Alison Morgan, Holy Trinity, November 2001
One evening in 1738 a young man named John Wesley was taken rather reluctantly by a friend to a meeting in London. John was a Christian. He’d been ordained 13 years earlier when he graduated from Oxford, and then he’d served as a curate in his home parish. Then he’d spent a couple of years as a chaplain to one of the new colonies in America. It hadn’t gone very well. It’d all seemed rather like hard work, and there’d been a spot of bother over a young lady. But John was still determined to serve God, and so he went to the meeting. At the meeting someone read Luther’s introduction to the letter to the Romans. As he listened to the words, John Wesley had a weird sensation of his heart being warmed, and he felt an immense sense of release from everything he’d been struggling with. After that his Christian life was completely different. This is what he wrote in his journal:
I was much buffeted with temptations; but cried out and they fled away. And herein I found the difference between this and my former state chiefly consisted. I was striving, yea, fighting with all my might under the law as well as under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now, I was always conqueror.
As the days went past, John found his spiritual life changing. Gone was the effort, the battle to live up to standards he knew he couldn’t reach; instead he found a peace and an assurance he had never known before. As his spiritual life changed, so did his ministry. And the result was a spiritual revival which stretched the length and breadth of England and beyond.
Let’s pray…
Today we’re thinking about how to walk in step with the Holy Spirit, and our text is Romans 8. Romans 8 could lay good claim to be one of the chunks of writing which has most changed the world. And perhaps the person who explained it most effectively was Martin Luther. It was his commentary on Romans which changed Wesley’s life and which changed England 2 ½ centuries ago.
Let me tell you about Luther. Luther was a German monk in the 15th century. He was utterly determined to be a good Christian. And so he did all the things monks did. He did spiritual exercises. He fasted. He confessed his sins. He struggled to overcome his sins. He punished his body. He recited the offices. He read the right books. He got up in the middle of the night to pray. But always he was full of a sense of failure. He felt that it was impossible to live up to God’s standards. He was filled with a sense of his own inadequacy, his own failings. The harder he tried, the more sinful he felt. He was a deeply unhappy man.
Now the medieval church had a wonderful system for dealing with all this. It was called indulgences. What it meant was that you could buy your way back into a state of grace. Certain men were given permission by the pope to sell special dispensations which got you off your sins. Bit like getting a fixed penalty parking ticket really. Easy for you – you just paid up. Convenient for the church and the indulgence sellers – they divided the cash between them. But as Luther watched peasants who could scarcely afford bread spending money on indulgences, he was outraged. And he went to the scriptures, which at the time ordinary people were not allowed to read, and he found Romans 8, and he discovered that this was not the solution God had had in mind.
Have you ever played that game where you try to jump on your own shadow? We used to play it a lot as kids, and I’ve watched my own kids play it. To start with, small children don’t realise they have a shadow. Life just isn’t that complicated. Then one day they notice it. I’ve watched them twist and turn, and the dawning realisation that it’s attached to them. That it won’t go away. So they play the game of trying to gain mastery over it by stamping on it. The problem is, the physical laws of the universe won’t play ball. Just as you’re about to land on its tummy, it jumps away from you and you find yourself still firmly attached to the feet.
That’s what it’s like being a Christian. You have two natures. One is your simple human nature, your natural inclinations, the thoughts and feelings which spring readily into your mind. And the other is the spiritual nature, awakened in you by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and kept alive by the Holy Spirit. The human nature, or the flesh as the older translations have it, is temporal in nature. It belongs to this world. The spirit within you is eternal, and belongs to the kingdom of heaven.
All your problems come from the fact that you have these two. When you become a Christian you are given new life. You become a child of God, and like the child you jump and dance and play. But sooner or later you notice, like the real child, that you have a shadow. It hasn’t gone away. That shadow is your old self, your human nature. And it is always with you, like a dark halo which befuddles your thinking and shines round your best intentions. It will confuse you. It will fill you with feelings you don’t want, of anger and fear, jealousy and insecurity. It will make you believe things you don’t want to believe – perhaps that happiness lies in material goods, or having lots of friends, or just in having fun.
The question is, what do you do about it?
Well, there are various options.
1. Option number one: Give in. Allow your natural inclinations to govern your thinking. The Christian who does this is indistinguishable from the non Christian. If this is you, you may find that you behave the same way at work as your non-Christian colleagues, and adopt the same values as those around you. You spend your leisure time in the same way, worry about your career in the same way, try frantically to keep up with your social calendar in the same way. There may be things in your emotional life which defeat you, but perhaps you’ve got used to that. Anxiety has become normal. Anger is your daily companion. Giving up smoking or losing weight just seems too difficult. And so you will find that you are in effect living according to the human nature, without benefit of the Spirit. Your faith is important to you, so you try to get to church each week and to contribute to its life in some way. But prayer doesn’t work very well, and fulfilment and contentment seem elusive. And at some level you know that you are missing out.
2. Option number two
So that’s option number one. Give in. It’s all too difficult. But perhaps you are made of sterner stuff, like Martin Luther and John Wesley. In that case you might want to go for option number two. Option number two is to try to overcome your natural inclinations, your unreliable human nature. So you focus on getting rid of it. You pray a lot about your shortcomings, you try harder to live a spiritual life, you determine to be committed and focussed and not put up with your weaknesses. This is commendable, but miserable. The problem is you never succeed. You aren’t even meant to succeed. Holiness is not supposed to be a human achievement. You are supposed to be learning how to depend upon God, not how to follow a self-improvement programme. Committed Christians often fall into this trap. People have tried everything from hair shirts and beds of nails to fleeing to the desert. And by and large they have found themselves becoming depressed, miserable, defeated Christians for whom prayer is a guilty and tormented affair. You can’t do it that way.
OK, so the problem with option one is that it doesn’t work. And the problem with option two is that it doesn’t work. So you’re stuck. Stuck with your own fallible, conquered self. You can’t get rid of it, but you don’t want to settle for living with it. What then do you do?
Paul talks about our natural inclinations. Or the flesh. Or the sinful nature – depending on which translation you are using. I prefer natural inclinations, because it’s in language we can understand. What then are our natural inclinations. Well, I think we can take them as being basically two things. First, our feelings. Second, our thoughts. Both cause us problems, and we can’t really get rid of either. Let’s think about feelings first.
18 months ago I was on holiday in Ireland. It was a fine summer’s day, and we decided to have a family expedition up a mountain. It was a perfect mountain, no more than a thousand feet or so, and there would be a 360 degree view from the top. The children put on their trainers and us our boots, and we set off. Edward bounded ahead, Katy ran after him determined to keep up. The path was well defined and the sun shone. The only problem was, that Bethy didn’t want to climb the mountain. Or at least, she did, but only as long as she was holding my hand and commanding my attention. So up we went, everyone having a lovely time except me because Bethy was winging and wailing and clinging to me. I couldn’t admire the view, I couldn’t watch the birds, because this child just went on and on at me. Mummy this. Mummy that. Mummy my shoe’s undone. Mummy wait for me. Mummy I need a rest. At first I did the perfect parent act, and encouraged her in bright tones. It made no difference. And so I got crosser and crosser and crosser. And less and less patient. Then I began to feel guilty for feeling cross. I spend a lot of time feeling guilty for feeling things. Anyway, eventually we got to the top, and Bethy was all smiles again.
The next morning I was praying about it, and resolving to be more patient and try harder, when God said something to me. He said, your life is like that. You are going up a mountain. There are all sorts of problems, and they will cause you all sorts of emotional responses. But it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is keep walking up the mountain. And your feelings will come with you, just as your children come with you. You can’t do anything about them. You don’t have to feel guilty about them. You just have to accept them. They are just there, there just as your children are there, just as the sun and the rain are there, your companions in life. I just want you to know that, and to stop hitting yourself over the head about it. It’s not what matters. All that matters is that you keep walking up the mountain, that you keep talking to me about it, that you keep letting me guide you, that you don’t get discouraged by what goes on inside you.
So I understood that the feelings are just like my shadow. I have no power over them. But I don’t have to be thrown off course by them either. I can just press on. I am not responsible for them, any more than I am responsible for the sun and the rain, any more than I am responsible for the behaviour of my children. It’s all part of what it means to be human. And I don’t need to let it undermine me. For I have the spirit of God within me.
Luther puts it like this. He says that when you become a Christian, it isn’t that your sin is taken away. It is that you are taken away. The sin is still there, it remains, as a kind of relic. But you are placed at one remove from it. You watch it, you feel it. But you don’t have to be overwhelmed by it.
So that’s negative feelings. What about temptation. Let me recommend a book to you. It’s a spiritual classic, and it was written by a Victorian lady called Hannah Whitall Smith. You know what the Victorians were like. Lots of respectability in the upper classes, and lots of sin in the lower classes. Holy Spirit very unfashionable. Hannah Whitall Smith was convinced that if Christianity was to seem attractive to those outside it, it had to be seen to work. It had to be seen to help people rise above the limitations of the earthly nature and walk with the Spirit of God. She was really one of the first people to call for a rediscovery of the Holy Spirit in the daily life of the Christian. So she called her book, A Christian’s secret of a happy life. And she has a wonderful section about temptation. She says temptations are a sign of grace, because they increase in strength after you enter the higher Christian life. If you are tempted, you are doing well. And she says it is important not to see temptation as sin. To see temptation as sin is as if a burglar should break into your house to steal, and when you begin to resist him, the burglar turns round and accuses you of being the thief. This, says Hannah Whitall Smith, is Satan’s strategy – to whisper suggestions of evil to you, and then to say you are wicked to think such things. You know you shouldn’t think them, so you agree with him. And then you think you’ve had it, so you give up the struggle and give in to the temptation. And then you really have had it.
So what’s the solution. She says we can have confidence. We can pray. We can expect to be given the grace to conquer. We don’t know how to pray, but the Spirit will intercede for us with sighs too deep for words. We can’t prevent temptation coming, but we can know that with every temptation we will be provided with a way out. There’s a proverb I rather like. It says, you can’t stop bats flying round your head, but you can stop them making nests in your hair. And so it is with temptations. You can’t stop them coming, for you have an inbuilt vulnerability to them. Temptation will always be there. But you can tell God all about it. And just keep walking up the mountain.
So whether it’s negative feelings or temptations that bother you, accept that you are saddled with a shadow, and instead of staring at it all the time or trying to get rid of it, or telling yourself how awful you are because you have it, just focus on God. Don’t feel ashamed. Just tell him about it, and ask for his help. And you will experience life and peace, you will know yourself to be his child, you will experience his love. It isn’t your fault. Your sufferings are part of the human condition. Once I got around after ages to praying about something I was struggling with, negative feelings that were taking away my peace of mind. I’d been afraid to pray, because I expected a rocket from God. And do you know what he said? As clear as a bell, inside my head: tell me about it. And I did. And I knew he was with me, and that he loved me. And suddenly the feelings shrank, like an ogre that’s just been turned into Tom Thumb.
So we have feelings. If we stop giving in to them, and stop struggling against them, and instead just offer them to God as a part of ourselves and ask for the grace to focus not on them but on him, then we find that we receive life and peace.
But I think you will find that God wants even more than that
for you. He wants you as a beacon, as a light shining on a lamppost,
conspicuous for the fact that you are living in accordance with his mind and
his purposes. Once you’ve learnt to deal with your feelings and your
temptations, you need to turn to your thoughts, for this is the other area
where we are tempted into inappropriate DIY. When you feel depressed it’s
probably fairly obvious to you that that doesn’t fit in well with your identity
as a child of God. These are the feelings which rise from the human
nature. But what often we don’t realise is that our thoughts also often
rise from the human nature. Scripture is full of stuff about the futility of
human thinking. Isaiah 55, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither
are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. Psalm 94,
the Lord knows the
thoughts of man, and he knows that they are futile.
Out there is a whole culture dominated by human thinking. Paul says, verse 5, that those who are living by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires. And that those who live in the spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. And that the mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.
So the question is, what determines what is in your mind? What we have our minds on tends to come from the culture we live in. That our thinking is determined not so much by the Spirit of God as by the spirit of the age.
Let me show you two slides.
All human thinking has to start from somewhere. And the thinking which
dominates our culture starts from a single sentence written by a single man in
the year 1637. The sentence was, I think therefore I am, and the man was
Descartes. Descartes was trying to come up with a philosophy of human
knowledge. The question he was trying to answer was, how do we know things. And
the solution he came up with was: only through reason. What can be proved by
reason can be accepted as reliable. And all human thinking since then has been
based on this assumption. Great advances have been gained as a result in
science and technology. But the result is that we have grown up in a culture
which is founded entirely on human thinking. And human thinking, excellent
though it may be when investigating the properties of the material universe, is
less reliable when it comes to matters of the spirit. The mind of the sinful
man is death.
Let me offer you an alternative. This is the alternative. In the beginning was the Word. The alternative view is that life is best understood not by reason but by revelation. That it isn’t the mind of man, but the mind of God which offers us the key to life.
Let me demonstrate. I think therefore I am. Where does that get us. Well, it confines us pretty much to what we can see and investigate by our own powers of reason. And so in our culture we value the material. Our gods are medicine, because that’s how we think we will get life, and technology, because that’s how we think we will control the world we live in. Medicine and technology, both products of human thinking, are the solutions to all our ills. Personal needs can be solved by drugs and procedures, global needs can be solved by technology. The problem is it doesn’t quit seem to work, because we find we have other needs, spiritual needs. And as all we think about is the world we see, that’s how we try and get them met. Not to put too fine a point on it, we don’t pray, we buy things. We are a consumer society. We are taught in every advert we watch that our fundamental spiritual needs for purpose and acceptance will be met by buying this or that. The founder of Revlon cosmetics said, in the laboratory I make cosmetics, in the store I sell dreams. And a recent survey by an advertising agency found that when you ask British teenagers what makes for happiness, they put money above friends and love. It’s frightening. Listen to this.
Is fitness a new religion? This is not about guilt. It is
about joy. Strength. The revival of the spirit. I come here seeking redemption
in sweat. And it is here I am forgiven my sinful calories. Others may never
understand my dedication. But for me, fitness training is something much more
powerful than exercise. It is what keeps my body healthy. It is what keeps my
mind clear. And it is where I learn the one true lesson. To believe in myself.
Sounds great, doesn’t it. It’s an advert for Avia running shoes.
Consumerism has been defined as the new religion of the 20th
century. It’s the best human thinking has been able to come up with when
confronted with the empty hole inside people who do not know God. Whose
thinking is futile. What does God say about it:
Those who are living by
their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires.
Those who live in the Spirit have their minds on spiritual things. And human
nature has nothing to look forward to but death, while the spirit looks forward
to life and peace, because the outlook of disordered human nature is opposed to
God, since it does not submit to God’s law, and indeed it cannot, and those who
live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God.
It isn’t even just that we buy things. We consume everything. We consume relationships. Do you know that the average Londoner meets more people in a week than his pre-industrial ancestor would have met in a lifetime? We kid ourselves that diaries stuffed with social engagements will meet our needs, and then wonder why we’re lonely. What else. We consume leisure. We don’t curl up with a book or play team sports. We buy an experience. Take theme parks. If I take my kids to a theme park, they come home shattered and in a bad temper. If I take them for a walk in the country, they come home closer to me and in a good mood. What else. Night clubs. Health clubs. Megazone. Video rentals. Massages. Everything is for sale. The lottery. The problem isn’t that it’s gambling. The problem is that it is the attempt to buy happiness. And it doesn’t work. The ancient Greeks knew a thing or two; it all reminds me of that story where King Midas gets given a wish, and he wishes that everything he touches would turn to gold. He gets it. It does. Even his food. Happiness is not for sale, it comes only from within. Every day the average person sees 80 adverts. They are all based on human thinking. And they brainwash us. We live in a culture which is brainwashing us, and half the time we don’t even realise it. You may have the right trainers. You may have the right ambitions. But they won’t bring you life and peace.
So let me invite you to ask yourself, what fills your mind? Do you start over here (I think therefore I am), or over there (in the beginning was the Word)? Are you seeking fulfilment through the materialistic assumptions of a society based on human thinking, or are you seeking fulfilment through your relationship with God? Wanting fancy trainers, or a full diary, or the right leisure opportunities won’t bring you life and peace. Life and peace are to be found only through meditation, prayer, praise and creative participation in the purposes of God.
In the beginning was the word. The word doesn’t just mean the scriptures. The word is God. The word is ultimate reality. ultimate reality is bigger than human reason, and ultimate reality will set you free. What was it Hamlet said? There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Too true.
Let’s end with Romans. If we walk in the spirit, offer our feelings to God, keep our minds fixed on him,
And nothing, neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
He knows all about it.