“Imagine the soundtrack from ‘Moulin Rouge’ playing in the background: ‘…There was a man who loved a woman deeply.’
“She was a prostitute. There may have been reams of reasons why she sold her body to men to do what they would. But whatever, her soul had shrunken to a size so small she could not hear it cry, only faint whimpers from time to time. But the man who loved this woman was mesmerized not by what she was, but what she could be. Not by how she lived, but how she could live. Not by the layers of makeup that now painted the wornness of her face, but a beauty marred like a coin handled too many times, pocketed too much, and spent too easily.
“He loved her. No, he was intoxicated by her. Why? Because he was married to her. He had married her when she was a prostitute. He knew that. She gave him two sons and a daughter. Years later, when she had left him again, he traveled to the street corner where she sold herself each evening. Men knew who he was. They grinned and made jokes about his manhood. And in front of all, he paid her pimp a sum of money to have her. The thugs in the alley laughed; what kind of husband had such little self-respect, so few prospects, so pathetically romantic that he could not see what she was? But he knew exactly what she was. Bathed in the mercury-vapor streetlight, head hung in shame, long curls hiding her eyes from his gaze, he knew deeply who she was. She was his wife. And these other men, these jackals, would never know her like that. Never. Because they’ve never known the glory of true love. He took her home. Again.
“Prophets sometimes had the tough job of serving as real-life dramatizations under the great Director of this Cosmic Drama—God Himself. And God was directing an autobiographical play—His love for His wife, Israel, which served as a microcosm of His love for the human race, His beautiful creation. The price He would pay to buy an unfaithful bride would be the life of His own Son. The New Testament writer Paul says that all these events of the Old Testament serve as allegories, as types. There is a hidden story between the lines.”
That’s the true story of a prophet named Hosea in the Old Testament…retold in The Outward Focused Life. It’s an incredible picture of grace…foreshadowing the most grace-empowered act of the universe.
Can you imagine that screenplay?—a God who marries a prostitute. We don’t look good in this story. And here’s the reality check: we’ve all prostituted ourselves at some point. We’ve loved other things more than the Ultimate Lover of us. It is God who takes us home…again…and again. The Faithful One pursues the Faithless one.
That’s a picture of grace…and that’s what we’re going to look at in this first week of this series called The Outward Focused Life. Grace is the undeserved favor—the unearned love, the offer of a “supernatural power to be free”—from God…to you. And if we don’t understand grace, then we won’t understand the heart of God. If we don’t understand grace, then we certainly won’t understand Christianity. And if we don’t understand grace, then we’ll never really become outward-focused. Being outward-focused is one of our core values at this church; in my mind, we can’t talk about it enough.
Sometimes I’ll meet people who, when they find out I’m a pastor, will tell me they don’t go to church, but they’ll often follow that by saying, “But I’m really a spiritual person…” Well, I totally understand that going to church doesn’t necessarily make you “spiritual”. I get that. I could sit in the Cincinnati Bengals’ locker room all day and never become a linebacker. But sometimes when I’m feeling feisty, I’ll ask them what that means: “I’m really a spiritual person.” Sometimes it means that they see themselves as being sensitive to spiritual things. But I still don’t know what that means. Is that like some spiritual radar that causes you to pick up metaphysical sound waves passing through the air? Does it mean that you consider yourself a “spiritual being”?
That’s nothing to brag about: the devil’s a spiritual being, too. But he’s full of himself. And it’s not working out that well for him…he gets fried at the end of the book.
In real spirituality, there is actually a continuum that we move on. We go from being someone who has zero awareness of God…
…to someone who’s reborn by the Holy Spirit…
…to someone who’s whole life is focused on Jesus Christ.
And the reason it’s focused on Jesus is because He’s God…and He’s the mechanism for this wildly amazing thing called grace.
The continuum of growth from seeker to servant is, interestingly enough, a journey that takes us from being self-focused, or inwardly-attentive, to becoming more and more outward-focused…with an ever-growing focus on God and others. The greatest, real spiritual growth is measured by an increase in self-forgetfulness.
For instance, in a recent psychological study it was revealed that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. I don’t know how they get a number like that, but it’s in a book so it must be true! And if we think when we’re sleeping, that’s getting close to a thought per second. That sounds like a lot of thinking. But just try not thinking for a while. For the next five seconds, try not thinking about anything. Ready?
How’s that working out for you?
Even more, I would guess that the overwhelming majority of my thoughts are about myself. Interestingly, the gift of grace is what ultimately liberates us to become more interested in what God wants. Let me show you a few of the ways grace jumpstarts and maintains the outward-focused life.
First, there is a grace for new beginnings.
Paul writes in Ephesians 2: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God… (Ephesians 2:8 New International Version). That means we start off with grace. It also means that we need to be saved from something. We need to be made whole. What’s more, we can’t make ourselves whole. We can’t be good to enough earn this gift of wholeness that God wants to give us.
When Adam—the prototypical Man—disobeyed God, the great divide opened between the holy and perfect Creator who gave Adam a paradise to enjoy…and the creation that decided it would rather be God and determine for ourselves what is good and evil. Humanity broke its relationship with God. As a matter of fact, in Hosea’s story, God tells Hosea that His people did exactly that: “But like Adam, you broke my covenant and rebelled against me.” (Hosea 6:7 New Living Translation).
History shows us the painful drama through millennia after millennia of us wanting to live the way we want, apart from any dependency on God, apart from any accountability to something higher than ourselves, thumbing our nose at the one who made us. One of the most telling verses in the Old Testament on the human condition is in the book of Judges where it reads that “…every man did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6 New American Standard Bible)
An inward-focused person makes a bad judge.
So here’s where the outward focused life begins: The first step to knowing God is to look outwardly, outside of yourself. That’s why Paul insists that he would only preach about one thing—Christ crucified.
Make sure you get this. In Paul’s mind there were only two types of people in the world: Jews…and everyone else. He calls them “the Gentiles”, or “the nations”. He says that both these people groups approach connecting with God the wrong way. In 1st Corinthians he says that Jews want God to prove himself by miracles, that is, if you want to find God, follow the signs and wonders.
The counterpoint to that, he says, can be summed up in the Greeks—or Gentiles—approach: philosophical wisdom. In other words, there are the power people and the intellectuals. But God will have none of that: a crucified messiah is His way. Think how ridiculous that must have been. As New Testament scholar Gordon Fee says, a crucified messiah is an oxymoron; messiah implied power, but crucifixion implied weakness. You can’t put those two things together. And on the flipside, how appealing is a guy on a cross to the intellectual—to those who insist on finding God through their own IQ points and reasoning?
The beauty is that grace is the great equalizer: only by faith in what God did in our behalf do we come to know God. That’s the ultimate fairness.
That’s why Paul writes: “But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles… For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” 1 Corinthians 1:23-25 (New International Version).
The very first outward focused thought is the thought that something outside of ourselves actually exists, a higher power, but even more, a personal God who longs for us to reach outwardly to Him. Until you have a spiritual rebirth, you can look inside of yourself for God until you’re blue in the face. He’s not there—He’s outside of us. That’s why Jesus said that those who were “poor in spirit” would experience the Kingdom of God—they recognize their own emotional and spiritual poverty without God.
It’s interesting to me that Paul begins every letter with this phrase: grace and peace to you…and usually he adds: from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace: the two walk hand in hand. The touch of grace brings peace, one of the evidences that we are experiencing the Kingdom.
Judgment, condemnation, punishment, retribution—all the things that rob us of real peace—melt away under the touch of grace. It is like waking from some terrifying, exhausting nightmare—the relief you feel when your consciousness stirs and it sinks in: it was only a dream.
Remember: the same grace that saves you is the same grace that sustains you. The more we realize that our value and worth come from God’s love for us by His grace, the freer we become to serve others. We have nothing to prove to others.
And that brings us to another way grace works in our lives to make us more outward-focused: He gives us grace to live in freedom. A free person is a person free to be a servant of God.
Hosea’s wife—and by the way, her name was Gomer; no wonder she had some issues—Hosea’s wife probably thought she was a free person at one point, unbound from the chains of marriage. But she was in deep bondage. Think about it: she didn’t need the money…her husband loved her and provided for her. Perhaps she worshipped at the altar of sexual freedom.
You see, most of us have little gods—little idols—in our lives. Usually it is ourselves. Sometimes it’s things. Sometimes it’s identified, known sins…what we want. But anything we give value to has the potential of becoming a god…and we give away the grace, the gift of life, God has for us.
As another prophet named Jonah once said, "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. (Jonah 2:8 NIV). That which we make a god in our lives operates differently from the Living God…they offer no real grace. And we become slaves to our little gods. It’s so subtle that most of us don’t even realize it. It’s like the comedian who said, “I don
