Bridge 3 Lifestyle Revisit As We Move to Bridge 5

[HKHaugan]

Bridge 3. Lifestyle. Lk.17:33 “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.” In Luke a lifestyle is hung onto but then lost.

Lifestyle...It's the way we choose to put our ducks in a row everyday so that we can say to ourselves and others 'This is the way to live.' One way we express that is in how we dress for others simply because 'they' will have an opinion about me as soon as they see me. Who are we dressing for? Who are we playing to? Who are we trying to impress and why? What motivates our buying? Where do we spend our time and why? What takes up most of my credit card statement? Why do I live where I do? When I set my eyes on a goal what do I have to do to get it? What is in our heart of hearts that shapes the way we let people see us? What does our heart really trust when it comes to our lifestyle? Lifestyle really requires more than we can say here but let's dig a little bit.

I don't know whether or not you watch Downton Abbey but there is no better illustration of a particular world lifestyle than that crystallized in the captivating capsule of what its creator, Julian Fellowes, has envisioned as an early 20th century English lifestyle. It is structured nobility with its rigid class consciousness, royal values and elegant superiority. It has an elevated Upstairs, Downstairs theme (an earlier British drama series) noting the accepted 'entitlement' of born nobility over born commonality, the master/servant social economy where 'neither the twain shall meet.' Whether Fellowes is a believer or not doesn't play here. There is no question that 'Abbey' studiously avoids church and faith. In the English mindset the clergy and church were simply a kind of spiritual justification for and an extension of the state. Yet, from a biblical perspective, Fellowes still insightfully isolates the spiritual reality that lifestyles rise and fall in the winds of cultural change and those loyal to the royal, like all, end in the soil. Paradoxically, one of the great English hymns calls out, “Lead on O King eternal.”

The deeper insight from 'Abbey' is that both nobility and their 'underlings' have a shared commonality, their inclination to sin. What the lower classes indulge in is seen as their norm while the upper crust hide their scandals in the knowing glances of an accepted slip here and there. However, noble birth always wins the moral advantage in the secular world. Shift that dynamic into our setting and not much changes. What ever the field or profession there is an aristocracy/democracy tension. As one person put it “All men are created equal but some men are created more equal than others.” Downton Abbey sets in visuals the plundered images of God and the futility of world lifestyles that believe in structure without spiritual substance. There is no eternity in Fellowes' characters, only endless frustrating aloneness.

Now consider all the other attempts at securing a lifestyle. A lifestyle is built around revenge in a program called Revenge. How about Sex and the City, Survivor, The Great Race? Then we have one show after the other that glorify some empty pursuit that turns into a life consumed in that pursuit that fulfills nothing but the glorification of the self. Even just satisfying the temporary becomes a lifestyle. Lines from a country song say, “I don't care what's right or wrong, I won't try to understand, let the devil take tomorrow, 'cause tonight I need a friend.” What message does American Idol send? For those performers who have faith “Idol' is a career step in the secular but their talent is a gift to witness and glorify God here into eternity.

So lifestyle is not just about what we desire to acquire, obtain to sustain and grow to stow. It is about the attitude that precedes it. Attitude is the state of the heart. Attitude is the measure of where our heart is. Jesus summed it up when He said, “Where your treasure is there will be your heart also (Mt.6:21).” What the heart treasures, the mind will, in turn, develop a system to obtain it. That is what a lifestyle is.

The heart is what processes our mind's belief and sends its messages to motivate our spirit into action. It's where attitude is shaped. If our eyes grab hold of a person, an object, a behavior, or anything that affects the mind, heart and spirit we reach for it depending on how strong that attitude is in the heart. Being a combination of the mind, heart and spirit we try and keep our attitudes in balance but sometimes one will outweigh the other. That imbalance is caused by sin. Sin is something we need to be cognizant of and know how it works. Sin is neutralized by repentance and forgiveness but we need to be aware of how it affects us.

Here's three immediate thoughts on sin's effects:

First, it keeps us in a horizontal mode.
Sin is anti-vertical because the vertical points to spiritual values and qualities above the secular plain. Secular culture conditions us to see things only from a lateral perspective. All you have to do is look at the response of government employees, educators, the press and all those who are unable to deal publicly with spiritual issues. Why?

Think of our own beginning. After our first infant cry we want food, we want to be held, we want warmth. We are totally inarticulate but the need for survival is in our body. As we emerge into being able to think, feel and act we are led by what makes us feel comfortable wherever we are. As we grow, awareness of life and the world is increasingly about 'me' and how I exist in them, the 'I' in me and that 'I' settles in the heart which I find is the most sensitive and illusive part of me. It's where I feel, where I sense everything from pleasure to pain. The heart is where my fears hide, my courage is tested, my desires search for completion and I alone have felt its yearning. It is the least understood and yet the most active part of me. We may think of ways to deal with what happens outside of us but it is the heart that concludes how we respond. Horizontal? Sin keeps us there. I need to control it. I become my own horizon. I am my lifestyle.

Second, sin keeps us in a fear mode.
This is not about fear as in cowardice where a smaller man fears pain from a bigger one. Although that could certainly involve avoiding a situation involving possible conflict. It's the deeper fears that plague our day to day outlook like fear of failure. You know, fear of losing one's self-defined identity, fear of uncertainty, fear of not being heard and seen as right, fear of attitudes, opinions and evaluation when relating to others and fear of losing the means that got me where I am socially and economically. Then there is the fear of success. What if I work really hard and don't get what I want or do get what I want and don't know what to do with it? You can also add the many phobias that surface due to repressed feelings and past trauma. Sin works my attitude into one that gives all my beliefs, thoughts and emotions a self-protective shield. You can add your own experiences here. The Bible calls them all strongholds, conclusions we make outside of God's Word that turn into attitudes we use everyday to protect ourselves. So, as we have already said, they are fueled by fear which makes my attitude my lifestyle based on fear.

Third, sin keeps us in an aloneness mode.
It is the hidden persuader that works within to isolate us from others by increasing our suspicion, distrust and cynicism. It is the retreat into self that is always getting us to lead from the negative. Sin is the great depressor, “Nothing ever turns out right for me. Everyone else gets the chances. I never had chance to begin with. They rejected me because...” and on and on it goes. Notice the suction that sin has. It starts with a seemingly harmless conclusion for which there may be some validity but apart from God spirals down into inner assumption, self justifying conclusions and eventually a complete separation from others. Our attitude has no altitude. Sin has no altitude.

As we venture here in the arena of attitude we haven't even covered immorality on its many levels. But our manipulative efforts to exploit others for our perceived needs outweighs our willingness to look at our deeper real needs. Sin's intent is to keep us focused on our perceived needs which are always momentary while our real needs are spiritual values that build integrity and character. Sin says we have no weaknesses and that whatever we want we ought to get right now. Sin is the energy that feeds on the fear of not having what the secular world considers the best way to satisfy any moment's need, desire and pleasurable outcome to preserve inner satisfaction.

Sin also encourages us to develop biases, prejudices and profiling methods to support them. We all develop some in the course of time based on parental and social conditioning. While we may work at ridding ourselves of them they still pop up from time to time. Sin is aggressive, repressive and obsessive striving to keep us unsure and in doubt about ourselves, our faith and who we really are. It's tentacles reach into our sense of guilt, unresolved ideas, emotions and issues from our past.

The bottom line about sin is this: its ultimate goal is to make us social, emotional and spiritual hermits living in the cave of irrational conclusions fully self absorbed forever. That is hell, the destiny of aloneness. Its procurator is the devil. Something that personal, your personal destiny, where you as an individual person end up forever, cannot be shunted away as mythical, superstitious and imaginary. Sin is very real with a personal agenda, our soul's capture and isolation. Faith is its cure. Faith is personal, spiritual and relational securing us to Jesus forever.

Jesus is the first to really exposes the devil as the dark personal force behind the scene of everything we call sin and evil. Jesus exposed him in the wilderness when He was led by the Holy Spirit for that specific purpose so we, you and I, would know who our real enemy is in the world we live in every day. The devil's method is temptation. His temptation is to use any technique to tempt us to take control in every next moment, a technique that isolates and keeps you alone. There, in the wilderness, Jesus showed that by faith in His Father and in the Scripture, we have the ability through the Holy Spirit to discern and withstand the subtle inner attacks the devil devises. And if we foul, fall and fail the Lord provides repentance and forgiveness. What all of this says is that a perceived lifestyle in the world is energized by sin while Jesus provides Himself in a moment by moment relationship where faith is the real and eternal lifestyle. With Him we are never alone nor are we ever left to have to figure life out alone. Jesus came to make us a family of brothers and sisters living by faith in Him. He killed the power of sin on the Cross and rose from the dead to prove it.

Jesus sends a warning shot across our bow in Luke, “Remember Lot's wife (17:32).” Looking back and trying to save the old lifestyle will lead to nowhere. But, in Jesus, life is “new every morning.” That is a singular attitude that Jesus brought into the world and He has made it available by faith in Him. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who...” Read the rest of this quote in Philippians 2:6-11. If Jesus is our treasure, His life becomes our lifestyle and His Word our structure and His Spirit our life.