MTD and the True Goal in Life #2

You know, one of the things, and the more that I go with this, the more that I just hate this mindset of moralistic therapeutic deism, the more I've thought about it, the more I truly hate it and think it is more lethally dangerous than maybe anything that we've talked about. Thanks for joining us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here, Don teaches God's people God's Word. I'm Bill Wright, and Don is continuing our series, Deception Close to Home, with part two of a message titled, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and the True Goal in Life. Last time, Don took us to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, where Jesus describes the true believer as mournful over sin. Now, that flies in the face of moralistic therapeutic deism, whose premise is that happiness is the true goal in life. Today, Don will show us how suffering is often the means God uses to make us more like Christ.

So, friend, have your Bible open and ready as we join our teacher now in the Truth Pulpit. You see, beloved, the promises of God, the goodness of God, the faithfulness of God are not for the people who are selfishly autonomous in their approach to life. The promises of God, the goodness of God are for the repentant, those who are humbly dependent upon the Lord Jesus Christ for their righteousness, those who look at themselves and find reason for mourning, and only when they look up to Christ do they find reason for joy. Now, obviously, obviously, God often blesses us with joy. Obviously, we often find satisfaction even as we're walking through this life.

Obviously. But, beloved, the joy that God gives often comes in the midst of adversity that is personally trying and uncomfortable. Look at John chapter 16 verse 33. John chapter 16 verse 33. There is no place in a Christian worldview for an assumption that God simply wants your life to be easy for you. Jesus said again and again the exact opposite.

The exact opposite! In John 16 verse 33, he said, These things I have spoken to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation. But take courage.

I have overcome the world. Elsewhere in Acts chapter 14 verse 22. You don't need to turn there. I'll just quote it briefly. In Acts 14 22, it says that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. Look at 2 Corinthians chapter 1.

You can turn to this place. 2 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Father of mercies and God of all comfort. Who comforts us in all our affliction. So that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. Abundant sufferings. All our affliction. You see, the comfort that God gives comes in the midst of the afflictions that come from living with corruption in our souls and in the midst of a fallen world. That cause us to despair of our self-sufficiency. That cause us to despair of hope in this world and to look up to Christ who has gone before us as the forerunner and as our representative in his sufferings during his time on earth and ultimately at the cross of Christ. Would we follow a Christ who suffered without having a cross of our own?

Perish the thought. Scripture speaks of affliction and tribulation being the mark of those who are truly entering the kingdom of heaven. And beloved, if you're here today, your life has been one of affliction or currently is one of affliction. And you have a sense, oh, I'm clinging to Christ in this, but oh, this is so hard.

Well, let me just encourage you with the words of Scripture. This is to be expected for believers. This is sometimes the lot of believers. Moralistic, therapeutic deism and the influence of it. And I think that true Christians can be influenced by this when they're not aware of its influence. I think you can be influenced by this and recognize it by certain spiritual attitudes that it inevitably produces in those who think that along these lines that God just wants me to be happy. Well, where do you see moralistic, therapeutic deism raising its ugly head?

One place that you see it is when people collapse when supposedly bad things happen in their lives. And they wander about as lost sheep saying, I don't know where to go, how could this happen, why would God do this to me? Well, the reason that you ask questions like that is that you have a prior expectation that God is going to protect you from every tribulation, protect you from every harm, and that you'll walk through life relatively unscathed. And then when it happens, why is God doing this to me? Why is God angry with me? Something bad has happened.

Well, no. Christ had done nothing bad. Christ had not sinned at all. And he suffered greatly in Gethsemane. He suffered greatly at Calvary. Of great internal anguish of soul.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It was the appointed path for our Savior that he would perfect us through his own sufferings. Sometimes it's our appointed path that God will perfect us, sanctify us through suffering. Sometimes God will prepare you for future ministry by bringing you years beforehand through suffering, through sorrow, through difficulty that seems to crush you under the weight of it.

Moralistic therapeutic deism has no place for that. Another way, and I have somebody specific in mind from decades ago in my life, I won't mention the name. You never know where things are going to go in the internet. And so you want to be careful with what you say to some extent.

But it's probably not, I know that it's not just from somebody from decades ago. This is the way that a lot of people determine what God wants, the way God is directing their lives. They start with this presupposition. Surely God wants me to be happy. Why wouldn't God want me to be happy? And so when that's their controlling presupposition in life, then when bad things start to happen, when adversity comes in marriage or in a job situation or in some other kind of life setting, and a little bit of adversity comes, then what starts to come out of their mouth is this. Well maybe it's time for me to move on, maybe this is God telling me to move on to something else in my life. And I need to move out of this situation.

And that becomes, and my point is, is that that is the first response to it. I've got adversity, God doesn't want me to have adversity and so he must be telling me to get into another circumstance. I'm unhappy in my marriage, God wants me to be happy, it's time to buck out of here. Well, no.

No. In those circumstances, adversity is simply justifying any means possible to seek an easier life and attribute it to God's will as you do. You know, one of the things, and I just, the more that I go with this, the more that I just hate this mindset of moralistic therapeutic deism, the more I've thought about it, the more I truly hate it and think it is, I think it is more, more lethally dangerous than maybe anything that we've talked about from a polemic standpoint because it's so subtle and it's so broad. You know what this mindset that Crossroads and others are teaching people, you know what it will never produce? It will never produce people who are courageous in adversity. It just, it produces people who run from adversity thinking that God wants them to be happy.

You won't find noble people rising up from moralistic therapeutic deism. Where you find people of courage and nobility rising up is those who are confident in the sovereignty of God, confident in his sovereign purposes and are submitted to his purposes and say, I will persevere through this. I will rise to the occasion of this adversity because I follow a Lord who has overcome the world, who has suffered and I'm following after a Lord who overcame and I want to be faithful to him.

I want to be like him. But if you think adversity is a sign that God wants something different from you, all you do is run, run, run. And the person that I was alluding to, I realize I nearly forgot about that from 20, 30 years ago in my life. This guy, bless his heart and bless his dear wife who had to follow him around. He struggled in ministry. He struggled in ministry. And so he goes to another church and he's there about six months and inevitably troubles come up in the ministry. And his response to that is not I need to persevere. What would God have for me here? His response was God's moving me on to something else. And so he moves around from church to church for a couple of three times and then he gives up and he moves back home.

And who knows what he ended up doing. But his fundamental presupposition, his fundamental thought was adversity was a sign that I needed to move on. Well, beloved, beloved, I say this pastorally. I say this supporting you. I say this as one who prays for everyone in this room by name. And so I say this sympathetically to you. I say this to encourage you.

I say this to help you. Let your first presupposition in adversity be that what God wants me to do is to humbly depend upon him and persevere. Maybe in time adversity becomes a means by which God moves you along.

I wouldn't sentence anyone to a permanent staying in a bad situation. But don't start there in your thinking. Learn something about how to walk dependently in Christ when the winds are blowing against you. Learn something about persevering and finding your satisfaction in Christ when you're lonely in life rather than pursuing sinful fulfillments. Learn something about the sufficiency of God and the sufficiency of his grace when you're sad, when you're lonely, when life is going against you. And in the reality of a Christ-centered joy that is independent of your circumstances as that flows out of your life as it does for so many of you, in the midst of that your joy is a testimony to the glory of God because it has no earthly human explanation. You see when trials come God does not promise circumstantial immediate relief. That's not why God exists. He promises something different.

He promises something better. Look at 2 Corinthians chapter 12. 2 Corinthians chapter 12 verse 7. And as you're turning there I just want to point something out because I'm almost done here.

I want to point something out. The things that help you see through this mindset that is superficially appealing, the things that let you discern it, these aren't rooted, it isn't rooted in, the discernment isn't found in obscure passages of Scripture. This is found in fundamental basic common passages that Christians know well.

And so ultimately there is no excuse for us getting sucked into that mindset. In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 verse 7 the Apostle Paul says because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations that were given to him, he'd gone up into the third heaven and saw marvelous things. Verse 7, for this reason to keep me from exalting myself there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me to keep me from exalting myself. Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. God, take this away. God, take this away. God, I ask you a third time, take this away. It's making me unhappy. It's uncomfortable to me.

This is making life hard. And God didn't take it away. Whatever that thorn was, verse 9, he has said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. So that Paul, the last thing that Paul is saying here in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 is that God wanted me to be happy and to be perfectly comfortable with my circumstances.

Just the opposite. He said, I was discontent in my circumstances. I was suffering. I asked God to take it away and God said, no!

I have something else for you instead. My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. Paul learned to depend even more on the sufficiency of my favor and my kindness to you in Christ. And let that be the fountain from which you drink to find your satisfaction in life.

Not the circumstantial, pleasant things that men seek after. Rather, the conscious knowledge that I am a good God and you belong to me. And that Christ suffered for you, Christ died for you, Christ rose for you, and you are alive in him. From that perspective, Paul says, most gladly therefore I will rather boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. And he says in verse 10, therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong. Garden variety, professing Christian, professing Christian in today's age would think that distresses and difficulties were a sign of God's disfavor and would be asking for relief. And so moralistic therapeutic deism shows up when we expect an easy life as though it were our entitlement from God or that we resent hardship or that we run at the first sign of adversity. This is not true Christianity. Happiness is not the goal.

Happiness is a secondary byproduct of something else. God's glory, beloved, is the goal. And if God is providentially ordering your circumstances and has brought affliction into your life, then his intention is for you to show forth his glory in the midst of your affliction, not simply by relieving it from you so that you can feel better about yourself. And as you read Christian biography, as you read about the ones who truly were the preeminent soldiers of the glory of God, you find that the ones who were the most noble were the ones who often suffered the most. Think of Jonathan Edwards being kicked out of his church for being faithful to a biblical view of communion. And he's sent off and he's sent away, rejected his congregation, rejecting the greatest theologian that American soil has ever produced. And he goes off and he's ministering to Indians, a small circle of Indians.

Affliction, unjust, unfair treatment. It wasn't that God was displeased with him. God magnified his grace and his glory in the midst of the affliction. And at an age younger than I am now, took him home to glory. And so you see, beloved, when you and I remember our Lord Jesus Christ, we remember his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his session in glory, and how he represented to us at every step along the way.

And one day he's coming back for us. When we remember Christ, we turn away from our preoccupation with the things of this life, and we set our hearts on his kingdom and glory as the goal of life, as the preeminent purpose of life. Jesus himself said, Matthew 6.33, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. The central goal is Christ. The central goal is his glory, his righteousness, his kingdom. A God-centered, Christ-centered focus is what true Christianity is.

Not a self-centered perspective that can leave him out of the equation as long as you're happy. And as these things crystallize in our minds, the goal of life no longer becomes our personal happiness, but something far better. You know, really, for you and me as true Christians, the goal of life could not possibly be about anything that happens during the window of life between our birth and death. That can't possibly be why we exist. That can't possibly have anything to do with your highest aspirations in life, what you most want out of your existence if you're a true Christian.

That can't possibly be it. Because, beloved, the thing that you and I are really living for, the central purpose of our existence, lies beyond the river, lies beyond this life. It lies even above and beyond being in heaven, if I could be that so bold as to say this. And let me just tie this back in as I close here with what we said out of Philippians about being slaves of Christ. Christ is our master, we are his slave, our desire is to please our master. What you're living for, really, as a true Christian. The only thing that matters, the thing that will compensate for everything else, every difficulty in life, every conflict, every want, every sorrow, the thing that will compensate for it all is when you stand before Christ, whatever that looks like, and he looks upon you and he says at the end of your difficult life, he says, well done, you good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master.

You see, beloved, that's our goal. We want to live in a way in response to our salvation that we hear those words from our Lord. And if you hear those words from Christ, the goal of your life has been perfectly attained. No matter what happened in the so-called 70 year window between your birth and death, you know, honestly, honestly, if all that eternity was for us, if all that eternity was for us was to be able to sit somewhere and rehearse and to remember in our minds that our master said, you were a good and faithful slave, you pleased me, you did what I wanted, you glorified me, I affirm you, you accomplished what I gave for you to do. If all that eternity was was just rehearsing and remembering that and having heard that from the lips of our Lord, that would be glory.

If that's all that it was, that's going to be a lot more than that. But beloved, our goal is to please Christ. And the affirmation that we get from him lies outside the bounds of time. Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master, Matthew 25, 21. Beloved, that's what matters. That is our goal in life.

We've been conditioned in our affluent society to see hardship and suffering as all bad. But as Pastor Don Green has reminded us today on The Truth Pulpit, Christians should be ready to accept them as character builders, always remembering Scripture's promise that all things work together for our good. Well, we'll continue our series Deception Close to Home on our next program, and we hope you'll join us then.

Right now, though, Don's back here in studio with some closing thoughts. Well, hello, my friend. I want to thank you for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Thank you for being a student of God's word.

You are the reason that we do these things. We want to bring God's word to you in a way that makes it alive and applicable to you and brings you into a deeper knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, if you've benefited from this broadcast, we just ask you to do a simple thing. Go to our web page or go to our Facebook page. Look us up on Facebook and just drop us a little note, just a word that would let us know that you've appreciated today's broadcast or the other aspects of our ministry. We would love to hear from you. Thank you for listening to The Truth Pulpit. We are grateful to Christ for you. Visit thetruthpulpit.com, where you can also learn more about podcasts and free CDs of Don's teaching. That's thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's word here on The Truth Pulpit.