Today, 230 years ago 13 Colonies signed the Declaration of Independence and a nation was born. The second paragraph of what they signed says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus begins the Declaration of Independence which we celebrate today.
However, there was a Declaration of Independence that was signed in the Garden of Eden in the immediate aftermath of God’s creative act. In Genesis 1:26-27 God created man saying, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . . . “ He created A’ dam’, man – a male/man and a female/man. Having created man as the apex of His creation, God placed them in the midst of a paradise filled with all that was good and godly Genesis 2:8-9; 16-17. . . Then came the signing of Adam and Eve’s Declaration of Independence in Genesis3:6, “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her and he ate.”
This signing gets sadder and comes even more closely to home as you and I also go through the process of signing our Declaration of Independence as well. Let me see if I can explain just how this happens. But first of all let me share with you:
I. Three Foundational Truths
1. God is Love
God is love and He created you to love you unconditionally. That’s what He was trying to communicate to Adam and Eve with the freedom that they had to eat of any tree of the garden except one (Genesis 2:16). God created you to love you unconditionally. So He fixed you where you would need to be loved unconditionally. All of us need that and if we didn’t need that, we wouldn’t need God. Wasn’t that smart of God or what?
2. God’s Job Description
God’s job description is, He runs things. That’s what He does for a living. When He goes to the office in the morning, He runs the Universe. Now, He’s got ways of running the universe too. Let’s call those laws. The Bible says all of His ways are good. Like for example, the Law of Gravity. Now, that’s not a natural law, God created that. Once upon a time there was no gravity. God created it to keep you from flying off the planet. It makes water slides work wonderfully well. But you can get out there and dive off the roof onto the driveway to demonstrate the law of gravity and you’ll go splat! No, is that an angry God or is that you playing Delbert Dumb? God didn’t do that. In fact, God’s gotten a lot of bad press for stuff like that – for the dumb stuff we do. God is love and God runs things. The third foundational truth is:
3. You sign your own Declaration of Independence
When you got here on planet earth you drew an imaginary circle around yourself and kind of homesteaded that turf. You set up a little kingdom in direct competition with God. And you established yourself as god of that little circle. God with a little “g”. Now, you were perfectly content to let God carry out the big stuff like sun rises and stars and stuff, but your attitude is that you’re going to run this little circle. “This is my life, I’ve got my rights, I do things my way,” you believe. Bill Gillham takes a little play on Tolekine and calls it playing “Lord of the Ring.”
So as you played “Lord of the Ring” you established patterns for living your life that would get you through the day. And many of those patterns are designed to milk love out of people so that you can get your need for love satisfied. But can you see that that’s conditional love. It’s based on how people respond to you. And that’s a cheap substitute for God’s unconditional love which He’s bestowed on man through Jesus Christ. So that’s how you started off on the left foot, right off the bat. And I call it, signing your own Declaration of Independence.
You see, the cardinal sin of man is independence from God. Adam didn’t break the Ten Commandments, there weren’t any at that point. What did Adam do? He wrote the first Declaration of Independence. He established himself and said, “I’ll decide what’s good. I’ll decide what’s bad. I’ll do it my way” and he passed it on to the rest of us. So, all of us show up on the planet as “Lord’s of the Ring” signing our own Declaration of Independence. Now let’s look at the:
II. Three Component Parts of Man
God designed man in three component parts as 1 Thessalonians 5:23 indicates. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely. And may your spirit, soul, and body be kept sound and blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Holman Christian Standard Bible) That says we are spirit, soul and body. The Scriptures say that God is spirit and it says that you were created in the image of God. Therefore, what are you? You’re a “spirit-critter” as Bill Gillham calls it. You’re essentially spirit. So you’re a spirit-critter who temporarily lives in an “earth-suit.” C.S. Lovett is the one who tabbed the body an earth-suit and that’s exactly what your body is. It’s made out of earth and it’s designed for planet earth and nowhere else. You can take it off the planet if you want to, but you’ve got to house it in an earthly environment if you do or else it will die.
So, you’re a spirit-critter in an earth-suit. You’re not a physical-critter with a spirit. This is a critically important point, because what I want you to understand is who you are in Christ – your identity. So who are you? You’ve got to zoom in on the fact that you are a spirit-critter, not a physical critter with a spirit. Now, the words soul and psychology come from the same root meaning personality. So your soul is your personality made up of your mind, will and emotions. Jesus came to planet earth and visited the planet as God in an earth-suit. As Colossians 2:9 says, “For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” That was God walking around on this planet. Does that blow your mind?
So Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, that those who worship God must worship in spirit, but you can’t do that because you’re dead in spirit. You’ve got a spirit, but you’re dead spiritually. The soul and spirit are housed in your earth. And your earth-suit is a vehicle through which you relate to people and the earthly environment. So the real Bruce, the spirit and soul are making my lips wiggle on my earth-suit and noises are coming out of it and they’re penetrating your earth-suit and you and I are communing with one another, fellowshipping – my soul and your soul, that is our personalities. So the truth is you and I live in two dimensions simultaneously. Our soul and spirit relate to people through the body. And we relate to God through our spirit. In conclusion, I want you to begin to see:
III. How We Operate In Independence
We further break the personality down into mind, will and emotions. Also we need to add a brain to your earth-suit where memories are stored. Now, your brain can’t be your mind because the brain is made out of meat and when your earth-suit dies, your brain is going to stay right here with your body and your mind is going to eject along with your soul and spirit. Now if your mind were your brain then your mind would die and you wouldn’t know whether you went to heaven or hell. So your mind can’t be your brain. Your brain is simply a body organ. It’s like your liver or kidney. It’s a computer and it’s designed to gather data through the sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, etc.) and organize these data into structures or constructs that we call meaning. If you use computer language, your brain is the print out or the image in the screen or the hard copy. Now if you’ve got a computer, you’ve got to have somebody who can run the thing or it’s just a paper weight or dust catcher. So, your soul operates the computer, kind of like a computer analysts.
Now the print outs come flying through this computer at thousands per hour I suppose. And mind and emotions have to analyze these data. So mind then analyzes the data and tells “will” what you ought to do about this stimulus situation. Now, “will” is the Big Boss. And the will controls behavior and works like a light switch. Either you do or you don’t. And there’s no notch in the middle – that’s choosing not to choose. So whereas mind tells will what your believe about the situation – emotions or feeler will kind of knee jerk to the stimulus and tell will how you feel about the situation. They’re the computer analysts. Then it’s up to the Big Boss, will to make the decision.
You see, you don’t make up your mind about anything – that’s a misnomer. Mind is an analyzer and a recommender. You make up your will about things. Now Christian’s have a free will that can override the recommendations of both mind and emotions. The mind could say to the will, “I don’t understand why the Lord is letting this happen to me and the will can answer, “Well, rain on whether I understand or not; I choose to believe it’ll all work to my ultimate good, because the Word of God says so.” On the other hand, the emotions could say, “I feel excited about the prospect of asking my secretary out to lunch today.” And the will can say, “Oh no you don’t Tiger! I choose to do the will of my Father!”
You see Christian, you’re really on the hook to obey God. The bottom line is, you’re absolutely on the hook to do the will of God. What is God’s will for you today? Are you alive spiritually? Have you been born again or are you living out of a dead spirit because you signed YOUR own Declaration of Independence?
