The Bridge of Virtue Sunday AM Sermon 7/10/10

This morning I want to look at something that perplexes many Christians. It seems like a very basic problem but it is perplexing many people and many churches.
The question can be framed as the following: I know that salvation is a gift from God and there is nothing I can do to earn my salvation. But what about once I am a Christian? Am I to just follow rules and regulations out of fear of God? Am I to just live just like I want to?
I am around many young people every day that are in desperate need of an answer to this question. Many groups come in and teach a basic evangelistic sermon and ask people to make a decision to follow Jesus or come to Jesus. They ask people to invite Jesus into their heart and tell them the importance of being saved. I think we would all agree with this, that one must accept Christ and make an initial decision to follow him. But this is where many leave the story and teaching stops. Basically I meet many confused young people that think that they have punched their ticket and they are saved. Now they are just trying to find happiness for themselves. Many don’t even belong to a Church. They are what I call ‘lone ranger’ Christians. This is why we are finding more and more people that profess Christianity and claim that they have been saved but live like the Devil.
But I think a bigger problem is at play. There is no teaching on what the Bible says on the matter. They don’t want to tackle the big question of what happens once I am saved.
I would propose that that this problem plays out in the individual as well as in society.
To keep this in our mind I would propose that we begin tackling this question by visualizing a river. We are on the bank of this river looking over the churning water. The bank that we are standing on is our moment of initial salvation. We have just placed our faith in Jesus and we are fresh out of the baptismal waters. On the other bank is Heaven, resurrection from the dead, or ultimate salvation. The River that we must transverse is our life. This is the tough task of navigating as a Christian in a fallen world.
What I am proposing this morning is a discussion on the bridge that takes us from the moment of initial salvation to our ultimate destiny. What would the bridge look like and how do we get to the other side. We will take a few weeks to look in depth at this idea of living the Christian life in a very Biblical and deliberate way. When we are finished my prayer is that we can describe exactly how to navigate this river or life and bridge from our time of salvation until our ultimate salvation at the end of our lives.
How the World Looks at this Problems:
1) Just obey as system of rules – have a check box mentality. Do a system of checks to please God. Go down a punch list of dos and stay away from the don’ts and things will be okay.
2) Just discover who ‘I am’. I must be true to myself. It is all about my happiness. God has given me grace and now I just need to find out who I really am and express myself to the world.

We see these two options played out in the private lives of many but in large cultural settings such as the government.
The Biblical answer to this quandary is TRANSFORMED CHARACTER
We can have all the rules and regulations that we please but if we don’t have character to do what is right in every situation then we will have chaos.
If we are honest with each other we would agree that we constantly live in a struggle between obeying rules imposed upon us and doing the desires of our heart. When we get into trouble is when the desires of our heart are much greater than our will to follow the rules. That is when we get into trouble.
I see this in classroom management in teaching my class. I have had years when I have had to have many classroom rules and I had to enforce them regularly. I have had other classes that had great character and I didn’t have to have many rules at all. The classes with great character were the ones that flourished and learned the most.
We see this playing out now in our own country. On the national level we have a government that has laws on the books that they refuse to enforce. The current controversy between our federal government and the state of Arizona Is an example of this. Arizona passes an immigration law that is much like the federal law of the same kind. The difference is that the federal government has not had the character or fortitude to enforce the law already on the books. What we need to fix people and our nation as a whole is not more laws and regulations but people of great character.
Francis Schaeffer was a Christian philosopher that said in the 1980’s that we cannot have freedom without chaos in the U.S. unless our people have a shared value system that involves people of high character. When character erodes the government will have to swoop in and regulate morality and make more laws. Now we see a population that is becoming less and less virtuous but at the same time a government that is even less virtuous.
Now is the time for the Church to find its voice on the issue of character.

I. This morning I will propose that the bridge that I mentioned earlier is transformed character.

We must see the Christian life in terms of TRANSFORMED CHARACTER
To get our minds around this from a Biblical view point I would like to look at the story of the Rich Young Ruler in Mark 10

Mark 10: 17-27
17 As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life ?" 18 And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call Me good ? No one is good except God alone. 19 "You know the commandments, 'DO NOT MURDER, DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, DO NOT STEAL, DO NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS, Do not defraud, HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER.' " 20 And he said to Him, "Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up." 21 Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, "One thing you lack : go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven ; and come, follow Me." 22 But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property. 23 And Jesus, looking around, said to His disciples, "How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God !" 24 The disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus answered again and said to them, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God ! 25 "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." 26 They were even more astonished and said to Him, "Then who can be saved ?" 27 Looking at them, Jesus said, "With people it is impossible, but not with God ; for all things are possible with God."


From this passage we need to note some important things.
Running – the man runs to Jesus and this was undignified in the culture of this time. Men just did not run in ancient Israel unless it was life or death. This man has something important to ask Jesus. He has a real sense of urgency.
We see quickly that his question is “WHAT DO I DO TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE?”
What does he mean by this question? The Jews understood eternal life to mean the general resurrection from the dead that would be accomplished at the end of the age in which all faithful Jews that had been faithful to the covenant would enjoy.
HE IS ASKING: HOW DO I LIVE NOW TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY OR INHERIT THE LIFE TO COME.
THIS IS MUCH LIKE THE QUESTION OR THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER THAT I PROPOSED EARLIER THIS MORNING. HOW DO I GET FROM NOW TO FINAL SALVATION? THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE IS ASKING.
WE MAY, MORE SPECIFICALLY, PUT IT AS HOW DO I BEHAVE TO PLEASE GOD?
2 questions are contained in this man’s question.
1) Content of behavior – What specific things should I do and not do – the nuts and bolts of how I behave.
2) Means or method - How will I do this? How will I live out this type of life? How do I put these rules into practice?
This is the question I think we would all love to ask Jesus today if we had the chance.
What do I do?
How do I do that?
These are very practical questions.
Jesus’ answer is very simple - FOLLOW ME!
In Jesus we see what to do and exactly how to do it. In the life of Christ we get exactly what one must and must not do and how you go about accomplishing it.

II. Building A bridge – involves having THE GOAL ever before us.

Great sports teams and business are very goal directed. People set a goal and keep that goal before them. We will watch athletes train their bodies to the point of exhaustion and go beyond that point because their goal is ever before them. I would propose that Christians must be the same way when we consider navigating from the point of initial salvation to the time of our final salvation.
We must keep the goal of Heaven and fellowship with Christ face to face ever before us.
The boy in this story has this sense of goal. He numbers the Last 6 of the 10 commandments that he has been faithful too. He has not murdered, not stolen, not bore false witness, not committed fraud, and has been faithful to his parents.
The 10 commandments to a Jew were the obligation that Jew had to observe to be covenantly faithful to God.
This young man new he was incomplete, he sensed it because he is here asking Jesus this question. The word for complete in Greek is from the same root as the word for Goal.
In other words in the original language of the New Testament the ideas of completeness and accomplishing a goal are tied together.
This young man knows that he is lacking. The rich young ruler had taken on a checkbox mentality and had lost sight of the goal. His character was in question because he had allowed his great possessions to replace his devotion to God.
Jesus takes this young man back to the most important command of all. The command that prohibited idols IS THE ONE THAT JESUS IS DRIVING HOME WITH THIS YOUNG MAN. God must come first and then your neighbor. We must love God first and then love those around us. That basically summed up all of the Law and the prophets.
This applies to us as well. Do we see our own lives as God sees us? God sees the ultimate goal of a new creation. God sees us as New Creatures in Christ.
God sees us as saved, justified, and cleansed. God sees our future and wants to bring that future into our present.
God wants us to start behaving like Kingdom people.
Isn’t that what God did in Christ? By Jesus’ resurrection from the dead God gave us an advanced sign of what is to come for all of us.
In the same way he wants to show the world through us and our transformed lives what he has in store for our world at the end of time when the New Heavens and New Earth are revealed and the New Jerusalem descends from Heaven.
God wants us to begin that type of living now!

Ephesians 2: 4-64 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved ), 6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus

Paul states as a matter of fact that we are RAISED UP – PAST TENSE- AND SEATED WITH CHRIST IN THE HEAVENLY PLACES
That is what God sees in us when we are saved and washed in the blood of Christ. That is the present reality.
We should behave as heavenly beings.
Would you not believe that a heavenly being would behave would great character?
We must see the goal that God has glorious things planned for us. He will give us a wonderful resurrected body free from sin but now is the time God starts to work away on us and sanctify us. The work of sanctification is a work of God that we have to make ourselves available to.
God does this through just tough hard work. Not hard work that earns your salvation but hard work that God has planned for us to prepare us for His Kingdom life. This process of sanctification creates a saintly person with transformed character.
I hope that this type of bridge of transformed character is becoming easier to see from a biblical standpoint.
I think of the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and in one scene Indiana Jones has to transverse a deep gorge on an invisible bridge. He takes some dirt and throws it on this bridge and when the dirt hit the bridge you could see the contours of this bridge.
By turning to Scripture I hope the same is happening for us that you can visualize the bridge of virtue and character that God wants us to use to transverse from the moment we are saved until our ultimate salvation.

III. The third and final point I want to emphasize this morning is critical to all of this and that is TRANSFORMATION
WE HAVE TO BE TRANSFORMED PEOPLE – WE ARE SINFUL AND HAVE DEEP FLAWS AND EVIL THAT LURKS EVER SO CLOSE – WE MUST BE TRANSFORMED- CHANGED- DIFFERENT – NEW
We don’t need a new set of rules – we need transformed character
To understand this point we must turn back to our text in Mark 10. The story of the Rich Young Ruler is framed up by two other stories.
1st – Mark 10:2-12 the teachers of the Law had come to Jesus to catch him in a question about divorce. This was a political hot potato during this time because Herod had married his brother’s wife. Jesus answers this question masterfully by not trying to argue with sophistry but goes back to God’s very original intent for marriage. Jesus points to what was God’s main intent on this subject.
2nd – Mark 10: 35-45 we see the other story that frames this story is the story of James and John asking for a seat of privilege in the Kingdom. They wanted power just like many human people crave and chase. Jesus goes back to God’s original intent on God for Human Power and how that works in God’s kingdom.
In Mark 10 we see Jesus address the three things that dog and destroy our culture.
SEX, MONEY, And POWER - In all three of these things that tend to bend and distort humanity Jesus goes back to God’s original intent. This is what God had wanted for Human sexual relationships, the stewardship of possessions, and how Human power should be exercised. In this chapter we see Jesus remind us that God is calling the world back to what HE WANTS FOR US AND NOT WHAT WE DESIRE.
TRUE TRANSFORMED CHARACTER UNDERSTANDS OUR PLACE IN GOD’S STORY- WHAT DOES GOD WANT FOR THE WORLD – HOW DO I FIT INTO GOD’S PLAN FOR OUR WORLD?
WHEN WE SEE OURSELVES CAUGHT UP IN GOD’S GRAND RESCUE PLAN FOR HUMANITY AND THAT WE ARE PART OF SOMETHING MUCH BIGGER THAN JUST WHAT WE WANT, IT WILL NOT BE VERY HARD TO ALLOW GOD TO TRANSFORM OUR DESIRES INTO HIS DESIRES
WE MUST WANT WHAT GOD WANTS – WE MUST CRAVE FOR THE WORLD WHAT GOD CRAVES – WE NEED TO BE ADVANCED SIGN POSTS TO A LOST AND DYING WORLD SAYING THIS IS HOW TRUE HUMANITY LIVES AND FLOURISHES!
CONCLUSION:
Jesus sums up with this young man that when in doubt Just Follow Me. As we navigate this confusing world that is throwing all kinds of curve balls at us we just sometimes need to make it that simple. Pick up your Bible and ask the question, HOW DID JESUS DO IT?
IT MAY BE THAT SIMPLE.
A story of a young boy may illustrate this idea.
A gentleman proposed to drive with his wife to the beautiful cemetery beyond the town. Calling his little four-year-old he told him to get ready. The child's countenance fell, and the father said, "Don't you want to go, Willie?" The little lip quivered, but the child answered, "Yes, papa, if you wish." The child was strangely silent during the drive, and when the carriage drove under the wide archway he clung to his mother's side and looked up in her face with pathetic wistfulness. The party alighted and walked among the graves and along the shaded avenues, looking at the inscriptions. After an hour they returned to the carriage and the father lifted his little son to his seat. The child looked surprised, and drew a breath of relief and asked, "Why, am I going back with you?" "Of course you are; why not?" "I thought when they took little boys to the cemetery they left them there," he said. As this little child said obediently, "Yes, papa, if you wish," though he thought he was going to a horrible death, so we should always say, "Yes, Lord," to any command, though it seems like our death warrant.
There are some here today that need to get into that car just as that boy did. There are doubts that you have and I will tell you that you will never have all of those doubts answered. Sometimes you must take courage and just follow Christ.