Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
October 21, 2007
Copyright © 2007, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.
GROWING TOWARD WHOLENESS--IN DIVINE FAVOR
And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. (Luke 2:52)
Foresighted, balanced living must stress equally the mental, physical, social and spiritual aspects of life. I cannot realize my full God-given potential, if any one of these areas is out of kilter.
However, all too often, the mental, physical and social can push aside those spiritual concerns, which are both our responsibility and our privilege.
Jesus developed spiritually. The exact words of Luke 52 read, "And Jesus increased. . . in divine. . . favor." Most of the translations read, "And Jesus increased. . . in favor with God."
Does the fact that Jesus developed spiritually excite you as much as it excites me? What an explosive fact this is. Think of its full implication! Here is God Almighty humbling himself to take on human form. Talk about the potential for a spiritual monstrosity. The life of Jesus could have been just that. But it wasn't. In this miracle of the incarnation, He came, humbling himself to experience what you and I experience. Instead of coming across as a ready-made spiritual giant, He emptied himself in a way that He experienced all of the feelings and temptations that you and I experience, yet without sin. He exposed himself spiritually--as well as physically, mentally and socially--to the same limitations you and I face.
This is a great relief to me. There are times when I feel spiritually inferior and not as fully developed as I would like to be. In these moments, I realize Jesus Christ himself, by the very fact that He increased spiritually, was subject to the same growth process I'm going through. Obviously, He was more successful. His progress was greater. But the very fact that He did develop releases me to live creatively with my own need for greater spiritual development. I'm challenged to grow myself. And I have to ask myself some questions. Is this my passion? Do I really yearn to grow spiritually? Do I have a heartfelt desire to please God?
Let's reverse the action, putting the question in another way. Close relationships can be fractured. I have a friend who is no longer on speaking terms with his father. He's an adult, a good person. So is his father. His father has opinions, which have become convictions. He stands in strong judgment of his son's lifestyle. The son is so convinced of his own rightness that he refuses to compromise his convictions, even though an alteration of his lifestyle would restore the relationship with his father. The son refuses to conform to his father's will. In the process, he has fallen out of favor. The fracture appears to be complete. Although, when they are together, each tries to be hospitable to the other; but even a total stranger can sense the tension between them.
How heartbreaking it is to see a broken father-son relationship. Jesus increased in a healthy relationship with God the Father. In this way, He modeled for us that growing love, which we can experience with our God.
When questioned by some religious leaders as to what is the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus responded, "He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:37-40). These verses epitomize the dual thrust of the Gospel. There is the magnetic, vertical interplay between God and humankind that, when authentic, breeds a similar horizontal interplay between human and human. The Bible says that to be humanized, one must first set things right with the Creator. Then our inter-human relationships will have a lasting quality.
Growing in favor with God involves committing one's self to Jesus Christ, both as Savior and as Lord.
Is Jesus Christ your Savior?
What is involved in claiming Jesus Christ as Savior? Think about it. From what has He saved me? My quick response could be, "From my sin." Has He really? Unfortunately, some of us who claim to be saved by Jesus Christ are still in bondage to sin. We have those pet sins we love. Our way of living flirts perilously close to our pre-Christian patterns.
Jesus would be the first to acknowledge the reality of temptation. He went through that agonizing period when Satan confronted Him with real options which appealed to Him every bit as much as they appeal to you and me. Sin is fascinating. It makes so many promises. It hangs from a tree as such luscious fruit, ripe for the reaching and tasting. Whether it offers the blatant temptations of the flesh or the more subtle temptations of the spirit, sin is attractive.
Stop! If Jesus Christ is my Savior, He has saved me from sin. This means that the Holy Spirit of God has worked within me a spirit of repentance. As attractive as sin is, defined as active or passive rebellion against God, the real hunger of my heart should be in an opposite direction. I should yearn for righteousness. My ultimate desire should be to please God. I cannot wholeheartedly love the Lord and really love sin.
I've known that empty, heartbroken feeling on those occasions in which I have whipped my life partner, Anne, verbally. That gut-level sick feeling is a hangover of my love for Jesus. It tells me that I really hate sin. Jesus has turned me around. I know I've done wrong. My desire now is to please Him. I thank God for that sick feeling that makes my heart ache until I've set matters right with the one I've wronged.
The tender conscience is that highly sensitive moral "spiritual thermometer" that God has placed in me. A person born again by the Spirit of God is sensitized to sin. That one is not just playing a religious game in which one paints a pretty, false facade as a coverup of the real person inside.
A strong emphasis is placed on accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. We call this conversion. It is salvation by grace. At the same time, there is a danger of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." Cheap grace is peddled from many a pulpit. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer says, "In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin." He goes on to say, "Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before." Again, he continues to describe cheap grace as, ". . . .the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."
So, we must be careful when we profess Jesus Christ as Savior. He came to save from sin. He's called us to repentance. He's called us to turn away from our sin toward Him. We are to have a healthy discontent with our own natural bent toward sin.
This leads to a second major question. Is Jesus Christ only supposed to be my Savior? Is He not also to be my Lord?
So I ask you, is Jesus Christ your Lord?
I used to think that He could be my Savior without being my Lord. Perhaps I thought this because of my own experience in coming to Jesus Christ as a child. At five years old, I knew that I was a sinner. I responded to God's call, putting my trust in Jesus Christ. It wasn't until I hit those critical teenage years that I wrestled with the dynamics of allowing Jesus Christ to be my Lord. So, I've often said that, for nine years, Jesus Christ was my Savior without being my Lord. Now I'm beginning to question that dichotomy.
Perhaps what I discovered that freshman year in high school was that the implications of the Lordship of Jesus Christ were much more penetrating than anything I had previously imagined. Or perhaps, as life became more complex, so did the implications of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. A seven- or eight-year-old doesn't have too big a struggle in applying Christ's Lordship to his sexuality, his business ethics, his career decisions or his intellectual thoughts about God. The more adult he becomes, however, the more complex his problems, the more demanding become the implications of living with Jesus Christ as Lord.
I see this principle continue to flesh itself out in my experience. Whereas the age of fourteen marked a crisis point in grappling with the Lordship of Jesus, I came to another crisis point at the age of twenty-three. I reached another in my early thirties. This process has continued through the years, to the point that even in the last several months, I have been going through a greater wrestling with what it means to commit myself totally to Jesus Christ as Lord.
Are you struggling with this matter of surrender? Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind? Or does He get just one hour and fifteen minutes a week with a few casual thoughts in between? Jesus said that I am to love the Lord my God with all my heart! With all my soul! With all my mind! How much more total commitment can there be than that?
Discipleship is the name of the game here. There are two dimensions to this. One is the outward. In the next message, we will deal with this aspect, when we discuss how Jesus increased in favor with humankind. At this point, we're talking about the inward dimension, the dimension of reverence.
Two great Christian doctrines are underlined in the question, "Is Jesus Christ both your Savior and Lord?
One is that of justification. In the redeeming work of Christ, God has taken action, independent of me. His salvation is potentially mine, independent of any good works or merit of my own. He calls me to make a basic decision for Christ in which He becomes my Savior, as I turn from my sin and put my trust in Him. Salvation is not just an invitation. It is a command to repentance.
Two, there is sanctification. That is the gradual process of growth toward wholeness in Christ in which I allow Jesus Christ to be my Lord. This will involve subsequent steps of spiritual steps of spiritual renewal. There will be struggle. There will also be the satisfaction that comes from knowing that I am increasing in favor with God. This covers all of life. This includes my zeal, balanced by a good stewardship of the mental, physical and social opportunities that God has entrusted to me.
How do I grow in favor with God?
Studying the pattern of Jesus in His spiritual development, three specific areas are noteworthy.
First, Jesus took time for the development of a private, inward spiritual life.
Jesus was not so hurried in going about doing good for other people that He neglected His private relationship with God.
Ours is a day of activism. We judge our success or failure spiritually by looking at external symbols of piety. Good works are important. They are fruits of a spiritual authenticity. But these good works, when they do not emerge from an inward devotion, can become cold, harsh, judgmental actions, the fruit of a false piety. Our outward actions, as disciples of Jesus, must be disciplined by an inner contact with the Savior.
Jesus developed this private dimension of His life. The Bible gives us barely a glimpse of Him during His first thirty years of development. What He did during those thirty years is not revealed in the Scriptures. We do know this: He cultivated His inward relationship with God. What a premium we put on action! So great is our stress on external piety that it's taken kind of a cultic movement of "spirituality" to shame some of us Christians into being more intentional in our inward development. Asian mysticism and various forms of "transcendental meditation" emerge as a kind of sad commentary on our failure as Christians to convey the importance of spiritual meditation, spiritual contemplation, spiritual reflection, the setting aside of an intimate, private time for God.
Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood's definition of the whole person rings clear in these words from his classic book The New Man For Our Time:
The new man for our time, the truly contemporary man who is the whole man, will be concerned about the overcoming of war, poverty, and racial discrimination, but if he permits these to be his only objects of concern, they will become more elusive than they now are. Only by a conscious and continuing nurture of his inner life can any man who supposes that he has no time to pray or to reflect, because the social tasks are numerous and urgent, will soon find that he has become fundamentally unproductive, because he will have separated his life from its roots. It will not then be surprising if, in his promotion of what seems to him to be a good cause, he becomes bitter in his condemnation of others. Without the concurrent cultivation of the inner and the outer life, it is almost inevitable that a man deeply involved in social action should become self-righteous.
Even during his most active public ministry, Jesus took time for prayer. For forty days and nights, He fasted and prayed in the wilderness. I once spent a whole day walking in that same lonely wilderness area to the northwest of the Dead Sea. What an experience of private, inward aloneness I had! Some of us Christians today too often bombard ourselves with constant, external stimulation. This robs us of that intimate quietness, which puts us in touch with both ourselves and our God. Jesus didn't flee the city, but He did retreat. He spent long nights of prayer on the hillside, away from the crowded streets. Afterwards, He returned to the city, spiritually revitalized to do His job.
I am in no way urging an avoidance of real life. The great Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton, left the noisy world behind for his life of silent contemplation. Others have been called to Holy Orders away from the mainstream of life. But the chances are God wants you and me to stay right where we are. Where we are, He wants us to quietly retreat into a priority time of solitude in which we confront His Word and allow it to search our lives. If we allow His Word to probe us, if we commune with Him in prayer, in intercession for others, we will emerge from that silence and solitude to a life of vital Christian action.
In his last major work, Comtemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton gave this simple definition:
Prayer, then, means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of His word, for knowledge of His will, and for a capacity to hear and obey Him.
Those of us who attempt to act, to do things for others without first deepening in our own self-awareness of God and His will, will find ourselves in a bondage to rugged, individualistic self-expression, which will minimize our effectiveness. In contrast to Merton's dedication, how many times have I looked at my appointment book and said, "I just don't have a half an hour a day for God. I'm too busy"? What a commentary that is on who I am and what I am becoming.
Second, in addition to prayer, Jesus was also involved in a covenant relationship" with a small group of other persons.
We seldom think of the disciples in that light. They were His small group. No matter how "private" we are, no matter how difficult it is for us to reveal our inward selves, we still need other people. We need those "significant others" into whose lives we can invest ours and who, in turn, help us grow spiritually. A friend of mine refers to this as "Barbra Streisand Christianity"--that approach to the faith that emphatically declares, "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world!" We will only grow spiritually in favor with God as we are willing to grow together.
Organized religion can be a mutual "rip-off" if one is not committed to other persons. What do I mean by that? I may come to church once a week for an hour, have my own daily devotions, but never become involved in conversation, never become involved in fellowship with other persons. By doing so, I am depriving others of that something special only I can give them. I am basically selfish in my unwillingness to share. I expect others to provide a spiritual environment in which I can grow. And yet, I'm not willing to make the same kind of contribution to others.
It is important for each of us to find several Christians with whom we can share our doubts and affirmations. We need to discover each other's needs. Together, we need to take our burdens before God in prayer. We need to study the Bible together and pray together. The Bible tells us to, "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). When a brother or sister in Christ is weak, I am to help that one along. And when I'm down, I'm to allow my brothers and sisters in Christ to give me encouragement.
It's exciting to see a fresh breath of fellowship of the Holy Spirit moving through the body of Jesus Christ today. I've watched the small group movement develop since I first encountered it in my senior year at Wheaton College in 1962. Dr. Richard C. Halverson, then the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., introduced me to its importance. Later that year, during my first year at Princeton Theological Seminary, he invited me to visit him in Washington, D.C., and he took me as a guest to his covenant group. I then started one on the Princeton campus. At first, it's a bit frightening. But as we begin to open ourselves to each other, we find a whole new spiritual release. Prayer covenants are established. New friendships are formed. Healings of body, mind and spirit are taking place where several are gathered together in the name of Jesus Christ on a regular basis.
For thirty years now, once a month on a Wednesday from 9:30 until 2:00 o'clock, I meet with several fellow pastors in the total transparency of sharing bathed in prayer. How grateful I am for this. And for the past fifteen years, Anne and I have been meeting several times a year with three other couples, the Bruners, the Demarests and the Moomaws, for similar sharing and prayer. I could not survive without this and other similar accountability groups of which I've been a part during the past forty-five years.
I was recently with Chuck Colson. We were lamenting a major stumble in the life of a prominent religious leader. Chuck's quick and insightful comment was, "He's a loner. He has no one to whom he's accountable. It's a kind of narcissism in our culture that causes some people to think they can make it on their own without the help of others."
In addition to inward, prayerful meditation and small group involvement, Jesus was also active in corporate worship.
His private devotional life and small group activity did not become a substitute for public worship. Luke tells us, "When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom"(Luke 4:16). Do you catch that? I love that phrase, ". . .as was his custom." Jesus was very aware of the weaknesses of people engaged in public religious expression. If anyone could have communed with the Father alone, He would be that person, wouldn't He? Nonetheless, he went to the synagogue, to the temple when He was in Jerusalem. He saw the flaws. He was aware of hypocrisy. In no way did He cover up the apparent inconsistencies of the hypocritical institutional religious establishment. At the same time, He didn't throw out the institution. Rather, He built upon it, as He established His Church.
Inward life and the small group were never meant to be substitutes for the Church, the larger gathering of brothers and sisters in Christ. The family of God gathered in Christ-centered worship enhances our private devotional life and our small group experience. There is a place for structure. The gathering of Christ's people into His church frees you and me to be and do what we could not be and do in an unorganized fashion.
Can you imagine a football team winning a game without ever working out together? Could you picture an army winning a battle without developing a strategy? There's a corporate nature to our faith. The body of Jesus Christ is His Church. We fit together, each one of us, in our unique way, making the Church complete. With our unique gifts, each of us is an essential part of the building. As imperfect as that structure may be, our loving, caring concern can breathe fresh life into it.
Our personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord compels us to a vitality of commitment in private devotion, in the prayerful intimacy of small group fellowship and in involvement with the larger community of the gathered, visible church.
Too often, we've asked the church to function as a cheap country club. We must promise to attend, pay our dues, and be a good person--that's all it takes, some would have us believe.
This is why we're taking so much time in this Visioning Together process. For most of my thirty years with you, we have functioned under the Mission Statement: "St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church is endeavoring to be the family of God together in joyful, Christ-centered worship and is committed to: leading men, women, and children to a personal saving faith in Jesus Christ; building ourselves in the faith; and serving others here and throughout the world."
Tuesday night, the Session reviewed the efforts of your leadership to take a fresh look at who we are. For months now, there's been this intense listening process that is endeavoring to crystalize what are our core values. This is what has emerged:
Our Core Values:
As a Christ-centered church we value:
And our Mission Statement has been freshened to read:
Transformed by Jesus and led by His Word, we are
On this weekend in which we have received seventy-one new members into our fellowship and on which we have dedicated our faith pledges 2008, I challenge you, as I challenge myself, to stop and reflect on how balanced are our lives. And in that endeavor--to be balanced intellectually, physically, socially and spiritually--am I, are you giving enough attention to growing toward wholeness spiritually in favor with God?