Core Choices

Sermon, February 13, 2000

Text: Exodus 20:13,14; 32:19-25; Mark 1:40-45

As we continue with our look at the Ten Commandments, I want to reiterate part of why we are doing so. Contrary to what some may have believed over the years in the Christian community of faith, Jesus did not eliminate the place of the commandments in the believer's life when He ushered in the era of God's grace and redemption. Granted, the commandments are no longer the way of salvation, as the Jews thought they were, but the commandments of God still provide the Lord's design for life, the way in which we can find contentment and joy, and we do well to attend to them. Coming to Christ and receiving His free gift of grace is necessary, it is vital; in fact, it is a fundamental duty of the church's work and ministry to call people to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. However, it should not and must not end there...choosing Christ and choosing the way of Christ is something we must do ten, twenty, thirty, a thousand times a day. Accepting the God's grace in Christ should not and must not lead to a life of doing anything we like, living our lives willy-nilly, and asking forgiveness later. Yes, there is grace; yes, we are forgiven; yes, Jesus is our Savior. He is also our Lord. When we come to Christ and make Him our Lord, it means that we are willing to submit to Him, we are choosing to follow God's direction again and again and again. And these Ten Commandments are an excellent roadmap to get us on the godly path we are to take.

Again, the commandments are no longer the way of salvation, but the commandments still provide the Lord's design for life, and I believe they also provide an excellent road-map pointing TO the way of salvation. I will only make a brief reference to that story in the Gospel reading from Mark this morning: The leper here experiences a miracle of healing; he is cleansed of his disease by our Lord and, against Jesus' admonition, runs around and tells everyone about it. Soon so many people were coming to see Jesus that he had to retreat to lonely places, and still the crowds pressed to see him. This may be stretching the point, but I believe there is a principle here to be observed: There are few things that attract people to Jesus Christ more than a life that has been genuinely and visibly cleansed by the Savior! Those who visibly demonstrate their moral, emotional and physical cleansing, those who live clean lives, draw attention; and that is especially true in a culture that is growing increasingly vulgar, corrupt and stained. Again, clean leaving isn't the way to salvation, but it certainly points TO the way of salvation...which is found in Jesus Christ. Our cleansed lives can draw others to the Savior; conversely, I would venture to say that few things repel people from Jesus Christ, the Way of salvation, more than the hypocritical, morally loose, and/or corrupt living of some who profess to follow Him...but that's another sermon. (Reminds me of the church bulletin board I read about this past week: "Hypocrite -- someone who's just not himself on Sundays.")

Now, in reference to my extra reading from Exodus. As explained, Moses had been up on Mt. Sinai for a very long time receiving the laws of God and having a wonderfully intimate and inspiring encounter with God. But down below, in the desert, the people were having anything but a revival. They were growing very tired of waiting, waiting, waiting for the promises of God to be fulfilled. They had legitimate concerns: they were worried about food and water and the fact that they were a very long way from the Promised Land; also, neither God nor Moses was anywhere to be seen. So they turned to the priest Aaron, Moses' brother, and asked him to come up with a new god for them. You know the story. One of the more humorous lines of the Bible is in Exodus 32: After Moses confronts Aaron and says, in so many words, "What's going on?!" his brother replies in verse 22: "Do not be angry, my lord, you know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, 'Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.' So I told them, 'Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.' Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!" This is not in the text, but can't you almost hear Aaron adding, "Shazaam! Where'd that come from?"

In his excellent devotional entitled Grace and Peace, Dr. Craig Barnes makes the observation that "...the priest Aaron's great failure was not just that he made the gold calf for the people, but that he never learned how to help them worship the true God they did not fully understand." He never learned how to help them to wait for God's good timing. "Instead, he assumed it was his job to give the people what they wanted, he assumed it was his job to take away their anxieties, he assumed it was his job to meet their needs. Maybe he really cared about them and just wanted them to be happy. The Aaron school of compassion is alive and well in our churches today, but it works no better for us than it did for him. Our mission is not to be the Savior, our mission is to draw people to the only God whose hope often seems to be delayed. Only then can we help people discover faith." He went on to add that perhaps the greatest danger to the faith of those around you is your ability to fix their problems...in the short run.

Again, Aaron's great failure was not just that he made the gold calf for the people, but that he never learned how to help them worship the true God they did not fully understand. He never learned how to help them to wait for God's good timing. He never set a proper example for them. He chose to not help them better understand and obey God's good laws. Instead, he assumed it was his job to give the people what they wanted, he assumed it was his job to take away their anxieties, he assumed it was his job to meet their needs, and as he did so he simply cast aside the first Commandments, especially the first three...thus leading the people further away from their only sure hope of salvation and deliverance. Observance of God's law leads to God; God is the One...the only One...who can ultimately save. As mentioned last December, our mission is to witness to the Light of Jesus Christ. I am convinced that we as parents, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, teachers, friends, pastors, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers best do that by making darn certain we keep walking in the light ourselves, by holding fast to the good, by avoiding every kind of evil, by making every effort to live as God would have us live, by making every effort to consistently and constantly and deliberately choose what is right again and again. Again, few things attract people to Jesus Christ, the Way of salvation, more than a life that has been cleansed. Clean leaving isn't the way to salvation, but it certainly points the way to the Savior...and the Savior is the only One who will ultimately save and salvage our lives and the lives of those we love.

Speaking of choices... I deliberately "chose" the word "choose" just now. I think few words have been more politicized, propagandized and, frankly, bastardized than the word, "Choice." Choice is not a moral good in and of itself; that is an illegitimate rendering of the meaning of that word. Choice can be wholesome and desirable; choice can also be mischievous and destructive...it all depends on what is chosen. Consider, for example, that "choice" can erode commitment and shirk duty. Perhaps it's no accident that the Greek word for choice is "Haeresis;" we get our word heresy from it. The essence of heresy is wrong choice. An excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity about choice:

The choices we make do matter. They affect the very core of who we are ... "Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other..." and it behooves us to make proper choices in the light of God's good law. I pointed out before that we have made a somewhat artificial distinction between the natural laws of physics and ethical laws of morality; but I believe the Bible teaches that ALL of God's laws are natural laws. God's moral laws are natural laws built into the very warp and woof of His created order. And these laws are still in effect...no matter what popular media may glorify and/or sanction. We violate the bounds of these gracious laws, and we suffer destructive consequences. As it is with the law of gravity, we suffer painful consequences when we violate these laws. No amount of human opinion will change that. God's moral laws are as much a part of His created order as is the natural law of gravity. No one "gets away" with anything. As we make our choices, we are changing that inner core of who we are into something more glorious, or something more hideous.

As we continue in our look at the commandments in the weeks to come, and especially as we review the commands most pertaining to Love and Life, I would like to clarify another word that has become somewhat corrupted in our time, and that is the world, "natural." How should one define "natural?" The Scriptures tell of our sin-corrupted Human Nature and its usual tendency to run counter to our higher, nobler, spiritual nature. It seems to be "human nature" to want to do sinful things. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is "natural" to sin! If we really believe that God is the Creator and that nature is as He created it, then what is natural is that which corresponds with nature, i.e., the way things were created. Properly speaking, that which is "unnatural" is that which runs counter to nature, no matter how many people are "doing" it. We may refer to our tendency to sin as "only natural," but we must understand that human nature as it is isn't "natural." Human nature is corrupted, and it often desires to run counter to it's proper design, the natural design of God's created order, His original Design. Don't mix up the words "natural" and "normal." What may be "normal" (the "norm") amongst a majority of people is not always what is natural, i.e. right. God designed us. He created us. He loves us, and He knows our limits and our aspirations. He wants the best for us, and these Commandments are designed with that in mind, and we need to make our choices accordingly.