January 18, 2009

Dr. Ron Sumners

What’s for Real?

2 Corinthians 5:15

To believe and fail to let that belief lead you to action is like warming one’s hands at the flames of his neighbor’s house while it is burning. Your hands may get warm, but your heart is cold! Sometimes it is a long and bitter struggle for us to come to the point of surrender; the place where belief turns into faith! Christ has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. His Holy Spirit has brought us all the way from rebellion to the honest admission of failure, the honest confrontation of ourselves, and finally to that greatest of all the experiences of life, turning everything over to Him.

This is a wonderful time of life. A lot of people want to stay up among the clouds of victory. They want to smell the fragrance of the heavenly places. When the emotional tonic begins to subside they feel “let down” and begin to seek “feeling” again. So they run from meeting to meeting seeking feeling for feeling’s sake. I don’t want to diminish the importance of feeling. In religion we sometimes become so impressed with ourselves and so sophisticated we suppress all feeling and rob ourselves of the joy that should be ours. But faith is so much more than feeling!

“My meat is to do the will of Him who sent me”, declared Jesus. So, this is the next stop for us in our pilgrimage of faith. We must do what we say we believe!!

In the fourth chapter of John there is a wonderful story of Jesus meeting a woman at Jacob’s well when she discovered that even though Jesus knew the intimate details of her wicked life, He still loved her and wanted to give her eternal life, she was really excited. She got so excited she forgot her water jar and ran to the village to tell her friends about this miracle. Her first impulse after making this marvelous discovery was to do something about it.

God loves us in spite of our sins and ugliness. If there is any decency in us at all, we surely will be prompted to do something about this love. First, we will want to begin to make right all the wrongs we possibly can, all the things that have resulted from the self we used to be. God has done his part and now we want to do ours. The miracle is that we come to the place that we want to do our part. We begin to have new motives for the things we do. And we begin to do the things our belief leads us to.

One of the most difficult things any human being ever has to do is say, “I’m sorry, forgive me.” We would rather say anything than that because it robs us of our pride. To confess that we have been wrong is agony to the proud spirit but if we want to be real, this is the thing that God wants us to do first. If we fail to do it we can never grow.

Though we are not told, I am sure in my own mind that not only confession to God but confession to one another took place between the disciples in that upper room before they received the Holy Spirit. The Bible says they “tarried” there for six weeks and that they were of “one accord”, that is, they were of one mind. My guess is that it took much discussion and prayer before they reached one accord. I am sure they must have confessed their own sins to one another.

In my mind’s eye I can see James or John stand up and say, “I was covetous. I was greedy. I was in this thing for what I could get out of it. And the very last week of His life, I was demanding the best seat in the Kingdom. I wanted to be at the top of the ladder in God’s count.”

I can see Thomas summoning the courage to get to his feet, “I doubted Him,” he says, with sadness. “He very plainly told us that after three days He would rise again, but even after the rest of you had seen Him with your own eyes, I had to have more proof…………I had to touch Him with my own hands. I didn’t receive your testimony by faith. I doubted Him.”

Last of all, perhaps because his sins were greater and his pride deeper, Simon Peter arises. “None of you hurt Him as badly as did I,” he says. “I constantly misunderstood Him. I constantly twisted what He said into what I wanted it to mean. And finally I denied Him. In order to save my own neck I lied and said I had never heard of Him. I did it three times. And then when He needed me most, I ran away!”

I am convinced that only after they had confessed, completely cleaned house with one another, and given themselves again to God, did the Holy Spirit come.

This is the kind of thing that we must do. I don’t mean we are going to parade our sins as a spectacle for the world to see. But we will quietly approach those we have hurt and wronged. We will confess our part of trouble and tell them we hope they will forgive us.

The world is full of people who profess to believe, but not very many are big enough to swallow pride, to let it melt down before God and attempt to right some of the wrongs in the past. Is your unforgiving spirit a hindrance to the work of the Holy Spirit in this church?

Did you ever watch any of the old Keystone Cops movies? The cops were always chasing the bad guys. The bad guys were usually in an old dilapidated Model T. As they drove along, parts started dropping off. First the top blew off, then the fenders, one at a time, then the doors and finally the body itself fell away and they were left riding on only the frame. It was a funny scene. Parts of the car were strewn for miles.

Back down the roads of our lives we too have left wreckage. We need to clean it up before we move on. Maybe you need to make a list! You may recall the story of the woman who had been bitten by a mad dog. The doctor said, “It’s possible that you might die of hydrophobia, so you had better draw up a will!” The woman took some paper and a pen and wrote for several minutes until finally the doctor interrupted her and said “That’s a rather lengthy will you are writing.” And the woman replied, “oh, this isn’t a will. I’m just making a list of the people I’m going to bite!”

We need to make a list of people we have already bitten!

Probably you should begin with your family, those who are the closest to you. They are the ones on whom the old self caused the most pain. How have you been by your wife or husband or children? Stingy, demanding, irritable, jealous, nagging, constantly critical, neglectful, autocratic, loved talking? Just what have they seen in you that other people never see?

Now, your relatives. More deep resentment and bitterness exists among relatives than the world ever knows about. Some little flea bite of an incident took place years ago, and all this time, resentment, bitterness and even hatred has been festering, taking its toll. Make a list of these hurts and get them made right!

Out in Idaho, the government built some huge potato bins some years ago. They bought up millions of pounds of potatoes and stored them in these bins. The bins were made of concrete, reinforced with steel and were six inches thick. But officials had not reckoned with one thing. The next Spring when the sunlight struck the concrete bins, it’s warmth was transmitted into the darkness of the interior: the potatoes began to sprout and grow. The result was that within a few short weeks every last one of those bins cracked wide open. The power of the potatoes in the darkness when combined with the warmth of the sun could not be contained.

It is just that way with all these old resentments and guilts we have in our hearts. We have thought they were dormant, and some of them we thought we had forgotten. But they were there, festering and growing and swelling. One day they will surge up and manifest themselves in physical illness, or, in some, lashing out at others. Our internal conflicts always externalize themselves. And sadly, those we hurt the most when this happens are those we love. That is why we have to give them to Jesus. We must bring them into the light of God’s will. There they melt away in His Love and Grace.

You see, we have turned our life over to God. We have named Christ as the ruler of our lives. So now the question must always be, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” If we have not made the obeying of His will our greatest desire, then we go right on holding grudges, nurturing bad tempers, holding to our prejudices, criticizing even hating!

But, if we have become willing to let Him run the whole show, then we will reconcile any strained relationships with our relatives.

Now we must expand our list to include those in our circle of friends, those in our business lives, those in our church, and those who are back there somewhere along the roads of the past.

In most every case you will discover that the hurt you have done to another has not been as great as the hurt you have done to yourself. And you will find that people are ready to forgive you. But even if they don’t, you have done what God requires by asking for forgiveness.

Our relationship with God can never be fully right until our relationships with one another are right.

Project this concept out onto the entire world for just a wistful moment. Suppose that on this day every person in the world were engaged in doing just what we are talking about. What if everyone had accepted forgiveness from God and were busy at the task of making things right between themselves and their brothers? What a different set of headlines you’d be reading next week? What a different newscasts you’d be hearing and seeing! What a different atmosphere would surround your community, your business, your home! This is a part of what we mean when we pray, “Thy kingdom come.”

God has said that His forgiveness is based on your willingness to seek forgiveness from those against whom you have trespassed, and to forgive those who have trespassed against you. When this happens in your life a newness and freshness will overtake your life, and you will cease being a joyless follower of Christ.

Let me tell you the story of a girl named Hilda. She was a blonde, blue eyed Swedish girl who possessed a genuine faith. She was a nurse in a state mental hospital. One Sunday morning as she sat in worship her pastor was shocked to notice that her face was all cut, bruised and scratched. He thought that she had been involved in an accident. When she went out the door that morning and shook hands with him he noticed her hands were covered with scratches and red marks. Not wishing to pry, since she offered no explanation, he did not mention her condition.

The last person out of the building that day was the head nurse of the section where Hilda worked. “What on earth happened to Hilda?” he asked.

Then the head nursed told him. Two weeks previously a little fourteen year old girl had been brought into the hospital, violently insane. A day or so later the doctor in charge told her story at the daily staff meeting. The little girl had been reared in poverty. Her father and mother were both alcoholics. Never in her entire life had she heard a single word of love. Never had she been made to feel wanted and loved and needed. Never had she known a day of kindness and affection. One day at the age of twelve she had watched as her drunken mother and father, in a violent argument, struggled over a shotgun. She had seen the gun fire and watched as the life of her father ended on the floor. The mother was charged with manslaughter and paroled, presumable to care for the child. But in the next two years the same old life continued and all she knew from her mother were curses and beatings. Finally her little mind became so filled with hatred and resentment towards all human beings it rejected reality and snapped. She drifted off into insanity and delusion and became violently insane.

The physician then told the staff that a part of her therapy must be catharsis. She must be allowed to vent her wrath on someone, to spew out some of the hatred which had poisoned her so. The doctor then called for volunteers, Hilda raised her hand.

Then for one hour a day for two weeks Hilda went into the cell with this demented girl and allowed her to have her catharsis. She took all of her kicks, all of her pounding, all of her clawing and scratching until the girl’s strength was spent and she crouched in a corner, trembling like a frightened animal. Then, as Hilda left the cell, each day she would pause at the door, turn and face the girl. And there with her own blood streaming down her face she would smile at the girl and say. “Honey, I love you! Honey, I love you!”

This is like Christ. See Him on Calvary, His blood streaming down His face and the words echo across the age even to this place today, “I love you, I love you!”

That love and forgiveness makes you right with God. Have you made things right in the other relationships of your life?