During our stay in England, we visited my wife’s cousin and his wife, who have a nine-month-old baby son. One night they needed to go out for a while on an errand, so they asked us if we would take care of the baby for a couple of hours. Of course we were delighted with the chance to do so, since it has been quite a while since there was anybody that young in our household. But I did quip to little Joshua’s mother, "Now he does come with an instruction book, doesn’t he?" She replied something to the effect that she was sure we would remember what to do, and left, fully confident of our care-taking skills.
However, later that night this young man decided to demonstrate his heritage: you see, his father, his grandfather, and his great-uncle are all preachers. In the family tradition, he exercised his lungs with great abandon! As we struggled to quiet him, I remembered that, so far as instruction books were concerned, we hadn’t even read the ones we had more than twenty years ago! We, like everybody in the sixties, had a copy of Dr. Spock on our shelves; but I don’t remember reading it except to try to find out what colic sounds like and what you do about it. We had just plunged into parenting by instinct, ignoring all the sage advice that somebody had written down for us. We didn’t read the baby book until long after the babies had grown up.
In fact, I still have on my shelves several baby books I’ve been meaning to read. One of them is entitled, "Give Your Child a Superior Mind". It is supposed to teach you how to get that kid doing fractions before he even enters kindergarten. But it’s too late for that. If we had read it, maybe my daughter would not have despised calculus so much! I wonder if it could help me do fractions forty-eight years after kindergarten! But, as I said, we didn’t read the baby book until too late.
Another book I’ve been meaning to read is called, "Guiding Your Child Toward College". Too late on that one too, unless it has a chapter on how to pay the accumulated tuition debts. But, once again, we didn’t read the baby book until too late.
It strikes me that that’s what Christians do all the time. We don’t read Dr. God’s baby book until after a whole lot of mistakes have been made. We don’t read Dr. God’s baby book until after the trial-and-error methods have broken down. We don’t read Dr. God’s baby book until it’s just about too late.
This is what I am calling Dr. God’s baby book. This is the instruction manual on life. The Bible is many things, of course: it is history, it is poetry, it is love story, it is genealogy, it is military strategy, it is music. Supremely it is the record of a searching God whose love will not let us go. But it is something else too; the Bible is an instruction manual on living. The Bible is a prescription for healthy living and for positive relationships. Today, as we emphasize the Scriptures, we are focusing on something which can instruct us in how to live every day, something which can nurture us out of our immaturity, something which can provide us tremendous insight about nearly every facet of life. We shared this truth together a few moments ago when we read from II Timothy: "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." The Bible is an instruction book on living.
There’s just one thing wrong. Just one thing wrong; what is it?
We don’t read Dr. God’s baby book until it is just about too late. It’s all here; but we just go out on instinct.
I have planned a series of three messages out of Dr. God’s baby book: this Sunday and the next two Sundays trying to get at some very basic principles of spiritual health. To do this I will be using the little letter we call First John. The First Letter of John reads like a baby book in many ways. It has the simplest language in the entire Bible; when I was a seminary student trying to learn Greek they started us on the First Letter of John, because the vocabulary is so simple. Besides that, the First Letter of John reads like a baby book in that John keeps on addressing us as children. "My little children" he says; "I am writing to you, little children." John is aware more than any other New Testament writer how much we need the basics.
So I want to challenge you to read and study the First Letter of John with me during these three weeks. Wherever you are in your spiritual journey, whether you are a beginner or a seasoned veteran, go back and read Dr. God’s baby book during this time.
Now the first theme I want to treat out of Dr. God’s baby book I call the Elbow Test – the Elbow Test. I don’t know about you folks, but in our household, when our children were small and it was time to bathe them, we used the elbow test. We touched our elbows in the bath water to make sure it was neither too hot nor too cold. Why did we use our elbows? I guess because our hands were so full of struggling baby there was nothing left but the elbow to stick into the water. But the elbow test was a way of finding out: what kind of climate is this baby going to enter? Will the surroundings be right for him?
Dr. God’s baby book as written in the First Letter of John has an elbow test. It is designed to help you make sure that you as a growing Christian are in the right climate. It is given to help you test the waters and be sure you are in the right surroundings. Listen:
I John 4:1-6
How can you know that you are in a healthy spiritual environment? How can you be sure that your spiritual health is off on the right path? Dr. God’s baby book poses three tests, and I want to ask you to stick your elbows into each of these.
I
First, when you stick in the elbow to take your spiritual temperature, you need to ask, who is Jesus Christ for you? Do you see Jesus Christ as the Lord of all of life, not just a part of it, but all of it? Do you acknowledge that His life is a model for your life? Do you understand that Jesus the Christ is a pattern of the way human beings were meant to be, not some abstraction, not some ethereal doctrine, but flesh and blood, real life?
John puts it this way: "By this you know the Spirit of God; every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God."
John is getting at a truth that is at the very center of the Christian faith. John is telling us that what we think about Jesus, what we do about Jesus, how we live Jesus -- that is the crucial issue.
You see, I know a lot of folk who think correct thoughts about Christ. They acknowledge His cross, they believe He died for the sins of humanity. They speak glowingly of His resurrection, and they may even anticipate His return. But that is not the issue, that is not the elbow test, as John sees it.
The elbow test, the critical thing, is, John says, to confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The elbow test, the critical thing, is to confess that the life of Jesus as He lived it on this earth is relevant for us. The Scriptures teach that the Word of God was made flesh and dwells among us as a real, flesh and blood, hurting, breathing, loving, hungry, sweating, crying, tiring, thirsty, angry, caring human being. And in so doing Jesus of Nazareth teaches us what life is intended to be.
The problem is that we set Him on the shelf and try to make Him into an impossible ideal. The problem is that we excuse ourselves by saying, "Well, I’m not Jesus. I’m not perfect. I can’t live like Jesus lived." So we paint Him with a halo and imagine His face with some sort of otherworldly smile on it, and refuse to understand that His life is intended as a pattern for our lives.
It has been well said that when God really wanted to reach His world, instead of sending ten more commandments, which had already been broken; instead of sending more laws, which had already been violated; instead of sending us yet another book, which we hadn’t read anyway, He sent us a life. He sent us the word made flesh, to identify with us, to touch us where we are, and, most of all, to show us what human life could be like.
And so John says, if you want to test whether you are off to the right start spiritually, if you want to determine whether you are immersed in the proper surroundings, ask yourself, "Have I made Jesus Christ the Lord of all of my life? Have I understood that if He is to be my Lord at all, He must be Lord of all? "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God". Begin to put the elbow test on your spiritual growth this way then: am I consciously, consistently working to be like Christ?
II
There is a second elbow test; there is a second way you can gauge your spiritual climate: Do you live with a sense of victory? Do you live with a sense of victory?
Do you approach life with the knowledge that you’ve been through a struggle, but that it’s been won? It’s over, it’s finished, it’s won. Do you live life confident that its basic direction has been settled? That’s the second test posed by Dr. God’s baby book about the atmosphere of our lives.
John says, "Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world."
Some of the most desperately miserable people I have known are those who can never quite get it settled about their relationship to God. The surest way to spiritual distress is to keep on nursing doubts about whether you really have a saving relationship to God.
In my home church in Louisville there was one gentleman who just never could overcome that fear. Every now and again our church would have a revival meeting, and invariably the visiting evangelist would start in on a familiar line: do you really know you’re saved? Do you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you’re all right with the Lord? If you died tonight, do you know whether you’d go to heaven? And this dear man would march down the aisle every time, trying once again to get it straight, still unsure of his relationship to God. He just about wore a path in the carpet from his seat in the choir down to the front pew, so often did he try to get it right with God.
I say again, I have never seen anyone so spiritually miserable as those who are never confident of their relationship to God. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Our God says, you have overcome. You have conquered. You can live with confidence. You do not have to wonder, day by day, whether you’ve done something that would destroy your relationship with Him. God is love, God is our father, God cares for us, and He will not throw us on the ash-heap. Stand on this, bank on this – that the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
Now I am not saying that you should not struggle. I am not saying that you will not make any mistakes. But as you do struggle, can you feel that God is having His way in your life? Can you feel God winning victories in you? Have you come through those pressure points where you knew your integrity was on trial, but in the end you did not yield to temptation? You took the high road. You let God have His way. If you did, then you know what victory feels like. You know what it means to be a child of God, used by Him. And you don’t have to live with self-doubt anymore. "This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith."
Dr. God’s elbow test means that you can live with the confidence that you are loved and held by a Lord who is strong enough to keep you. "The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world."
III
And finally, Dr. God’s baby book poses one other elbow test, one other measure of the spiritual surroundings in which you can be healthy: Whose opinion matters to you? Who is it you want to be accepted by? Whose judgment counts? Who hears you and authenticates you? Whose opinion matters to you?
John says, "They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us."
You can put the elbow test to how you are doing spiritually by identifying who it is that you choose to listen to you. Who cares about the truth and will interpret it to you?
One of the most valuable aspects of life together in the church is that we can test our thinking with one another. We can truly be heard by one another. Church is not simply sitting on pews together or working on committees together; at its heart, church is listening to one another, responding to one another, counseling with one another. And if you want a good reading on your spiritual health, if you want the elbow test made, then use those who are in touch with the Lord to give you honest feedback.
Not long ago a church member called me and asked me to stop by. It turned out that in that person’s family there was a brokenness and an estrangement that he knew was not right.
He had a plan of action to try to resolve the problem. But he just needed for somebody to listen to the plan and counsel with him and pray with him about the issue. This church member said, "I have a friend at the barber shop I might have talked about this with. And some of the fellows I used to work with are pretty sensible guys too. But I just felt I wanted to talk it out with someone who is in touch with the Lord." I was so pleased that this church member asked me to come, but he could just as well have talked with any one of you. Why? Because, as John says, "we are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us".
Whose judgments do you value and whom do you trust? If you feel at hone with the people of God and can trust them to listen to you and to hear you, then your spiritual health is solid and you’re passing the elbow test.
The other night, when young Joshua demonstrated his ample lungs, Margaret and I did what we knew to do. We rocked him and held him, we sang to him and we checked his south pole, but still he wailed. And that little head kept turning from one side to the other, as if to say, "Who are you and what have you done with my Mom and my Dad?" Nothing we could do would satisfy.
Happily, it was only ten minutes later that Derek and Cathy came though the front door, and within seconds they had the situation under control. I guess that means that, children as we are, we are happiest only in the warm embrace of the one who has given us life. I guess that means that, children as we are, we are best cared for by the author of life, the writer of the baby book. "Thou has made us for Thyself, 0 God; and restless are our souls until we rest in Thee." Maybe, if the elbow test shows some deficiencies, you’d like to correct them right now. Maybe you’d like to come home to the Father right now.
