GYC SE 2015: Gripped

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GYC Southeast

Steve Bauer

Gripped by Christ

I want to take a moment and review our bearings before we get into today's study.

Thursday night we talked about the problem of being gripped by sin.

And I think that we don't capture our problem adequately when we reduce it to sinful nature.

The fact of the matter is in Paul's theology, sin is a universal power introduced through the agency of Adam, which we are all born under by birthright, and we cannot deliver ourselves, and we cannot fix behavior until we address the power issue." So how do we do that?

Well the good news is there's a second Adam who brought another universal power into the world called grace.

And Paul says that where sin increased, what did grace do?

And so Jew and Gentile are both under sin because we Both come from Adam, get this as a birthright.

So if we have Jew and Gentile have 1 problem and there's 1 God of God, both Jew and Gentile, how many solutions are we expecting?

And thus God saves Jew and Gentile the same way by faith in Jesus.

And to put it in terms of Colossians, it is through faith that we move from the kingdom of sin into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

But in Paul's theology, God does not save us to become autonomous.

And so we move from being slave of sin to Paul's favorite term for himself, slave of Christ.

Your choice is who you're going to be a slave of.

Now I don't always feel like slave of Christ.

To use Jesus' words, the slave of Christ is the 1 who is born again, right?

And you and I, I don't know about you, but I know I don't always feel born again.

But the good news from our Scripture reading is you don't have to feel like you're born again to be born again.

You're born again by faith, and those who are righteous, the faith reality governs decision-making more than the emotional reality.

We have emotional reality, But we live by faith, not by feeling.

And in fact, the Christian walk is often filled with this tension between faith and feeling, between faith and perception, between faith and experience.

And as I like to quip, the righteous are dumb enough to trust what God says anyways, in spite of how they feel.

That's what we're going to work on today, practical nuts and bolts.

And we're going to have 2 parts, some broad principles And then some very specific tools.

So let's start with our broad principles.

I would like to suggest that there is much to be learned about the Exodus from Egypt and that slavery to Canaan.

The Exodus provides a metaphor for our Exodus from the kingdom of sin into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

And the first principle of this Exodus metaphor we find in Exodus chapter 13.

Exodus chapter 13, and I'm going to start in verse 17.

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by the way or the road in the land of the Philistines, although that was near.

For God said, lest the people repent when they see war and return to Egypt.

But God led the people round by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea.

God says I'm going to take you from Egypt to Canaan.

And you look at the map and the most direct way would be to go north, perhaps slightly east to the coast and take the highway through the Philistines' territory right into Canaan.

God says I'm not taking you the direct way because you're not ready for Philistines.

So he took them on a 90-degree tangent due east And he pins them against the Red Sea where there's no escape.

And the Egyptians pin him against the Red Sea.

The slave master got him in 1 last struggle and Moses says, you're not going to have to fight, stand and watch what God will do.

And God parts the Red Sea and they go further east, away from Canaan into the Sinai Peninsula.

And eventually they head north after the 40-year delay, etc., and they go through Sihon and Og, who are not as strong as the Philistines, right?

And they go through Midian and Moab and so forth, and God uses these Red Sea and the sea hone and ogs and so forth to prepare His people to face Canaanites.

But you remember on the first encounter the people went up and spied out the land and they said, it's still too strong for us, we can't do this, right?

Principle number 1 then is, you want to get from here to glory and you want to get there as fast as possible, I bet you God's going to send you on some detours because you're not ready for Philistines.

So He's going to send you through some Red Seas and some Sihons and Ogs to prepare you and you're going to be frustrated because I want to conquer this Philistine now.

God says I'm not ready for a Philistine I want you to take care of this Moabite first.

We're not going to deal with Philistine now.

This is a little different message than I sometimes hear preached that you come to Christ and you're delivered from all temptation and live in euphoria, temptation-free, above reproach, never falling hereafter." Let me illustrate it with a short version of a story.

I had a man who had come out of the gay movement, ex-Adventist who re-found Christ, preach in my pulpit a number of years ago.

After helping organize gay coming out marches in the late 80s in San Francisco, he felt the spiritual void in his life.

And he and his partner started going to an Adventist church in San Francisco.

And perhaps it was good it was San Francisco.

The church wisely said, Let's lead them to Christ and let Christ confront the issue.

So they didn't baptize him, but they loved him, fellowshiped, studied, prayed, and the first thing they worked on was how to have a devotional life, how to have a prayer life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But as these guys studied and worked with the church, they started keeping the Sabbath.

They started playing vegetarian games, right?

You see, when you yield to God in the easy things, that softens the heart and prepares it to yield in the risky things.

Somewhere between 12 and 18 months into this walk with the church, they woke up 1 day in their devotions and said, you know, God's will for sex is not for us to be running around seeing how many partners we can conquer in 1 weekend.

And the church said, praise the Lord they got the monogamy right.

And they kept loving them and encouraging them to have a walk with Jesus and so forth.

Now a lot of us would say, we want to hit that Philistine, right?

It was like 3 to 4 years into this process.

That as they were having their devotional times, when they finally compared their prayer journals, less than 1 week apart they each started to fall under conviction that God's will for sex was not just monogamy but heterosexual.

When they came to my church, they had been 4 years celibate and were still engineering the full disentanglement.

Powerful testimony of God's leading in their lives.

The point is God may not take you to Canaan instantly.

And you've got a goal in mind that I want to conquer this Philistine in my life and God may be saying, I'm not quite ready for you to deal with Philistines, I'm going to detour you.

And if He detours you, be faithful in those little things because that's what prepares the heart for the big things.

10 chapters later in Exodus 23, we get our next principle from the Exodus.

On the 1 hand, in the ballpark of verse 23-24, he says that he's going to send the hornets and drive out the Canaanites.

But then a few verses later, and I believe it's down around verse 27, I will send My terror before you, and I will throw into confusion all the people against whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn your backs on you, and I will send, " here's the hornets, "'before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, Canaanite, Hittite, etc.'" Verse 29, "'I will not drive them out before you in 1 year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beast multiply against you.

Little by little I will drive them out before you until you are increased and possess the land." This is a very intriguing concept because we all have Canaanites in our character that we know God is calling us to drive out.

And yet God says, not going to drive them out all at once.

Why does He drive them out little by little?

Now, his stated reason is that things would get out of control and he'll get swallowed up, but how does that apply in the spiritual life?

If God threw out all the Canaanites at once, and we had nothing to fight, what would happen?

We would forget how weak and dependent we are, and we would start depending on ourselves, and we'd fall flat on our face.

So God says, I'm not going to drive it all out at once.

I'm going to put you in a process where you have to stay engaged, progressively driving out Canaanites because it's that progressive engagement that teaches you that day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, moment by moment, raw, naked dependence on me.

When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me I was stubborn.

In fact, you know they have the phrase stubborn as a what?

She used to tell me I was not as stubborn as a mule, I was stubborn as a whole train of mules.

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Gripped by Christ

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