A Daunting Direction

If you were thinking that the reading from Romans this morning sounded a little familiar, you would be correct. In fact, it picked up where we left off last week, and with a reiteration of the first verse from last week. As I was preparing for this sermon on Thursday I finally decided to look up The Message version. I find myself doing this regularly because The Message version often puts Scripture into words that we are more familiar with. So I’d to read you our Roman’s reading from The Message.

12-14 That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.

What Is True Freedom?

15–18 So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

19 I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

20–21 As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.

22–23 But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

In my sermon last we I spoke about the “implications of being a Christian”. What that can look like and be like in some more extreme situations. And recognizing that living a life as a follower of Christ isn’t something we can do on our own. I would add that it isn’t something we should even try to do on our own. But rather that it is something that we do fully reliant on the Holy Spirit. And that thankfully each day we die to our sin, our separation from God, and each morning we are raised again in the newness of Christ Jesus.

Well…when I read the first verse of our passage from Romans for today I thought to myself, this is either really important or Paul was flogging a deceased equine (I wanted to make sure that didn’t freak out any of the kiddos with that idiom.) I ended up leaning toward it being really important and kept going. The further I went, the more it made sense.

Let me ask you a question. Have you every been involved in something that was really unhealthy for you but there didn’t seem to be a way out? I would suspect that a lot of people have, and I definitely know that I have. I had a friendship once, many years ago, where the other person demanded unhealthy amounts of my time, tried to control who I spent time with, expected me to answer every call and text they sent me, sent me ugly text messages accusing me of abandoning them when I let the person know that I was no longer making myself available to them all of the time, and behaved in other very unhealthy ways. But it took me slipping into a deep depression to end our friendship. You see, this person had flattered me, telling me that they’d witnessed changes in me that they wanted for themselves and had asked me to be their accountability partner. I told myself that the reason for continuing this friendship was to help this person…that was true on some level. And…well, it also felt good to have someone look at me as a role model. Despite us both being Christians I had not put God at the center of our friendship, I had put my own pride there, and as Paul said, “Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act.” This may be seem like an extreme example to some, but remember that this is only one example.

God desires us to be in relationship with God. It is for this reason, that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. So for me this means that I must keep God at the center of my life, my relationship, my everything. I’ve had jobs that required me to put them before God, and I’m not talking about working on Sunday, but rather jobs that my entire life had to revolve around. Jobs that took up, not only all of my head space, but also all of my heart and soul space, relegated God to an afterthought, drowning out the voice of the Holy Spirit in my life. There are probably a few people out there who can relate to this.

Realistically, putting God at the center of our lives, all on our own simply isn’t possible. What is possible is allowing God to be the center of our lives through the power and movement of the Holy Spirit. It begins with a single step, not an unattainable sky dive. Our Gospel message from the book of Matthew brings this home for us.

“We are intimately linked in this harvest work. Anyone who accepts what you do, accepts me, the One who sent you. Anyone who accepts what I do accepts my Father, who sent me. Accepting a messenger of God is as good as being God’s messenger. Accepting someone’s help is as good as giving someone help. This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.”[i]

As the body of Christ we are intimately linked. The Holy Spirit works through created means, which includes us. Allowing the Holy Spirit to make God the center of our lives will look different for each of us. For some it may look like calling someone they know lives alone, for another it could look like watering flowers or mowing a lawn. There is not one set or right way to love God and one another, so long as God is at the center of that love.

AMEN.