Too Far Down the Road

Jonah 1:11 NIV

 The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, "What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?"

Have You Gone Too Far?

Recently I had to take a rental car back after a trip to Los Angeles.  I needed to return it to the San Jose airport which is about a twenty minute drive from my home.  Before that though I discovered from my son that my wife’s car needed to be taken to the mechanic so after dropping it off, I headed to the airport.  No one in my family could drive my car because it is a manual transmission and it was in the church parking lot.  So it was up to my son to bring my wife to the airport to come get me.  For an hour I waited for them to arrive.  Growing frustrated, I called my wife to find out what had happened to them, only to discover that the hood of my son’s car had flown open while they were driving on the freeway and because they could not figure out how to reattach the hood, they were driving slowly back home, praying the hood would not bounce back up onto the windshield again while they were in traffic.  So what was I to do?  It was easy, I would just call one of my friends to come get me but I only had the numbers of three people in my phone who I thought I could ask.  One by one I called each of them and every time, the person I called did not take the call.  So now what was I supposed to do?  The normal answer would be, “Just solve the problem!”

What is your typical response to a difficult problem?  Do you just figure out what to do? Do you make the best of things and not worry about the outcome?  Are you a fretter?  Do you try to find an expert and get advice?  Do you just quit when you aren’t sure what to do?  How do you respond psychologically to the problems in life?  Are you most likely to take charge of the issue at hand or pretend as if nothing is wrong?  It is true that each situation is different and sometimes we react one way and other times another way.  Yet we must admit that we probably have a default setting when it comes to challenging situations; a way of approaching them that is our usual pattern.  What is going to be suggested today is that we can go too far in how we solve matters and when we do so we can be left psychologically exhausted.

What is meant by “psychologically exhausted”?  This is the state when we find it nearly impossible because of the lack of internal resources to cope emotionally in our preferred manner.  For example, rather than feeling relaxed and peaceful, you can’t hold back your anger, depression despair, anxiety and bitterness or even lust or moral limits.  Like someone who is so tired from driving that she cannot keep from falling asleep at the wheel, certain types of situations become too big for you to handle the way you wish you could or would.  You blow up at someone you really do love.  You develop a headache because of anxiety levels you have reached.  You lie or act in ways morally incompatibly with your values or you give in to an addiction you thought you were past or don’t show the sort of integrity you think you should or believe you ought to maintain.  There is a cause of psychological exhaustion that is actually quite simple.  We try to do God’s work and it is too much for us to handle.

Here is a way of illustrating this that you may have experienced personally or at least have known of happening.  A person who is not a skilled swimmer wades out into the ocean and suddenly a wave unexpectedly swells and sweeps that person off his feet and he is caught in the undertow.  Flailing wildly, the person tries desperately to get his head above the water so he can get his breath.  His heart is pounding, his mind is racing in desperation and his eyes are frantically searching for the surface.  If he does survive, he is left exhausted and even traumatized.  Spiritually it is like that for you when you are not careful.  If you take away from God the work He alone is supposed to be doing, you respond psychologically in similar ways to the panting and traumatized swimmer.  We see examples of this mistake often in scripture.

There is a strange detail in the account of Jesus’ crucifixion that although curious, rings true to human nature.  Christ was hung on a cross and on either side of him two criminals were also nailed to crosses.  Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed.  When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals — one on his right, the other on his left…One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: "Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!" (Luke 23:32-33, 39 NIV)  Isn’t this odd?  One of the two men suffering the same fate as Jesus, convulsing in terrible agony used that time to curse and mock Jesus.  His psychological pain was also great and the way he managed it was by insulting Jesus.  What had Jesus done to hurt this man?  How had he earned the fellow’s wrath?  Of course our Lord hadn’t done anything to warrant the insults and rage.  This was the case of someone dealing with a circumstance much too big for him to handle.  The terrors of impending death, the grief of a life wasted, the regrets of pain he caused others to suffer was crashing down upon him and he was trying to cope with all this on his own.  Unwilling to turn to God to carry him through his pain, he was left, like a drowning man unable to swim, without the psychological capacity to handle what he was facing and so the psychological reaction was to become angry with someone who actually loved him.

We see something similar in the Old Testament.  Unable to have children but determined to figure out some way to provide a child for her husband, Sarah, without turning to God for help and counsel, convinced her husband to take her servant girl and try to father a child through her.  We know how well this went.  Abraham was successful and the slave Hagar eventually gave birth to his son.  It was not quite as easy as Sarah imagined seeing her servant pregnant with a child her husband fathered.  When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.  Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me."  "Your servant is in your hands," Abram said. "Do with her whatever you think best." Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. (Genesis 16:4-6 NIV)  Clearly Sarah’s jealousy was egged on by Hagar but Sarah’s plan worked perfectly except that she was not equipped psychologically to live with the consequences of her actions.  Rather than turn to God for help regarding her seeming infertility, she figured out things on her own and the result was she became psychologically exhausted trying to do God’s work.

Jeremiah 2 gives us rich insight into the difficulties we face solving all our problems without God.  "My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)  The two sins are clearly to God evil and deadly.  The people quit turning to God for help and then developed their own strategies for solving their problems.  We have come to think as they did that getting along on your own is somehow noble and courageous.  But it is just the opposite.  It is foolish and ruinous.  On your own, all you have are the psychological skills you have acquired in life.  Some have quite a few and can manage well for a while without God.  Some have been so damaged by the hardships they have faced that they have almost nothing in them to keep their anger and depression and bitterness and jealousy at bay. Why do we see suicide and drug abuse and violence and crippling depression?  Without God carrying you through the troubles of life, you may or may not have the psychological strength to protect you and keep you at peace so you turn to your own brokenness to see you through.  There is however another option to independent living.

Consider the fascinating case study of Daniel who as a believer in God, prayed three times a day.  When a law was instituted that demanded no one would be allowed to pray to anyone other than the king for the next thirty days, Daniel coolly opened up the shutters covering his windows and quite publically continued praying to the Lord.  When he was caught and brought before the king, even though the king, who was desperate to try and save him from his own law, fretted in despair, Daniel seemingly did not have a care in the world and without comment bravely faced his sentence of being thrown into a pit with ravenous lions.  When the king heard this, he was greatly distressed; he was determined to rescue Daniel and made every effort until sundown to save him.  Then the men went as a group to the king and said to him, "Remember, O king, that according to the law of the Medes and Persians no decree or edict that the king issues can be changed."  So the king gave the order, and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lions' den. The king said to Daniel, "May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!" (Daniel 6:14-16 NIV)  Where did Daniel get his courage and peace to see him through his trials?  He went directly to God.

Jesus’ famous promise to give his people peace is almost universally misunderstood in one important detail.  Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27 NIV)  Jesus is not offering to give you a reason to have peace.  He is pledging that the peace He possesses Himself will be inserted into you when you accept it from Him. Regardless of what you have learned or not learned in life, of however many self-help books you have read or not read and however much confidence or despair is in you, God’s peace will take over and put calmness in your heart.  Christ did not die on the cross in order to give you strategies for having peace in your life.   That would leave you with the same failure rates of all other men or women who have tried to work out their problems on their own.  He died so that you might have his own personality working inside you regardless of what you face each and every day.  Stop trying to figure everything out on your own.  Let God work out things in you so that whatever challenges you face can be worked out through you.

His Holy Zeal

There is a violence to God's working into your life Christ's personality.  The perfect picture of this is our Lord chasing the money changers from the Temple with a whip.  If you believe the Christian life is to be a serene holiday, you have not read either Job or Romans.  There is a temptation in Christian circles to kid ourselves about what we should expect from God.  A great deal of teaching makes it seem like a life free of diseases and distress ought to be ours if we just practiced greater holiness but it cannot be so.  In this life we face a tremendous amount of trouble and countless heartaches and that goes for both the "saint" and the "sinner".  When our Lord enters your life, He begins to cut out from you every strand of rebellion and ungodly desire and this does not come with anesthesia.  He gives you the pain of your sorrow over sin that you might die to Sin emotionally and psychologically.   We are being made to be like Christ in how we think about things and what we desire.  Sin has corrupted not just the core of us psychologically but also how we feel about every inch of the world.   Do we realize that our Lord does not laugh about the foibles of sexual sin like we do, that He does not chuckle when we snap at our wife or criticize our parents.  Holiness is going to be built into us and perfect love shall bind our personality together.  Until this is accomplished no amount of "self-realization" grounded in Sin will be tolerated for it is the realization of God that is being worked in us.    His hope, His faith and His love are becoming ours but not without cost.  Sin must go.  Pride must disappear.  Self-determination will be eliminated.  What will be left is a perfect union of Christ and us; our personalities born again at every level of being.  The unconscious and the conscious are being conformed to Christ and nothing will get in the way of our Savior redeeming us into a new creation.   Settle this matter quickly.  God will do whatever it takes to work His perfect love into you that what will come out of you will be joyful holiness that is pure and unconquerable.

His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me.    John 2:17 NIV

Forgiveness Journey

Hebrews 9:22 NIV

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

How Is Forgiveness Working For You?

A number of years ago I went whitewater rafting with some friends.  We were going through a particularly rough stretch of water when we came upon a bend in the river where a giant boulder stood at the turn.  The water was rushing fiercely through the gorge there and despite our river pilot in the back urging us to with our paddles turn the raft to the left, we didn’t make it and we came barreling into the boulder.  The force of our impact cause one of the guys at the front of the rubber inflated raft to be catapulted into the air and he went flying ten feet in the air backwards and into the pool of water behind us.  At that moment, we watched in shocked disbelief as he shot past us; we were going one way and he another.  We were suddenly going on separate journeys, us sliding upon onto a rock and down the river and him soaring through the air and back into the chaos of the swirling caldron of white-water.

All of us are on journeys; some going one way, others a different road.  There are those heading for higher education, others not interested in further schooling.  Some are building families, others prefer to stay single.  Many are trying to save all the money they can, still more looking for ways to spend it.  There are those wanting to connect with as many people as they can, others would prefer to be left alone.  Some like to take it easy, others would rather work hard.  Sometimes we decide what journey we take, other times the journey decides who we are.  You might be on a journey of honesty and integrity or a journey of fraud and corruption.  Our journeys may be similar or quite different but every one of us is on a journey and eventually it will bring us somewhere.

It seems that the Bible has described a pair of journeys that between which we all must choose.  The first is the journey of Sin and the other of Forgiveness.  Sin is what the Bible calls the “broad road” and many enter through it. (Matthew 7:13 NIV)  The journey of Forgiveness is narrow because few choose to take that path.  Sin is your default direction.  All are sinners and come short of God’s glory.  The result of being sinners is that we die in our sin.  The other journey is that of forgiveness.  Acts 10: 43 declares that from ancient times, the Lord has been telling us through His prophets that we can enter a journey of forgiven sins.  All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." (NIV)  The Bible throughout declares that one day and now it has come to pass, our sins would be taken from us, as the Psalm puts it, “as far away as the east is from the west.”  Through Jesus dying on the Cross, that has happened.  Paul in Ephesians 1:7 lists two results of Him dying on the Cross.  In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace… (NIV)  We are no longer slaves to sin and sinning and the guilt of our sin is removed.  We are now free to live completely in line with God and our lives immersed in Him.

Sin has a devastating effect upon our personality.  It leads to confusion, frustration, bitterness, depression, anger, selfishness, pride, discouragement, stress and worry.  The sins we commit always damage us and the long range effect cannot be calculated for it is too immense.  The sins others commit injure us terribly and we are mangled by both ends of sin.  What Christ has done by pouring out His blood on the Cross is begin the work of making us holy and free of the damage sin has caused us.  He is “redeeming” us, taking us out of it.  Because we have lived in a world of Sin and that is all we know, we are like a frog slowly cooking in a pot of water growing hotter by the hour.  We have never known life without the damage of sin and so we are not conscious of all it has done to us.  The Bible says that what Sin brings us is death…psychological death, social death, emotional death, mental death and eventually physical death.  The miracle of all time is that God decided to put an end to the destruction of Sin by placing all the sin of the world upon His Son Jesus Christ and letting the Sin itself die in His crucified body.

This of course may be “old hat” to you.  You understand the Cross and God’s work with Sin but here is something that must be considered profoundly in regard to sin forgiveness.  Jesus declared that our determination to forgive sins is linked to God’s generosity in forgiving our sins.  This is underscored in the model prayer He taught us during the Sermon on the Mount but given naked expression in Matthew 6:14-15.  For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (NIV)  There is an undeniable link between our forgiveness of the sins of others and God’s forgiveness of our sins.  Often it is thought that if we don’t forgive the sins committed against us, then God won’t forgive our sins.  But then, what is the point of Christ dying on the cross if not to put away our sins...if it is really dependent on what we do?

Paul cements this relationship between God’s forgiveness and ours in Colossians 3: 13.  Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (NIV)  It is established by Christ and the Apostle Paul that all Christians are forgiving people.  They put up with the quirks and difficult behaviors of those in their circles and they forgive or “show grace” as it literally is, to those who treat them badly.  Now the Greek which Paul used to give us this teaching is a bit tricky.  Literally it reads, “As also the Lord showed grace to you, so also you”.  To show grace to someone is a bit broader than to forgive the sins of that person but it includes it.  The primary teaching here is that as Christ has done for us, the same is to flow out of us to others.  If that does not happen, then we have to ask what is wrong with us.

There is a most fascinating teaching found in Hebrews 9:22ff.  In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness...But now he (Jesus) has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself…so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. (NIV)  Paul here declares that forgiveness of sins is not possible without the shedding of blood.  That means that I cannot, even if I wished, forgive a single sin of any person, regardless of how good or bad I view that one—good or bad.  It is beyond the scope of my ability!  So why does Christ and Paul insist we forgive sins?  There is only one explanation.  Through Christ’s death on the Cross, He brought us into His redeeming work.  He made us the freer of slaves.

Christ’s poured out blood upon the Cross completely altered the moral landscape of the world.  Every sin, before that, was irrevocable…it could not be removed and had to be punished.  If you sin against me, whether it seems important to us or insignificant, it was a deadly sin and we could not change its impact upon the one who sinned.  Paul stated this clearly.  “For the wages of sin is death…”  (Romans 6:23a NIV)  Before our Lord’s blood shedding, I could not help you out of your sins against me, even if I wanted to do so.  I could not wave it off and say “no big deal” because it wasn’t for me to decide.  God’s law said the sin brought death and that was the end of the matter.  But with Christ’s death and His loving forgiveness through it, I now can forgive the sins of anyone that has hurt me or offended me.  I am joined with Christ through His poured out blood in the work of forgiveness.

Consider this one aspect of sin.  Each sin has a devastating impact upon the personality.  One sin wrecked Adam and Eve and if you multiply that ten thousand times, there are layers and layers of damage in each of us.  Forgiveness is God’s way of healing us and making us whole.  Somehow, God uses us to bring forgiveness to those we encounter and it is no small privilege or responsibility.  Every forgiven sin is a removed sin.  What does this mean?  Forgiveness as a Biblical teaching is not me accepting whatever you have done wrong to me and saying, “No big deal!”  Forgiveness is the removal of sin in an actual way.  The word Jesus used in saying we are to forgive the sins or “transgressions” of others means “to put away”.  In other words, we do something with the sin, at least as far as it is connected to us.  Of course, that is only possible because of the pouring out of Christ’s blood.

Here is a crazy analogy on the part we play forgiving sins.  When Jonah began his journey running away from God, the Lord did not let him go very far before he sent a gigantic storm to get his attention.  It was a blazing light of chaos for everyone on board the ship…not just Jonah.  The only way the storm could be shut off, it was discovered, was to throw Jonah overboard.  Jonah knew it and he convinced the sailors it was so.  But no one wanted to actually toss Jonah into the raging sea…they felt badly about it.  We are like that with forgiveness.  We don’t want to let go of the sin.  We prefer to nurse it, coddle it, relive it and cling to it.  God though tells us to toss it away.  Forgive it.    Meanwhile, for the sailors and for us, the storm continues to rage.  The damage of sin keeps increasing as we hold onto it.  Only, when by the power of the blood of Christ, we toss the sin away does God stop the storm it creates.  Jonah, the one who caused the storm, also began a new journey when he was thrown into the sea.  He was in fact rescued and given a new life by being tossed overboard.  When we forgive the sins of someone, we in a way rescue that person.  We give him or her a fresh start.  A forgiven sin stops being an active sin; it is a crucified sin and is no longer able to damage either the one who forgives it or the one who has had the sin forgiven.  It is a new journey when a sin is forgiven…a journey of peace within and without.  We can either refuse to forgive a sin and continue being damaged by it, or forgive it, and be set free from it.  Somehow, in a way only God can explain, when we forgive a sin we join Christ in His work on the Cross and by His blood, keep the sin from hurting us or others anymore.  

Internal Healing

Depression is not corrected by an ongoing inward exploration of damaged systems within.  We can gaze internally for decades and never get any further than a thousand different psychological wounds that have festered because we keep looking at them and refuse to turn away.  Unlike physical injuries, psychological injuries do not improve with increased concentration upon them.  Whenever Jesus healed, whether it was the lepers or the blind, He did not give them instructions for continued care to the damaged body part.  He made the blind man wash the mud out of his eyes and be done with it, told the lepers to go to the priest and have their clean skin verified by the priest, ordered the paralyzed man to pick up his mat and walk.  All focus was upon the new life that had come, not the old life that had been a plague of sorrow.   The injuries done to the personality are, if they are not physical in nature, the result of Sin and its penetrating corrosive work.  Whether it be the "sins of the fathers" or "the sins of the sons", we cannot say.  Sometimes we are wrecked by the sins we commit, other times it is the sins committed against us that take us apart.  Regardless, it is the Cross of Christ that must be worked into us if the psychological damage caused by Sin is to be worked out of us.  Even the most disturbed among us can be brought into joy by an ever growing trust in God that He is good and His love for us in Christ unceasing.  The simple prayer, "Jesus, you are good and I trust now in your love for me" if voiced again and again during the day will begin, perhaps slowly, to heal our personalities of the harm done to them; not because it is a magical prayer but because it opens us to the touch of Christ at points where we have not before given Him access.  Jesus asked the odd question, "Do you want to get well?" not because He was trying to draw out of the paralyzed man a profound statement of faith but because our Lord will only work in us where we give Him permission and it was not clear that the paralytic was open to God dealing with him.  If we want our personalities to get well, at some point we must take our eyes off the damaged parts of us and look squarely at Jesus and keep our eyes fixed on Him long enough for Christ to enter the inner courts of our personality and make us new.

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.              Romans 6:4 NIV