Author: Happy

The cliché is true. When we have been hurt by others, we tend to become people who “share” our pain by inflicting it on the people around us. Hurt people truly hurt people.

Do you know when the last person died because of World War II? January. Yes, this January! January 4, 2014. Undetected, undetonated explosives triggered an accident that killed one and wounded thirteen in Euskirchen, Germany.

Do you know when the last person died because of World War I? Two weeks ago! It’s the same basic story. A bomb lay dormant for a century near Flanders fields in Belgium. It killed two construction workers.

Do you know when the last person died because of the American Civil War? It’s practically ancient history compared to the other two stories. It was in May of 2008, more than 140 years after the Appomattox Courthouse surrender.  Sam White was restoring a cannon ball he had found. Something went wrong. The antique explosive was still powerful enough to send shrapnel over a quarter of a mile.

Each of these wars has long been over. The last World War I veteran died in February of 2012. To schoolchildren today, these are stories from the history books. Despite the passage of time, explosives still remain, ironically becoming more unstable as time passes.

These bombs make a pretty good analogy for how hurt people operate. Sometimes our wars are long past, but relics from our history show up and hurt the people close to us. We might not be fighting anymore, but the weapons are still within reach. Sometimes we’re not even aware that they’re buried where they are. Sometimes people can trigger those explosions without even realizing it. Hurt people hurt people. We need to be aware of the long-lasting effects of our pain and be on guard against these unseen dangers!

Scientists at Duke University in 2008 rounded up a group of test subjects and gave them electric shocks. After the first round of zapping, they gave each of the test subjects one of two possible pills and then administered a second identical jolt. The human lab-rats were asked to compare the pain of the first and second shock.

85% of those in the first group said the pill reduced the pain. 61% of the second group said the same thing.

What makes this study interesting is that both groups received identical pills—and they weren’t pain relievers. They were simple sugar pills or placebos. The only difference between the first group and the second group? The first group was told that their pills cost $2.50. The second group was told that their pills cost $2.50, but they were discounted all the way down to a mere ten cents. Somehow, when the second group heard that their medicine was discounted, their brains interpreted it as “cheap” or “without value.”

It’s really amazing just how easy it is to confuse our little minds!

It’s easy to put the wrong value on the wrong things. Our culture values possessions more than people, form over function, and the future and past over the present. We evaluate what is better and worst. Without realizing it, we evaluate things on a standard that just isn’t right.

It’s important that Christians always keep this idea at the front of our minds: the values of the Kingdom of God are not the values of the world.

Jesus said that the whole world isn’t as valuable as a single soul (Mark 8:36). He said that the least among us would be the greatest (Luke 9:48). He said that meek would inherit the whole earth (Matthew 5:5). Let’s compare our values with his values—and adjust as needed!

This post is taken from a recent sermon on our “Spiritual Sicknesses Series.”

Memory-related diseases are hard to watch. Alzheimer’s and dementia rob our loved ones of their memories and even their personalities. As the memories erode, we find ourselves frustrated by trying to deal with the shell of a person we once knew.

What happens when we become spiritually forgetful?

It could happen in a couple of ways.

1. Sometimes it happens through trauma. Like in the movies when somebody gets bonked on the head and ends up forgetting who they are. Have you ever met someone who was doing pretty well until they experienced loss or pain…and then they forgot everything they once knew?
2. Sometimes it happens slowly, like Alzheimer’s. The plaque of life builds up in our brains, and what once was fresh now is buried under layers of dust. Without a little cleaning, it becomes out-of-sight, out-of-mind and inaccessible to us.

Either way, the outcome is similar. We can sing “Jesus Loves Me” for years until we can sing it without thinking about it. And then we find that we’re not thinking about it at all!

2 Peter 1:3-4 describes some of the great things that God has done. He has given us what we need. He has called us to his glory. He has promised us us “precious” and “very great” promise. He made us partakers of the divine. He let us escape corruption. And based on all that stuff, verses 5 and following describe how we continue in the journey God started us on. We call the list that follows the Christian Graces.

After these descriptions of the beautiful things that we focus on as Christ-followers, Peter tells us: make sure you pay attention to these things. If you don’t have these things, you have forgotten your forgiveness.

What happens when you forget your forgiveness?

Peter says that it causes your life to be a jumbled mess of anything but godliness.

He says it keeps you from being useful or effective servants.

He says it makes you blind to what God has done!

I’d sum up what he writes by saying: if you forget your forgiveness, you will get spiritually stuck.

But that’s not the only consequence. People who forget forgiveness usually turn into self-righteous jerks!

(I really wanted to use a good theological word here…but “jerks” is just too accuate!)

Remember Luke 15 and the Prodigal Son? His older brother’s problem was that he forgot that he needed forgiveness. He forgot that his little brother needed it, too.

Matthew 18 is a time when the disciples ask Jesus how many times they have to forgive. Jesus could have countered by simply saying, “How many times do you want to be forgiven?” But he didn’t. Instead he told them a story about two debtors. The one owed a lot; the other owned a little. The guy who owed a hopelessly large debt had it forgiven. But when the man who owed a fraction of percentage point as much came to him, there was no mercy. He forgot that he once needed forgiveness, too.

Luke 7 has almost the same story line, but Jesus asks a simple question: “Who will love him the most?” The answer is the one who was forgiven most.

There’s one more consequence of forgetting forgiveness: you never can feel saved. If you forget that you were forgiven, you never can know how you stand with God.

So here’s the point of the lesson: don’t forget forgiveness!

This post is taken from a recent sermon on our “Spiritual Sicknesses Series.”

Here’s a trivia question for you: who killed the most people in World War 1?

Nope. Not the evil Central Powers. Not the victorious allies, either!

The killer was a little guy—microscopic, even! The worst killer of 1918 was the flu.

The Saturday Evening Post said that, “No recorded pestilence before or since has equaled the 1918–1919 influenza death toll in total numbers. In those years, an estimated 21,000,000 died of influenza-pneumonia throughout the world, some 850,000 in the United States alone.” More lives were lost in the flu epidemic than in all of the battlefields of World War 1. Recent numbers indicate that 5% of the world’s population died. All because of the flu!

There are all sorts of reasons that this flu was particularly bad.

It was an especially virulent strain. Counter-intuitively, it was more serious for the healthy. An immune over-reaction is what caused most of the deaths.

People were traveling more than ever. Other than those pesky Titanic and Lusitania incidents, inter-continental travel was the safest and most affordable it had ever been in history. The war contributed towards globalization.

No real effective treatments were available for the flu. Chicken noodle soup, fluids, and rest was about the best we could hope for.

One of the most deadly things about it was that it was not particularly well understood.

When you think about it, the Spanish Flu makes a pretty good description for what happens in sin.

Sin always seems to get a little bit “easier.” Pornography is a click away. Gossip is a text away. Greed is a credit card away. Distraction is a tweet away. We come into more contact with sin than we ever imagined possible.

We don’t understand it all that well. We think we’ve got the important stuff in life figured out, but we don’t realize just how vulnerable it is. We don’t realize how it takes over us and turns us into factories to produce more and more of it, hurting more and more people.

Sin and the flu can be pretty similar…

Sin takes over people. Just like the flu!

Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever.” (John 8:34)

Sin has a way of sneaking in and becoming our master. Jesus said that we can only have one master! So Paul warned us, “Give no opportunity to the devil.” (Ephesians 4:27) I like the NIV Better “Don’t give the devil a foothold.” The old church sign says, “Give him an inch and he’ll be your ruler!”

Sin spreads in influence. It replicates and replicates and replicates…

“Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” (Proverbs 13:20)

“Avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene!” (2 Timothy 2:16-18)

Sin makes us sick. We might not have a fever and aches and pains, but it keeps us from thinking, feeling, and living the way we want to.

Romans 1:21-22 “…they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

Scripture says that sin can actually break our thinking!

Jeremiah 2:5 records this question from God to his people: “What wrong did your fathers find in me, that they went far from me, and went after worthlessness and became worthless?” Of course the answer is—there was no fault to be found in God. There was fault in the finder!

1 Timothy 4:1-2 “The Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared….”

Sin kills.

“Desire, when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.” (James 1:15)

That’s not a baby you want to welcome into the world!

“The soul who sins shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:4)

What was the devil’s first lie? You will not surely die!

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” (John 3:36)

“For the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23)

This is where the similarities end, though…

The flu kills a small percentage of its victims. Sin kills all.

The flu comes from outside. But Jesus says that sin comes from within (Mark 7:21-23).

But the good news is—we actually have a cure for the sin problem. The best we can do with the flu is try to prevent it and manage the symptoms. But with sin, there’s a cure: “Where sin increased, GRACE ABOUNDED ALL THE MORE, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 5:20-21)

What would you add?

Physical illnesses have one redeeming quality: you can test for them.

Sure, the tests aren’t perfect. Sometimes they’re slow and expensive. They have occasional false positives or negatives. But they are generally quantifiable.

If your blood sugar level clocks in at 1,000, the doctor knows what to do. If the EKG shows that you’ve flat-lined, we know we better act fast!

Spiritual sicknesses require more discernment to diagnose. There’s not a blood panel we can order to tell us that gives us the warning signs of our greed or pride. There’s no x-ray that can spot a malignant mass of bitterness spreading within us. No numbers are available that tell us what the three-month running average of our spiritual sweetness is. Determining our spiritual health—or “soundness” if you prefer Paul’s term—requires intentional introspection, self-evaluation, and the accountability of community.

So what’s the plan?

For the next several weeks we’re going to study some specific spiritual sicknesses. We’ll compare them with some physical ailments that you’re already familiar with to help make the study sick…and then, we’ll look for the cures!

What do you think some of the most common spiritual sicknesses are?

There’s an interesting movement among atheist communities—even in Nashville, the “buckle of the Bible Belt.”

The Tennessean (and others) recently reported about a new trend: Sunday gatherings among atheists. The headline is accurate: “Atheist gathering looks a lot like church.” Take a minute to read that article. I’ll wait right here until you get back…

There are at least 16 of these groups across the nation. Nashville’s is called “Sunday Assembly.” Like a church service, there is music, activity for children, an inspirational message—even multiple services!

What strikes me most about this gathering is this: people of all kinds have a hunger for community. We find community in all sorts of places: with our co-workers, in our kids’ little league bleachers, with our Warcraft guild, our motorcycle club, our service organizations, and in our churches.

Some churches have forgotten just how hungry people are to be with each other, especially when they’re united by a cause they can agree on. The atheist assembly is just that—an example of people seeking community.

Some churches have lost their community—individuality is key. Churches have been deformed into places where people drop in, check in, check out, and drop out. Church is supposed to be so much more! A place where people get to know each other—warts and all. A place where people help each other. A place where “everybody knows your name.”

Don’t forget that God invented community. The only thing “not good” about creation was that man was alone (Genesis 2:18). Ever since, God has used communities (tribes, nations, church) to accomplish his purposes.

Let’s learn a lesson from this trend and make sure that we are the sort of community God wants us to be.