bring about this change.

Only your Holy Spirit can teach us how the moral machinery works.

So we pray for your divine guidance just now, and we ask this in Jesus' name.

When we talk about internalizing the Word of God, there's at least 2 parts to it.

1 part is exposing ourselves to the Word of God.

This is 1 of the best ways to begin the process of internalization, but you can have the same experience by constantly studying the Word of God, by reading the Word of God, by listening to Spirit-filled sermons.

Anything that we do to expose ourselves to the Word of God is just the first part in the process of internalization.

The second part comes when we encounter those moment-by-moment experiences in life where the Word of God comes into contact with the reality of our circumstances.

So, say for example, we're struggling with doubt, or we want more love in our hearts, or we want more of a burden for souls, or some specific area that we're working on in our life.

And so we go to the Word of God, and we study, and we read, we listen to sermons on that particular topic, we memorize key verses, and we're trying to saturate ourselves with the principles of the Word of God.

But the next step comes when we're faced with that situation where we have an opportunity to be loving or not loving, to deal with fear or not fear, or courage, or whether we're dealing with the temptation to give in to some addiction or not give in to it.

Right at that moment, the Word comes into contact with the realities of our life, and this is where real internalization happens.

It's not just what we hear, what we've listened to, but whether or not we can bring the Word of God to bear into our moment-by-moment experiences that really results in the internalization of God's Word.

Now, I'd like to try and focus in on the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts of what happens at that precise moment.

How do you make Christianity work right at that moment of temptation?

Turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Galatians.

We're going to look at quite a few scriptures here to get started with.

I want to lay a little bit of groundwork.

If I had time we could go into this in much more detail and bring out a lot more evidence, but I just want to make a couple quick points to start out with.

First of all, there are different facets or different aspects of the nature of man that are competing with each other at that moment of temptation.

The Bible says, For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary, the 1 to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would.

In other words, in this verse, we see that there are 2 different sides pulling simultaneously on each of us.

There is on the 1 hand, the Spirit of God that is pulling us in 1 direction, and then we have our own sinful flesh that's pulling us in a different direction, and they're contrary to each other.

And this is why we sometimes go either way.

Sometimes we listen to the 1 voice, sometimes we listen to the other.

I remember when I was a kid, they would have cartoons, and they would have someone being tempted, and they have a little devil on 1 shoulder and a little angel on the other side.

There's 1 side that's pulling us towards spiritual ways, and there's another part that's pulling us towards fleshly ways.

Now in between those 2 forces, there's another faculty or aspect to the nature of man that makes the decision about which way we'll go.

Turn with me to the book of Romans chapter 8.

And we'll see what part of man it is that makes the decision which direction we're going to go.

The Bible says in Romans 8, starting with verse 5, For they that are after the flesh do what?

But they that are after the spirit, mind the things of the Spirit.

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The Moral Machinery

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