Remember!, Part 2

Materialism.

Add that to your color palette. Materialism, this word, covetousness, Paul is effectively saying, is enslaving us to want more. It thinks about it, it dreams about it, it fantasizes about it, it lusts after it, it lives for it, it needs more money for it, whatever it is, I want that shade and that shade and that shade and that shade and I want that color and that color and that color and that color. I want it all. I want it all.

I'm never satisfied because there's another color. I want that one too. One of the ways that Christians demonstrate the power of the Gospel is by living lives of gratitude. When God saves us, he calls us to live a distinct lifestyle. Stephen Davey refers to that lifestyle as remarkable Christianity and that's the name of our current series. In today's lesson, Stephen continues teaching what remarkable Christianity looks like in a lesson called Remember.

Imagine where you would be today if Jesus hadn't reached down to save you. In today's message, Stephen challenges you to take a step back and really consider who you've become since your conversion. We began this message last time, so we're going to do a little bit of review and then bring you the conclusion. We've watched in recent years legislative bodies begin to weigh in on all kinds of things or passing bans and creating laws on all sorts of activities, major and minor, weighing in where parents should even. Now there are actually legislative bans against things like body piercing on minors, on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, or even laws against junk food machines in the school lunchrooms. We're going to have a law about that. In fact, the lower house in the Texas legislature even devised a ban on overtly suggestive cheerleading for high schools. We've got to put a ban on it. We've got to make a law about that, which I thought was ironic. Texas is trying to ban suggestive cheerleading. What's even more ironic is that they in every state in this union would never think about banning or even discouraging sexual activity after the game. Let's just keep the cheerleaders from suggesting it during the game. Let's put a ban. Let's make a law about that. One author put it perceptively that we just simply have more and more children who are arriving in the classroom without any kind of moral compass.

Their parents didn't have one to begin with to pass along, and lawmakers rightly don't even know where to begin to enforce them. Listen, you cannot watch an argument take place on the floor of a national political party on prime time television on whether or not you should even mention God and then expect the next generation to care about God, much less obey God. Here's the progression. You develop a personal and cultural bias against God, and you will soon develop a personal and cultural belligerence against the boundaries of God, anything that smacks of authority. I am where I am. Don't mess with me.

It's just a little step away from who do you think you are to even suggest that I move. So foolishness becomes disobedience. Bias turns into belligerence, which leads Paul to call what he says here a disobedient spirit, literally a chafing under any kind of moral or ethical authority, and it's going to grow more and more obvious. One report I read recently talked about an incident where 125 Harvard University students were caught collaborating on an exam by way of email. Even though on the exam, printed on it was, and I quote, a violating and no collaboration policy, they could not violate it by talking to each other.

But get this. Many of the students were shocked when they were caught and then charged with cheating. Some of them threatened to sue the school because they didn't know it was cheating, even though it was printed on the examination. One reporter responded tongue in cheek when he wrote, are we meant to assume that students who are smart enough to get into Harvard don't know what cheating is?

Will the school need to offer later a course on why it's a bad idea to pour gasoline on a flaming toaster oven in the dormitory? All these news items and all these reports simply highlight the simple fact that apart from a moral lawgiver, you cannot have moral guidelines. Who's to say what's right or wrong? And we're watching that with such speed taking place. In fact, just this month, just this past month, the country of Brazil became all tangled up. They had passed a month earlier the legality of gay marriage. And now a notary happened to approve a three-way civil union, one man and two women, which is where we're gonna get eventually. She claimed that she hadn't broken any law.

And the trouble is, nobody could argue with her. In fact, she noted that Brazil approved gay marriage. The notary said there's no laws against polygamy. There are no laws on the books, and so since now the definition is flexible, marriage is obviously flexible, why not?

One man, two women. Our culture is being set up for polygamy. That's one of the next hurdles in our belligerence against the standard of God. Why not, though?

Think about it. You dismiss God, one man famously said, and anything's permissible, right? Not folly. Our world is biased in their folly. They are belligerent in their disobedience. Now thirdly, Paul would write, they are blind.

They're blind. He says deceived, spiritually blind, is the idea. You dismiss God, follow your own path, and the Bible tells you ahead of time you're gonna go from bad to worse.

You're gonna go from a little tangle to all tangled up. Why? Because God isn't the only voice out there. He isn't the only voice. In fact, sometimes I feel his is the quietest among them.

Let me tell you about another voice out there. While God will always speak the truth to you, while God will always seek to protect you, while he will always give you guidelines to provide guidance, direction, there's another voice, and that voice has a native tongue, and it isn't the truth. It is lying. He is the father of what?

Lies. John 8, 44. He comes up with that stuff.

It's his native tongue, and he's had thousands of years to practice. From the very beginning lie, he whispered into the ear of Eve. He masquerades, not as a guy with a pitchfork and a tail and horns, but as an angel of what?

Light. 2 Corinthians 11, 14. He deceives the whole world, Revelation 12, 9.

He's a master at it. So the person that says, I'm not gonna listen to the voice of God, guess what? You are now open to listen to the voice of a master deceiver. So the word Paul uses here to describe our fallen condition, deceived, is a word that you could literally translate misled. In our vernacular, you could even use the word duped, duped. Paul warned Timothy that evil men will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. While they got their own scam going, deceiving others, they are deceived. They are duped. 2 Timothy 3, 13.

They look good. They sound religious perhaps. They might even have a collar on or stand behind a pulpit. That's what Paul wrote earlier to Titus to make him alert to those who've actually turned away from the truth and are now upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach. Titus chapter 1, verses 10 and 12. They're teaching things that might uplift the spirit, might please the ear. But they are, Jesus said, blind people, leading blind people. And they're all eventually gonna fall into the same pit. Matthew 5, 14.

The world is rejecting a creator God and is duped in the process. Blinded. So here's the description. Biased, belligerent, blind, and now fourthly bound. He writes in the middle part of verse 3, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures. Enslaved.

Bound. Bound in lusts. The word is epiphymeia, for strong desire. Keep in mind that word refers to that which is only in the mind and the heart. It is the fantasy of the mind. It is the desire of the heart. People then, he says, are enslaved to fantasies. You can be enslaved to something that only takes place in your mind, whether you ever do anything about it or not. You see, Paul would have something to say to our culture today and the popular argument that violent gaming or pornography isn't really all that bad because you're not actually physically involved. It's just a game.

It's just in the mind. Paul would say, no, it all belongs in the same kettle of soup. And more than that, he's writing this to all of us. And here's part of this point. He's saying, look, this is part of our old lives. This represents our old life, not our new life. That that belongs in the pit.

And yes, it wants to crawl out of that pit on every occasion it can create. Car it up. Put all kinds of limitations. Guard your heart. Out of it comes issues of life and death.

Here's the warning. Since we eventually act out fantasies, it begins in the mind and heart and eventually is or can be acted out. Paul then uses the next word. Not just lusts, but pleasures. This is a word of physically acting out sinful desire. The word Paul uses here for pleasure is actually the word hedoni, which gives us our word hedonism.

And that broadens it all. See, hedonism is simply the pursuit of self-satisfaction. And that can be any way, anything, whatever it might be. Hedonism is the number one religion on the planet. It's at the core. It's I, me, and mine. In fact, would you notice he uses the word here before lusts and pleasures, the word various, various.

I don't know how it is in your translation, but it means multicolored, variegated, many colored. You have no idea how many kinds of sins we can come up with. I have no idea. The word for pleasures here, by the way, is not just a reference to some kind of immoral or sexual sin. Paul actually uses it in his letter to Timothy for covetousness.

Oh, man. Materialism. Materialism.

Add that to your color palette. Materialism, this word covetousness, Paul is effectively saying is enslaving us to want more. It thinks about it. It dreams about it. It fantasizes about it. It lusts after it. It lives for it.

It needs more money for it. Whatever it is, I want that shade and that shade and that shade and that shade. No, I want that color and that color and that color and that color. I want it all. I want it all. I'm never satisfied because there's another color. I want that one too.

Oh, I didn't see that shade. See, the world thinks it's free as a bird to think anything, to do anything, to want anything, to pursue anything. And Paul says, no, it's actually enslavement. You are enslaved to what you have, to what you can't have, to what you shouldn't have, to what you don't have. And it spirals downward from there because you never get everything you want. So what happens next? Paul goes on to describe the next step with this loaded phrase.

Verse 3 again. Spending our life in malice and envy. Literally passing the time.

This is the hobby of everyone's life. Passing the time, envying. Driving to work, envying. Coming home, envying. Going to the campus, envying.

Going out to play, envying. See, envy is a key driving factor in what we'll all simply label as bitterness. Bitterness. Look at what they have. Look at what they wear. Look at what they drive. Look at where they live. Look at what they do. Look at their toys.

I didn't even know that existed. I've got to add that one to what I want. Envy is more than that though. Envy, this Greek word, has the feeling of displeasure when you see someone having it. It isn't just I want what they've got. It's I don't like them because they've got it. It's the idea.

Malice is a chilling word that talks about wanting to remove that person, do something to that person so I can have what they have. I'm not going to sit down. I'm not going to take it. I deserve it. I want it. I ought to have it. That's the idea.

Let me give you just a little illustration. This might just be a blip on the radar screen, but I saw it come across the news. Parents in Tennessee, they complained that putting up the honor roll embarrassed the kids who were excluded. So because of the uproar they created, that school literally eliminated the honor roll. The issue was not embarrassment over the kids whose names weren't on the list. Kids whose names weren't on the list don't care.

I was one of them. Big deal. You mean these kids are working so hard to get that? Is that it? Is that the reward? Forget that. It was parents who were envious because their kids weren't on that list. It doesn't just stop with the honor roll. One father was so angry that his daughter had been suspended from the school softball team.

He took an aluminum bat and beat that coach and put him in the hospital. You will not get in my way or in my family's way. Word rage. Where did that come from? Envy.

They took my spot. Malice. I want to run them off the road because of it. My son told us recently he was behind a guy who was moving slowly down the road. I didn't ask him how slowly.

Didn't want to know. When the dotted line appeared, he got around the guy and that guy just came awake. He just came alive. He raced after my son. Zipped around him and immediately slammed on his brakes. The only thing that kept my son from not hitting him was he was able to swerve into the other lane and around him. To which the guy then caught up past him and then my son backed way off.

What's that all about? Infuriated at being passed on the road? A person becomes willing at their own peril to shed blood?

I mean can it really become that malicious? Absolutely. It was envy. It was envy that led the Sanhedrin to the point where they incited the riot who shouted crucify him. Bringing Jesus to Pilate.

Pilate, I love that he says he knew that it was for envy that they delivered him. That's at the core of it. They're following Jesus. They're not following us. We're going to get rid of him. He's taken our spot. That's ours.

So Paul ends the list then where it would naturally progress. Foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy. Now notice, hateful, hating one another.

There you go. It's the bottom of the pit. We just hate everybody. And we're just hateful people.

You could call this bad tempered. People are just at each other's throats. Think about it.

Think about the shallowness of relationships where you work or where you go to school. Think of how quickly the behind the back comments break out when someone's not around. Because maybe they got promoted.

Maybe they got something somebody else wanted. So you could you could outline this text in three steps downward or three concentric circles working outward whichever but the first one is a description of our attitude toward God. Foolish and disobedient or biased and belligerent. Secondly Paul describes our attitude toward ourselves. We think we're smart. We think we're free but we're actually deceived and enslaved. We're actually blind and bound. Then thirdly he describes our attitude toward others.

Malice, envy and hatred. Now we could close our Bibles and we could admit that Paul fully and realistically described the awfulness of our sin in the past but also the depths of our depravity even now. And he has indeed every right to say that this list includes us all for we all came from that pit and our nature gravitates back toward it. But I don't want to end there today. So let me just kind of dip our toe into verse four and one of my favorite words in the English Bible appears. But how bad can it get.

Oh it's bad. But but when the kindness of God our savior and his love for mankind appeared he saved us. You don't come to the end of a list like that and say but he saved us.

You come to the end of a list like that and you say that's why he got rid of us. But he saved us. Kindness and love of God appeared.

The word is epiphany. It appeared a reference to the incarnation. He came not to discard us but to save us biased bad tempered blind belligerent bound bitter and he saved us. This will then in Paul's mind provoke us incentivize us to live for Christ.

Remember the pit. Oh but he saved us. You know in light of that I want to live for him.

I want to love him. And I really ought to love all these people out here because you know what they remind me of me like George Whitefield who watched a man walking toward the gallows who said there but by the grace of God go I see there's no room for pride in that realism it's humility it's compassion it's love. This will provoke an incentive to love Christ back and deliver him and to serve them and to serve others here in the body to serve those in our world as we make him our master and Lord our lives become one gigantic exclamation point of gratitude.

That's why Paul has reminded us of why we can be so thankful and how it changes our lives. I read some time ago about an old man who lived in Florida everybody referred to him as old Ed. Just about every Friday evening he could be seen walking along the beach to his favorite pier carrying a bucket of shrimp wasn't for him one first family one first friends the shrimp. It was that bucket was for the seagulls.

That's an expensive way to get birds around you. But he would walk out to the end of that pier and soon the evening sky would be filled with screeching birds swooping down to catch the shrimp as he threw it into the air and people talked about how old Ed he'd be seen out there and they could tell his lips were moving and they knew he was talking to the birds and he was within minutes the bucket would be empty and old Ed would stand there at the end of the pier and he'd just stare off at them as they flew away and deep in thought and he'd turn and walk home. His full name was Eddie Rickenbacker he'd been a captain in World War II he'd flown a B-17 with a crew of seven other men on one particular mission across the Pacific they actually got lost and the plane ran out of gas. They settled it as smoothly as they could in fact it was smooth enough to allow all of them to survive it and miraculously they made it out of the plane and into their life raft. They lived for weeks he talks about it in his autobiography. They fought the sun they fought the sharks and most of all they fought their hunger as they began to starve to death. Ed remembers and would write about being semi-conscious sitting in that raft his hat pulled down over his eyes when he felt something land on his head it was a seagull. That gull meant food and so as slowly as he could hardly daring to breathe he reached up his hands and he caught it. They made a meal of that bird used the leftovers for bait which allowed them to catch fish. They repeat the cycle and they survived later rescued. Old Ed never forgot nearly every Friday evening for years until he died he'd go to that pier with a bucket full of shrimp and the seagulls would fly overhead and if he got close enough to him you'd know as he threw it into the air what he was saying was thank you.

Thank you. What are those Christians mumbling about? They're talking to God I guess. If the world could get close enough to us might they hear nothing less than our gratitude to God who saved us from ourselves who saved us from the pit who forgave every sin past present and future saved us from a horrible future saved us from a meaningless life all tangled up in ourselves. What an incentive to leave that old life and pursue a new life Paul would effectively say that that's my point get out there and live it and and say it what are you saying Lord we remember thank you Lord we remember thank you thank you. Were it not for the grace of God in our lives we'd be living according to the things on the list we saw today so why don't you do what Stephen just suggested take time to remember and reflect on what your life would be without Christ and then find time to thank him for saving you and for delivering you from the domain of darkness. Stephen's message today is part of a series he's calling remarkable Christianity this lesson is called simply remember we'll continue working through this series in the days ahead in the meantime we'd enjoy hearing from you if you have a comment a question or would like more information you can send an email if you address it to info at wisdomonline.org we have a special place on our website where Stephen answers questions that have come in from listeners like you if you come across a passage that's confusing or encounter a teaching that you need to have clarified Stephen would like to help you in fact you might enjoy going online and looking at what other people have asked it might be that someone had the exact same question as you but anytime you have a question regarding the Bible or the Christian faith send that question to info at wisdomonline.org we'll add it to the collection of course you can use that address if you have a question about our ministry or a comment for us as well thanks for listening to speak with us today dial 866-48-BIBLE then join us next time for more wisdom through the hearts.