Pentecost 61 Separating the Wheat and the Chaff

[HKHaugan]

Pentecost 61 Separating the Wheat and the Chaff

1Jn.4:5 “Every God-begotten person conquers the world's ways. The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith. The person who wins out over the world's ways is simply the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God.”

The Holy Spirit elevates Jesus as the only person to whom we can look to guide us through the growing hazy maze mankind has fallen into. It is the Holy Spirit Jesus sends to enter our heart to correct its trajectory toward God and away from the devil. But in order to let Him work in us we need to know the enemy and his strategy.

Evil spirits are attracted by weakness. Weakness emits a scent drawing them. Temptation exploits that scent. Weakness becomes the need of the moment. The devil seizes that moment to distract us from the Lord and His will (Gen.3). This is where the world gripped by the devil moves in to offer whatever will satisfy the need he wants us embrace. Paul identifies the vulnerability of the sinful nature in Galatians 5, “19 What the sinful nature does is clear. It enjoys sexual sins, impure acts and wild living. 20 It worships statues of gods. It also worships evil powers. It is full of hatred and fighting. It is full of jealousy and fits of anger. It is interested only in getting ahead. It stirs up trouble. It separates people into their own little groups. 21 It wants what others have. It gets drunk and takes part in wild parties. It does many things of that kind. I warn you now as I did before. People who live like that will not receive God's kingdom.”

If that one didn’t grab you read how The Message Bible translates it. “19-21It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.” We can either continue to let spirits overtake and deteriorate us or take up the shield of faith, discern them and rebuke them in the name of Jesus.

Take for instance the spirit of compromise, which is very real and often mistaken as humility. Compromise can be a social technique allowing you to fit in to the group you are with at the moment. The spirit of compromise behind it is real. You can feel it when you are in a group where crude jokes and language dominate the conversation. There is that hesitant embarrassed semi-laugh you emit but wish you were somewhere else. Those are the party courts, partying late into the night, hoping for something or someone to happen that will make sense but never does. But you still go and participate in the endlessly meaningless conversations. The usual frenetic attempts to bring some novel joke or impress the surrounding onlookers with intellectual depth or physical prowess end up with empty glasses and empty hearts drifting into the night only to face another day of burdensome labor and unfulfilled expectations. There is no question the devil is the prince of this world and his spirits are relentless in their fear-driven need to latch onto the weaknesses in human nature.

Institutions of all kinds are courts in the world that can appear to be ends in themselves, final answers to the deep heart needs only God can satisfy. The country club, the yacht club, the fraternity setting, alumni associations and the myriad organizations that covet your membership can be fraught with spirits that would distract you.

Denominations are no exceptions. Many mainline churches have emerged as world-conforming self-perpetuating bureaucracies whose secular-compromised authorities submit to annual budgets, man-made laws of governance, drawing arrogant self-elevating leaders with control issues and the ever-demanding program to keep membership happy, subscribing to the bloated secular idea that quantity equals quality. None of them has an eternal fix. They are temporary man-made copies of world structures. They take God’s ideas and make them ideals to be worshipped apart from Him. Separated from God they become ideals without substance thus making them idols. From idea to ideal to idol, without God the courts of the world are merely shadows of what could have been. Church apart from Jesus and His Word is just another man-made social idol.

Typical of this process is the way the world uses the words of God like love and truth. The idea that one can ‘make love’ is absurd. God is love.

Over the entrance to the New York Public Library is engraved, “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.” The implication is that if you can keep delving into all the knowledge in the library you will be free. Think about it. Where did that statement come from but John’s Gospel where Jesus says that if you are His disciple then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free, this in the ultimate context of Jesus declaring that He is the truth. This is what the world does with God’s ideas.

Away from the world into God’s courts next time…….stay tuned