It is no secret that Paul had
a very narrowly focused understanding of what is going on in history. For him it is that in, through, and as Jesus
the Christ God has entered his Creation and defeated the powers of darkness
primarily sin, death, and evil. Now, as
the result, the Kingdom of God is bursting forth all over the place as the
Gospel of this Good News of what God has done is being proclaimed all over the
world and Christian communities are forming.
Through the power, presence, and indwelling of the Holy Spirit this
defeat and reign is being manifest in people.
The people in whom it is taking effect Paul calls redeemed. That’s a slave block word meaning they have
been bought out of slavery, freed, and given their true human dignity back as
creatures bearing the image of God in loving community.
We should also note Paul’s
strong emphasis of prayer. He indicates
that this New Way, this New Act of Creation, this New Existence becomes evident,
bears fruit, spontaneously as we pray for one another that we may know God and
grow deeper in our love for each other.
We pray for one another as Paul says, “so that you may walk in a manner
worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the
knowledge of God.”
“Walking in a manner
worthy of the Lord” means living a lifestyle that is an expression of what God
has done in delivering us from the powers of darkness. God in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the
power of the Holy Spirit has set us free of the darkness, transferred us into
the light and so now we must live the dignified life of free people who bear
God’s image shone in the way we love each other. Praying for one another that we personally
come to know God who has revealed himself in Christ and made himself available
to us through the Holy Spirit…praying for one another, this is the heart of our
lifestyle.
So, lifestyle...lifestyle
is simply living in a manner which corresponds to particular values and
beliefs. There are components of our
lifestyles that we choose and others that we are just born into. Lifestyle can be changed. If it couldn’t, then every commercial on TV
and every billboard along the road wouldn’t be trying to sell us a lifestyle
along with their product. If you by this
product you will have this lifestyle. There are myriads of lifestyles available
to us. There’s the lifestyle of the rich
and famous, the adult lifestyle, the cottage lifestyle, the hockey/soccer
lifestyle, the middleclass lifestyle, Western lifestyle, etc. We all
reflect in our way of living what our core values and basic beliefs are.
Now, if someone were to
ask us what the Christian lifestyle was, what would we say? This is an important question for the simple
fact that for most of the history of the Western church the Christian lifestyle
really hasn’t been all that different from that of our surrounding
culture. There have been such groups as
the Amish and the Puritans who tried to live differently. But, for the most part, the people in the
pews have had the same lifestyles as the people who are not sitting in them. Our lifestyle pursuits are largely the same.
So, what is the Christian
lifestyle? Well, Paul gives us a
starting point here in somewhat lofty terms that need unpacking. Basically, the Christian lifestyle is living
in a manner worthy of the Lord or which corresponds to Jesus’ way of life; living
in a way that is driven by the desire to please him rather than the pursuit of
the values that define our myriad of lifestyles.
Lifestyles are driven by
desires. As human beings enslaved to the
“powers of darkness”, as Paul would call them, our desires are for the ways of
the world. In our culture our desires are for money, sex, power, consumerism,
materialism, celebrity, freedom, self-determination, family, individualism, education,
health, and the list goes on. In fact, we
say God has blessed us if we are not lacking in these areas or not hindered in
our pursuits of them. When we are
lacking or hindered in these pursuits we worry.
We fear. We lie, steal, cheat, murder,
abuse. We feel shame and hide from one
another and from God. “We love the right
things wrongly and the wrong things rightly” someone once said. But, when we compare our desires for these
values and the lifestyles that result from them to Jesus’ desires and his way
of life we are forced to say either “Jesus is crazy” or we come to admit “I
have a problem.”
The traditional
theological word for this problem is “sin”.
I’m going to talk about sin here for a moment and I wish to invite you
to consider sin from the perspective of it not simply being a behavioural
problem. But, rather that it is a spiritual
disease of the mind that affects our thinking, our perspective, so that our
desires are inordinately self-destructive.
Sin is a disease just as addiction is a disease. Just as an alcoholic is powerless over
alcohol, so every one of us is powerless to do anything about our sin on our
own to free ourselves from its ill effects. An alcoholic cannot just sober up anymore than
a clinically depressed person can just snap out of it. So it is with the disease of sin.
Only God who loves us can
free us from the disease of sin. It
begins with God’s confronting us with the truth of our disease. In Jesus we see who we should be – beloved
children of God bearing God’s image of loving communion in this world and whose
primary desire is to know God and bear God’s image. Yet, Jesus death on the cross reveals to us
that we are hopelessly alienated from God in our sin diseased state in which
our deepest desire is to serve our own inordinate desires. But, by his death and resurrection God has
wrought humanity anew and by the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to dwell in us God
redirects our desires towards himself and makes this New Creation evident.
Teresa of Avila was a
Cistercian nun back in the 1700’s. She
wrote quite a bit on our relationship to God.
One of the things she is most famous for saying is “I don’t love
God. I don’t want to love God. I want to want to love God.” People struggling with addictions know the
truth and depth of her reflections on our relationship to God. Addicts don’t want sobriety. Every fibre of an addict’s being just desires
to feel the effects of a particular substance.
It is like feeling God. It is
only when in some mysterious way God touches them with an inkling of his love
that they begin to find themselves wanting to want sobriety. Usually, this inkling of unconditional love
comes through the love and acceptance and prayers of others in an “Anonymous”
group such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
This desire to want to
want to love God is usually awakened in us as we encounter Jesus followers who
walk according to the Jesus Way of unconditional, sacrificial love. Jesus people know the power of darkness
because they know the power it had over them and are not afraid to call
themselves sinners because coming to that admission is the first step of
recovery. Jesus people also know that
they have been redeemed from slavery to the powers of darkness and have come to
know that Jesus has given them their human dignity back because they feel loved
by God.
Walking in a way worthy of
the Lord flows rather spontaneously out of knowing oneself to be redeemed by
Jesus from the darkness, a redemption that is felt in a self-understanding of
being beloved by God, a self-understanding sealed in us by the presence of the
Holy Spirit with and in us. Things
happen in our lives that we know could only have been by the hand of God. Sometimes a feeling of peace and burdens
lifted washes over us. However it happens,
God makes his personal love and presence known to us and we begin to want to
want to love God. This is a change in
our desires that marks the beginnings of our being cured of the disease of sin.
This results on the one hand in our beginning to care for one another and our
neighbours in a Christ-like manner. Our
relationships with others begin to change.
It also results in a desire to pray that we and others come to know God
and his love for us more and more. This desire to pray is certain evidence that
our desires are being changed. Friends believe this truth
and let yourselves live accordingly.
Amen.
