Losing Our Loose Canon Tendencies

Matthew 15:10-20

On Saturday, June 22, 2002, the scheduled game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field was cancelled because of an eerie discovery. The Card’s ace pitcher was found dead in a Chicago hotel room. Thirty-three-year-old Darryl Kile, who wore number 57, had been a major league pitching sensation for 12 years and had appeared in three All-Star games.

At a recent team physical, the 6-foot 5-inch athlete seemed in excellent health. When the medical examiners conducted an autopsy later that day, they discovered that Kile had died from a massive heart attack. His main coronary artery was 90 percent blocked.
Darryl Kile appeared to be healthy, but his heart was diseased.

Many of us here appear healthy. For the most part we can keep it together. Most of the time we can appear happy, well-adjusted, and in control. We can even appear quite spiritual and in tune with God … most of the time.

Inevitably, though, it happens. Those circumstances come along that cause us to react in inappropriate ways. We blow out tops. We lose our cool. Unexpected words escape our lips. We speak in anger. We lie in fear. We criticize and judge. Sometimes these circumstances trigger bad actions. We become destructive or abusive or run away into isolation or escape. Then there are the thoughts of envy, jealousy, hatred, fear, anger, lust.

How do you explain that? One explanation is that the human heart is utterly diseased by sin. We can pretend for a while, but who we really are beneath the surface eventually comes out. That line of reasoning works for a large portion of humanity, but how do you explain a genuine follower of Christ lapsing into such things? After all, the Bible says that those who’ve placed their faith in Jesus have been given new hearts. They are, at their core, good. They are holy and righteous. The Bible calls them saints. In fact, God’s Spirit resides within them. So what’s up?

To use a common phrase these genuine Christians are “loose cannons.” It comes from when ships had cannons which became loose and would fire and spin, blowing things up that they were put there to protect. Being a loose cannon humanly means acting crazy or out of character. For believers it is not acting or speaking in alignment with their recreated heart. Their heart is no longer diseased by sin, but God’s truth hasn’t yet been internalized. They know how God views them intellectually, but that knowledge hasn’t become a reality internally. As a result they’re loose cannons, acting out of character.

This morning I’m going to show you how to reprogram yourself internally. Once you do this your responses to different circumstances will increasingly be in line with your good heart. You will begin living out God’s will in all your reactions to life.

The process that we’re going to use is called “The Trip-In” and it was developed by Robert S. McGee in his book, The Search for Significance. Here are the STAGES OF THE “TRIP-IN” The first stage is a reality check. This may actually be the hardest one to come to grips with because we lose the power of justifying ourselves.

1. Cease blaming situations or people for your responses.

To get our hearts and responses in line with God’s truth about us we must courageously stop blaming our spouses for our moods. Our children and their irritations must not take the blame for our angry outbursts. Heavy traffic, high prices, taxes, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, incompetent co-workers, overbearing bosses, a bad pastor whatever excuses we may use – we must stop blaming for our responses.

I know of a man who lost his wife and three children because of an adulterous lifestyle. He had all sorts of excuses. He blamed the Nicorette patch that he was wearing for weakening his defenses. He blamed the beer that he drank. He blamed the woman who invited him to her motel room. It wasn’t the situation, or the woman, it was the lie in his heart. You see, what’s on the inside has a way of coming out.

The next time you become upset and blame someone for your response, think about your tube of toothpaste. This morning you squeezed your toothpaste tube, and out of it came toothpaste. The reason the toothpaste came out is because that is what is in the tube. Someone may have squeezed you once, and out of you may have come responses that were really ungodly, maybe even embarrassing. You blame another for your responses, but you have to understand that what came out of you is what was in you. Often, God allows us to undergo troubling circumstances so that we can really see what is inside of us.

Jesus made a similar argument with the people of his day. They mistakenly believed that things on the outside (situations and people) made them spiritually unclean. He corrected their view Matthew 15:10-11 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’” (NIV)

Cease blaming those situations and people that you think make you act and speak and think in ungodly ways. Your responses reveal what really going on inside you. It can be pretty ugly, can’t it?

Here’s the good news, God wants to use your sinful responses to get you to look inside. If you’ve never come to him by faith, he wants you to see the depth of your sin and turn to him. If you are one of his children by faith, he’s sending those unpleasant situations and people to point you to some internal reprogramming that needs to happen.

2. Depend on the Holy Spirit to reveal the source of your negative emotions, destructive thoughts, and damaging behaviors.

He doesn’t want you to feel bad about yourself, but to find healing for whatever is wrong on the inside. Again, let’s look at what Jesus had to say about this. Matthew 15:16-20 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him ‘unclean.’” (NIV)

The way you feel, think, and act are indicators of what’s in your heart. Negative emotions (like anger, sadness, and fear), destructive thoughts, and damaging behaviors are symptoms of a deeper problem.

Has anyone here ever had a fever? When your body temperature goes up it’s an indication that something’s wrong on the inside. Sometimes you can simply treat the fever and your body kills off the infection that’s causing it. Other times you have to medically treat the source of the infection before the symptom of the fever goes away.

If we’re submitted to the guidance of God’s Spirit, he will begin pointing out certain behaviors and words and thoughts that are out of character for a follower of Christ. If we’ll pay attention when he points them out, we can trace them back to their source in our hearts. Let me give you an example from The Search for Significance

…Mary and Bill meet someone who is a critical, demeaning person who puts down everyone. Mary encounters this person and responds by feeling awful about herself. The meeting triggers all those negative messages she is carrying around inside. Bill meets the same person and walks away with the thought, What a miserable, angry person. I wonder what’s wrong with him. Mary wonders what is wrong with herself; Bill wonders what is wrong with the other person. What is the difference? It is that the situation (meeting this angry, mean person) has triggered long-held beliefs in Mary’s mind that she is not a valuable person, that she should be rejected, and that she only gains value if she can get everyone to value her. Bill sees the reality of the situation.

We must come to the place where we realize God is trying to tell us something through our negative emotions, destructive thoughts, and damaging behavior. Your response to every situation and person you encounter is filtered through your beliefs. You see life through the lens of your beliefs. If the beliefs in your heart are true, your responses will be good and godly. If there are some false beliefs swimming around in your heart you’ll act on them given the right circumstances. With God’s help you’ve got to trace those negative emotions, destructive thoughts, and damaging behaviors to the false belief that generating them. stage three:

3. Root out the false beliefs underlying your responses.

Jesus spent a great deal of his ministry simply helping people see the error in some of their beliefs. He knew that wholeness and godly living was dependant on identifying and rooting out false beliefs. Speaking figuratively, he advised: Matthew 15:13, He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

Physicists tell us that nature abhors a vacuum. This doesn’t mean that Bambi hates Electrolux or Hoover. The natural world tends to fill empty places with something. Spiritually speaking, we must fill the void to the rooted out false belief with something else.

David Seamands tells the story of the alchemist who sold villagers a special powder that he claimed would turn water into gold provided that when they mixed it, they never thought of red monkeys. Well, of course, no one ever got the gold, because you can’t tell yourself to stop thinking about red monkeys or you’ll just keep thinking about red monkeys. It doesn’t work to say, "Well, I’m just not going to think about those things. I’m going to put all of that out of my mind." So often I see Christian brothers and sisters trying to do that.

4. Replace the lie with God’s truth.

As Operation Iraqi Freedom raged, Mohammed al-Sahhaf, Iraq’s Minister of Information, daily refuted clear evidence that Iraq was losing the war. On April 6, after coalition forces seized Baghdad’s Saddam Airport, renamed it Baghdad International Airport, started flying planes in, and ventured into Baghdad itself, the Miami Herald quoted al-Sahhaf saying, "We butchered the force present at the airport." On April 7, after U.S. troops penetrated central Baghdad and stormed Saddam’s Republican Palace, the Washington Post quoted al-Sahhaf saying, "There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all.… We besieged them, and we killed most of them."

The media began to call him “Baghdad Bob”, becausehis efforts to explain away coalition victories as illusions were comical. In the same way, our spiritual enemy is already defeated at the cross of Christ, yet he continues to lie, insult, and condemn the saints.

As a follower of Jesus Christ, God has pronounced certain truths about you but you have an enemy who is a propaganda master. He’s had thousands fo years to perfect his art. Your enemy, the devil, wants you to believe his lies so that he can render you useless. As a person of faith you can no longer be dragged to a Christ-less eternity with him in hell, but he can and will thwart God’s purpose for your life by getting you to accept his lies and reject God’s truth. This is part of the battle we fight. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 says, Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (NIV)

The strongholds of the enemy are the lies we believe. They are in direct opposition to the truths we’ve learned about our identity in Christ.

Satan says, I must meet certain standards to feel good about myself. Those who fail (including myself) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished. I must be approved by certain others to feel good about myself. I am what I am. I cannot change. I am hopeless.

Let me remind you how God sees you. If you can internalize these truths you counteract the lies of the enemy and destroy his strongholds in your life: I am completely forgiven and fully pleasing to God. -- I am deeply loved by God. -- I am totally accepted by God. -- I am a new creation, complete in Christ.

The Trip-in works like this: I stop blaming people and situations for my responses. I allow the Holy Spirit to show me my inappropriate emotions, thoughts and behaviors and point me to the false belief that’s the source. Generally, those false beliefs will be in opposition to at least one the four affirms we just talked about. With God’s help, I root out the false belief and replace it with God’s truth. I meditate on and reaffirm my identity in Christ. The false belief is replaced and my ungodly responses transform into holy living. This is one way of understanding Romans 12:2: Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. (NIV)

Replacing the lies of the enemy with God’s truth means not only meditating on those four affirmations of our identity, but also, and especially, meditation deeply on God’s word in the Bible. Just look at the results of replacing the lies of Satan with God’s truth.

Psalm 1:1-3 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. (NRSV)

You don’t need an Extreme Makeover to feel good about yourself. Just begin seeing yourself through God’s eyes. Don’t stop with yourself. Begin affirming your kids: “You completely forgiven and fully pleasing to God. You are deeply loved by God. You are totally accepted by God. You are a new creation, complete in Christ.” Tell them and live it out as well. Affirm your Christian brothers and sisters with these truths.

If we could begin seeing ourselves as God see us, the world would begin seeing God through us.

Search For Significance, Robert S. McGee Thomas Nelson Pub., 1998