Services | Sunday at FPC | Sermons | Podcasts | Home

Sin Management

Doug Pratt — May 23, 2010
 

Download: Sin Management as an MP3 file
(right click and save as)

Jeremiah 31, Acts 2

“The time is coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant I made with their fore-fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.

³³“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord.

“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

Jeremiah 31:31-34

The Day of Pentecost

This is the day known as Pentecost, exactly 50 days after the Passover Celebration in ancient Judaism. On this day—a minor holiday in the Orthodox Hebrew year—a big event occurred historically nearly 2000 years ago that impacted the Christian Church. Some have even called it the “Birthday of the Church.” It was the day when God infused the first followers of Jesus with power, boldness and faith that were a quantum leap beyond where they had been. It was the day when multiple prophecies spoken by multiple prophets over the course of centuries past finally were fulfilled—in one dramatic moment—as the Spirit of God came roaring into the hearts and minds of the believers.

Our Old Testament text from Jeremiah 31 was one of those long-ago hints of what would come. Our New Testament text from Acts 2 will be the eyewitness account of what actually happened on that day in Jerusalem. This morning we will try to understand and apply to our own lives and experiences at least something of the implications of that event. Here’s what happened:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. ²Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them …

¹⁴Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: ‘Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. ¹⁵These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

¹⁷" ‘In the last days, God says, 
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy, 
your young men will see visions, 
your old men will dream dreams.
¹⁸Even on my servants, both men and women, 
I will pour out my Spirit in those days, 
and they will prophesy.’"

Acts 2:1-4, 14-18

Managing Our Problems

The 2003 film Anger Management depicted Adam Sandler as a passive, milquetoast kind of guy—always being trampled on and bullied by others—who is set up by his girlfriend (in cahoots with the judge) to be unjustly sentenced to an extreme course in “anger management,” led by a seemingly-unbalanced psychologist played by Jack Nicholson.

While Sandler doesn’t appear at first to have any problems with anger, he has actually repressed and hidden a huge load of it. And in typical “pop psychology” fashion, he is led to assert himself, to release all his pent-up anger, and to get back at all the people who have trampled on him. It’s certainly not a film I recommend to all audiences, as the plot and dialogue are filled with raunchy scenes and verbal filth—as are most Hollywood comedies today. But it does remind us of the typical approach that’s popular in our secular world.

Problems, we are told, need to be “managed.” Celebrities caught in bad behavior go to “rehab” to “recover” from their misbehavior—and then their agents arrange carefully-controlled press conferences where they can “apologize” and act humble and ask the public for forgiveness. In books, seminars and talk shows we’re given advice on how to channel, control, redirect and project our inner struggles. Finding the right people to blame, acknowledging our addictions, pleading that “after all, we’re only human” and asking people to “respect our privacy”—these constitute the supposed path to “managing” ourselves.

There’s no question that support groups, 12-step programs, psychologists and self-help books have at times been helpful to people in modifying their behavior. Here at First Church we certainly believe in counseling; in fact, our Counseling Ministry has been used by God in many of your lives. But today I want us to look at our problems from a different viewpoint than that of contemporary secular psychology. I want us to look at ourselves from the inside out of human nature, and from the perspective of God, who sees us more accurately than we can ever see ourselves.

Separation from God

The core, deep-down problem of the human race is, and always has been, our separation from God. That results in willful sin and disobedience, in dysfunctions, addictions, issues, problems, bad habits, resistant behavioral problems, broken relationships, inner feelings of guilt and shame, outward explosions of anger and violence, and all the rest. The symptoms are quite varied for the same basic disease.

Down through human history, including the centuries recorded in the Old Testament, mankind has tried all sorts of strategies to do “sin management.” One of the most common attempts of the ancient world was the sequence of ancient religions developed in various civilized countries. By the time of the late second millennium BC, God began His process of solving the problem of human nature, and He did so gradually: through Abraham and Moses and the Hebrew leaders who succeeded them.

First, God revealed a new approach to religious practice, which would be anchored on the twin pillars of righteous (or holy) law based on His own character, and animal sacrifice to experience the vicarious (or substitutionary) forgiveness of sin. The Law was meant to cut through the self-justifications and rationalizations we humans are prone to cook up, and confront us with the reality of our true moral condition as failing to live up to God’s perfection. The sacrifices were meant to show that any attempts at saving ourselves were guaranteed to fail, and that we would need another to take our place and pay for our sins. Even through hundreds of years of faithful Hebrew worship and proclamation of the law and study of scriptures, the final solution to the problem of human nature hadn’t yet been revealed.

The Coming of Power

But some of the most perceptive prophets, including Jeremiah (in our Old Testament text for today) and Joel (quoted by the Apostle Peter on Pentecost in our New Testament passage) sensed that God, like a great magician, “had something else up His sleeve.” That “something else” would be the coming of the Holy Spirit to enter the hearts of every believer and change completely the process of “sin management.” As Jeremiah said, the entrance of the Holy Spirit to our consciences would make the perfect laws of God something internal, not just external. He would “put His law in our minds and write it on our hearts.” And we would have a personal relationship with God—not distant or formal, but an intimate and daily one. And as demonstrated on Pentecost, the Spirit of God within us would give us a new power that we don’t have in ourselves—a power to live in the way God wants us, turn from the sins that distract and weaken us, and serve Him with confidence and effectiveness.

For the past 20 centuries, Christians who have turned from the world’s ways of dealing with personal sins and problems (which we could sum up as “sin management”) to letting the power of God into their lives (the way the first disciples did on Pentecost) have discovered a dramatic difference. What we are incapable of fixing in our own strength and willpower, we find that we can do with His Spirit inside of us.

Christian writer and philosopher Dallas Willard, in his book The Divine Conspiracy, gives a personal illustration of what a difference the infusion of external power from God can bring. Dallas grew up in a very rural area of southern Missouri, in the Ozarks. It was a place that was hard to reach and lacked some of the conveniences of the modern world we take for granted. It was not until his senior year in high school that the Rural Electrification Administration extended power lines into the remote area of his family’s farm. When that happened, Dallas says, “a very different way of living presented itself. Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, hot and cold, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better.”

The power line hooked up to their house gave them a capacity they had never had before. But the family still needed to buy the appliances, plug them in, and re-learn their patterns, behaviors and habits to now take advantage of the full potential available to them. And some of the farmers in the area were slow to change. They had always done things the old-fashioned way, and it took conscious effort to re-train their thoughts to draw upon the new power at their disposal.

This, Dallas Willard says, is a humble and imperfect picture of what has happened to the human race since the Day of Pentecost. The power has arrived. And now mankind needs to access it. This is also, on a personal level, the story of what happens to each person. When you place your faith in Christ and become His follower, the Holy Spirit enters into your heart. His power is available to you. He is within you always.

But you and I must learn to draw upon that inner strength by our daily choices. This is what the Christian counselors in our church and community talk about with everyone who comes to them. With Christ in our heart, we can draw upon His power to change, and to deal with the behaviors, addictions and self-defeating cycles that otherwise will keep us bound. The theological term is “progressive sanctification.” Its simple meaning is that as we choose to let God’s power into our lives, by doing things His way, we become stronger and gradually grow more into the men and women He wants us to be.

A New Heart

Can you and I solve our problems and fix our dysfunctions apart from God? We can certainly try, and many do. A famous athlete caught in a personal scandal vowed that he would overcome his problems by Buddhist meditation (one of the oldest of the self-help and self-salvation techniques). Other people try willpower, psychotherapy or “anger management” groups. Some are more successful than others in making their own changes.

That’s not, however, God’s prescription. He has seen how high our failure rate is in trying to fix ourselves. Instead, He’s offered to do something for us we can’t do for ourselves: put His Spirit within us. Rather than teaching us techniques for “managing sin,” He wants to give us a new heart. He wants to enter into a love relationship with us that is so precious and so fulfilling, we will want to be a different person in order to please Him. And He offers to help us every day, with His strength and His grace, to forgive others, to let go of the past, and to do things in new and fresh and godly ways.

This Day of Pentecost we are celebrating, with its dramatic events nearly 2000 years ago, was quite an event. If you and I had been there in Jerusalem that day, we would have been talking about it like everybody else in town. We would have witnessed the birth of the Christian movement, an advance of faith that has spread to every country around the globe and produced the largest religion in the world, with current estimates of over 2 billion people claiming faith in Jesus Christ.

But the real meaning and significance of Pentecost was not in the pyrotechnic display God produced—though that was pretty incredible, with a mini-tornado blowing through followed by fireworks and then a mass evangelistic crusade. Nor was the lasting significance of Pentecost found in its organizational dimensions—though the Christian church is the oldest, most resilient and longest-lasting human enterprise any of us have ever been part of, over 1700 years older than our nation itself and certainly older than any company for which you have worked, school where you studied, hospital in which you were a patient or theater you attended. Those aspects of Pentecost were actually incidental. What really mattered on that day was that the Spirit of God came into the hearts of everyone who believed in Jesus, and He continues, unfailingly, to do so today.

And what that means is profound. As we try to deal with the sins and temptations and personal demons and dysfunctions that infect us all, Pentecost tells us we are never alone. He will live within us.