Transcript
Well what I want to talk to you about is one of the disasters of sin, because I'm deeply persuaded that unless you're willing to acknowledge the handprint of these disasters of sin on you, you won't esteem grace. Because whenever you minimize what sin does, you immediately devalue grace.
The Thing That Is Inescapable for All of Us
I want to talk about something that's inescapable for all of us. It's the thing that makes children, little children, think they know more than their parents. I have a fifteen-month old granddaughter, and already she's expressing this stuff. Last time we were with her - we spend every Monday with Lily Grace, we love Lily Grace - she grabs my hand, she leads me across the room, she points to a chair, and she pats the seat. She's saying, "I am Lord, you're not - follow me, sit, and do what I tell you." She can't even talk yet. And I'm a grandfather; I follow, I sit, and I figure out what she wants me to do.
It's the thing that produces such self-oriented angst in teenagers, where you say, "You went to bed last night and you woke up with a different personality; it's just not fair. Who are you, and why are you so upset with everything?"
It's the thing that makes marriages demanding and dysfunctional, because I don't so much love you in a serving way, I love what I think you can deliver to me - please deliver. And if you deliver, I will be nice to you, and if you don't, I'll hurt you. Welcome to marriage.
It's the thing that makes bosses more willing to criticize than to praise. It's the thing that corrupts the hearts of politicians, and they quit being patriots; they become takers. It's the thing that embitters old people and makes them angry and self-centered. It's a disaster. What is this thing? It's the foolishness of sin. Hear this - somehow, someway, sin reduces every human being who's ever taken a breath to a fool. A fool has the world inside out and upside down. A fool sees the world in reverse. A fool thinks things that are not true are true. A fool thinks things that are wise are foolish. A fool thinks he's capable of things he has no ability to do. A fool is much more concerned about the unrighteousness of another person than he is of his own.
Ultimately, in all of that, a fool does this horrible thing: he denies the existence of God. Oh, maybe not in a theological, philosophical atheism, but he denies God by placing himself in the position that God only belongs in by making himself the only god he's interested in serving.
I'd like you to turn in your Bibles to Titus 3. I love Titus. He's one of those people who, when I get to heaven, I'm going to kiss on the lips. I just needed to say that. You can worry about me later.
I want to read verses 3 through 8: "For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people." (Titus 3:3-8, ESV) You see, I think that it is important for us to continue to requires ourselves to revisit the unmitigated, inescapable disaster of sin, to look at it, to think about it, to acknowledge it again, because when you see sin for what it is, when you see what it does, you can't possibly hold on to the thought that the law is all that you need. Because when you understand the disaster of sin in all of its magnitude, it makes a mockery out of the fact that somehow I can obey my way out if this. Somehow, all I need is to be told what to do and I will be okay. Enough with that - it doesn't work! Because if all I needed was to be told what to do, Jesus would not have had to come. And so we got to go back, we have to humbly acknowledge the disaster of sin so we are not tempted to ask the law again to do what only grace can accomplish. Listen - the Church is a weary, exhausted place, full of creepy, demanding people who have lost their way because we keep asking the law to do what only grace can accomplish. Enough; it's killing us! And you can't look at sin seriously and think that that system is going to work. It doesn't work.
And so I'd like just to take a little bit of your time to visit, to exegete, to unpack, this foolishness for you that gets us all.
First, there is the foolishness of self-centeredness. We were created by God to live an upward and an outward life - upward in loving worship of God, outward in self-sacrificing love of neighbor. What sin does is sin turns us in on ourselves, sin makes us all too self- focused and self-oriented, selfish in the true sense of what that means. Sin makes us all too obsessed with our wants, our needs, our feelings; sin inserts us in the center of our little worlds, the one place where we must never be. Sin pulls the field of our concerns down to the claustrophobic confines of what little things will make us happy. It's a horrible, exhausting, terrible dysfunctional way of living. 2 Corinthians 5 says this, "And he died for all, that those who live (can you finish this?) might no longer live for themselves."
You can't regulate a person out of self-centeredness; it won't work. You can't shame a person into living for something bigger than themselves; it won't work. You can't guilt a person into self-sacrificing love.
How many of you are parents here? Wow - if you're a parent, you understand that the child you're parenting came into the world as a shockingly self-oriented human being. It's true! And don't feel righteous about that - you did that to your parents, too. Some of you still are, middle-aged that you are.
Nicole and Her Three Brothers
I've shared this many times, but it's just such a pointed example of that. I have four children; three boys and a girl. Nicole, the girl, felt disadvantaged by that. She didn't think that she had three brothers; she had a unit called "the boys". I heard 10 million times, "Dad, the boys are..."
And so she thought that there's got to be a place for me in this family, and she did a good job of carving out her space. Well, we're going on a long family road trip to see grandma and grandpa. If you want to experience depravity, take a long road trip. You'll not only experience your children's, you'll experience yours. I had a man told me once that he had two children, he was going to take a long road trip, and he made a template and actually built a plywood wall that fit into his back seat between his two children.
My dad was not that determined; he just told my brother Mark and I on one of those trips to pretend there was a concrete block wall between us. So we fought for two hundred miles about where the wall was, and then after about two hundred miles, I had a great idea and told my brother Mark that I had taken a block out of the wall and I could reach out and touch him.
So, we're going on this family road trip and my son Ethan has polyps in his nose, and when he would breathe, he would wheeze. It was really quite distracting; we didn't like him in any room in the house.
So, he's sitting in the back seat next to Nicole, the self-appointed diva of the Tripp kingdom, and Ethan's back there next to her wheezing. We had the radio on loud. And Nicole says, "Dad, Ethan is bothering me." So, asking the next parental question, I said, "Nicole, [I'm driving] what is he doing?" Without hesitation, she answered, "He's breathing!" I couldn't resist the next question. I said, "What do you want me to do?" And with no hesitation or guilt in her voice, she said, "Tell him to stop!" "You're respirating. That bothers me. Stop! I don't mind if your now deceased body is sitting next to me, but your wheezing hurts me."
This self-centeredness is chronicled all throughout Scripture. I would say if you would read the Bible, the blood and guts of this self-centeredness is all over the place, you see it all over Scripture. It is a massive human dysfunction. And all of us have it in us; all of us want life to put us in the center. All of us want to have our way. All of us want not to have to wait, want to be right, want to be first, want to have the best story, want to be the best looking, want to be the smartest theologically. You want, somehow, to get attention. You want, somehow, to be at the center.
It's foolishness, and it's foolishness that's confronted by the first four words of the Bible. You don't even need to read far. "In the beginning, God..." You could argue that those four words are the four most important words of the Bible because it tells you everything that life is about. I will never be at the center; to put myself at the center only leads to drama and dysfunction and hurt and fear and disappointment and brokenness. It's a disaster.
But that's not all. There's also the foolishness of self-deception. You see, here's how it works: if you are not recognizing your need for a savior, and running to the rest that he provides, you are somehow working to convince yourself that you don't need a savior. You're somehow working to convince yourself that you're okay. And what you do is you go through this exhausting thing of recasting your history and renaming your sin and blaming other people, any kind of system you can construct that will make you feel like you don't need what only grace can offer you; you're okay. This will probably hurt your feelings, but it is absolutely true - no one swindles you more than you do. No one deceives you more than you do. No one has told more lies to you than you have told to yourself; sorry, it's true.
And you're good at it. And you actually develop this creepy skill of knowing the lies that work for you. It doesn't work to tell yourself bad lies, because they don't provide atonement. And so you learn to tell yourself good plausible lies. So you'll say things like, "It's just my personality. I'm just a loud person, I talk this way all the time - I'm not angry! It makes me so mad when you accuse me of being angry! I'm just making my point. You know, like one of God's prophets! You haven't read the prophets?!"
"It wasn't lust; I don't lust. I just have an eye for beauty, feminine sort of beauty." "I don't have to be in control all the time; don't accuse me of being controlling. I'm just exercising God-given leadership gifts." "I'm not being jealous and envious; I just want to experience the full range of God's blessing."
And we could spend the rest of the night, you could write down your own system of lies that you tell to you. It's an endless, exhausting system where you have to save you. That's what self-deception is. Self-deception is your particular chosen system of saving yourself; that's what it is.
The Height of Foolishness
Now that's the height of foolishness. Maybe that's the definition of foolishness, because you have no ability to save you, because you are the problem. You're the poison; you're the disease. You can run from a situation, you can run from a location, but you can't run from you. I find whenever I try to run from me I show up with me at the end of the run. It doesn't work.
And the fact of the matter is: you are very influential in your own life because no one talks to you more than you do. You're in a constant, evaluative, interpretative conversation with yourself. And you are always preaching some kind of gospel to yourself; it's the gospel of deep abiding need and gospel of celebration of Jesus, or it's the gospel of ability and righteousness and self-atonement.
Self-deception; the foolishness of systems of self-salvation. Third - the foolishness of self-sufficiency, where I try to tell myself I have everything within myself to be who I'm supposed to be and do what I'm supposed to do. I don't need your help, thank you. Now, I want to say this. There are two lies that every sinner tends to buy into. They're really the lies of the Garden. I hinted at one just now; I'm going to give them both to you. First is the lie of autonomy. Autonomy says I'm an independent human being; I have the right to live my life anyway I want to live it.
If you're a parent of a young child, and they fight you when it comes to you choosing what they're going to eat, or they fight you when it's time to go to bed, listen - that fight is not about food, and it's not first about sleep. It's about autonomy. "You will not rule me. I am self-ruling; watch me!"
Or perhaps you're watching a little child who's just discovered that he has laces on his shoes. He hadn't noticed that before. And he decides that he wants to tie his shoe. Now he has no knowledge of how to tie a shoe at all. He could fumble with those laces for the next seven years and never create a bow.
And so, you see him fumbling, some of you have experienced this, and you walk over to help him. What does he do? He slaps away your hand, because he wants to believe that he's self-sufficient, that he doesn't need your help.
Autonomy and self-sufficiency are foolish, disastrous lies. I'm created as a dependent being. Now you say, "Paul, I don't think that I'm self-sufficient." Well, let me ask you: how do you respond when someone approaches you with a wrong, when someone confronts you?
Do you say, "Thank you. My walk with God is a community project. I'm so thankful for your commitment to my sanctification. I see you as a tool of God's grace right now. I would invite you to come more, because I'm surely going to need it probably in the next ten minutes. Just stay close."
You know that's not how you respond. You know that that self-sufficiency boils up inside of you. You feel your chest tighten; you feel your ears get red. You're thinking, "I didn't actually ask for your help." You think, "You know, I'm not the only sinner in the room." And you activate your inner lawyer, and you begin to defend yourself against help - against help! Listen: if the eyes of someone else, or the ears of someone else, ever see my sin, weakness and failure, and they approach me, it's never an offense; it's never a hassle; it's never an interruption - it's always grace! God loves me. He's put me in the community of faith and he will send his helpers my way because I need the help. I'm not self-sufficient.
I'm not worried about your inner child; mine's grounded. But I have a lot of concern about your inner lawyer. I have a lot of concern about patterns of self-sufficiency. There are some of you (I know all of these struggles myself, so I'm not singling you out; there's nothing I could say to you tonight that I don't need to hear myself) are skilled at nonanswers. You're skilled at saying platitudinous things that end conversations. How was your week? "The problems were many but the Lord was faithful." Get a real grip and be honest with me!
Some of you are very good at having a public persona that you sort of polish, that is really not who you are. It's a Facebook way of living. You know what it's like: a family goes to the state park for what they think will be a day of picnic bliss. The mistake is, they've drug a family of sinners there - them!
A Horrible Day With Burned Hot Dogs
And it's a horrible day. The kids are fighting. There's nothing enjoyable about the day. Dad burned the hot dogs and, in a gracious fatherly tone, told the family, "Shut up and eat them anyway." Mom is at the edge of tears, because this is just been anything but a nice day. But, before they leave the park, they pose for a family selfie. Now other families look at that Facebook and say, "I wish we could have that kind of joy in our family." It doesn't exist; it didn't exist for those people; it's a fake! It's saying to all the people who are your Facebook friends, "We're fine; you don't need to worry about us. Look at our picture."
The foolishness of self-centered. The foolishness of self-deception. The foolishness of self-sufficiency. Here's the final thing: the foolishness, the sad foolishness, of selfrighteousness. That deep, irrational, ridiculous drive to name myself as righteous, to convince myself that I am righteous, to try to convince the people around me that I am righteous. It's a horrible, exhausting way of living, because I'm not.
To again argue with myself that I'm okay; you see, here's how this works. When you do what is wrong, if you're God's child, and the heart of stone has been taken out of you and a heart of flesh has been replaced, when you do wrong, your conscience will bother you. That's a beautiful thing; that's the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. But when your conscience bothers you, you only have one of two choices: you either confess that that wrong is wrong and you place yourself once again under the justifying mercy of the Savior, run to him in your need, celebrate his forgiveness, or you erect some system of self-defense, self-atonement, self-righteousness, that makes that wrong thing now acceptable to your conscience.
You cannot hold on to you righteousness without working to make what God says is wrong acceptable to your heart. Because it's inevitable because you're not the redeemer, you're not the messiah; you will do, you will think, you will say, you will desire, what is wrong. And so, in order to hold onto self-righteousness, you have to work to convince yourself that your wrong isn't actually wrong. It's not actually sin, "sin sin", you know, the real sin. It's something less than that. You're actually harming your conscience because you're teaching your conscience to be satisfied with naming what God says is wrong as not so wrong after all.
You say, "I don't think I'm a self-righteous person." Well, I would ask you one question: if I would watch the video of your life, would I conclude that you're much more concerned and distressed about the sin of the people around you than you are your own? Would I?
Now what I've described for you in self-deception, self-centeredness, self-sufficiency, and self-righteousness, is the angst, brokenness, sad drama, and dysfunction of humanity. How could you ever look at this seductive, deceitful system and think the law will rescue me? "All I need is a better of what is right. All I need is a little more commitment."
You see, this is why Paul writes, "For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us."
You see, what the foolishness of sin deeply needs - it's only hope - is an appearance. Not an appearance of your ability to argue for yourself, not an appearance of your ability to defend yourself; an appearance of a Person, the Savior, the Lamb, the King - Jesus. Jesus had to appear because there was no hope for fools apart from an appearance. Isn't that beautiful?
The incarnation had to happen; history had to be sovereignly controlled; the forces of nature had to come under subjection, because the whole world groaned, the whole world groaned that the Messiah would finally appear. There was no hope for this company of fools, but an appearance.
Not a better theological outline. Not a better system of law. Not politics or education or social justice. No - what the world cried for was an appearance, that the Savior would come! That he would subject himself to the foolishness; that he would be willing for that foolishness to put him to a Cross, so that fools would be rescued from their foolishness. That's the Gospel. And the joy of this evening is this: that he did appear. He did live a completely un-foolish life. He was completely righteous. He died an acceptable death. He rose, conquering sin and death. He appeared, and his work is complete! And so I don't have to put myself at the center anymore. I don't have to deceive myself into feeling better about me anymore. I don't have to act like I'm self-sufficient anymore. I don't have to argue for my righteousness anymore, because the Savior appeared. And by grace, he's rescuing fools and making them wise again. Wise enough to be humble. Wise enough to be dependent. Wise enough to be submissive. Wise enough to be broken by the acknowledgement of sin. He appeared. He appeared. He appeared. He appeared.
The only hope for the foolishness of sin was an appearance. And he came. And there's hope, because he came, and he completed his work. And he graced you with rescue. How could you ever consider better news than that? He came. There's hope for fools.
