Are You Bundled?

[HKHaugan]

Epi.27 Are You Bundled?

Lots of cable TV commercials want you to sign up for the bundle which, by the way, usually costs a bundle. The bundling they offer is TV programming, a landline telephone and internet access. It usually includes DVR that enables you to save programs you’d like to watch at a later time and HD, high definition, that gives sharply defined pictures. You get a remote to control the TV and technical help if something goes wrong. There is a manual with detailed instruction you can peruse if necessary. But it doesn’t work until someone presses the ‘on’ button. You believe it will work, you trusted its source and the manual’s instructions, then you faithfully hit the remote’s ‘on’ button.

There’s another kind of bundling, spiritual bundling. Making an image of Himself, God bundled a mind, a heart and a spirit together, created a human body to put the bundle in each of us. The problem is we lost our remote, the Holy Spirit Word, and sin became our remote when Adam and Eve chose to use their mind, heart and spirit apart from Him. God loved us. He didn’t want to lose us so He had a plan---send His Word, His remote, through the Jewish people to prepare the way for His Son Jesus, His exact image, to come into the world: fully God, fully man, fully connected and fully committed. What makes His humanity stand out like us is how He identified with us. He chose to live in a human body with all its limitations so that He could feel aloneness like we do. He lived the one and only bridge to God that sin-drenched humanity needed, faith. He chose to let the Spirit guide Him by faith in every area of His mind, heart and Spirit. He did it perfectly. He came to restore us to be like Him through belief, trust and faith in Him.

Again, how He did it was by His remote, God’s Word. The Holy Spirit fulfilled the Word in Him. He led Jesus into the desert with a purpose, to face temptation by the devil. Temptation is from the Greek word, peirazo, to prove, test, put on trial. Temptation is not the sin. Temptation is being made aware of the source of our desires. For believers it’s choice awareness, the opportunity to exercise free will to serve God or not to serve Him. What the Lord’s Prayer is asking: “Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from the evil one” = “Please Lord, don’t let our desires overtake or overwhelm us. Help us to identify and rebuke the devil when he attacks.”

What is desire and what are its specifics? How are they to be met? If there is a choice, what is directing the choice? If it’s leaning into a desire without God, it’s sin. If it’s momentary, back off. In one sense it is testing one’s own resolve. (Eve in Eden saw the fruit was pleasing to the eye, good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom apart from God, so she ate. Esau was hungry so the moment of satisfaction was more important than his birthright, his right to assert being an image of God. He allowed his hunger to identify him instead of who he was in God’s eyes.). We inherited Adam’s tendency to tilt toward sin, to follow the impulses of the moment. Living alone in a physical body tests the mettle of character. Because of sin, all of us assume we are wise enough to handle anything. “There are none righteous, no not one,” says Paul. No one really gets it. No wonder we need a Savior.

The secular world is all about appearance (pleasing to the eye), performance (good for food) and personal satisfaction (desirable for gaining wisdom). But if the choice is made in the Spirit, that choice is based on God’s Word. As far as Eve is concerned she made her choice apart from God. The devil used choice to tempt her. That’s how he made his way into her heart. Thus he gained the title of being the tempter. His power is sin, the centrifugal force in us aimed at throwing our choice making into disarray. The temptation he throws our way is to take control and do what we think satisfies the moment. That’s how he devours us. Rather than getting what we want, which is personal satisfaction, we get more fearful, more self-deceptive, more self-justifying, more prideful until we are wrapped in the cloak of total and depressing aloneness. This is the devil’s goal, total aloneness for the whole of humanity.

His strategy is simple. First, get people to rationalize with their minds. Second, get their hearts to trust in themselves apart from God. Third, get them to do what works for the moment. Because in those three are where sin does its most effective work. The devil tempts us to make choices based on our perceived needs not our real needs.

Perceived needs usually demand immediate satisfaction. Real needs are spiritual and their satisfaction is a moment by moment developing maturation of the mind, heart and spirit. It’s spiritual, personal and relational growth that takes a lifetime. Immediate satisfaction is impossible. If you really think about it, any trophy and the winning are momentary. It was what was accomplished in every moment that got you there. The people you met, the relationships you built, the values that made sense and learning that relationally, you were never alone. The Lord was with you and with the people you bonded with along the way. What we come to realize is this: it’s the process, the work, the faith from one moment to the next,---that’s where satisfaction is experienced. Setting goals is great but the real payoff is in the relational experience along the way. That’s where we build character and stability. When Jesus and His attitude become our goal it is that moment by moment belief, trust and faith in Him that build us relationally. That’s living!

When we received Jesus as our personal Savior and Lord He filled us with His remote, His Word in the Spirit. His goal for us is eternal life and all our choices, whether they involve the mind, the heart, the spirit or all three at the same time, have two alternatives, God or self. For Jesus it was His Father’s will. The Father’s will was faith in His mind, heart and Spirit. Faith in His Father, serving His Father, pleasing His Father, for Jesus that was righteousness. For Jesus faith was being right the way His Father willed. To be righteous, to be right in mind, heart and spirit takes faith from one moment to the next. That’s how Jesus grew in wisdom and stature with God and man. Bundled in faith. For Him, baptism and dealing with temptation by faith for forty days and nights without anything to eat and drink was the first and most important part of the recovery process for the mankind He loved.

Being right was faith leading the way. Faith is the key to understand what the life of Jesus means for us. It means being right with the Father, being right with the self and being right with others. Faith was so important to Him that the first thing He said was He came to fulfill all righteousness, the way to be right. Faith is being right before God wherever we are and with whomever we meet. Fulfillment starts with His being baptized. Baptism is the visual and physical way to begin His kind of spiritual, personal and relational life (Mt.3:15).

How did Jesus ‘fulfill’ righteousness? The Cross. Everything Jesus did in His earthly life was geared to modeling life, spiritual life that would end with the final test, death on the Cross. That’s why He calls us to take up our cross, which is faith in Him, when choices have to be made. And that is every next moment. That’s why we turn to the Word. What was His remote is now ours.

We start where He started, with His Baptism. Immediately after that the Spirit led Him into the wilderness. We live in a wilderness called the world. Jesus starts His walk by facing temptation. What humanity is dealing with every day is temptation. The temptation to choose between right and wrong. On one side is God and on the other is the devil. There is no middle ground. We are either going to choose to be in control or to let God and His Word lead. Temptation is to leave God and His Word out of the process. Baptism is when the process of being right begins. Baptism is where personal salvation begins. Baptism is when the life in Jesus begins. What does it mean to be righteous, to be right?

When He submitted He was doing what His Father willed for Him. That submission was not just a thought, a feeling or an idea. It was the action that committed Him to visually and physically acting out what He believed would honor His Father’s will. From His baptism on to His death on the Cross, every word, thought and action was right. That ‘right’ was faith which pushed His belief and trust into action. Being ‘right’ is living out what you believe and who you trust for that belief. Jesus believed in His mind He should be baptized. He trusted His Father for that belief. When He put His body in the water, let John pour that water over Him, that was faith. That fact of His action set the pace for Jesus entire mission and ministry. He believed He had to submit physically because of His Father’s will. Being conceived by the Holy Spirit, He resonated with all the Scripture that identified the coming Messiah. The moment He chose to be what the Father called Him to be, that act of submission to baptism sealed Him as the Messiah. He was the One. There He claimed His identity and knew in His heart that cousin John was the designated future Elijah to herald His Messiahship (Mt.11:14 as understood from Mal.4:5-6, the last words of the Hebrew Scripture). He believed, He trusted and acted in faith: He sought out John, He humbled Himself to a biblically prophetic authority and went into the water. He acted in faith.

He believed. He trusted. He ‘faith-ed.’ That’s why Jesus, not any of us, is our righteousness. He is the only One who ever got righteousness right. He did every next moment by faith. He was faith at work. Faith doesn’t know what lies ahead which is what makes it faith. Hope is the substance of God’s promise that His will acts when we trust Him. Faith is walking through every next moment totally dependent on how He will act through us in that moment. If you act knowing what is going to happen it is no longer faith. It’s just you and you alone. But relying on the Holy Spirit for words and action...that’s faith. When Jesus declares He is the Way, that way is faith. The purpose of faith is to show God’s love. The progression is simple. You believe in God. You trust Him. You act for Him. You share His love. He tells us He is with us to the end of the age.

Righteousness is not a state of mind that is consumed with being good. That’s self-righteousness. Real righteousness is the way Jesus lived out His Father’s will in the Word: believing right, trusting right and acting right. It’s a bundled spiritual experience starting with belief prompted by the Word, trusting the Father’s will and then faithing that will into action. Heb.11:6 says it well,”Without faith it is impossible to please God.” James is more pointed, “Faith without works is dead (James 2:17).” Faith can’t be separated from action. Faith is the action prompted by belief and trust. From the mind to the heart to the spirit. Having faith in Jesus Christ for every next moment is righteousness, being right, being right with God and being right wherever you are.

We are bundled; a mind, heart and spirit, with a remote, an instruction manual and technical assistance always available through the Holy Spirit and our brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ.