Authentic Living (Part 2)

What does it look like to delight the Lord? As you reach the New Testament we see as God takes on flesh and becomes man in Jesus.

Here is Jesus being baptised in the Jordan, a strange event in itself as John recognises. So why is he baptised? Because “it is proper to do this to fulfil all righteousness.” says Jesus. And as Jesus comes up out of the water God speaks from heaven and declares “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Or I am delighted.

In Matthew 12:17-21 Jesus is again spoken of as the one in whom God delights as Jesus fulfils messianic prophecy.

“This was spoken to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:
“Here is my servant whom I have chosen,
the one I love, in whom I delight;
I will put my spirit on him,
And he will proclaim justice to the nations.
He will not quarrel or cry out;
No-one will hear his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he leads justice to victory.
In his name the nations will put their hope.”


At the transfiguration Jesus is again identified by God as the one he loves, in whom he takes delight, yet soon after the shock of the gospels is that you get to the cross and you see the one in whom God delights cut off, dying under God’s curse, and you ask yourself why?

Because he is making a new covenant in which our wickedness has been paid for and we are credited with his righteousness, because there is no other way for us to righteous. Those who by faith believe in him are called to know God and to live lives to delight God, to make his character visible by our just and honest dealings with those around us, called to show that God has promised to meet all my needs and therefore I do not need to scheme to meet them myself. Called to live lives dominated by our awareness of Jesus, the one in whom delights, dying in our place so that God can delight in us as we are given his righteousness.

That awareness is to prompt, to provoke us to authentic living.

Authentic living

“The LORD abhors dishonest scales, but accurate weights are his delight.” Proverbs 11:1.

That was the passage I was preaching on last night. It is passage that instructs the Lord's covenant people to live in the light of that grace bought relationship. It is a call for God's people to mirror the character of the God who has redeemed them and to live to delight God.

God loves honesty, integrity and justice, he despise deceit, dishonesty and injustice. God's people if they are living authentically will live in such a way that it delights God and displays his love, mercy and justice to the world through their actions.

It is to affect my selling - I am to be open, and honest. I am to delight God in my description of what I sell and in my conduct whilst selling. Be it a house with noisy neighbours, an article on eBay, or a product or service at work.

It is to affect my buying - I am not to exploit others in order to get a bargain. It must affect my shopping in the supermarket, the clothes I buy. I am to delight God in my buying not delight my bank manager.

It is to affect my actions with what I buy -be it software, Cd's, DVDs, whatever. I am to delight God in my use of such things, not to seek to deceive the seller.

To live authentically as one of God's covenant community is to live to delight God.

Authenticity

There was a great article in the Times on Saturday by Matthew Parris bemoaning the lack of authenticity in Britain today. Everything is spun or perception managed, the truth is covered up by appearance. We live in a world where authenticity has been lost, where appearance is the new reality, where what something really is does not matter as much as what it is perceived to be. So the question now is when is a Lord really a Lord, is it when he or she deserves to be or because they have paid to be? How do I know when a phone-in is a genuine phone in or a fraud? How do I know whether money promised for flood defences is a now promise or a 2011 promise?

It means that we live in a world desperately searching for the truth. It is only found by examining actions and words, if ever there was a society in need of Christians living in the light of the gospel Britain in 2007 is it. As we do so it will provoke questions and confrontations with sin and sinners, but it will enable us to share the great news, to share the truth of our predicament and danger, and the great answer God provides in Christ.

our biggest addiction

Someone has said “We need to confess our addiction to morality and the appearance of godliness…Jesus is holy which means different without being sinful?” What do you think?

2 Peter 1:5-7 gives us a great MOT for our faith as Peter calls on the believers to make every effort to add to their faith things that are the marks of true godliness and religion and its frippery does not appear once. Yet why so often do we end up weighing someones godliness based on appearance rather than self-control and on attendance rather than moral excellence. It is because hardwired into our hearts is the Pharisee, religion is our default setting.

Yet the Bible continually calls on us to radically revise how we view living for God, it is not about doing set things for him or for show it is about increasingly becoming like him, conformed to the family image.

It means I can be just as holy in a pub as in a church, just as Jesus was perfectly holy when eating with a swindler or a prostitute as when he was in the temple.

That realisation is to liberate me to live in every situation for God's glory in God's power through his spirit.

The rise of militant atheism

I'm sure you've noticed that the last couple of years has seen the rise of a very aggressive atheism, Channel 4 has aired Richard Dawkins 'The Root of all Evil' where he sought to expose that religion is the root of all evil. And religion has definitely be a root of evil, none of us who watched the two plans fly into the Twin Towers could ever deny that, none of us would argue that religion has been the given reason for some evil.

But actually what Dawkins and other militant atheists do not understand is that following Jesus is not about being religious. In fact Jesus himself is almost as scathing as they are about religion.

The TV programme was then followed up by the book 'The God Delusion' in which Dawkins wanted to convert theists into atheists. More recently Christopher Hitchens has published 'God is not Great' the case against religion. So why is there suddenly this militant aggressive atheistic attack on religion, surely it flies in the face of cultures mantra of you have your beliefs and I have mine and they are all equally valid.

The key to understanding the publication of these books is peoples fear of extremism or fundamentalism. So what does that mean for us? Are Christians extremists? Fundamentalists? How should we explain it to our friends?

If you don't stand for something...

...you will fall for anything. So went the saying that I was told as I grew up and it is true. If we don't stand for something we are tossed about on the waves of the latest idea or fad. This is true in life generally but it is even more vital when it comes to the truth about God.

God has revealed himself in the Bible and if we want to know him, what he is like, what pleases him then the obvious place is to look in the Bible that he has given us. However, it may be that we find some things there that we don't like or that conflict with out societies values, and that poses a question; what do I do? Do I accept that is what God has revealed or do I seek to mould God into an image of my own choosing reflecting my like and dislikes?

This week has seen many pages of ink spilled debating the schism that is growing in the Anglican communion over the issue of the consecration of practicing homosexuals in the USA. What are we to make of this debate? In the media it is portrayed as a debate between fundamentalists and liberals, or the Western church and the African Church. But it is not, it is a debate over truth, God and sin.

Christianity is not homophobic, some Christians maybe, just as some people in society at large are, but that is not because it is what the Bible teaches. Homosexuality is a sin - in other words it is something that displeases God that will provoke him to judge men and women, just as sex outside of marriage is a sin, just as greed is a sin, just as lying is a sin.

The Bible tells us that as sinners we cannot stand before a Holy God in our sin and expect to live. God therefore sent Jesus to die on the cross in our place bearing our sin and shame, cut off from God so that we never need to be in the most costly act of sacrifice willingly undertaken by Jesus. For those who accept that Jesus Christ has done that for them and who repent of the sins something must happen s a result. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians writes: "Those who have been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need." Likewise those who lied must speak truthfully, it is a glimpse of the affect of repenting, in repenting we turn our life around and instead of living opposed to God we live for him.

That means for the adulterer, they put off adultery because God says it is wrong - they may battle for the rest of their lives with the attraction to other men or women but they are to battle with it. The couple having sex outside of marriage are to get married or stop having sex. The homosexual if he or she repents is to stop practicing though they may battle for the rest of their lives with the attraction. The greedy person must stop being consumed with material possession and would be wise to get rid of many of those possessions and give to the poor though they may battle with greed for the rest of their lives. Why? Because they now live to please God, and what pleases God he tells us in his word the Bible.

One cannot repent and yet keep on willfully doing what is against God's revealed will. That is not to say Christians are perfect, Christians are only ever sinners saved by the grace of God in Jesus, we sin by omission and commission, but the Christian should never deliberately set out to live a life opposed to God or you have to question if they have understood what it means to repent and have eternal life.

Sexuality is not the issue, sin is the issue no matter what that sin is. You cannot be a repentant sinner and yet live a life that is blatantly sinful disregarding what God says - that is not repentance. Repentance is to turn from sin to God in Christ.

Truth is the issue as the Bible delivers it, truth about God and what pleases him and what repentance looks like. To pick and choose what we believe about God is to leave us with God in his image, God who conforms to cultures standards, in fact it leaves us with no God, no salvation and no truth.

But God has revealed himself and repentance means living in the light of what has been revealed; that God loves us so much he sent his Son into the world to die in our place and to call us to repent and then live a life that pleases God.

Make every effort

Carrying on from yesterdays thoughts on 2 Peter 1, it is striking that Peter exhorts the believers to 'Make every effort to add to your faith'. Peter is not saying we can earn forgiveness and right standing before God because he has already said that the believers righteousness comes by faith in Christ and his achievements on the believers behalf. He goes on to say that (v3) God by his divine power grants us all we need for godliness and life. So God gives us everything we need but that does not remove the need to take and utilise what God has given us!

The word 'add' that Peter uses carried with it the notion of costly and generous cooperation. We are not just to pull our socks up on our own but we are to generously cooperate with God as he through his Word, Son and Spirit works in us to add to our faith these characteristics. How do we do that? I would suggest that it involve spending time in the Bible, the word of God, finding out what those characteristics look like en-fleshed as we see them in the life of Jesus. That making every effort is about having the desire to develop these godly attributes, it is to do with putting off sin and striving for Christ likeness.

It poses the question am I making every effort? Maybe even am I making any effort to cooperate with God? To reject such a great offer of help would be foolish in the extreme and as Peter says would show that one had not grasped the magnitude of events at the cross.

Right-ness

We are all obsessed with being right, with having the right answer, with being proved right in our dispute with someone else. But what does it mean to be right before God?

In 2 Peter 1 he starts this letter with a reminder that “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.”

To be righteous is to be in a right standing before God, to be able to face God without being in your sin. God is holy and as such cannot even stand to look upon sin, and one day he will judge all sin, all rebellion, all rejection of his kingship. Now therein lies the problem because our rejection of God’s way of living means that we stand guilty before God. We don't in and of ourselves stand right before God, in fact we stand under just judgement and condemnation.

But says Peter the believer can stand right before God, and the basis of the believers right standing before God is “through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ” and it comes by faith. By faith in Jesus as the Messiah, God’s promised one, and Saviour, the one who dies in our place, saving us from the consequences of our sin, they and we can stand before God in a right relationship with him, viewed by him as his perfect children.

Do you see why faith is so fundamental? Because without faith in Jesus we have no chance of pleasing God, without faith in Jesus we are utterly bereft of any hope of ever escaping God’s righteous judgement for our refusal to acknowledge him as God and King.

But in Jesus, through faith we can be right!