GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

Clothes and Gloves

Over the past few weeks, several of us have been at work building an extra room and bath in our garage. We have had to frame the room in, hang sheetrock, drill holes in unrelenting concrete, dig a trench through the front yard, discover and fix old plumbing problems while laying new sewer lines, and so forth. In doing this work, I used a pair of gloves: red and gray, brand new, with quilted padding on the inside that made my hands look like the hands of Esau when I took them off, all covered with tufts of red hair. I also had two thinning old tee shirts and two select pairs of work pants that used to be a major part of my wardrobe but have been relegated to the work detail because of the gaping holes in the knees.

To do my work on that first workday, I got up very early in the morning, went to the dresser, pulled out these special work clothes with their holes and poured my groggy legs into the pants, further tearing the hole as my foot caught on it. Then I pulled on my tee shirt, and went outside to clear all the boxes from the garage. Once the garage was clear and some of the other men had arrived, the real work began: it was time to dig the trench. So, I put my new red and gray gloves on and grabbed a shovel. We dug and dug, discovering more and more pipes, roots and rocks that were in our way. But we kept at it, digging and working until darkness fell.

Then I took off the gloves and put them down. All the activity of the day now over, the gloves looked lifeless and empty. I went downstairs to take a shower. I pulled off all those work clothes, leaving them in a little pile by the shower tub in the bathroom. They too looked lifeless and empty, just a little heap that bore silent witness to the life of which they were now only the abandoned shell.

Gloves and clothes are everyday things. They are things made for service, made to be useful, and above all, made to be filled. A pile of clothes and a pair of gloves, no matter how elegant or ugly they may be, can do nothing by themselves. They just sit there. But when they are filled, they fulfill that for which they were made: they become an integral part of the life and work of their owner. They might get dirty, they often get torn, but they are there in the trenches, put to good use.

Why do I tell you this? Because we are the empty clothes which our God designed for Christ to wear for His work in the trenches of this world. Our humanity clothes His divinity. When He fills us, like a hand filling a glove, like an arm thrust into the middle of a sleeve and through it, we become an integral part of Him. We become the part the world sees, and His work is accomplished through us. This is the glory and honor of the everyday believer. It is also the Gospel in a nutshell: we were empty and lifeless without Him, but He fills us with His life and works His loving activity through us. It is the redemption of the everyday and useless to the eternal and glorious.

Romans -- Book of Definitions

Today we are going to take a moment to consider one of the remarkable aspects of the book of Romans. It is the book which best outlines for us the Gospel of God, God's great news for man's great problem. In laying out the gospel so clearly and concisely, Paul presents for us very synthesized truths. Some of these truths form tight definitions or succinct descriptions of essential tenets of the Christian faith, often within a single verse. Some of these single verses are so important that we will take extra time to study them individually.

For example, we started our study by looking at the first verse alone. In that verse, we see Paul's self-introduction, a unique window into the Apostle's identity. We discovered his identity to be entirely derived from his relationship with Jesus Christ. Today we are going to look at the gospel synthesized into one verse, every bit as moving and encouraging as John 3:16. It is Rom. 5:10: "For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life."

Gospel in a Nutshell

In this little verse is the outline of Romans 1-8, the Gospel of God, in a nutshell. When we studied Rom. 1:18-3:20, we discovered the universal scourge of sin, afflicting all humanity across all time. We spoke of sin as a terrible sickness of self-centeredness and self-absorption, where we were constantly elevating the self to the place which God was intended to occupy: we worshiped the self, rather than God; we elevated ourselves into the judgment seat, trying to replace God as judge; and we replaced righteous God-confidence with shaky self-confidence. That is the way sin works: get God out of the picture, that I may do what I want. We summarized it by saying that sin happens when we communicate to God, either overtly or covertly, that "I Don't Need You." Sin fools us into thinking we are greater than we are. Paul synthesizes these first three chapters of the letter in Rom. 5:10 in the first phrase: "For if while we were enemies ..." Sin made us God's enemies.

But then, just as Paul has proven this stark reality to us, the focus shifts away from our sin and onto our God, and what He did to address our sin with the power of His love. This is Paul's main point in Rom. 3:21-5:21. What He did was send Jesus Christ to the world, to die on the cross as a public display of God's love for His enemies. Jesus Christ's death on the cross was the atoning sacrifice to end all sacrifices, an atonement accepted by a holy God as evidenced by the resurrection, and we are justified when we believe in Jesus Christ who died for us and was raised for us. Thus God was the just judge over sin, condemning it on the cross by placing it on Jesus as the sacrifice, and the just justifier of all who believe in Jesus Christ's sacrifice as the means of their salvation. And because of our justification by faith in Jesus Christ, we are introduced into this grace in which we stand, a standing Paul describes eloquently in Romans chapter five. What God did in Christ on the cross is summarized nowhere as beautifully as in the next phrase in Rom. 5:10: "[For while we were enemies], we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son." The cross of Christ ransomed us, paying for our introduction into the inner family circle of our God, where by grace we are welcomed and accepted unconditionally. Our God, because of Christ's death, embraces His former enemies, and in that embrace is the reality of our reconciliation, the beginning of grace.

But this is not the end of the great news. Many people believe the gospel ends here, but it doesn't. While the sacrifice of Christ on the cross solved our problem of sin once for all, removing the barrier between us and our God, the remaining outworking of our lives remains a problem for us. Having been saved, how should we then live? Since our sin has been forgiven, what do we do when we find ourselves continuing to sin? What provision has been made for us to live a truly changed life, not just a legally changed life secured by our legal justification purchased on the cross by our Christ? Romans 6:1-8:39 addresses these problems of our daily Christian identities and Christian lives, cluminating in God's most shocking answer in Romans chapter eight: He gives us Himself by the indwelling Holy Spirit, that He might live out the life of Christ through us on a daily basis. We are not left alone in a gulf between the high mountain of our conversion and the higher peak of our homegoing to heaven, wandering a lifelong valley in a confused state of waiting. No: we become the human clothing for our Christ. Our heart becomes Christ's home: He lives in us and works through us. This is the glory of Rom. 6-8, and it is why these chapters are among the most beloved in the Christian's Bible. And nowhere is the truth of these chapters synthesized more brilliantly than in the final phrase of Rom. 5:10: "... much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life."

Thus, what we have in Rom. 5:10 is the gospel in a nutshell, God's great news in microcosm. Let's study each of these phrases, that our hearts might be awakened anew to just how great this news really is!!

Who We Were: Enemies of God

Paul reviews our status before placing our faith in Jesus Christ in his first phrase of Rom. 5:10: "For if while we were enemies ..." There can be no mistaking it: without the indwelling presence of Jesus Christ, whom we receive as a free gift by believing in His death and resurrection, we are God's enemies. Paul is addressing Christians, who were enemies, reminding them of the war they formerly fought. For Christians, this war is over: we have peace with God. But for those not yet Christians, there is a war going on. Most of humanity today is in the enemy camp, fighting for the death of God. Without Christ living inside, we are enemies of God.

Now I'll wager that right now your heart is rebelling against such a stark truth. "Dorm, what do you mean, that we were 'enemies of God'? That's too harsh in the sensitive 90s! You may offend someone! Isn't it really more like we are lost in the darkness, that we are alone and in need of a friend, that we are all searching for God in our own ways?" That all sounds good, and there are small grains of truth in some of that. But there is a truckload of truth in the stark fact that we were enemies of God before He came and captured us out of the enemy camp. We recoil against this moniker "enemies of God" because it reveals the ugliness of our sin in an uncompromising fashion. And we humans are masters of concealment, we have mastered the cover-up, whereby we bend over backwards to call our sin anything but what it is: open rebellion against God. And the fact that our hearts rebel against this bold truth is nothing but the evidence of sin at work in us.

We discover in Rom. 5:10 the seminal truth which Paul explains more completely in Rom. 5:12-21: all humanity is divided into two camps. From God's perspective, mankind is separated into two camps: those who are His enemies, and those who are His children by faith in Jesus Christ. These are the goats and the sheep. These are the offspring of Adam and the disciples of Jesus Christ. As a comfortable human construct, we imagine that there are many ways to get to God, and that all are God's children and will eventually get to heaven in their own way and their own time. Nothing could be further from the stark truth of the Bible: if we have not yet been reconciled to our Creating God through faith in Jesus Christ, we are enemies of God. There is no way to get around it.

The term "enemy" implies a war, with two opposing camps. If you think about it, wars are fought over one issue: CONTROL. Just this week, war almost erupted in the Middle East. The Israelis dug an archaeological tunnel right beside the third holiest shrine in Islam: the Al Aqsa mosque on the south side of the temple mount in Jerusalem. The Palestinians were incensed, as was the entire Arab world. An emergency diplomatic meeting was called to avert a war. What would that war have been over? Who has CONTROL over Jerusalem. In each person's war with God, the issue is the same: who will CONTROL my life. If you don't think there is a war over this, just open your daytimer. Now, as a Christian, one of our ongoing struggles is letting God have control over every item in that daytimer. Think how much more an unbeliever would fight against God, if God came and asked for absolute control of his or her daytimer! The unbeliever would hold onto that daytimer and tell God to keep His hands off. A war would break out, and the issue causing the war would be the age-old dilemma of control.

I remember vividly sitting outside at an open-air amphitheater one Easter morning twelve years ago, at an Easter sunrise service that PBC used to sponsor on the Stanford campus. The man speaking was an English preacher who had been a boy during World War II. He wove a beautiful tale that morning of the comparison between the war he lived through as a boy and the war raging in each human heart regarding Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the bone of contention, the stumbling block. That man compared the bombs of Hitler with the salvos of disinformation and lies about Jesus Christ that assail unbelievers. He compared the lone voice of Churchill to the quiet but compelling voice of God drawing the unbeliever to Himself. And through that whole message, he kept saying this refrain over and over: "There's a war going on ..." There is a war raging in the hearts of those all around us: our co-workers, our unbelieving family members, our lifelong friends who tolerate our Christianity, our neighbors. Like the nations who preached appeasement while Hitler grabbed whatever he could, it is pure foolishness to think the war is not raging. There's a war going on, and anyone who has not stepped forward to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is an enemy of God. This is the gospel truth about all who have yet to receive Jesus Christ by faith. But God reaches out to enemies in a compelling way.

What He Did Once: Reconcile Us Through the Death of His Son (Rom. 3b-5)

In this great war chronicled across every page of the Bible from Gen. 3 to Rev. 20, God produced the ultimate weapon. It was a weapon of love so powerful that it obliterated the enemy's hate at the seeming triumph of that hate. What God revealed in this war was Himself, in the middle of the battlefield, dying in place of the enemy soldiers. His supreme weapon was actually His supreme sacrifice.

It is no mistake that one of the first believers in the crucified Christ was an enemy soldier. Matthew tells us in Matt. 27:50-54: "And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth shook; and the rocks were split, and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many. Now the centurion, and those who were with him, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, 'Truly this was the Son of God!'" Here was the first literal enemy, the leader of the crucifiers who nailed His hands to the beam, who crossed the battle lines and came to the camp of the redeemed. He saw the supreme sacrifice of Jesus Christ, watched how the world wept for Him and was convulsed because of His pain, and he became convinced that Jesus Christ was God's Son. And at that moment the centurion himself ceased being an enemy of God, and became himself a son of God. He was reconciled to his God by the death of the Son of God on the cross.

This momentous reconciliation is what Paul describes next in Rom. 5:10: "For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son..." The verb phrase "we were reconciled to God" is a mouthful and a heartful. Only a story captures it best.

As many of you know, there was a Dutch father who along with his two daughters Betsie and Corrie aided and secretly housed Jews during the German occupation of Holland. They were discovered, and Betsie and Corrie were shipped off to Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. Betsie died there, but Corrie Ten Boom lived to preach forgiveness and reconciliation around the world. Here is a story she tells about preaching in Munich, Germany, in 1947:

"It was in a church in Munich that I saw him -- a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear. It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.

It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander's mind, I liked to think that that's where forgiven sins were thrown. 'When we confess our sins,' I said, 'God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a Scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, NO FISHING ALLOWED.' The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.

And that's when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister's frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were! The place was Ravensbruck and the man who was making his way forward had been a guard -- one of the most cruel guards.

Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: 'A fine message, Fraulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!" And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course -- how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women? But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.

'You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,' he was saying. 'I was a guard there.' No, he did not remember me. 'But since that time,' he went on, 'I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein,' -- again the hand came out -- 'will you forgive me?'

And I stood there -- I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven -- and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place -- could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking? It could not have been many seconds that he stood there -- hand held out -- but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it -- I know that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. 'If you do not forgive men their trespasses,' Jesus says, 'neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.'

I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.

And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion -- I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. 'Jesus, help me!' I prayed silently. 'I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.' And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

'I forgive you, brother!' I cried. 'With all my heart.' For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then. But even so, I realized it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit as recorded in Rom. 5:5: '... because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us.'"

Now THAT is a story of reconciliation: between a cruel sinner and a mightily forgiving God; between a victim and her God who wanted her to forgive; and between the cruel guard and his victim, whose handshake of reconciliation joined the almost electric current of the hands of Christ indwelling two of His "gloves."

This indwelling Christ, who saves us by His life within us, is the final and greatest word of the gospel, synthesized in the final phrase of Rom. 5:10.

What He Does Now, Every Moment: Saves Us By His Life (Rom. 6-8)

But as glorious as is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, and as amazing as is the reconciliation between the enemies of God and the holy God, there is something still far greater described as the crown of the gospel at the end of Rom. 5:10. This last phrase is the emphatic phrase, the great truth to which Paul has been building throughout the verse: "... much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life."

This is where Paul describes what happens in our lives between the mountain top of our conversion and the higher peak of our homegoing to heaven. Our lives immediately cease in a profound way, and a remarkable new life takes precedent. Paul describes this transference in more extensive terms in Col. 3:3, 4: "For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory." Paul also explains this core reality of the Christian life in Gal. 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me." Thus, the Christian life is exactly that: the life of Christ lived out in my life. There always has been only ONE genuinely Christian life, and it is the original article: the life that Christ lives. He lived it in the bodily clothing of a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth almost 2,000 years ago. He lives it today inside each believer, each one forming His wardrobe at the end of the Second Millenium.

This is the crowning truth of the gospel. That Jesus Christ died is a magnificent thing. That Jesus Christ stands right now at the right hand of the Father in heaven making intercession for us as our great High Priest is beyond our ability to imagine. But that Jesus Christ lives right now inside me by the Holy Spirit brings it all home to me. His indwelling life is THE LIFE, the only life. The life of Christ IS the Christian life: it always was, it now is, it forever will be.

The great tragedy of the world is that almost nobody knows this. To the eternal question, "What is life?," the world around us offers a thousand specious answers. Judging from our sex-saturated culture, and the countless articles in women's magazines at the check-out stand in grocery stores, many say that having good sex is what life is all about. We have a media-generated picture in our mind of "the good life:" attending a party in perfectly fashionable clothing with perfectly beautiful women and stirringly handsome men surrounding us, everyone chatting with wit and charm, everyone smiling or laughing, but just enough to be chic. What a joke: if party life is the good life, I never attended one of those parties. The party life is far more clown-like in my experience: all dressed and dandied up, but only thinly disguising the sadness and anguish within each heart. The world claims to know about life, at least the advertizers do, but the life they think they know is actually a slowly unfolding death.

Perhaps the greater tragedy is that very few Christians know that the secret of the Christian life is the life of Jesus Christ Himself lived out in us. This is what breaks my heart. We know theologically that Christ saved us from our sins by His death on the cross. We also invited Jesus Christ to come and live in our hearts. At the moment of our conversion, those two truths reigned supreme in our mind. The problem comes when we wake up the next morning. All the demands of life are there to greet us. Although there is greater peace because we have been reconciled to God through the forgiveness of our sins, all the problems we had before conversion are still with us afterward. We still find ourselves in relationships that don't work, or are characterized more by bitter grudge-holding than redemptive forgiveness.

So what do we do? All too often we meet these challenges in our own strength, just as we always had before. Only this time we try to Christianize it. We walk the path of self-discipline: we make vows and resolutions to change our behaviors, we work out schedules of quiet times, prayer times, Bible study times, and we go to work on our problems. I worked so hard the first six months of my Christian life that I nearly exhausted myself: one hour quiet times at the beginning and ending of each day, nearly 40 hours per week of Christian commitments, etc. I cranked it up. I was doing my best. I was praying for God's help, and felt like I received it in small, hard-to-measure doses. I felt like the little child whose letter is the final page in the little book entitled Children's Letters to God. Little Frank wrote simply, "Dear God, I am doing the best I can." I remember praying that same prayer in utter frustration: "Lord, what else do You want? I'm doing my best." And I was doing my best, but I was slowly suffocating under the weight of all my good intentions, and under the load of such a heavy Christianized schedule.

I had missed the point. The Christian life is not about "doing my best." It is also not about "doing my best, and letting Jesus do the rest." No, no, no: It is about letting Jesus do it all, including putting me to rest. Our prayers must move beyond prayers for God's help in our problems, as though God were withholding His divine assistance. He is entirely capable and present inside us, having withheld nothing. He withheld not His Son, whom He sent to die on a cross; He withheld not His Spirit, whom He sent to dwell inside us. He has already given all the help we will ever need, come what may. The trick is to begin by faith to thank Him for it, and step into life on the basic assumption that He will live His life through us because He said He would.

But there is a further trap we so easily fall into. We think, "Aha!! The Holy Spirit lives in me with great power. Now all I need to do is tap into that power, and learn to use it." But there again, we miss the point. If the Holy Spirit is nothing more than a power source, we have forgotten that He is a Person. A power source is something I plug into and get on with my own business of living my life my way. But a Person must be related with. Our question ought not to be "How can I get hold of the Holy Spirit and use His power?", but "How can the Holy Spirit get hold of more and more of me, that He might live and work through me?"

Here is a memoir from Robert Munger's autobiography entitled Leading from the Heart. Munger, a wonderful pastor, describes in this section the day he discovered the fullness of the life of Christ within while at Forest Home, a Christian camp:

"Morrisey's subject that morning was 'How to be Filled with the Spirit.' I knew he was speaking to me. Was this the moment when I should openly and boldly ask God to do it? Suppose nothing happened. Suppose I was given the gift of glossolalia [i.e. tongues]. Then what would I do? For me, it was a step of enormous venture and consequence.

The time soon came for us to pray. About a dozen of us knelt in a circle. Would I share my condition? Would I admit my desperation? Did I dare pray publicly for God to give me a special anointing and infilling of the Spirit of God, even though it might mean a radical change in the direction and association of my ministry? I had covenanted in writing before God in that crisis night that I would do anything, everything, go anywhere.

It was a kairos (crisis) moment. Finally it was my time to pray. I told the gathered Christian brothers that I needed to be filled with the Spirit and asked them to pray for me. They did -- earnestly, lovingly and with warm faith. Then I prayed, reminding God from Scripture of our covenant relationship and what he had already promised to give me for his glory.

When I finished praying, the brother next to me, a big man whom I did not know but whose loving concern I could feel, put his arm around me and said, 'Lord, help Bob's unbelief!' That was a bit hard to take, but I took it! I had often told inquirers that we receive Christ not by feelings but by faith in his person and promise. Now, suddenly, my own faith came alive. With a holy boldness I told God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I was now receiving all of him and all that was meant in John 7:37-39. I thanked God that he was doing what I had asked of him. Now I knew for certain he would glorify Jesus Christ somehow even in me.

On the way out, Armin asked me, 'Do you think God heard your prayer?' I said, 'I hope so, because I feel confident I've done everything the Lord has been asking me to do. I can think of nothing more. The next step is up to him.' 'That's good,' Armin said. 'Keep on thanking him.'"

Thus Bob Munger came to learn the simple truth of the Christian life, that it is all about Christ alive in you, living the truly Christian life through you. Munger went on to write one of the greatest distillations of this truth in the 20th century, the simple but moving little booklet entitled My Heart -- Christ's Home.

What I love about Munger's testimony about that morning prayer meeting is that final dialogue with Armin. There are two essential attitudes our Christ must cultivate in us in order to prepare for the adventure of His life lived out through us. The first attitude is one of total availability to Him. Munger said, "I've done everything the Lord has been asking me to do. I can think of nothing more. The next step is up to him." That captures the fundamental dynamic of total availability, accompanied by patient waiting, that unleashes the life of Christ within us. All He asks of us is our availability, that He might use us when He wants; and just as important, that we might wait on Him when He does NOT want to use us!! We are focused on Him, resting in Him, trusting Him, and totally available for Him to use however, whenever, for whatever. That is the first attitude of this new life.

The second attitude is one of constant thanksgiving. Armin was encouraged by what Munger said, telling him, "That's good ... keep on thanking him." If all the fullness of the godhead dwells in us bodily through the Holy Spirit, then we have all the help, all the resource, we will ever need for any problem we will ever face. The point now is to face each day, each moment, each problem, not with a helpless sigh of "Oh well ...," but with a quiet prayer of "Thank You."

I can trace this transition in my own life over the past two years, in one specific area. One of the things I have prayed a great deal about in my life is my future. Especially in the days when I sensed the winds changing in my last two years at PBC, I spent countless hours in fervent prayer about my future. I prayed for God's guidance, His wisdom, and His help in making the decision. I prayed for the type of future I hoped I would have. I prayed my hopes and dreams out to Him. But notice how "I" oriented all those prayers are. After a solid year or so of such prayers, a new thought dawned on me, a thought of bracing simplicity. Those prayers began to change fundamentally. My prayer became simply, "Lord, thank You for the future You have already marked out for me." That prayer made perfect sense out of all my angst of the previous year. God already lived in me with all His wisdom, all His help, all His divine resources. And my God is a sovereign God, who holds my future in His mighty hand. Thanking Him for all that seemed the only appropriate thing to do. And it still is.

Imagine what this practically means for each of us right now, and again on Monday morning when we get up out of bed. We will be faced with countless hassles, innumerable little problems, probably one or two thorny, nasty problems that haven't seemed to go away. This time, face right into each of those problems, walk right into the heart of your day, with the simple prayer "Lord, Thank You" on your lips and in your heart. He is alive in you: as you trust in Him, He will release all His divine energies in the direction of your mundane problems. He will unleash His mighty right hand to wrestle down your thorny, nasty problems. He holds you in the palm of His hand. All is well with you, whether you worry about it or not, because of Him. The way to face the day, and each trying moment of the day, is with a simple, "Lord, Thank You!" This must have been what Paul was talking about in that compelling section at the end of I Thessalonians, when he encouraged them in I Thess. 5:16-18: "Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Jesus Christ." Amen, so it is.

God gave me a little clinic in this on Wednesday morning. Some of you have been noticing and alerting me to the fact that my right rear tire on my pickup has been getting low on air. I have been nursing it along with periodic trips to the BP station for air, knowing that on some morning I would go out and it would be totally flat. That morning was Wednesday, one of my study days that I try to keep free from distractions. I was driving down our driveway, and noticed the truck bouncing strangely. I got out and found the flat tire. With a groan, I got out and spent the next half hour changing the tire. I finally got on the road to work about forty minutes later than I had hoped, which meant I would have to work later than usual. Then, on the way in, I got behind a construction truck carrying gravel that was creeping along the road at 35 in a 45 MPH zone. I shook my head in disgust when he turned in front of me. But then, the Lord having finally slowed me down enough that I might listen to Him, He gave me a clinic in thankfulness. He ran across my mind all the many worse things that could have happened with that tire: it was a rainy morning, and I could have had to fix the tire on a muddy dirt road rather than our asphalt driveway; furthermore, I could have discovered that tire the morning before, when I rushed out at 5:55 to get to a 6:15 Bible study here at the church, and be late for a meeting I was leading; even furthermore, I could have had a blow-out and lost control of the car, wrapping it around a tree. I could have been killed. Suddenly I found myself deeply and sincerely thankful for that flat tire, and thankful for the truck that caused me to slow down to be tutored by my God.

Now, at this point, I can imagine that doubt is creeping into your minds. "C'mon Dorm, this sounds too good. This sounds too simple. Where's the catch?" I believe the only "catch" is when we doubt that it really is this simple. The only "catch" is a snag we introduce into the perfect workings of God's grace in our lives, and that snag is doubt. Some of you might be asking, "Where is it written that it is this simple?"

Let me catalogue for you the wealth of Biblical teaching on this subject. God uses countless examples of simple, everyday things to illustrate this golden truth of Christ in you, living His life through you. It is joyous to me that God uses everyday, seemingly mundane things to illustrate this grandest of truths.

Moses was shepherding in the wilderness of Sinai when a mysterious firelight caught his eye. It was a scraggly bush, nothing so very special, but the fire that burned inside it didn't consume it. It was a miracle he had to stop to see. It was just an everyday bush, but the fire burning inside became the match that ignited the freedom of the nation of Israel from the taskmaster's whip.

Jesus used everyday things to illustrate this principle as well. In the Sermon on the Mount, He told His disciples in Matt. 5:14-16: "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a lamp, and put it under a peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to the whole house." Now I have seen actual lamps used in Jesus' day, and they are unadorned clay vessels roughly the size and shape of the cupped palm of your hand. They had toward the "finger-tip" a wick that was lit, and the rest of the lamp contained oil. This is a perfect picture of us: filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, bearing within ourselves the genuine light of Christ. Jesus knew every time His audience lit a lamp, they would think about His imagery.

Jesus also described the sower and the seed. If we study that parable closely, we discover that when the seed landed on top of the soil, without penetrating it, there was no harvest. The key point of the story comes in Luke 8:8: "And other seed fell into the good soil, and grew up, and produced a crop a hundred times as great..." Thus, seed that sits on top of the ground languishes; seed that goes into the ground produces fruit. It was when the word of God came into the soil that the harvest was produced. Similarly, it is when Jesus Christ as the eternal Word of God comes into the heart of the person open to Him that He is able to produce His fruit in their lives.

Jesus also used two pictures of living water to show how His life was to bubble up and flow through believers. When at Jacob's well with the woman at the well, Jesus foreshadowed for her the truth of the coming Spirit, in John 4:13, 14: "Jesus answered and said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." Thus Jesus used a common well to teach an uncommon truth. In a similar way, Jesus compared us to a river channel, out of whom shall flow rivers of living water. In John 7:37-39, we see perhaps Jesus' clearest teaching on the subject of His life flowing through the believer: "Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, 'If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, "From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water."' But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." Each believer is designed to be a channel of blessing, allowing the living water of His Spirit to flow through us to water a dry and thirsty land.

On the night before He died, Jesus left in the minds of His disciples three indelible images of exactly this simple truth. Once again, the images are of everyday things endowed with the weight of heavenly glory. The first image is the vine and the branches. These men had grown up seeing the vine and its branches as regularly as we see the TV. And Jesus gave them the enduring picture of Himself as the true vine, and them the branches, whose life came only from the flowing sap available to them from the vine, the sap representing the Holy Spirit. His words in John 15:4, 5 are as tantalizingly simple and profound as anything Jesus ever said: "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing."

Shortly before that, Jesus had taken two of the most everyday things in the world, and blessed them with meaning and glory far beyond imagining. He had taken some bread, the most everyday part of a meal the world over, and He compared it to His body to be broken for them on the cross. Then He took a common cup and filled it with wine, symbolizing simultaneously His spilled blood and the Spirit who would fill us up. It was a cup of blessing. It was the cup of the new covenant of His blood. Then the true magic of communion comes alive for us when we realize Jesus gave us both of these things to ingest, to take within ourselves. As the bread and wine are ingested, digested and life-giving to us physically, so the dying and living of Jesus Christ is consumed into us by faith, digested daily in our experience, and life-giving to us spiritually. Jesus gave us communion as a ritual for one reason: to remind us of His death that allowed His life to come inside us by faith.

Jesus Christ indwelling Paul wrote of similar everyday things telling the truth of the glory of Christ indwelling everyday people like you and me. Paul tells us in II Cor. 4:7-12 the mechanism of this mystery: "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh." Earthen vessels, clay pots, even cracked pots. Not much in themselves; but oh the glory of the treasure inside! Like us: cracked vessels carrying Christ within!!

Thus, the Bible is replete with pictures of everyday little things imbued with the glory of God: a desert bush, a common house lamp, seed sown into the ground, a well bubbling up, a flowing river, a vine and its branches, a piece of bread, a cup, an earthen vessel. Thank God for these everyday things filled with shining glory, because the body of Christ is entirely comprised of everyday people like you and me indwelled by the glory of God through the Spirit. Far from being a tangential truth of the gospel, this is the heart of the gospel: that promise that "we shall be saved by His life."

Notice that there is no uncertainty in this. It is not "we might be saved by His life if we are good," nor is it, "we will be saved by His life as long as we do A, B and C," nor is it, "we will be saved by His life once we get to heaven," it is a simple FACT from the moment of reading into the foreseeable future. It is a certainty, not a mere possibility.

Paul makes this clear at the end of I Thessalonians as well. He concluded by saying in I Thess. 5:24: "Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it." There is no question that Christ will live His life through us, as long as we trust Him and say simply, "Lord, Thank You!!!!"

Conclusion: A World of Empty Clothes, Unused Gloves

This is why I began with the simple, everyday picture of some work gloves and work clothes. That is just like us as believers. We will not be useful in accomplishing that for which we were made unless filled with the living being of our Christ. Once we are filled by Him, He lives through us and works in and through us to accomplish His good pleasure. It is for Him that we are made, and without Him we are as empty and useless as the pile of discarded clothes on the floor.

Even more than that: everyone we meet in our neighborhood, in our families, in our workplaces, who does not know Jesus Christ is an empty garment. The garment might look nice, but it is terribly empty nonetheless. Oh Lord, may we have a heart for the loneliness, emptiness and futility of life for those who were made expressely to be filled by You, but remain Your empty enemies. May You reach out to them with Your love through our hands, through our faces, through our words, through our feet approaching them, and may they see beyond the everyday us to see You loving them! Amen.

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