Worship 10 Living Life to the Hilt

[HKHaugan]

One of my jobs when I was a chaplain to prep school students opportunely allowed me to coach track among other sports. I had two extremely gifted runners that I spotted as future collegiate athletes. The rules of the school didn't allow us to take students farther away than the local town just a mile away. It was especially difficult to train them in the Winter with no indoor facilities. The closest indoor track was at Dartmouth College, 40 miles away. They were too good not to train and they wanted to. So one afternoon I piled them on the back floor of my car, covered them with a blanket and drove to Dartmouth. This started an every other day trip unbeknownst to anyone. When Spring track rolled around we had our usual meets and then the league championships to which we actually took 6 boys. The two trained at Dartmouth won the mile and two mile events. It was later discovered but overlooked with the display of the awards.

Sometimes you find that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. We got by. I don't suggest that as a principle but as an example that there is a way to be assured by the Lord. If we are in the Word of God, in prayer and yielded to the Spirit we know we are on solid ground to follow the Spirit's leading as a result. We don't have to hide under a blanket. We let His light shine. He will produce the inspiration to step out in faith and get God's will done.

By the way, one of the students went on to Williams College to be that star runner and later won the Foxboro Marathon. His name is Jay Haug whom some of you may know, a solid believer, speaker and leader in Christ and Culture seminars. Again keep in mind the Bible and its principles trump making one's self an exception.

Following that short trip back in memory gives us a return reminder when Moses received the 10 Commandments. He was given commentary on how to live them out for the community. When Jesus gave us the Beatitudes, commentary came from within Him, the 'how' of living them out from the heart. There is however, an enormous difference, a night and day difference. Three new personal blessings arrived in Jesus---identity, witness and experience.

First, God gave Moses the Law for the people to define their identity with one God among the nations of that time. The Beatitudes on the other hand came from within Jesus to the disciples to experience Him in their hearts and share Him with others. God's personal identity in them gave them their personal identity in Him.
Second, Moses was given commentary aimed at being an external witness to those nations that there was One God and how One God called His people to live with each other. The commentary Jesus gives is how to personally experience God and each other in order to reach out to the hearts of others who don't know Him.
Third, the Mosaic Law convicts the heart of sin and its need for the Savior God. The Beatitudes gives us a personal experience of God and presents Him as the Savior and provider of the Spirit enabling the restoration of our heart to Him and empowering our mission to share Him with others.

From separation to restoration, from being given an identity to sharing it, from legalized obedience to the desire to love others, from being a separated ethnic bloodline people to inviting all people to share a new spiritual bloodline, the Cross-shed blood of Jesus. It's from flesh to Spirit, from heart to heart. That's God's eternal plan. The 'how' for the heart was the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, God indwelling and inspiring the heart. God used the Law to pave the way for the heart and through Jesus, to fill it with His Holy Spirit.

It's the sequence of the Beatitudes, each one building on the other, that gives us an insight into the whole sermon. Jesus' immediate following statements identify the disciples as those who bear God's heart (Mt.5:13-16) and builds a platform of confidence by telling them three things:

1. Believers are the salt of the earth.
2. Believers are the light of the world.
3. Believer's deeds are the evidence.

There was a shift from exterior performance to interior attitude. What was directed from without was now to be directed from within. Something entirely different was happening. When God directed Moses to whip an identifiable God people in shape using a highly defined legal system, how they worshiped, lived socially among each other and stood together in the world was a visible witness dependent on strict obedience to every command. But now in Jesus exterior behavior would be shaped internally by Him through the Holy Spirit. This was totally new. The salt and light were combined behavior and attitude that was God the Son's presence within each believer's heart. The Holy Spirit is the salt and light.

The presence of Jesus in the mind, heart and spirit of the believer went beyond the old behavioral Law. Now it was spiritual fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, God the Holy Spirit salting and lighting the heart of the believer. It was no longer a fear driven yielding to be obedient through legal conditioning but a heart's desire to attitudinally witness to Jesus, the Law's purpose and fulfillment. The salt and the light was Jesus moving the Holy Spirit in them, filling them with what the Law pointed to, the forgiveness of one's sin through a personal relationship with the One Holy spiritual and personal God. It was the new wineskin, being born spiritually from above, born again by the Holy Spirit (John 3:1-21). The new wineskin was a spiritualized attitude, a Holy Spirit attitude always open to being led by the Lord Jesus. The old wineskin was legalistic judgmentalism.

Being a believer was no longer being a member of an ethnic group. Rather it was an individual experience of being loved by God from within, His presence moving in the heart. This is what being a witness was all about, the personal mercy and love of God, grace in the flesh. Witness was a heart to heart encounter, the sharing of a changed attitude that lit up a person with insight for the mind and behavior from the heart that could only emanate from God. Because of Jesus people would be good not because of what they did but because of being faithful to Him which would lead them to be led by the Spirit to be right in their mind and reach out to others from the heart. Like Paul said, “That which does not proceed from faith is sin (Ro.14:23).” Good deeds are not what I think ought to be done or what others think but what the Holy Spirit inspires. What we do is Spirit led and fed through prayer and Scripture.

Jeremiah prophesied this shift 600 years before Jesus,

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

This new covenant is dynamically new. Worship is our total life experience, the new worship experience. No longer enslaved to a legalistic liturgy that demands perfect performance, we are free for liturgy to be a springboard to worship. Liturgy led by the Holy Spirit serves the Lord by bringing believers together in gathered worship to celebrate His presence, singing His praise, sharing what He has done amongst us and praying for our mission to bring the world to His feet. Liturgy also gives us a shared pattern for daily worship reminding the believer that worship begins remembering the sacrifice of Jesus and His life poured into the world. Liturgy bonds small groups and individuals in a common experience of the Lord's Supper as their model for sacrificial ministry and mission in the world around us.

May I repeat again, we are not human beings having spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Live it to the hilt in the Spirit of God.