A Bad Man Made Good Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many philosophers have seen a dual nature in mankind, good and evil coexisting, both fighting for ultimate control.

The Bible paints a different picture, one of a basic depravity that can only be remedied by the grace of God through Christ. To learn more, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, today you begin your final message on why good people do bad things. Give us a look ahead into A Bad Man Made Good. Yeah Dave, what I want to do in this message is to show that it is possible for God to take the vilest of sinners who truly believes, as the song goes, this moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

Of course, it's the life of the Apostle Paul and the transformation that God brought about. Very critical. Let me ask our listeners a question. Are you struggling with your emotions one way or another? Are you denying your emotions? The Bible is a book that exposes the fact that we are created with emotions for a reason. And by the way, if you've never read the book of Lamentations recently, read it.

It's Jeremiah's emotions spilling over, weeping over a destroyed city. It's fine to have emotions, but we need to also control them and not be governed by them. You know, I've written a book entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong, and today is the last day we are making this offer available to you.

For a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com.

RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I think that this book will help you put your emotions in proper biblical perspective. And now let us open our hearts and our minds as we consider the transforming power of God, even in the life of great sinners. This past summer, I took time to read the book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Heard about it all my life. Never read it.

Checked it out of the library. Decided to see what Robert Louis Stevenson had to say. The premise of the book is that really man is not one, but two.

There's two of us inside here. On the one hand, there's the intellectual part. That's the Dr. Jekyll, the noble part, the part that can be very generous and kind and caring. On the other hand, there is the Mr. Hyde part of us. That's the dark animal instincts.

That's the selfishness, the lust, the greed. And the problem is that the two of us are chained together and there's nothing that we can do about it. So Mr. Hyde resents all of the control and the restraints that are put upon him by Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Jekyll is grieved and lives in remorse that he so often is influenced by what Mr. Hyde really wants in the depths of his desires. Now, says Stevenson, what would happen if it would be possible to separate the two? Let Dr. Jekyll become a good man, as good as men can become, and let Mr. Hyde become as evil without restraints. In the movie version of the book, Dr. Jekyll is one who is a very kind man and woos and wins a young woman's heart through his kindness and his love. Then he drinks a potion and becomes Mr. Hyde. And so he becomes evil, uncaring, abusive, terrifying to her. Now, we may question whether or not the theology of Robert Louis Stevenson is right in all respects, but he's onto something, is he not? Is it not true that there are these two parts of it? You think of the women who might be able to testify that when they walk down an aisle to marry someone, they were marrying a Dr. Jekyll, kind, loving, and then they woke up on their honeymoon next to Mr. Hyde.

So what would it be like if indeed the restraints were gone? Well, listen to the quote from Oscar Wilde, who won many awards for his writing. This is what he said. He said, the gods have given me almost everything, but I let myself be lured into long spells of senselessness and sensual ease. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search of a new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that little actions of the common day make or unmake character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one someday has to cry aloud from the housetop. I was no longer the captain of my soul and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me.

I ended in horrible disgrace. That's Dr. Jekyll, the good part, but Mr. Hyde, evil, unrestrained. Well, as you know, we've been in a series of messages titled Why Good People Do Bad Things, and it's time to wrap some things up, to put some things in perspective, and then talk about the topic how God changes bad people. Let me give you some of the summary statements that I'd like you to be able to take home with you in terms of why good people do bad things, to kind of put some kind of a summary on this.

First of all, let me say that the premise, essentially, of the topic has been wrong. Why good people do bad things. Jesus made it clear that there is no one good but God. When the young ruler said to him, good master, what must I do to be saved?

He said, why do you call me good? Unless you're calling me God, it's out of place, because there is none good except God. We've all turned from our own way. We've all done our own thing. We have all willfully sinned against God.

You know, there is some medical insurance that you can purchase that does not cover preexisting conditions. Well, you know, the problem is when it comes to sin, all of us have a preexisting condition. We were born into it. We love it by nature. We're under the condemnation of it. And as a result of that, all that we have to do is to follow Mr. Hyde wherever he might lead us. And as a result of that, we can do some very terrible things because there is none who is good.

Let me give you a second reason. As we've emphasized in preceding messages, we are basically rationally, oftentimes, inhibited. We are desire driven. We do what we want to do and we ask the Dr. Jekyll to cover for us, to use his intellect in order to justify what Mr. Hyde wants to do. And therefore, we think to ourselves that if we only knew the truth, we would do it. But the fact is we know the truth and we still don't do it because we're driven by these desires. You know, during the days of the Enlightenment, it was believed that if only we could somehow educate people that morality would be on a new plane.

The fact of the matter is, no matter how much the Dr. Jekyll part of us knows, it is Mr. Hyde who most often gets his way. Thirdly, we deal with our unmet needs in idolatrous ways. We deal with these unmet needs in idolatrous ways. Instead of fleeing to God, and that's why we preached on shame and anger and addictions is a part of this series because there is something within us that says that when we have this need, I want to meet it and we don't go to God. And rather than bringing our desires in line with what God requires, what we do is we shape a God who is in line with the desires that we want to have. And so we warp the truth and we seek fulfillment in all the different places where it cannot possibly be. And as a result, we begin to do some very bad and possibly even evil things.

Let me give you a fourth reason. We trust our ability to control sin. We trust our ability to control sin. We say to ourselves, I know where I can stop. I know where it is possible for me to do X, Y, and Z.

And then at the end of the day, I will know how to make sure that I put a little box around it. But God does not allow us to do that, as we learned last week. God is a God who begins to move in and he begins to give us that light and begins to make us uncomfortable.

But we think that we've been able to pull it off in the recesses of our mind, in those secret chambers we can do as we please and not even God is allowed to enter. When we think of moral failure or spiritual failure, we usually think of a blowout, don't we? We say this man was going along the road so well and then suddenly everything went wrong. Maybe it wasn't sudden. It is generally said that when a tire blows up, it's because there have been cracks in that tire all the way along the line and now suddenly the separation begins to take place and the blowout occurs.

But actually there were signs way back when that the tire was beginning to fall apart. Number of years ago I spent a half an hour with Richard Dortch. Many of you will remember him.

If you remember back to the early 80s, back that far, he was one of the workers with Jim at the PTL Club, Jim and Tammy Baker, you'll remember the story. And Dortch was on TV with them, defending them and so forth and eventually went into prison and wrote a book entitled Integrity, What It Is and How I Lost It. It's an intriguing book. It's a good book because if there's anyone who came clean, it was Dortch.

He confessed his sins to anyone who would listen because he so desired to be right with God. But I remember what he said. He said it is almost impossible to get by telling only one lie.

Almost impossible because you begin to tell one and then you have to tell another to cover the one that you told and on and on it goes. And what the devil wants us to do is to make such a heavy investment in the direction of our lives, in the sinful direction of our lives that we will not be able to pull back because we've invested too much and we can't go back without paying a tremendous price as we emphasized last week. Let me give you another reason. It's a final reason.

It's a fifth reason and I have to explain it before I give you the bottom line. We as human beings, we don't, we aren't changed necessarily because we see the light. We can be talked to, it can be explained to us, we can even agree that yes it's right, but if our heart isn't where it's supposed to be, all the truth in the world is simply shunted aside.

It is like water off a duck's back. And what we learned last week is that the Holy Spirit of God has to move in and make us so uncomfortable, make us so desirous of God's blessing that finally we cry up in our misery and say God do whatever you have to do. So what I want to say to you today is that people don't change just because they've seen the light. They only change when they've felt the heat. Unless the Spirit of God urges them, unless they are exposed, they just keep on going.

They sit and they listen to messages and they maybe even read their Bibles on occasion, but there is no transformation because the desire is not there. When I was pastor of another church, I remember a couple who brought their teenage son to me and the boy was really messed up into drugs and immorality and the whole schmear and he didn't want to come and see me, obviously, but the parents insisted so here he is. Now he comes into the office and in effect says, okay, here I am, fix me. I'm sorry, I can't fix you.

I can't fix you. So the question today is how is a bad man made good? Immanuel Kant, who did so much damage to the Christian faith as a philosopher in Germany, brought up in a pietistic home, did, however, ask a question that is important. He said, how can a man who by nature is evil become good?

Well, that's our topic today. The Bible says in the book of Jeremiah, can a leopard change his spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to evil. Because people are accustomed to evil, they oftentimes die evil. I wish I could tell you there are all kinds of people out there who are evil, but they're going to die good.

No, they aren't. Some are, and we're going to talk about how that happens, but many of them are going to die in their sins. How can you do good to those of you who are accustomed to evil? There's something else about that verse, however, and that is this, that if there's going to be a transformation that has to come from outside of the human personality. You know, the New Age movement always says that what you need to do is to look within and pull yourself up by your boot straps and yes, indeed, God helps those who help themselves.

And so what you do is you try to somehow bring about these changes by all of the enlightenment that you have. It will not work. The leopard cannot change his spots.

It can't be done. The leopard can't wake up in the morning and say, I want a lion's skin because a lion has no spots. So today I'm going to change my spots. Spots be gone.

The spots are still there. No matter how optimistic, no matter how much he believes in himself, no matter how confident he is that if he just has the right amount of information and the power of positive thinking, the little engine that said, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. He can't change himself.

My dear friend, if you want a fundamental change, it has to be a God thing. Now it's true that mankind can change some things. Sometimes they change behavior. There are people who overcome alcoholism. There are people who are in prison.

They get out and they no longer go back into prison because they live a different lifestyle. That is true. There is such a thing as behavioral modification. But my friend today, when it comes to spots and I take those to be the stain of sin, only God can take those away. And when it comes to the human nature as we're going to see in a moment, only God can change it and implant within us a new desires and a new heart. I will take out the heart of stone, God says, and I'll give you a heart of flesh.

That is a God thing. Now to illustrate this, I want us to look at the conversion of the Apostle Paul. Take your Bibles and turn to 1 Timothy chapter 1.

1 Timothy chapter 1. You will recall that the Apostle Paul was on a mission to exterminate the Christian church. And he wanted to do that because there was a fundamental problem he had with accepting Jesus as Messiah.

Many problems, but the most basic was this, that Jesus was nailed on a cross. And the Bible says in the book of Deuteronomy, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. So for Paul, it was absolutely unthinkable that the Messiah would be crucified, that the Messiah would be cursed. Therefore, what he wanted to do is to take all those who believe that Jesus was the Messiah and literally rub them out. Now notice what he says in 1 Timothy chapter 1. Verse 12, I thank Jesus Christ our Lord who has given me strength that he considered me faithful appointing me to his service even though I was once a blasphemer.

Let's stop there for a moment. He was a blasphemer because he denied the deity of Jesus Christ and he desired to make sure that no one else did. And he forced other people to deny that Jesus was the Christ. So he says I was a blasphemer in my past life.

And then he says also a persecutor. Now I'm going to read for you exactly what it says in the 9th chapter of Acts, verse 1. Meanwhile, Saul, and that was his name before he was converted and God even gave him a new name, God cleaned him up so drastically. Meanwhile Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogue in Damascus so that if he found any there who belonged to the way, that is Christianity, whether men or women he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. Paul said to himself, there is some of the Christians who are running around the country, some of them are going to Damascus, and I know that there's an enclave of them there and what I want to do is to go there and extradite them to make sure that they suffer full punishment. Whether that punishment be jailing or death, let's take care of this sect as he believed it was. So he was a persecutor of the church. But notice in 1 Timothy he's not finished yet.

He says I was a persecutor and a violent man. The Greek word is hubris. It refers to those who are insolent, those who are cruel.

In fact Aristotle gave this definition to the word. He says to hurt and grieve people in such a way that shame comes to the man who is hurt or grieved and it refers, that is hubris, refers to a man who finds delight in his own cruelty. So the Apostle Paul went to the limits of sadistic brutality. That's who he was. How is God going to change him?

Jesus comes out of heaven and reveals himself to him. Why that? Why doesn't he use Ananias? Why doesn't he use some of the believers?

Do you understand why? Because there isn't a person around who believed that Saul could have been converted so the Christians were staying as far away from him as possible and nobody dared witness to him. So Jesus said, because I've chosen him to be my apostle, I'm going to come out of heaven myself and appear to him. And that's exactly what happened there in the ninth chapter of Acts.

I shall pick up only one or two of the verses. And suddenly as he neared Damascus on his journey, a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you, Lord, Saul asked.

I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, he replied. Then the rest of the story is that he begins to understand that indeed Jesus is Messiah, God of very God. Now let me ask you the question, what does God do as a result of this? By the way, the vision was so real, so real that later on the Apostle Paul is going to argue that he has a right to be an apostle because he's seen the risen Christ. That's how real the revelation was to him. The bottom line, my friend, is simply this, that God is able to save even the most unlikely great sinners. If he converted the Apostle Paul, now he may not do it like he did the Apostle Paul on the way to Damascus, but he uses the gospel to overcome people's resistance to the truth.

So share the gospel of Jesus Christ. By the way, today is the last day that we are making a special resource available to you. It's a book I've written entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. It discusses the role of emotions in the Christian life, shows how we should neither deny them nor be controlled by them.

I think it will give us real biblical balance. As I've mentioned, for a gift of any amount it can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com, or if you prefer, call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let me give you that phone number again, 1-888-218-9337. Time now for another chance for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Do you really know the one you're wanting to marry?

That's Susan's question. She writes, I've not made good choices in my relationships, and now I've met a wonderful Christian man whom I'd like to marry. I know he wants to marry me.

My problem is this. Through a set of circumstances, I've come across some text messages he has sent to other women. In one instance, he was planning to meet one of these ladies. He claims that he has maintained these relationships and that they are not a competition for me and the love I've shown him. But still, because he keeps referring to how beautiful these other women are, it's made me very uneasy. He claims to love me exclusively, but still, he does not want to break completely with these other relationships. What should I do?

Listen, throw that fish back into the lake, all right? Here's a man who says he loves you exclusively, and yet he's willing to keep contact with other women that makes you feel uncomfortable. He is willing to talk about how beautiful these other women are, and then he tells you how much he loves you and that you mean so much to him.

Here's the bottom line. If you meant that much to him, he would be willing to give up these other relationships that make you feel uncomfortable. By continuing the relationships, even though you are uncomfortable, it shows that he really doesn't love you exclusively after all.

And if he's willing to do this before you marry him, imagine what it's going to be like after you marry him. You know what I would do, Susan? I'd get on my knees and I'd thank God that he gave you a red flag. Sometimes God gives us red flags. In marriage counseling, when a relationship goes sour, sometimes I say to the couple, weren't there some indications that the person was going to be that way? And they say, yeah, there were in our courting days, but I ignored them. Don't ignore this.

I believe that this relationship has to end, and give it to God, end it, and move on. Some tough love from Dr. Erwin Lutzer. Thank you, Dr. Lutzer. If you'd like to hear your question answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer. Or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. In life's race, we can't win without agreeing with God about our basic condition. We need His grace not to supplement our goodness, but to save us from our depravity. Next time on our broadcast, Pastor Lutzer concludes his final message in this series, A Bad Man Made Good, by describing the wonder of God's grace. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.