You and I must never forget that what we're now experiencing is a miracle. It's a miracle that anybody would get up on a Sunday morning and want to worship God. The average person in Philadelphia doesn't get up thinking about that. It's a miracle of God's grace that we're here. It's a miracle that He accepts our messed-up, imperfect, jacked-up worship - willingly accepts that. It's a miracle that His Spirit is right now present with us. Isn't that amazing? Opening our hearts to His Word, you should never get used to this.
A Miracle of Grace
You should never take this for granted. The gathering of God's people is a miracle of grace. That has nothing to do with what I want to say to you today, but I couldn't resist. Let's pray. Lord, thank You that we are the recipients of a miracle this morning. And yet, in the midst of that miracle, we know that we can have cold and fickle and easily distractible hearts. And so, we pray that You would open our hearts to Your word, that we would receive what You have to feed us. You never give us anything but good food.
May we take it in with joy. And we pray this not so that we would get glory, but that You would get the glory due Your name. We pray this, oh, King, oh, Savior, oh, Lord Jesus, Amen. I was a very, very angry man. I didn't know I was an angry man. If you would characterize me as an angry man, I would have been hurt. That would have hurt my feelings. But I was an angry man. Luella, some of you know my wife, knew I was angry. And my children knew I was angry. But I didn't know I was an angry man. I was a pastor.
I was in the midst of destroying my life and my ministry, and I didn't know it. Luella would come to me and she did it very patiently and graciously in godly ways. And she would hold that anger in front of me and I would not listen, I would not hear. I would wrap my robes of righteousness around me - which I don't have and neither do you - and tell her what a great guy I was. I'm sort of a domestic man. I don't mind doing things around the house. I've traditionally done most of the cooking in our family and I like to think that I do all that cooking because I have a servant's heart, but it's just because I like to cook.
And when Luella would be confronting me, I would tell her that I thought her problem was discontent and I would pray for her. That helped her. That's a lie. It was a disaster. There was one moment - this is embarrassing to confess - where I said, defending myself, these deeply humble words to my wife. I said, "95% of the women in our church would love to be married to a man like me." How's that for humility? Luella very quickly informed me that she was in the 5%. It really was a moral disaster. I was on a weekend with my brother, Tedd, ministry training weekend and on the way home he said, "You know, Paul, we probably ought to make this weekend practical to our own lives."
We were heading up the northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And he said, "Why don't you start?" I'll never ever forget this moment. I will celebrate this moment 10 million years into eternity, I'm serious. Tedd didn't make a statement. He began to ask me questions, questions I could have never asked myself. And as he was asking those questions, it was like God was ripping down curtains and I could see myself with accuracy and hear myself with accuracy for the first time in many years.
Praise God for the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. Don't ever resist the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is convicting you, you aren't being condemned, you are being graced. Run toward it. Don't run away from it. Nothing ever good happens in a person's life when he resists the ministry of the Holy Spirit. That conviction is rescue. I was broken and grieved. It was so disjointing for me to look in and see that man and hear that man was so far from what I thought about myself.
But it was me. I couldn't wait to get home and talk with Luella and I got home late at night. And I have a lively sense of humor and I often enter the house humorously, poor Luella. But I came in very serious that night, she could tell something was up. And I asked her if we could sit down and talk, and she was glad to do that. And I said to her, "I've known for years, you've been trying to talk to me about my anger and I've been unwilling to listen and unwilling to hear. And I think for the first time tonight, I can say I really want to hear what you have to say to me."
I'll never forget what happened next. Luella began to cry. She told me that she loved me, which I thought was itself an act of amazing grace after all I had put her through. And then she talked for two hours. And in those two hours, God began a process of the radical undoing and the rebuilding of the heart of this man. The operative word is "process". I wasn't zapped by lightning, but I was now a man with open eyes and a willing heart. And over the next several months, I saw that anger everywhere I looked.
It was very painful. There were times where I felt like I couldn't breathe. It was just everywhere. But I want you to hear what I'm about to say. That pain was the pain of grace because God was making that anger like vomit in my mouth, so I'd never want to go back there again. Praise God for His grace. I'll never forget months, months down the road, I was coming down from the upstairs of our house and I saw Luella sitting with her back to me and I couldn't remember the last time I had felt that old, ugly, life-dominating anger.
And I want to be honest with you. I'm not saying that I had risen to a level of sanctification that a moment of irritation was impossible for me, but that life-dominating anger was broken, gone. Praise God! And I walked up behind her and I put my hands on her shoulders. And she looked at me up like this and I said, "You know, I'm not angry at you anymore," and we laughed and cried at what God had done. Now, here's the question of the story. How did that ever happen to me? How would that ever happen to a believer?
How Does This Happen?
I've got the Bible in my hands, I got the Holy Spirit in my heart. How does this happen? And I want to take you to a passage that answers that question and gives you God's solution. But I want to set it up this way because I think this is a way to move toward that passage. There are two lies that every sinner ever born somehow, some way believes. First is the lie of autonomy. Autonomy says "I'm an independent human being and I have the right to live my life the way I want to live it". Now, you know autonomy is a lie, but every child buys into autonomy.
If you watch children, you'll see autonomy. You know, that fight you have with a little child over what to eat isn't about diet. This child hasn't read a diet book and decided he or she wants to eat the Atkins diet. It's autonomy. That child is saying, "This body belongs to me. My life belongs to me and you will not tell me what to put in my mouth, thank you." My daughter, Nicole, decided she didn't like those green vegetable orbs called peas. She didn't want to eat round green things. She had no idea what round green things taste like.
And she would close her teeth like a vise. You'd need the jaws of life to open that up. Or that fight over when to go to bed. That's not about sleep. This child hasn't done a sleep study, for Pete's sake. It's autonomy. "You will not rule me, parental person, thank you. I'm self-ruling, you probably didn't notice." Now you say, "Paul, there's no autonomy in me." Seriously? If you're a Christian person and you're in the process of saying something nasty to your wife or your husband or to a friend because they've made you angry, you're not saying something nasty because you're ignorant of the fact that that's wrong.
You're saying something nasty because at that point, you don't give a rip what is wrong because you feel anger and you will express it. That's autonomy. If you're a man, you're now looking at a website that you have no business looking at, you're not doing that because you're ignorant of the fact that that's wrong. You're doing that because as a Christian man, you don't care what is wrong, you will get the pleasure that you want. You've just taken God off the throne, you put yourself on the throne.
You've thrown away His law and you've written your own law. That's autonomy. I'm going to say this because we all need to hear it and I say this to myself, too. Nothing I'm saying today excludes me. There's autonomy living in this room. Subtle patterns of autonomy where you take your life back, you act like it belongs to you, you write your own rules because there's something that you want. The second lie is a lie of self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency says, "I have everything I need inside of myself to be what I'm supposed to be and to do what I'm supposed to do.
I have everything I need inside of myself to be what I'm supposed to be and to do what I'm supposed to do." Let me just take the child example. You see it, you see self-sufficiency in children. Little Hector has realized - he's about three or four years old - he's realized that his shoes have laces and he wants to tie his shoes. Now, he has no bow knowledge in his life. He has not yet learned to live bow-istically. He could fumble with those laces for a century and he would never make a bow, but mom reaches down to help him and what does he do?
He slaps away her hand because he wants to believe that he's a self-sufficient human being. Now maybe say, "Paul, there's no self-sufficiency in me." Really? Have you ever gotten defensive when a sister or a brother points out a sin, weakness, and failure in you, rising to your defense, letting them know that you're not the only sinner in the room? What you're saying is, "Thank you, Jesus, for the body of Christ, I just don't need it. They do." If you think that you can live a healthy Christian life and not be in your Bible every day, you are living a self-sufficient lie.
If you think that you can live without a constant flow of the wisdom of the Word of God, you have bought into self-sufficiency. I don't know about you, but I don't have one twit of wisdom in me that hasn't come from the Word of God. If you think you can live virtually a prayerless life, when you only pray in an emergency or corporately on Sunday morning, you have bought into the lie of self-sufficiency. Now, hear what I'm about to say. The fruit of self-sufficiency and autonomy is a lifestyle of isolation and self-protection.
The fruit of autonomy and self-sufficiency is a lifestyle of isolation and self-protection. I'm not done. I'm going to cause more trouble. And isolation and selfprotection are enemies of grace. They're enemies of grace. Now, we're ready for the passage. Hebrews 3:12-13. I am so, so thankful that these verses are in the Bible. Let me read. 12Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
What you have in this passage is a warning and a call. And you'll never understand the essentiality of the call, the vital nature of the call, unless you first understand the warning because the warning is what makes the call necessary. Now, think of Hebrews in this high holy moment of laying out the glory of the new covenant. The writer of Hebrews stops in the middle of that and lays down this warning. That's how important it is. Literally, God ordained that the writer of Hebrews, basically, right in a glorious hymn of the new covenant, would interrupt himself to give this warning because it's just that important.
A Progressive Warning
Now, I want you to look up here because it's not a static warning. It's a progressive warning. It's a warning of a very dangerous downward spiritual process. I'm going to demonstrate this with my body. Watch this. See to it that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving, turning away, hardened heart. He's laying out a process for you. Now, here's where it begins. It begins with subtle patterns of sin. I begin to let subtle patterns of sin in my life. What happens to all of us is the grace of God, the truth of Scripture becomes familiar to us and familiarity is a beautiful thing.
If you're familiar with the truth of Jesus Christ, you have been blessed by grace, but familiarity is a dangerous thing because familiarity does something to us. Oh, let's pretend that you'd move to a new community and to get from your home to where you work, you have to drive down this beautiful wooded street. 200-year-old trees, they're like a canopy over you and the first time you drive down the street, you're just thankful for the beauty and you're thinking of those trees has been like arms that are lifted to the glory of God.
It's worship for you. Check this out. Six weeks later, you're on the same street, you're pounding on the [inaudible], "This traffic drives me crazy," and you haven't seen a tree for three weeks. That's what familiarity does to us and so, in our familiarity, we begin to let our guard down and we begin to let little subtle patterns of sin into our lives, sin that we'll never let into our lives in those early days of faith when we were so deeply conscious of our sin and so deeply grateful for God's forgiveness.
Little patterns of lust, little patterns of anger or envy or gluttony or greed or bitterness. Now, when you let sin into your life, your conscience will bother you. That's that beautiful convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. But hear what I'm about to say. When your conscience bothers you as a believer, you only have one of two choices. You will either confess that that wrong is wrong and you will place yourself once again under the justifying mercies of Jesus and receive His forgiveness - stay with me - or you will erect some system of self-justification that makes that wrong acceptable to your conscience.
We are so good at doing that. Everyone in this room, including Paul Tripp, is a very skilled self-swindler. Nobody swindles you more than you do. And so, a man who's out there shopping and lusting after a woman will say, "No, that wasn't lust. I'm just a man who enjoys beauty. Praise the Creator for the beauty He's put in this." Because what He's working to do, here's what those self-atoning arguments are working to do. They are you working to make you feel good about what God says is not good. That's what's going on.
And you see, whenever you minimize sin, you automatically de-value grace. You can't minimize sin without devaluing grace. Or two people that have just spent a half hour on their cell phones in just horrible relationshipdestroying gossip about a dear person who has no ability at that moment to defend themselves, end the conversation this way. "We should pray." I mean, come on. That wasn't a prayer, but why did you say that? Because you want to walk away saying, "This wasn't gossip. It was just a very detailed personal prayer request."
A parent who has yanked a child down the hallway in unbridled parental anger. That yanking a child down the hallway is never biblical discipline. That's violence against the body of your child. Slam them into a chair and let vocabulary go on that a child should never hear. Walk back down the hallway and say, "That wasn't really anger. I was just like being one of God's prophets. 'Thus says the Lord.'" All of that is working to make me feel okay about what God says is not okay. Now what I'm describing to you is the second word: unbelief.
When you shuck and jive with the Word of God, when you tell yourself that what the Bible says is sin is less than sin, when you resist the indictment of the Word of God, that's unbelief. I have to say this. Don't think that because you're a believer, there is no unbelief in your life. You can be in the general category of believer and have patterns, spiritually deadening patterns of unbelief in your life. In fact, don't think because your theology is correct, that you always live out belief where the rubber meets the road in your everyday life.
I'm going to say this to you. This is controversial. I think theology is the easiest form of belief. The harder form of belief is that you would actually believe at street-level what God says about you and what God says you need. And I want to warn you, the devil will give you your theology if he can capture your heart. Do you understand what I'm saying? He'll be willing to make you feel comfortable because your theology is accurate if he can claim your heart. The Bible would tell us that the demons are theologians.
Scripture says that. Don't think that because you're in the general category of a believer - praise God you're in that general category, praise God He has given you a heart to believe - that there aren't patterns of unbelief. Now, that leads us to the third word: turning away. You see, that simple childlike belief in the Word of God, receiving openly its indictment is meant to be a moral anchor for me. And when I begin to cut that anchor cord, it always leads to further turning away. It will always do that.
Sin That Isn't Sin-Sin
You begin to drift because now, you become quite comfortable with telling yourself that your sin isn't really sin-sin. It's not what the Bible is talking about. And listen, if you're more concerned about the sin of others than you are your own, you're a person in deep spiritual difficulty. If your response to the sin of others is irritation and not compassion, that response is always born out of self-righteousness. And where does it end? This is sad. It ends with a hardened heart. Now, hear this.
The writer of Hebrews has interrupted a glorious conversation to remind us that a believer can have a hard heart. And that hard heart, that phrase, that word picture means two things. First, it means what once bothered you doesn't bother you anymore. What once would have plagued your conscience doesn't bother you. You can now walk right over God's boundaries and it doesn't bother you. It means a second thing. It means resistance to change. It's a picture of a stony heart. If I had a stone in my hand right now and I would press that with all of my might, what would you expect would happen?
Well look at the size of my arms. It's not hard to answer. Nothing because that rock is resistant to change. That's what it means. And why would you resist change? Because you don't think you need it, because you're telling yourself all the time you don't need it, because you've begun to view yourself as a grace graduate. Between the "already" of your conversion and the "not yet" of your homegoing, no believer is a grace graduate. Now, I want to posit the question again. How does this happen? How can you get to the point where your heart is that hardened, where you have no desire to change in places where God is calling you to change?
How does that ever happen? Well, the passage tells you. Look at verse 13. 13But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," [listen very carefully] that none of you may be hardened by [what; say it] the deceitfulness of sin. Hear this. Sin is deceitful by its very DNA. I have no problem seeing the sin of my wife and children, but I can be shocked and surprised when mine is pointed out. Now, hear the gospel because this is very important to get a hold of. Yes, the power of sin has been broken in the justifying mercies of Christ, but the presence of sin still remains and is progressively being eradicated.
And as long as sin still lives inside of you, because sin is deceitful - are you listening to me? - there will be pockets of spiritual blindness in all of us, all of us. Ten out of ten of us. So that means you have a problem that you can't individually solve because you're the blind one. Now, here's what this means. This is going to hurt your feelings, but I think it's my job. Everyone in this room must give up the thought that no one knows you better than you do. Give it up. It's a delusion because as long as sin lives inside of you, there will be pockets of inaccuracy of your view of yourself.
If you tell yourself, "No one knows me better than I do," and someone comes to you with something you haven't seen, what will be your natural response? You will tell yourself you're being misjudged, you will be defensive, and you will walk away singing victim songs to yourself. Telling yourself that no one knows you better than you do will always close you down to the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit and the insight-giving ministry of the body of Christ. Now I got to crank this up even further.
Spiritual blindness is not like physical blindness. When you're physically blind, you know you're blind and you do things immediately to compensate for that loss. I have a dear friend, George, who's been blind since 9-years-old and George says everything. He's a master woodworker. He's an amazing guy. Why? Because he knows he's blind and he has made it his mission not to live a restricted life because the only thing that I can think of that George doesn't do is drive and he's probably working on it, except driving by Braille is dangerous.
You see, here's the deadly reality. Spiritually blind people are blind to their blindness. The danger of spiritual blindness is you think you see, when, actually, you don't see. Now, hear what I'm about to say next. This is where this call comes in. The only solution that scripture ever gives for a lifestyle of isolation and self-protection that's the result of autonomy and selfsufficiency, the only solution scripture ever gives is community. First with God, who sends me His Spirit and next with the people of God because I need instruments in my life to see myself with accuracy.
I am deeply persuaded that what this passage is teaching very powerfully - you're ready for this? - is that personal spiritual insight is the result of community. In fact, I will say it even more strongly. I'm persuaded that self-examination is a community project because I so, so quickly give in to my own blindness. Sometimes, I'm blindly willful. Other times, I'm willfully blind. They both operate in me. You see, what this passage calls us to is to surrender to the need of the essential sanctifying ministry of the body of Christ.
You cannot reduce Christianity to a belief system and an occasional gathering. You just can't. You cannot believe what the Bible tells us and hold on to isolated, individualistic Jesus-in-me religion. That religion is not the religion of the New Testament. It's not. Here's the plan. I love saying this. God makes His invisible grace visible by sending people of grace to give grace to people who need grace. There's the plan. Welcome to the church. And we need to be a functioning community of help. I think that much of what we call fellowship just isn't fellowship.
Terminally Casual Relationships
It's just not. It doesn't rise to the level of fellowship. It's just, you know, we live in cycles of terminally casual relationships. People know things about us, but they don't know us. Most of what we call fellowship is not much different than what happens at the pub down the street. We have to just call it pub-a-ship. We're going to gather for pub-a-ship. There will be no fellowship. You don't need to be concerned. Now, I want to ask you a question and I want you to open your hearts. I want you to, right now, fire your inner lawyer.
I can say that because I have an inner law firm. Fire your inner lawyer and hear this question. Who knows you? No, I don't mean knows things about you. Who knows you? Who knows you at a level that they can speak truth to you when you need it? Who have you invited to step over the boundaries of normal Western culture niceness to speak uncomfortable words of love to you? Who? If you don't have a name, I would not question that you're a Christian, but what you're living is not biblical Christianity because you are still living in patterns of isolation.
No wonder the church is not the force that it should be in the culture. No wonder the rate of divorce in the evangelical church rivals the culture. No wonder hundreds of thousands of Christians treat the church like it's an evangelical Macy's and shot from church to church, never committing themselves. No wonder. Now, here's what this leaves us. There's two character qualities that have to live in the church of Jesus Christ and for me, need to live in Epiphany, this church that I love so. I take Epiphany around the world.
I love talking about my church. But these two character qualities need to live amongst us if we're going to be a spiritually healthy church. Here's the first one: the humility of approachability. The humility of approachability. Are you a humble, approachable person? Are you? Don't answer that yourself. Ask your closest friend or your spouse. Approachability isn't intuitive for us. It's just not. It's only God's grace who can get us there and there are a lot of us in this room right now who are saying, "I'm not an approachable person, God help me.
Soften my heart, make me willing." Listen, there's no reason for you not to be approachable. There's no reason for you to be afraid. There's nothing that ever could be known or revealed about you that hasn't already been covered by the blood of Jesus. Let's believe the gospel. It's not about how many people like you. It's about Jesus died for you. How burdensome is it to live where you're polishing your own righteousness and defending it to others. That's a burdensome way to live. Jesus released you from that burden.
The humility of approachability. There's a second character quality. It's the courage of loving honesty. Now, notice the qualifier: loving honesty. Truth not spoken in love ceases to be truth because it's bent and twisted by other emotions and other agendas. Hear what I said? Truth not spoken and love ceases to be truth because it becomes bent and twisted by other emotions and other agendas. Truth in love. I hear people say this a lot. "Well, I didn't speak. I didn't talk to them about that because I love them."
That's baloney. You didn't talk to that person because you love you and you didn't want to be in an uncomfortable moment with that person to be an instrument of God's grace in their life. That's not other-love, that's self-love. We need to call it what it is. The humility of approachability and the courage of loving honesty, why are they so important? Because sin still lives inside of us and sin is deceitful. And God, in the glory of His condescending love, knew we need help and He designed His church to be a daily resource of help.
How beautiful is that? The question is, how skilled are you at telling yourself that you don't need the help that God has provided? This is hard talk, but you know what, because of what Jesus has done, we should be able to be the most honest community on earth because there's no hard thing that we could ever look at that hasn't been met by the glorious grace of a sovereign, powerful Savior who unleashes His glory on us. Are you approachable? Do you live with a courage of loving honesty? Are you sitting in a community but living in isolation and self-protection because you got to know isolation and selfprotection are the enemies of grace?
They give the devil a huge opportunity in your life. May God help us. Let's pray. Lord, what we've talked about today is not natural for us. It's natural for us to be self-righteous and defensive. It's easy for us to live in fear and not in faith. It's easy for subtle patterns of unbelief to grow when we don't even see they're there. Oh, Lord, may You open our hearts to this passage, to the need for the humility of approachability and the courage of loving honesty. And, Lord, I would pray for that person in the room who has who has never opened his or her heart to You, that they would do that today, that they would let go of autonomy and self-sufficiency and the thought that they know themselves better than anyone does; and find your mercies which are new every morning.
Thank You for hearing us. Thank you for the practical street-level, transformational truths of Your word. In Jesus name, amen.
