The Lowercase "L" Law

* I want to start with an odd portion of Scripture to start our time with today.

* You know, I’ve met a lot of people who if it wasn’t for the God of the Old Testament, Christianity would be a good idea.

* They’re really cool with Jesus. He seems like a really loving guy.

* But the God of the Old Testament seems really angry and really fickle and really harsh.

* The God of the Old Testament seems like a really hard god to figure out.

* I mean, there are the great stories right?

* Noah & the Ark, Jonah and the Whale, Moses and the Red Sea

* But for all of those awesome stories, there are others that make God seem as kind of a harsh god.

* Let’s look into the book of 1 Chronicles this morning to see one of these stories.

* Turn in your Bibles to 1 Chronicles 13.

* Let me set this up for you:

* David is King of Israel and one of the things he wants to do is bring the Ark of the Covenant back to its rightful place in Jerusalem.

* 1 Chronicles 13:1-10 - "David conferred with each of his officers, the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds. He then said to the whole assembly of Israel, “If it seems good to you and if it is the will of the Lord our God, let us send word far and wide to the rest of our people throughout the territories of Israel, and also to the priests and Levites who are with them in their towns and pasturelands, to come and join us. Let us bring the ark of our God back to us, for we did not inquire of it during the reign of Saul.” The whole assembly agreed to do this, because it seemed right to all the people. So David assembled all Israel, from the Shihor River in Egypt to Lebo Hamath, to bring the ark of God from Kiriath Jearim. David and all Israel went to Baalah of Judah (Kiriath Jearim) to bring up from there the ark of God the Lord, who is enthroned between the cherubim —the ark that is called by the Name. They moved the ark of God from Abinadab’s house on a new cart, with Uzzah and Ahio guiding it. David and all the Israelites were celebrating with all their might before God, with songs and with harps, lyres, timbrels, cymbals and trumpets. When they came to the threshing floor of Kidon, Uzzah reached out his hand to steady the ark, because the oxen stumbled. The Lord ’s anger burned against Uzzah, and he struck him down because he had put his hand on the ark. So he died there before God. Then David was angry because the Lord ’s wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.

* We have a hard time with this type of story don’t we?

* We say things like, “C’mon God, Uzzah was just trying to help out!"

* These stories really stick out to us, don’t they?

* I think they especially stick out because of the culture you and I live in.

* We live in a culture of optimism.

* We live in a culture where people project themselves on social media has beautiful, successful, and most of all happy.

* We live in a culture that vehemently despises anyone telling them what is right and what is wrong.

* And that’s why the God of the Old Testament comes off as offensive.

* I think we portray optimism as a culture for two reasons.

* One, I think we whole-heartedly believe that our future is going to be bright and fabulous either because of the decisions we make now or in despite of them.

* If I can lose 25 lbs, then I will be hot and sexy and then I will get a hot girlfriend and my life will be made.

* Or, I am young now and I have plenty of time to write a best-seller, make it into the NBA, or become the next Taylor Swift.

* We have been told from our very beginning to just believe in yourself and everything will work out.

* But, no amount in believing in ourselves keeps us safe from what we are powerless against.

* The second reason we portray optimism is that we believe that we are in control of our own lives.

* I remember being 16 and the thing with being 16 is that you are getting the first sense of independence in your whole life.

* Man, when you get wheels - life is an open road.

* Then, when you’re 18 - graduating from high school and heading off into the wild blue yonder - you can become anything you want to be if you just go to college and study it.

* But, the downside with being 16 and being 18 is that you have a warped belief that you are in control of your own life.

* Just like Uzzah.

* His story, just like ours, is about the myth of control, the kind of control that the righteous God declares we do not possess.

* And that’s why we are going to talk about what we are going to talk about this week.

* Because even in this so called culture of optimism, we have an impossible time keeping it up.

* We lose the illusion of control and we fall short.

* Where I want to start this morning is to tell you about where we are headed for the week.

* We will be studying our way through the most essential doctrine of Christianity, the main theological center of the Bible, the study of Law & Gospel.

* The Law, for Martin Luther, brings humankind face-to-face with its own death sentence.

* And Gospel, the Good News, that there is One who rewrote the name on your death sentence with His own.

* By the end of this series, I am hoping that you have been driven to your knees because of the absolute unwavering nature of the Law and that you have been made alive again because of the most incredible work of Christ, amazing Grace.

* But before we can talk about Grace, we must talk about the Law, but before we talk about the Law, I want to tell you a story.

* I want to tell you the story about a guy named Marty.

* Now, Marty was a pretty good kid who had incredibly overachieving parents.

* His dad was a lawyer and his mom was a doctor.

* They both had attended Ivy League schools, like harvard or yale, and they wanted nothing more than for Marty to also attend one of these schools.

* The problem was that Marty was not a very good student, at least in his parents' eyes.

* They couldn’t understand that! Why can’t Marty just buckle down and be as successful as they are.

* They began to blame that the school was not teaching their son properly and that some of the teachers even had it out for Marty.

* Well, it came time to start thinking about what college Marty would attend but his GPA was a little too low so it all came to what Marty could do on the ACT.

* His parents hired a top-notch ACT tutor and Marty worked his butt off and amazing pulled off a 35 for his ACT.

* Everyone was thrilled! His credentials finally reflected his presumed ability.

* With his ACT score and a few strings his parents could pull, Marty was off to Yale.

* Sounds like a pretty good story right?

* The American dream - work hard and with a little luck you’ll be successful in life.

* Well, what happened next didn’t surprise his college counselor, but Marty found out that Yale was insanely difficult.

* Marty would work twice as hard on his homework than the people around him were and he found that he was doing homework up to 10 hours a day.

* He pretended everything was alright with his folks but limped along for two years before having a mental breakdown and dropping out of Harvard.

* He just couldn’t keep it up any longer.

* Marty moved back home with his folks for a year and worked and then enrolled in a nearby community college.

* He knew he would never become a doctor or work on Wall Street or go to law school and he’s learned to be ok with that.

* His parents however, are still coming around on what happened.

* Now, lets process through this story.

* What was Marty feeling pressure to do? Go to Ivy League school

* Who was Marty feeling pressure from? his parents

* Why was Marty feeling pressure? pressure to succeed and not let down his parents

* Do you ever feel pressure to be a certain way or act a certain way or to be successful at something?

* Yeah, we all do.

* How many of you have ever seen the Ten Commandments posted up on a church wall or something like that before?

* Yeah, thats for a good reason.

* The 10 Commandments is the center of our moral law.

* Next week we are going to talk about God’s big “L” law but today I want to talk about all of the laws and rules we feel in everyday life.

* We all feel the pressure to be successful at what we do and to be good people or to look a certain way.

* We call these little “L” laws - these rules or expectations we have that produce pressure or guilt or feelings of failure.

* What are some laws - be it legal laws or school rules - that you obey on a regular basis?

* What are the benefits of obeying these laws?

* What are the consequences of disobeying these laws?

* Now, are there any unspoken laws that you obey on a regular basis?

* These ones tend to actually be more prevalent in our lives but harder to notice.

* For example, my wife and I felt the pressure of one of these laws a few years ago.

* In our neighborhood back in Minot, we had a lot of houses that have pretty flowers out in front of them and their lawns are always really green and lush and mowed perfectly.

* So what am I supposed to do as a homeowner?

* Yeah, I need to make sure my lawn looks good too.

* So, Brittany and I decided we had to go buy some flowers so that our house wouldn’t look so crappy so we went to Home Depot and bought 6 hostas which are like these little green leafy bush things and we planted them and stepped back and looked and it was a like a sea of dirt with like these little plants sticking up. It looked pathetic.

* But we had to follow that unspoken law of if you don’t put time into your lawn your neighbors will think poorly of you and everyone driving by your house will think your a schlub and like your cable company will cut off the HGTV channel because clearly you don’t watch it anyways.

* Are there laws you break on a regular basis?

* I am guessing everyone in here of driving age probably speed on a regular basis?

* I have to confess, the one I break all the time is texting and driving. I know! It’s horrible! but when that thing dings it is like so hard to not just take a quick peek at it!

* Now, I imagine there are some little “L” laws that are easier to keep than others, right?

* Like, we have a unspoken rule in my family - Nick gets the biggest piece of dessert. Hard to believe, but I find that rule to be pretty easy to follow!

* But, then there are some rules that are way harder to follow.

* When I was a college student, I went to a little Lutheran school up in Plymouth in the Cities that was on a lake.

* And at this school, they had a rule that curfew was 10:00 on weeknights.Everyone had to be in the dorms by then or you would get penalized.

* At the time, I was dating a girl who would later become my wife and she attended a school that was an hour away on the border of Wisconsin.

* One evening, I was hanging out at her place when I realized it was 9:15!!! I had 45 minutes to get back to school!

* So, I hopped in my little green Ford Focus station wagon, because I drive cool cars, and began to speed all the way back to school.

* I was cruising along, making pretty good time but it was getting close.

* It was 9:58 and I was a mile away from campus.

* Now, I had 2 choices. I COULD take the main street and have to stop at 2 stop signs or I could take Lovers Lane which had no stop signs.

* Now, we called it Lovers Lane because if you had a sweetheart or wanted someone to become your sweetheart, you would walk this little side street that wrapped around the lake.

* So, I chose to take Lovers Lane.

* I was doing like 40 down Lovers Lane when all of a sudden, I hit a raised manhole cover where they had been doing some road construction but the lip of the manhole cover was raised like this much.

* I hit that lip so hard, it literally popped both tires on the right side of my car like balloons.

* Needless to say, I was very late for curfew that night!

* Think about all these laws we’ve just mentioned. It seems like that there are rules and regulations and little “L” laws for every area of our lives that we need to be obedient to. Why do you think that is?

* You see, we can begin to understand our relationship to God’s law when we first begin to see how our lives are governed by all the little “L” laws because God’s law and these little “L” laws both feel the same.

* For example, every commercial on TV tells me that I need to drop some weight and look like a chiseled Olympic weightlifter and if I just buy this product, I can make that happen.

* But when I look in the mirror, I see that I’m not a chiseled Olympic weightlifter and probably never will be and I feel guilty for eating too many doughnuts and not going to the gym enough.

* It works that way because I can see the results and I feel like I have control.

* Does anyone here wear a Fitbit?

* The reason why a Fitbit is attractive is that it turns our physical performance into quantifiable data which gives us the illusion of control.

* And in this illusion of control, it is far easier for us to find out where we stand and if we’re better than the people around us

* This is the false promise of the Law which demands perfect adherence but cannot inspire it and may in fact produce worse results.

* It’s the reason why most Fitbits end up in the sock drawer after a few months.

* A few years ago, when I was living in Minneapolis, I would have these monthly meetings with different pastors and church planters at a thai restaurant. We would sit in a big circle at this restaurant and talk about important pastor stuff but I would notice that all these super cool guys had really cool leather boots and I didn’t. Every month, I would look at their boots and tell myself, “If I want to be a ‘cool’ pastor, I need to have ‘cool’ leather boots.”

* But have you ever tried buying “cool” leather boots? They’re like $300!

* Then I was in Target and I found a pair of cheap leather boots for like $25. Perfect. These guys would never know!

* So I bought them and proudly wore them to our next “cool” pastor meeting.

* But the whole time I was sitting there, I looked at everyone else’s boots and they still looked way cooler than mine would ever look.

* You see, I felt the pressure to live up to an unspoken law that I was never going to succeed at.

* It actually brought a feeling of death because I was never going to be the “cool” pastor because I couldn’t afford the cool boots.

* The dream to be the “cool” pastor had to die because there was no chance of it becoming a reality.

* You see, we try to follow all of the little “L” laws in life because if we succeed at following all of them, then we feel like we are in control of our own destinies.

* If we can just follow the rules, then I will be successful and people will think highly of me and I will have a great job and make a lot of money and life will be good.

* Now, are little “L” laws all bad?

* No, a lot of them are meant to be helpful in your life.

* We have a little “L” law called stop at the red traffic sign that says stop.

* Why? So you won’t get crunched by oncoming traffic! That’s a good thing.

* But the thing with little L laws, is that a lot of them don’t deliver what they promise.

* Like the commercial telling me to work out and take the pill to become a chiseled Olympic weightlifter, its probably never going to happen for me.

* At best, I might get like a dad bod.

* So, we end up failing at laws we so desperately want to follow that are not going to make us any better in the long run anyways.

* Remember when we talked about this culture of optimism?

* I want to end today saying one more thing about that.

* The culture of optimism we are all apart of tells us that we are better people than the way the Bible talks about us.

* And this view has warped our sense of ourselves.

* I am sorry to have to burst your bubble, but you probably are not as good of a person as you think you are.

* I have a saying that you will hear me say over and over and over again.

* “I am a dirty, rotten, broken sinner."

* Can you say that with me?

* “I am a dirty, rotten, broken sinner."

* We have to be reminded of that constantly lest we begin to believe in our own hype that we are genuinely good people.

* But there is hope my friends, because there is a solution. There is an answer. His name is Jesus. And in the weeks ahead, we are going to dig more and more into who he is and what he has done for us but just know, there is hope for us and it is found in Christ alone.

After thought:

* Remember, you are worse off than you can possibly know but Grace is more powerful than you can even imagine.

#sermons/warmbeach #lawandgospel