Sermon Tone Analysis

! Releasing the Past—Holy Amnesia

There is holy amnesia and practicing it is one of the healthier ways to keep our souls growing.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:12-14

A leading women's magazine (McCall's, Oct. 1986) recently carried the story of a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four who suddenly suffered a splitting headache.

Before she knew what had happened, she was undergoing surgery for a brain aneurism.

The operation was successful but had an unusual side effect.

Partial amnesia caused her to forget sixteen years of her life.

In her mind, she was twenty-three, the mother of four small children.

Can you imagine the courage and patience it took for her to overcome that kind of experience?

She'd forgotten all those years of happiness and achievement.

But isn't it interesting to realize that she had also forgotten the hardship and the regrets of those years, too?

Some of us might think it would be a blessing to forget some of the things that have happened to us.

Wouldn't we like to forget some of the things that we've done, things we're not proud of, things that keep haunting us?

In a spiritual sense, the apostle Paul would agree, but he'd also probably say that we might be better off as Christians it we would forget some of our /achievements,/ too.

Does that sound strange?

Paul spoke of wishing for a sort of "holy" amnesia in which he would be able to forget both the guilt of past failures (that could paralyze him) and the pride of past achievements (that would hinder his pace in the spiritual "race" he was running).

So what does Paul say? "Forgetting both things, I press on."

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul makes it quite clear that growing believers should confess a kind of holy discontent with their spiritual growth.

Often we allow one of these two things to keep us from continued growth—either we are paralyzed by guilt from the past or we are content through the pride of our past achievements.

Think of one experience from your past that you feel guilty about.

Just one.

Most of us have many to choose from, but one is potent enough to keep us down.

We may even believe that God has forgiven us, but we just can't forgive ourselves.

Our memory becomes an enemy and slows our pace in the spiritual race.

We're slowed to a crawl, as if we're having to drag this mighty weight behind us every step of the way.

And yet we do this to ourselves.

Now think of one experience from your past that you are proud of.

Just one.

Most of us upstanding Christians have many to choose from, and this list is not one we'll usually hide.

Pinned on our mental bulletin board, we have that list out front so we can remind ourselves again and again how upstanding we truly are.

Yet believe it or not, even one of those experiences is as potent as a guilty memory in slowing us down on our way to that goal of Christian maturity.

How?

We're so busy patting ourselves on the back for how far we've already come that we aren't concentrating on what's still ahead.

And we may be quite content with right where we are.

Again, our memory becomes an enemy in our quest toward wholeness in Christ.

Paul knew these two kinds of memory were deadly to spiritual growth.

And Paul's own life is a great example of the possible effects that both sides of this memory coin can have.

!! To Brag, or Not to Brag?

First, Paul certainly had a lot of accomplishments to brag about, didn't he? Religiously, he probably had as many bragging rights as anyone who ever lived.

And yet he was the first to point to his spiritual imperfection.

In fact, he uses the word "perfect" in a strange way to describe himself.

As he put it, he has not been "made perfect."

What does that mean?

As evangelicals, we believe that the work of Christ /for/ us on the cross was a perfect work—but we must confess that the work of Christ /in/ us through the Holy Spirit is an imperfect work in that it is not yet complete.

Why? It's not because Christ or the Spirit is imperfect, but because we are.

Paul made that clear in his own life.

He said, "It is not that I already obtained all of this, or have already been made perfect, brothers.

I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it."

So Paul confesses a discontent, a dissatisfaction with his own spiritual progress, even though his credentials were absolutely impeccable.

A lesser person would have been sitting on his laurels.

Think about Paul's situation.

Here was a man who by this time had suffered imprisonment for the cause of Christ, who had founded churches all over Asia and parts of Europe.

Here was a man who'd written the letter to the Romans, the greatest treatise on Christian doctrine ever written.

Yet he's saying he had not obtained perfection.

He had not grasped /the goal/ of the high calling of Christ.

Like a child standing by the seashore with the waves lapping at his feet wondering what the entire ocean must be like, Paul feels discontented, wanting to see more.

But let's look at the rest of Paul's bragging rights.

Even before his conversion, he had a great deal to brag about.

He tells us of his blue-blood background, of his orthodox upbringing, of his perfect education, and his card-carrying membership in the very elite group called the Pharisees.

He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

Then after his conversion, he could have bragged how his family disowned him and his friends snubbed him.

He had also suffered physically for the faith.

He then continued down an unparalleled list of achievements as one of the greatest disciples of all time.

Yet, he said, "I consider all of these things rubbish, that I might gain Christ.

I press toward the mark for the prize."

Startling, isn't it?

If we'd been put in prison for spreading the gospel, wouldn't it be somewhat difficult not to mention that sacrifice as quite a spiritual coup for us personally?

How many of us wouldn't be proud if we had written Romans?

Yet as Paul looked back on his entire Christian life, deliberately, fully, cautiously reflecting on it, he said, "I do not count myself to have apprehended the fullness of Christ."

He had not achieved the maturity that a Christian ought to have.

Since he was writing to the Christians at Philippi about this situation, it's probably fair to guess that maybe some believers in that church were resting on their past achievements.

Gnostics did believe that if a person kept the law of God perfectly, he or she could have absolute righteousness on earth—that spiritual perfection was possible on this side of the resurrection.

And, of course, believing that, it would be only natural to keep quite a list of one's personal accomplishments, wouldn't it?

But are we that much different now?

I have no doubt we know ourselves to be far from Christian perfection.

Our difficulty may be that we haven't arrived—yet we're satisfied anyway.

And smugness will remove us from the race toward spiritual growth faster than anything.

At the time of this writing Paul could easily have felt he had arrived.

He had put in years and years of service.

He could have pointed back to those early years of daring enterprise, those middle years of great responsibility, and sat back in smug satisfaction feeling retired with honor and distinction in Christian service.

He could have had the attitude we see so often exemplified in the church today.

But instead, he was making big plans.

The impulse of his heart, the beat of his pulse was to get out of prison and take the gospel all the way to Spain.

He literally wanted to march off the map before he ended his earthly life.

Paul was never satisfied or seduced by his past accomplishments.

He kept on pressing on.

Yet, if Paul had allowed it, his past could also have crippled him.

Just as he had reason for pride in his heritage, he also had much in his past to be ashamed about too.

The apostle could have been paralyzed with guilt.

He had held the cloaks of those who had stoned Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

He could have cloaked himself with guilt the rest of his life for being an accomplice to that murder and many more.

In his religious zeal to commit more murder in the name of religion, he had made it his duty to hunt down Christians.

According to the Book of Acts, Paul at that time was like a wild beast stalking and slaughtering the believers.

Can you imagine the way he must have felt when he finally became one of those believers himself?

Think of it

!! Spiritual Atrophy

Not too long ago, a news story told of a forty-year-old man who, because of his overprotective parents, had never been outside the house in which he was born.