I don’t know about you, but sometimes the hardest thing it seems that I do is make a decision between two forks in the road. I’ll sit there and be forced to choose between left and right. And in my gut I know I should go left, but I choose to go right and then I get lost in some unknown country road in the middle of Pennsylvania. Oh wait, I thought I was talking about a theoretical choice, but no, I was talking about real life. You don’t have to admit this or even acknowledge so lest you be judged by our peer sitting in this room, but how many of us have ever spent a night conflicted about a choice we need to make and essentially it was a hard decision because you were fighting against yourself throughout the whole ordeal? Is it just me? I’m not even talking about moral conflicts right now, I’m talking about the difference between 48 hot wings and 64 hot wings at this point. Yeah, I know, we all have, it’s part of human nature, it’s part of life to struggle over such meaningless philosophical questions. I was 16 and i was a senior in high school. I was a proud jock– i had varsity jackets and letters and trophies for participation, you know, I was the bomb! And there is a certain lifestyle that comes with living this popular jock kid lifestyle– [cut to hot clip]. Oh wait, no that wasn’t popular when I was growing up 15 years ago. But really, my dad was a pastor and I spent 16 years going to church by that point and I heard the gospel message. I knew the ABCs, it just had no value and meaning to my life. In fact, the sole reason I went to church on any given Sunday wasn’t because I believed anything, but I knew that when I went to church and did some motions and smiled for the people, God, because I believed that there was a God, would do some voodoo magic and I would be free to lives messy, uninhibited life. The repercussions of my decisions was the hour and half of suffering I had to endure through Sunday service. And yet, we have the problem of the gospel. Some of us, if not all of us, live in constant conflict with the good news and ourselves prior to the gospel and we struggle through it. We move and live the gospel like its girly smelling soap and we hate washing with girly smelling soap. Its a bad pattern we have embraced not only from our friends, but from our parents and our brothers and sisters. Lets just be honest, we on our best days are two faced, on our worst days we tend to be liars and thieves and every single day we wake up fighting ourselves because we are the dichotomy. So most of us come to church. Let me honest and really rip into us, as a community– so be offended because this is also a criticism of me too. None of us want to really be here on Sunday. We are here because we have an obligation to each other t least one day a week. However, there are plenty of other things we would rather be doing on a Sunday afternoon. Most of us, we give ourselves to service in the morning and when I look, it’s a sad look. I ain’t going to lie, I tell you to get here at 8 and be prepared and man oh man, its so hard getting up in the morning, especially when it’s cold. You wish the church was 70 miles closer. Yeah, I know that’s what you’re thinking I’m thinking and it’s true. But we come in some order to fulfill some need we have within ourselves to cover and make up for our two facedness or at least make atonements for the sin you committed all week. We use church as a place to hide our sins from God. What? Let’s go to Genesis 3. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” (Genesis 3:7-10 ESV) Here’s something about human nature we learn from Genesis 3. We think we can hide from God behind a covered veil of self imposed righteousness. Adam and Eve hid their naked selves from God when he called thinking that what they were or had become was unacceptable to God. Indeed it was unacceptable, because at that moment when they decided to revolt against God by disobeying His one command, they had soiled themselves. And so we, thousands of years later, do the very same thing. We hide who we are and what we are, even though it fights within us by systematically and unsympathetically going through the motions of religion at church. Let’s cut to Ephesians. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:13-22 ESV) I forgot where I saw it, I think on Facebook, because I don’t think I have anymore real interactions with human beings anymore… However the post went like this– “why can’t so and so listen to me and be a better a person? Doesn’t so and so care about the advice I am giving?” in my head, I said, “God, if he would only listen to himself, he would laugh.” the interesting fact is that we people are self destructive as a result of the fall. It’s in our nature to bring ourselves to a slow death. Just ask anybody that binge drinks or does drugs or gluttonously consumes transfats…it’s a slow death. So, the fight to find ourselves is also a slow death until we really meet Jesus. We meet Jesus and we still stand as though we are still battling ourselves and why are we doing it here at this church. That is the question. We need to stop playing ourselves and turn around and live with ourselves without being hostile to ourselves and thereby alienating everybody else around us. Am I right? If we believe our savior came to this earth to stop us from alienating ourselves before God like Adam and Eve alienated themselves before God, why are we alienating ourselves before each other? But to give you some reassurances on your fears of being exposed for confessing your weaknesses, mistakes, and shortcomings to Jesus at His Cross, I will tell you that there is no risk in coming close to Jesus cross. He is not going to be surprised by what you confess. He is not going to strip you from having the power of coming near. If you want to live a life free from the burden of being somebody youre not, you need to take hold of the power offered by Christ to come near to God and be everything you knew you were created for. Our sins and our past do not disqualify us. Nor are they a stumbling block if we are ready to say yes to it. Jesus allows us to be comfortable in our own skin. You say you are comfortable in your own skin here, but I know you’re not; and I know that because I’m not. Here we are all trying to be chameleons. We spend most of our lives trying to be chameleons. We need to stop and be comfortable and let other people see us for what we are. Sinners, redeemed by God through the blood of Jesus, ready to welcome our friends and families to the great family of God because we have Jesus to cling toward in our weakness and inadequacies. Here is what people in Christian communities do terribly wrong — we make strangers and aliens. We need to stop that because we too were once strangers and aliens. Here is my challenge to all of us in this room: and I say this knowing that most of us are incredibly private and don’t keep many friends that are more than acquaintances. I’m going to go out on a limb and challenge us anyways. How can we be real enough with ourselves first, internally, that we can be real to each other externally and in turn be comfortable enough to invite people into this community so they too can stop living split, fighting internally and join us in this relationship we have with Jesus? What steps do we have to take, what things must we change. I want to take a few minutes now, in open prayer, because don’t do that enough here and we must, we have to. Let’s pray and I challenge you to pray loudly now and ask God to reconcile if you haven’t in a while.
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