SCRIPTURE READING: 2 Corinthians 12: 20-21
20For I fear that when I come, I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish; I fear that there may perhaps be quarrelling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder. 21I fear that when I come again, my God may humble me before you, and that I may have to mourn over many who previously sinned and have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and licentiousness that they have practised.
SERMON: "SPIRITUAL WART REMOVER"
Sunday, February 24, 2008
PASTOR HUDSON: Some of the
things that we have talked about over these days is
that as Christians we are uniquely blessed with a
marvelous status in the presence of God. Here's the
status: Number one, we have been washed by God. From
the best and most graceful person in this sanctuary to
the orneriest rascal -- and I'll let you fill in the
identities of those persons. We all would have our
opinions, I suspect. Both of those persons and all
the individuals in between share in common the
benefits of having been washed by God.
We've been baptized. We've been to the Jordan
River. We are cleansed. We are forgiven, but we also
have another benefit that we've talked about, and that
benefit is that by the divine work of God in Christ,
we have been sanctified. Now that's an old-time word
that we don't parlay around as much as we used
to, but it carries the idea that every believer's life
has been set apart by God for the Lord's purposes.
To use another old word, we are made holy to the Lord.
Now sometimes that word is a little slippery because
if we ask what is the definition of holiness,
we think of holiness as deeds related.
A person is holy when he or she does not
drink or smoke or chew or run around with fast guys or
fast gals, that if you have this list of really really
good things that you do, you're holy. If you have
a list of questionable things, somehow or another
you're not holy.
Well, that's not really a very good definition of
holiness, to be honest. Holiness, biblically
speaking, has to do with the fact that one's life is
reserved by God, for the purposes of God. It would not be too
far a stretch to say that an illustration of holiness
might be that on our altar we have a bread plate that
holds the symbolic communion bread on communion Sunday.
How would you feel if suddenly you realize that
somehow or another we had carried this plate off to do
something else? Maybe to hold loose change in the office, or perhaps to use
for some kind of a condiment tray for the next
pot-luck dinner. I suspect some of you would say
that's outrageous, you can't do that, that's a piece
of altar ware that belongs on the altar.
It is holy meaning that it has been set aside for
one purpose and one purpose only and that is to hold
the body of Christ on communion Sunday. Now that's
what holiness means. So when we say we've been
sanctified, when we say we've been made holy, what
we're really saying is that God has declared through
this work of grace in our lives that he has claimed us
for himself, and we belong to him.
Now all of those things are wonderful images, but
the truth of the matter is we've also seen over these
last few weeks, that, we are
not yet perfect with respect to this holy function.
The concept of perfection holiness, however
we might define it, eludes us.
By any standard and definition, we're not there
yet, but even by the more limited standard of
perfection that speaks to completeness, we're not
there yet either. By completeness, we could say that
we have our life of faith, our discipleship life all
ordered out and all the loose ends are tied up, and
we're focused, we're journeying. We have pretty much
mastered this notion of following Jesus Christ.
The truth of the matter is we're not there yet
either, at least not many of us. There might be a few
out there that you could think of that really are, at
least comparatively speaking, spiritual giants, but
the majority of us, those of us who rub elbows every
week, we recognize that we still have got some things
to deal with. Those things are what I'm referring to
today as spiritual warts, the things in life that just
are annoying.
Now some of you have never had a wart, but I've
had one on the heel of my hand a good number of years ago,
and one of the things that I realized is that they usually
manage to be in the most inconvenient place where they're
troublesome, they're annoying, they're worrisome, and
you know, they're just a problem.
Everytime I was trying to work, I'd hit it with
something, or I'd tear it, and it would bleed, and it
would get sore.
You know, it was an annoyance all the time until
the day finally came that I went to the doctor, and I
said, Look, I want you to take this wart off just
about at the elbow because I am that fed up with this
thing. Well, fortunately, technology had advanced,
and they didn't need to do anything nearly that
drastic, and I got rid of that wart, but up until
that point, that wart was an annoyance and kept me
from being as effective as I wanted to be.
So spiritually, what is Paul saying? You heard
a moment ago when Kris was reading the text. He
said, My fear is that when I come, I will not find you
as I would like to imagine I would, but that I would
find you battling with spiritual warts.
Now remember this has nothing to do with them
being washed. It has nothing to do with them being
sanctified. It has nothing to do with them being set
apart. They are all of those things, and yet the
warts of their lives of pettiness and carnality and
attitudes and all the rest are flourishing in the life
of the Corinthian church and defeating them on a daily
basis and keeping them from being as effective as they
would like to be. So Paul says, I fear that that may
be the way I find you.
Is it possible that the church today is
susceptible to the exact same thing? The answer is
absolutely unequivocally yes. The church is just as
susceptible to spiritual warts today as Corinth was
2,000 years ago.
We have the same issues of pettiness, jealousy,
turf issues, squabbles, greed, lust, envy, anger,
malice, wrath, hatred. Does that mean that we're not
washed? Does that mean that we're not sanctified?
Does that mean that we're not all of those things?
No, it doesn't mean that at all. It just means
that you, as a vessel, me, as a vessel, still have
things that are a part of our life that need to be
dealt with and laid to rest. We need some spiritual
wart remover. We need some potent medicine.
There is a potent medicine that God speaks of in
Paul's writing in Galatians 5:15 and following. I'm
not going to read that whole passage because time
would not permit us, but I commend it to your reading,
and I want to draw just a couple of images out of it
this morning.
The first is that Paul understands
that whether in Corinth or in Galatia, they have wart
problems. All of the stuff that we do as human beings
that we grieve about later on, those, "oh, I wish I
hadn't done that" moments, those, "oh, I wish I hadn't
said that" moments, they also were doing. Galatians 5, is
Paul's admonition to them to apply the potent medicine
that for God is a wart-removing medicine.
What does it look like? Number one, he says to
the Galatians and through the Galatians to Wesley,
live by means of the spirit, that's the first step.
Let me unpack that just a little bit.
Paul understands that everything that I've said
about being washed, being sanctified, being justified
and all that, is very true, that's part of
our status from God, and thank God for that, but he
also understood that the warts were going to be there,
and the way you deal with the warts is by in your
daily life you attune your life to the beckoning of the
Spirit.
You let the spirit commune within you. You let
that Holy Spirit fill and impel your life in such a
way that it begins to have a powerful impact on your
frame of thinking and your mode of acting.
Live by means. In fact, in the grammar, that's
referred to as a dative of means, if you'll just allow
me that one little phrase, and what it simply means is
is when Paul says live by the spirit he doesn't mean
live by the guidelines of the spirit. He's not
thinking checklist here.
It's not a list. For him, it is a mode of
empowerment. So live in the spirit, Paul says, that
everything in your life will be bathed by the presence
of the dynamic and powerful Holy Spirit. Live by
means of or the empowerment of the spirit.
In Galatians 2:20, Paul unpacks this a little
bit. It's a one-verse thing. If you want a motto to
remind you of the life we're living by means of the
spirit, here it is. In Galatians 2:20, Paul says, I
am crucified with Christ -- that's that status stuff,
that's what God does -- nevertheless, I live, yet not
I, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of
God who loved me and gave himself for me.
You see Paul understood it was not just God's
forensic work on our behalf, but it's also the
empowering, dynamic work of the spirit that flows into
our heart and life, and we start doing everything that
we do with the cautionary alert of the Holy Spirit.
What old timers would have called being checked in the
spirit.
Now some of you may have heard that phrase, some
may not, it may be new to you, but you go back a few
years into an earlier day of Methodism, and Methodist
Christians would have said, I was going to do thus and
such, and I was going to do this and that, and I felt
the check of the spirit in my heart and life.
It's a way of saying, Brian, that the Holy Spirit
reaches out, and just about the time you get ready to
do something really ill-advised , the spirit says, now, wait
a minute, Brian, come on back here, and you're tuned
to the spirit in such a way that you feel something
drawing you back, so to speak, in terms of your
attitude, your choices and your decision.
You know, I've got to tell you -- not Brian
because he's one of those perfect people, but some of
you need that kind of a watch dog on your life because
left to your own devices, you're a mess. You need
that check of the spirit to draw you back, and so do I.
My wife and I were watching a
documentary not too long ago where they were talking
about some of the issues that young adults were
facing, and one of the chapters of that documentary
had to do with sexually transmitted diseases, and they
were talking to just a really wonderful young woman
who had gone on a spring break trip off down to one of
those places where they all go, and in an
ill-conceived moment -- she was a Christian, by the
way – but in an unthinking moment, an unguarded moment, she
engaged in dangerous behavior and about a year
later discovered she was HIV positive. She was
devastated. I found
myself thinking about it as I was talking to Marilyn
as we watched this thing, if there was ever a time
that it would have been good to have the check of the
Holy Spirit in your life drawing you back, boy, that
would have been the time. No, don't go down that
road. You know, let's get rid of those tendencies and
deal with those spiritual warts and respond to the
tugging of the Holy Spirit.
It is the power to change one's course and
direction. That's pretty a grim example, but you know
and I know, we're all here, we're all in the same
boat, there is scarcely a day goes by that you don't
look at the inventory of the day and say, wow, I
really wish I hadn't done this, this, this or this.
Now it might be something as trivial as just
flying off the handle at your spouse and later on you
think, oh, man, I wish I hadn't done that. Wouldn't
it be great if you had a spiritual wart remover that
would get that wart out of your life before you
actually had that experience?
It is also the power to refrain, to be able to
step back away from those things and live a life, as
Paul puts it in another location, Colossians, live a
life that is worthy of Christ. It's a potent
medicine. Paul always understands that the power of
the spirit is the effective, powerful agency that
allows us to live above the world. We simply need to
invite that Holy Spirit into our heart and life.
One of my professors back down the years, this
would have been back in the heyday of kind of the
charismatic movement that was catching a lot of the
attention of people at the time, and we were talking
about this whole charismatic phenomenon of the Holy
Spirit and how that in some ways we found ourselves a
little befuddled by it or a little bemused by it, and
as I was talking to Dr. Hahn, we explored this notion
that seemed to be so popular with so many people.
People were flocking in those days, '70s and
early '80s, to that charismatic movement, and we were
wondering what's going on there? Dr. Hahn made a
statement that has stayed with me over the years. He
said, you know, I think in some ways, aside from the
fact that people are hungry for an effective presence
of the spirit of God in their life, there is also the
fact that we -- and what he meant by that was the
mainline church, Reed United Methodist in this case --
we are not really offering them anything that is its
equivalent.
You know, we want them to come. We want them to
join the church. We want them to pay their tithes.
We want them to support apportionments. We want them
to do all that stuff, but we had kind of backed away
from that whole Holy Spirit thing because we didn't
want to be perceived as some kind of a weird fanatic.
So what we did was we just folded our hands and said
we're not going to talk about the Holy Spirit.
We'll talk about Jesus. We'll talk about God,
and we'll stop from there, and the fact of the matter
was we needed to find a whole new theology. I say
new, we needed to reclaim the theology of the Holy
Spirit empowering the lives of disciples in the United
Methodist Church that would be effective and cause
people to say, yes, I can have the in-filling of God's
spirit in my life, and it can be powerful in shaping
me and helping me to live a life that is worthy of
Christ. It's potent medicine, but medicine is no good
if you don't get it into the situation it's designed for.
Faithful application. If God has given us
through the Holy Spirit a powerful, effective wart
remover, the wart remover is only as good as the
faithful application. In that same passage, Chapter
5:25 of Galatians, Paul affirms to us that we are not
only to live by means of the power, but we are to be
daily guided by, in terms of direction, this Holy
Spirit. It suggests process.
This is not just an occasional, ecstatic moment
where we have some kind of an illumining or
enlightening moment in the spirit, but we are daily
being guided in our process by the direction of the
Holy Spirit, and the goal is to apply that spiritual
reality, that spiritual sensitivity into every
situation of our life.
A number of years ago you remember the bracelets
that were kind of popular, What Would Jesus Do.
People wore them for quite a while and maybe some
still are, but as trite as that little rubber bracelet
might have been or at least might have become, in its
inception it's an extremely valid question, but it's a
question that I think is really not as effective as it
could be until it becomes an inward spiritual
question, not just an outward bracelet.
Nothing wrong with wearing the bracelet, but
there needs to be a sense in which our communion with
the spirit of God and the application of that
spiritual wart remover is such a daily process that
begins when we go to our knees in the morning and we
say, God, be with me this day that the thoughts of my
heart and the words of my mouth will be guided by you
and everything that I do, that we live in that kind of
a spirit until finally the bracelet that really asks
the question what would Jesus do is the bracelet
that's around our heart and our spirit, not just on
our wrist.
Faithful application. We live in a generation
when physicians would tell us with great concern, and
legitimately so, that antibiotics when they're given
to you for a condition, you need to finish the entire
course of antibiotics. You know, there is a long
history there. Oh, I feel pretty good now, I've only
taken about five out of this 10- or 15-tablet course
or whatever, so I'll just toss them in the drawer, and
I'm fine.
They're telling us now, and correctly so, that
that has grave problems in terms of providing
resistance or creating resistant strains of disease.
When I give you medicine, the doctor would say, take
it all. Whether you feel better or whatever, take it
all, stay the course. So it is with this spiritual
wart remover.
You may think you've dealt with the problem,
whatever that problem might be, and remember the
catalog list: Anger, envy, greed, lust, you know,
whatever. You may think you've dealt with the
problem, but you keep applying the medicine of the
spirit to your heart every single day. God, help me
to live this day, not just in the status side of my
equation, but in the state side of my equation where
that my life is an example of what you'd want me to
do. Faithful application.
If this spiritual wart-removing medicine is a
daily process, there is also an additional thing that
the New Testament talks about. I'm going to mix my
metaphors here a little bit, but this is the term,
it's a debridement process, and that may be a new
term.
Kelli, what is it -- I haven't interacted with
Kelli in a long time. Yeah, blonde Kelli, not brunette
Kelly. Blonde Kelly, what do you do when you debride
a wound?
DR. KOONS: Clean it out.
PASTOR HUDSON: Indeed. And sometimes
that's not very comfortable. I had a friend that was
burned while he was fighting a grass fire.
From his knee down to his ankle he had a
severe burn, and as it were healing in that
slow process he would have to go back into the
doctor's office to debride the old tissue -- you're cutting
the old, dead tissue out is what you're doing. So
they were scraping his leg.
Can you imagine a severe burn and you get in
there, and the doctor says, here, let me scrape on
this with a putty knife for a while? Now I'm sure
they didn't do that, but debridement, is getting rid of the old,
necrotic tissue.
Believe it or not, the New Testament talks
about that spiritually, Colossians, the third chapter,
the first seven verses.
This supportive therapy of debridement is exactly
what Paul talks about there. Yes, You've
been washed. You've been cleaned. You've been
sanctified, but now put off the old stuff of this
world.
Did you notice that's an active verb? You put
off the junk in your life. Say no to the greed, the
anger, the lust, the envy, you know, etc., say no to
that, put that stuff off.
The very first church that I pastored, this
was a small church. I'll tell you how small this church was.
My first Sunday, there were eight people in that
church. Now you can imagine a sanctuary probably this
size with eight people. Long history of how they got
there, but nevertheless, that was the reality, eight
people in a big sanctuary, and it was weighing on
their hearts.
I remember that we had a marvelous lady, Ms.
Haas. She had been in that church forever and
eternally, and this was one of those churches where people, like to
come to the altar.
The only difference was Ms. Haas was one of those
individuals -- we come to the altar and we pray quietly.
Not Ms. Haas.
She wanted to be sure the Lord heard her, and so
she put some volume in those prayers, and I can
remember during my time there hearing Ms. Haas pray
for her church, and this is what her prayer sounded
like every single time: Lord, Jesus, send people into
the church, fill our pews, send people into the
church, over and over and over again.
One time I asked her, I believe her name was
Esther or Rebecca, it was a biblical name, I just knew
her as Ms. Haas, I was pretty young at the time, and I
said, Have you every invited anybody to church? She
said, Well, no, you know, I don't know anybody. You
get the idea here?
What she was hoping was that the church would be
filled up by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit, and
it would bypass things like inviting people or
building relationships or doing ministry. Wouldn't
that be great? Wouldn't that be a marvelous way to
build a church? Just say, Lord, just fill the church,
fill the pews, then back off, leave the doors open
because here comes the stampede.
Well, that's the way we are sometimes about these
warts, dear friends. We don't like the wart, but what
we do is we say, Lord, would you just take the wart
away? Take the wart away. Take the wart away.
Change my bad attitude. Change my evil mind-set.
Change my bitter spirit. You know, just do that. You
know, Lord, take care of it. Then when it doesn't
happen, well, I don't know, we either figure we don't
have enough faith or maybe God likes us this way.
Well, here's a clue. God doesn't like you that
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