GYC SE 2015: Gripped

Steve Bauer

GYC Southeast

Gripped by Christ

I want to take a moment and review our bearings before we get into today's study.

Thursday night we talked about the problem of being gripped by sin.

And I think that we don't capture our problem adequately when we reduce it to sinful nature.

The fact of the matter is in Paul's theology, sin is a universal power introduced through the agency of Adam, which we are all born under by birthright, and we cannot deliver ourselves, and we cannot fix behavior until we address the power issue." So how do we do that?

Well the good news is there's a second Adam who brought another universal power into the world called grace.

And Paul says that where sin increased, what did grace do?

And so Jew and Gentile are both under sin because we Both come from Adam, get this as a birthright.

So if we have Jew and Gentile have 1 problem and there's 1 God of God, both Jew and Gentile, how many solutions are we expecting?

And thus God saves Jew and Gentile the same way by faith in Jesus.

And to put it in terms of Colossians, it is through faith that we move from the kingdom of sin into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

But in Paul's theology, God does not save us to become autonomous.

And so we move from being slave of sin to Paul's favorite term for himself, slave of Christ.

Your choice is who you're going to be a slave of.

Now I don't always feel like slave of Christ.

To use Jesus' words, the slave of Christ is the 1 who is born again, right?

And you and I, I don't know about you, but I know I don't always feel born again.

But the good news from our Scripture reading is you don't have to feel like you're born again to be born again.

You're born again by faith, and those who are righteous, the faith reality governs decision-making more than the emotional reality.

We have emotional reality, But we live by faith, not by feeling.

And in fact, the Christian walk is often filled with this tension between faith and feeling, between faith and perception, between faith and experience.

And as I like to quip, the righteous are dumb enough to trust what God says anyways, in spite of how they feel.

That's what we're going to work on today, practical nuts and bolts.

And we're going to have 2 parts, some broad principles And then some very specific tools.

So let's start with our broad principles.

I would like to suggest that there is much to be learned about the Exodus from Egypt and that slavery to Canaan.

The Exodus provides a metaphor for our Exodus from the kingdom of sin into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

And the first principle of this Exodus metaphor we find in Exodus chapter 13.

Exodus chapter 13, and I'm going to start in verse 17.

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by the way or the road in the land of the Philistines, although that was near.

For God said, lest the people repent when they see war and return to Egypt.

But God led the people round by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea.

God says I'm going to take you from Egypt to Canaan.

And you look at the map and the most direct way would be to go north, perhaps slightly east to the coast and take the highway through the Philistines' territory right into Canaan.

God says I'm not taking you the direct way because you're not ready for Philistines.

So he took them on a 90-degree tangent due east And he pins them against the Red Sea where there's no escape.

And the Egyptians pin him against the Red Sea.

The slave master got him in 1 last struggle and Moses says, you're not going to have to fight, stand and watch what God will do.

And God parts the Red Sea and they go further east, away from Canaan into the Sinai Peninsula.

And eventually they head north after the 40-year delay, etc., and they go through Sihon and Og, who are not as strong as the Philistines, right?

And they go through Midian and Moab and so forth, and God uses these Red Sea and the sea hone and ogs and so forth to prepare His people to face Canaanites.

But you remember on the first encounter the people went up and spied out the land and they said, it's still too strong for us, we can't do this, right?

Principle number 1 then is, you want to get from here to glory and you want to get there as fast as possible, I bet you God's going to send you on some detours because you're not ready for Philistines.

So He's going to send you through some Red Seas and some Sihons and Ogs to prepare you and you're going to be frustrated because I want to conquer this Philistine now.

God says I'm not ready for a Philistine I want you to take care of this Moabite first.

We're not going to deal with Philistine now.

This is a little different message than I sometimes hear preached that you come to Christ and you're delivered from all temptation and live in euphoria, temptation-free, above reproach, never falling hereafter." Let me illustrate it with a short version of a story.

I had a man who had come out of the gay movement, ex-Adventist who re-found Christ, preach in my pulpit a number of years ago.

After helping organize gay coming out marches in the late 80s in San Francisco, he felt the spiritual void in his life.

And he and his partner started going to an Adventist church in San Francisco.

And perhaps it was good it was San Francisco.

The church wisely said, Let's lead them to Christ and let Christ confront the issue.

So they didn't baptize him, but they loved him, fellowshiped, studied, prayed, and the first thing they worked on was how to have a devotional life, how to have a prayer life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But as these guys studied and worked with the church, they started keeping the Sabbath.

They started playing vegetarian games, right?

You see, when you yield to God in the easy things, that softens the heart and prepares it to yield in the risky things.

Somewhere between 12 and 18 months into this walk with the church, they woke up 1 day in their devotions and said, you know, God's will for sex is not for us to be running around seeing how many partners we can conquer in 1 weekend.

And the church said, praise the Lord they got the monogamy right.

And they kept loving them and encouraging them to have a walk with Jesus and so forth.

Now a lot of us would say, we want to hit that Philistine, right?

It was like 3 to 4 years into this process.

That as they were having their devotional times, when they finally compared their prayer journals, less than 1 week apart they each started to fall under conviction that God's will for sex was not just monogamy but heterosexual.

When they came to my church, they had been 4 years celibate and were still engineering the full disentanglement.

Powerful testimony of God's leading in their lives.

The point is God may not take you to Canaan instantly.

And you've got a goal in mind that I want to conquer this Philistine in my life and God may be saying, I'm not quite ready for you to deal with Philistines, I'm going to detour you.

And if He detours you, be faithful in those little things because that's what prepares the heart for the big things.

10 chapters later in Exodus 23, we get our next principle from the Exodus.

On the 1 hand, in the ballpark of verse 23-24, he says that he's going to send the hornets and drive out the Canaanites.

But then a few verses later, and I believe it's down around verse 27, I will send My terror before you, and I will throw into confusion all the people against whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn your backs on you, and I will send, " here's the hornets, "'before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, Canaanite, Hittite, etc.'" Verse 29, "'I will not drive them out before you in 1 year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beast multiply against you.

Little by little I will drive them out before you until you are increased and possess the land." This is a very intriguing concept because we all have Canaanites in our character that we know God is calling us to drive out.

And yet God says, not going to drive them out all at once.

Why does He drive them out little by little?

Now, his stated reason is that things would get out of control and he'll get swallowed up, but how does that apply in the spiritual life?

If God threw out all the Canaanites at once, and we had nothing to fight, what would happen?

We would forget how weak and dependent we are, and we would start depending on ourselves, and we'd fall flat on our face.

So God says, I'm not going to drive it all out at once.

I'm going to put you in a process where you have to stay engaged, progressively driving out Canaanites because it's that progressive engagement that teaches you that day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, moment by moment, raw, naked dependence on me.

When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me I was stubborn.

In fact, you know they have the phrase stubborn as a what?

She used to tell me I was not as stubborn as a mule, I was stubborn as a whole train of mules.

Gripped by Grace

Tonight I get to preach about my favorite topic.

And so if I get excited, pardon me, because I enjoy this very much.

Just to orient you before I officially get rolling tonight, for those who were absent last night, we spent our time on Paul's theology of sin as an enslaving power.

And Thus, while Paul does talk about a law of sin in my flesh, in his dynamic, he doesn't talk so much of us having a sinful nature as much as we are enslaved to something that makes our will and our efforts ineffectual.

And therefore, the solution is not just trying harder and making right choices.

And so we left you on that bad news last night, and Tonight we're going to start bringing the good news and tomorrow is going to be very practical about how to conduct yourself in the middle of temptation when you're in the battle.

And so we're very nuts and bolts more seminary oriented.

I will call his name Fred, and some of my theology majors have heard this story in class, so I don't want to give you PTSD, and I apologize now.

Fred was raised in a good Adventist Christian home.

The kind of Adventist home where you'd have worship every evening, went to church faithfully, good vegetarians, high standards, the whole 9 yards, right?

These were not out there on the progressive edge of newfangled theology.

These were good, old-fashioned Adventist Christians.

Now Fred's a little older than I am, And so he went to the now defunct Pioneer Valley Academy where I went.

And it's a shame now, every institution I've gone through in the Adventist Church through bachelor's degrees now closed.

So I'm not sure what my jinx is, but anyway, done.

He went to Pioneer Valley Academy, fell in with some questionable friends, and it was there that he got introduced to beer.

Went to AUC, Atlantic Union College, which is now closed down, they're trying to reopen it, but we'll see what happens.

He went to AUC, and there was able to get fully addicted to alcohol.

Shortly after graduation, he got a job, married his college sweetheart, and it didn't take very many years for alcohol to ruin his life.

He lost his marriage, custody of the kids, lost his job, etc., etc., etc.

By the time I met him when he was age 50, he had been through 25 detoxes.

Now if he started detox around age 25, 26, that's about 1 a year.

My medical people tell me it's kind of like having varicose veins inside your esophagus and as you drink that irritation, these develop and they get bigger and bigger and eventually 1 of these can rupture and you bleed to death into your own stomach.

If he keeps drinking, he's going to be dead soon.

And all of a sudden, because I had been preaching to them what I've been preaching to you, his sister invited him to church and he starts coming to church.

The question is, why is Fred suddenly coming to church?

Is he coming to church for its message of social justice?

Is he coming to church for wonderful community and fellowship?

He was already getting something like that at the bar, he thought.

Is he coming to church to learn vegetarianism?

So the question is, why is Fred coming to church?

Help to stop the drinking because the counseling, the detox, etc., etc., 25 times he can't stop.

Are you prepared to minister to Fred?" And because of my own experience with slavery to sin, I had something to say, but I couldn't say it right away.

So Fred would come to church, often smelling of beer.

And it's funny, this was a church that was racked with monumental church conflict.

I call it my World War III in Armageddon church in 1 package.

And they were arguing, ironically, over the doctrine of salvation.

For some reason, they didn't get along with each other very well, but they were excellent at handling and accepting evangelistic interests.

They were calling him during the week, you know, staying in touch, praying with him, praying for him.

He's up and down, still trying, you know, up and down, up and down, pretty much down, but coming, they're encouraging him, etc., etc., etc.

I should say, how do we lead them to hope?

I don't think we give them the hope, right?

See a lot of us talk about conversion and sin in the life, but few of us really know what we're doing.

I too grew up in the good Adventist home, a good enough Adventist home that while most of the kids of my church aren't in church anymore, Me and my 2 siblings are active in church.

My brother is an elder, deacon, whatever, in his church in Maryland.

All 3 kids from our family have stayed deeply tied to the Adventist Church and been very active in it because we saw something that worked at home.

But even when you grow up in such an idyllic home, there's a point where you recognize that there's something wrong in your life and you want to fix it.

And no matter how hard you try to fix it, it doesn't want to fix.

And when you're a teenager, the nature of these problems, you don't feel comfortable going to mom and dad, right?

But then there wasn't anybody in my church that I was sure I could go to.

They all seemed to be struggling just like me.

Went away to academy, talked to some week of prayer speakers, right?

They're here today, gone tomorrow, forget who I am, right?

And no matter who I talked to, I pretty much got the same song and dance.

If you just spend enough time with God in prayer and Bible study and so forth, it would just kind of take care of itself.

So I would spend time in Bible study and spend time in prayer and so forth, and it didn't take care of itself.

Now I was groomed for a career in the natural sciences.

So in shorthand, I wanted to be a bird brain, anyway.

And the Lord laid the call to ministry on me in a very unusual way, and I realized I had been arguing since about sixth grade why I ought not to be a pastor.

So I went to Andrews as a freshman to take ornithology, change my major, sent a snail mail home.

We didn't have email in those days of Ellen White and Noah.

And figured that by the time my parents could get a snail mail and mail me back, it would be too far in the semester to be forced to change the program, you know.

Funny thing though is all my bachelor's religion classes and weeks of prayer and whatever else, I still didn't feel effective with my issue.

Gripped by Sin

I was told that our theme is gripped based on Philippians, and as I bandied about, I said, this gives me a chance to talk about my favorite topic, righteousness by faith.

Now, if you want, I spin this a bunch of different ways to the situation.

So if you want an alternate version, I preached about a 4 or 5 sermon rendering on this at the Advent Hope Sabbath School in Loma Linda, and that's on audio verse.

So if you want more punishment, you can go to audio verse and get some more.

But gripped, I looked up the word grip in my trusty online dictionary to grab or hold something tightly, to seize or hold firmly, to hold the interest strongly.

And we have colloquial expressions, right?

When somebody seems to be losing control, we tell them, get a – Get a hold of it.

On the other hand, being gripped may not always be positive.

The arrested criminal is gripped by the police.

Perhaps a bit more positively, the trapeze artist is gripped by the 1 hanging on to the swing.

And if he or she loses the grip, down you go, right?

The quarterback gets gripped by the defensive lineman in the sack, and so it goes.

So gripped in the passive may not be quite so positive.

Now let me give a quick outline of our 3 meetings.

We are going to talk about being gripped by sin.

Tomorrow night we start the good news gripped by grace and Sabbath gripped by Christ.

And we're going to get very, very practical on Sabbath.

Not that it won't be practical now, but Sabbath is the nuts and bolts day that way.

Now, to illustrate 1 perspective of what it's like to be gripped.

When you don't want to be gripped, we have about a 55, 60 second video, if they could play it at this time, please.

Let's think about that, Ram's situation, for a moment.

No, you look at the ground under his feet.

He's been trying for a long time, hasn't he?

He's trying to go, but he's in the grip of a tree and he just goes in circles.

You ever feel like your spiritual life is going in circles?

I try, try, try, try and I'm not getting anywhere.

So he's making choices and he's making efforts but it's not working.

He's in the grip of something that he can't figure out, that he can't manage, and this something neutralizes his efforts and makes his will and choices ineffectual.

He's in the grip of a force too big for him to manage, beyond his skill set, beyond his power.

And in Paul's theology, particularly in Romans, Paul informs us that sin is a power that grips us and like the ram we can choose, choose, choose and try, try, try but it's not going to go anywhere but in circles.

Let's review Paul's theology here by turning to the book of Romans.

Paul is writing this book to the Roman church to introduce himself.

He's writing to people that he generally does not know.

This is a church that he has not planted.

And so unlike the Galatians church where he just comes in and goes, pow, because he knows them, we get the professional Paul here, the polished Paul, the crafted Paul.

And Paul is writing to present the gospel because we have a controversy in the church, the Judaizer controversy, right?

And the Judaizer controversy was saying that Gentiles had to first convert to Judaism before they could receive Christ.

So if the Gentile is circumcised, He's converting to Judaism and he's taking on the whole caboodle, not just a surgery.

Because their premise appears to have been that Jesus Christ was a Savior for the Jews.

So if you Gentiles want to have a Messiah, what do you have to do?

He's fighting it in Galatia, in Romans, etc.

You don't have to become Jewish to have a Savior.

And so after introducing himself to the Romans and a few comments, he hits the word gospel and it sends him off on his journey.

It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.

This is the thesis sentence of the whole book.

Everything else after this is explaining this verse.

But we're going to come back here tomorrow night.

But starting in verse 18, Paul starts to define the problem.

And in verse 18 to the end of the chapter, Paul establishes why the Gentiles need a Savior.

Or to put it in more legal terms, He establishes the guilt of the Gentiles.

And I don't want to linger long here tonight, but what is the guilt of the Gentiles?

We can pick it up here in the first few verses of this section.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Gripped by Christ

50m

Gripped by Grace

49m

Gripped by Sin

44m

4-Deconstruction & Analysis

1h

3-Demonstration: “Make Disciples”

50m

2-Practical Considerations

1h 11m

1-Foundational Principles

1h

Prophecies of Jesus

29m

Til Death Do Us Part

30m

What Are the Odds?

29m

Temple Run

40m

05. Luke: Christ as Lord of the Sabbath

45m

Sound Doctrine