Good morning. Does anybody remember this game of Life? It is a game that basically simulates life. All the choices you have to make in life. Remember the first choice you have to make in the Game of Life? College or career. That is the first choice. Then you go on and make choices whether you are going to marry, have kids, and on and on. Eventually, you don’t really get to choose, but you end up in the retirement home or the poor farm. That is basically how it ends. Although the game is old, it came out in the 60s, the premise is still pretty valid. Life is really a series of choices. One choice after another. Some of those choices are relatively minor like you get up and you have to choose what you are going to eat for breakfast. What are you going to wear? Decide which clothes you are going to put on. We make these choices in life and some are relatively minor and some are more major like are we going to go to church today? That is a major choice. I am glad to see that you chose to come to church today. It reminds me of a story about a man who really just didn’t want to go to church. It was about a half hour before the service would start and the wife is trying to get the husband out of bed. She is shaking him saying you have to get up or we are going to be late for church. He says I don’t want to go. You have to get up. You have to go to church. People are expecting to see you. I don’t want to go to church. She keeps checking on him. You have to get up and go to church. I don’t want to go to church. She says you have to go to church. Finally, he says why? Because you are the pastor! Pastors don’t have the choice. We have to be here. I always thought it would fun if some Sunday Chris and I decided not to show up and see how long you would sit before you would gradually get up and walk out. I am wondering who would walk first. We have these minor choices. We have these major choices. We have to choose our mates. We have to choose what we are going to do for a career. We have to choose what city we are going to live in. Other times we have to make some real life or death choices. Some minor. Some major. Some life-giving and some death-giving.
In today’s passage out of the book of Deuteronomy 30:19 we are going to see that Moses basically presented the Israelites a choice between choosing life or death. If you want to follow along in your own Bible it is Deuteronomy 30:19. If you want to use the red Bible in the pew, I think it is about page 201 or so. A little bit of background because this is a long book and we don’t obviously have time to go through the whole book. We have Moses at about 120 years old at this point in the book. You may recall that Moses was the person who led the Hebrew people out of 400 years of slavery under the hands of the wicked pharaoh. He was the one to go in and become the deliverer of the Hebrew people. He kept pressing pharaoh to let the people go. Finally, Pharaoh let the people go and Moses took them out into the desert and he was able to, through the hand of God, be able to part the Red Sea and the Hebrew people were able to walk through towards the Promised Land. The problem is because the people did not believe that God’s hand was upon them, they were afraid to step into the Promised Land so they had to wander around the desert for close to 40 years.
At this particular point in Deuteronomy, we have Moses facing the Promised Land and facing his people and basically saying listen. Here we are again. I just got done laying out all these laws and regulations for you, and if you are smart you will listen to them. He knew that the people were about to go into the Promised Land, but they were going to face a whole new set of trials. They were going to face a whole new set of temptations of different types of enemies. The good news is that they were going to have a leader that was fresh. Joshua would turn out to be their leader and the one who would actually take them into the Promised Land. Moses was telling them about this and laying out all the rules and regulations not designed to restrict them but to help insure that they would be able to live in community in a safe way in a way that would promote hygiene and spiritual health. When we look at Deuteronomy 30:19 Moses writes (scripture read here).
He is pretty strong here. He is pretty commanding. He says choose life. “I have set before you blessings and curses.” In other words, I have set before you life and death. Now be smart and choose life. You would think by this time they would have figured it out, but he knew his people. He knew that, although they were under the cloud of God and God had taken them out into the wilderness and protected them all this way, they still were prone to go back to their old lifestyle and their old ways. He knew it. We know it if we look back in history. We know what happened immediately as they passed through the Red Sea. As they went to Mount Sinai and as Moses was up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments, the people got bored and got tired of waiting. They began to take off their jewelry and gold and melted it in a fire. They shaped an idol in the form of a calf. There were many people just killed that day by the hand of God. Moses knew his people. He knew that they were prone to go back to their old lifestyle, their old ways, their old habits. He is reiterating the idea be faithful to the one who was faithful to you. Be faithful to the one who created you. Be faithful to the one who delivered you through the Red Sea out of the hand of the Pharaoh.
I stand here today in on January 23rd staring down at 11 months in front of us and there are a bunch of choices there. In other words, on any given day, we have hundreds of choices. Like I said, some are relatively minor, but some can be major choices. As we look down the calendar, there are probably several thousand choices that we have to make. Some can be life-giving or death-giving. We need to be aware of those particular choices. Especially as Christians, as we go into the Promised Land, as we head towards heaven and go through our sanctification, there are going to be all these choices that are going to come up, and we have to decide whether we are going to choose life or choose death. I stand here today and I say choose life. In other words, make good choices. Think before you get into a potentially bad or abusive relationship. Choose life. Think before you put that illegal substance into your body or drive with a substance in your body. Choose life. Think before you put yourself in a compromising position with a person of the opposite sex. Choose life. I stand before you here and like Moses I say choose life. All the while I know that you are probably not going to listen to me. They didn’t listen to Moses so why would you listen to me. Moses knew that not everybody was going to listen to him. He felt the responsibility to do a couple things. For one, he felt the responsibility to remind them of their deliverance. They had been set free. He encouraged them to walk in that deliverance. He gave them some tips to make sure that they would walk in that deliverance. So that is really what I am going to do in the remaining minutes.
First of all, I am here to remind you of your deliverance. I am here to remind you that just as Moses freed the Hebrew slaves from the hand of Pharaoh, we who call ourselves Christians have been freed from the hand of our oppressor which is Satan. Specifically, we have been freed from the penalty of sin. We have been freed from the guilt of sin. We have been freed from the shame of sin. All the tools that Satan had we are now free from. As we see in John 8:36 “If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.” How many of you are free? How many of you believe that you have been delivered from sin? You have been delivered from the hand of your oppressor. You have been delivered from the enemy of your soul. I stand here and say that is cool. Now let’s see if you can go a little farther. Let’s see if we can begin to walk in that deliverance. We should know that as we become a Christian and as we step towards the Promised Land, which in our case is life everlasting, just like the Hebrews were faced with a bunch of temptations and trials, we will be faced with temptations and trials and enemies. Temptations that we didn’t have before we were a Christian now become temptations because we are aware of that. Now we have enemies that we didn’t know we had. The people that were our friends could now become our enemies. Just as the Hebrew people had temptations and enemies, we have temptations and enemies. Just as the Hebrew people had a new leader to look to, Joshua, we have a new leader to guide us, Jesus. What is interesting is the Hebrew name of Jesus is Joshua. Just as Joshua led the Hebrew people out of the desert and out away the hands of the pharaoh, we have a Joshua that leads us out of the hands of the enemy and takes us towards the Promised Land. But we have the responsibility to walk in that deliverance. I think we do a disservice to new Christians because we do not remind them that as you step out of those waters of the baptistery and have accepted Christ as Lord, you are immediately going to face new temptations, new trials, and new enemies. That is just the reality of it. We have the responsibility to tell you about those temptations and to continue to walk past them and better yet not look back. When you look back is when you get in trouble. Remember Lot’s wife when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife looked back and it turned her into a pillar of salt. There are Christians who, for some reason, when they become saved and experience this new life and joy, they immediately walk back into their old environment and into their own activities and their own particular behavior. Some actually relish in it because their logic, which is very bad logic and bad theology, is that if I go back and start engaging in those activities again, because I have been forgiven, I can continue to engage in those activities and then I can be forgiven again and receive the grace of God over and over again. That is nonsense.
That is what Paul rebuked the Romans of when he writes “What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death but now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul is saying choose life. He is saying choose life. He says why would you go back to your old self. Why would you go back to the thing that you left that you wanted to be redeemed of? Why would you go back and live in that muck and yuck again? In fact, the apostle Peter is a little bit more vivid and uses more creative imagery to talk about what people are like that go back to their old ways. He writes “If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.” He goes on to say “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit’ and ‘A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.’” You can’t get much more graphic than that. That is what you are doing if you go back to your old ways. You are choosing death. You are choosing to go back and wallow in the mud. You are choosing to be like a dog that goes and licks up its vomit. How gross is that? Peter is trying to get across to you don’t go back to the crap behind you. I don’t have a nicer way to say it. Don’t go back to it. Choose life. Continue to move forward in your deliverance all the while knowing that you are going to hit some obstacles. You are going to hit a bunch of choices. To be honest, at some point you may mess up. Everybody messes up. There are two types of sin. They talk about the sins of commission and the sins of omission. Commissions are sins of action. You acted to do something. Omissions are sins that you neglected to do something that you should have done. When you are feeling prompted to serve, help somebody, pray for somebody and you say I am not going to do that, then that is a sin. We all sin and we fall short of the glory of God. Some people seem to get more caught up in the cycles of sin. They keep going round and round. They do the same sin over and over again but really we are all sinning. The difference between those people that are sinning unintentionally and the people that are going back purposely to wallow is that God knows we are not perfect. God knows we are trying. God knows our hearts are bent towards serving him. We are really trying. As long as we have this old coat on us, this old natural man or woman on us that we are slowly taking off, we are going to mess up. As you know, the good news is that God will forgive us if we confess our sins to God and each other, he will purify us. You may be familiar with the verse out of 1 John 1:9. If you are not, you should hang on to this one. He says “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” It tells you right there we are all going to sin. If we say we don’t sin, we are liars. That means we are sinners because if we are liars, we are sinners. At the same time, we know that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and he will purify us of our unrighteousness. If we go to him and confess our sins to him and ideally to the person that we may have offended. These are the things that we have to do. If we confess, we can walk in the freedom and we don’t have to get caught up in the self-condemnation that comes from when we sin. Yes we should be remorseful and sorry but confess it and move on. Romans 8:1 says “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Some people commit a sin and they are beating themselves up over and over again. They are beating themselves up for sins they committed ten years again over and over and over again. Satan loves that because he knows when you are beating yourself up and you are guilty and feeling bad and condemning yourself, you are not going to be an effective Christian. You need to free yourself from that and remember that there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. Even yet, we still have a responsibility to walk forward in our deliverance. We cannot just sit there and wait around for God to deliver us from our particular sin.
That is where I want to camp out in the remaining minutes on a passage out of 1 Peter where Peter writes “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” I just want to hit on a couple words here. The first word is a very small word. It is be. The word has a lot of meaning behind it. If you could look at the grammar you would see that it is called an active imperative. It is an action verb. Imperative is a commandment. It is on par with a commandment. Not like be self-controlled. No. It is BE self-controlled. It is a command. That says we have a certain responsibility for our own action. For our own life or death choices in life. There are some people who would say I am just going to sit around and wait for my deliverance. Someday God is going to deliver me from this alcohol. Someday God is going to deliver me from these cigarettes. Someday God is going to deliver me from this gossiping or whatever it is. They wait around for this deliverance. What I say is stop waiting and start walking in the deliverance that you already have, which we all have. Don’t wait for a new deliverance. You have been delivered. Who the Son sets free is free indeed. Don’t sit and wait for your deliverance. You begin to walk in what you already know to be true. You BE self-controlled. Self-controlled does not mean self-reliant. From the world when you hear self-controlled people think I have to control myself. You see how well the world does in self-control. The difference is Christians have self-control and our self-control comes from the spirit of God because if we are in line with the spirit of GOD, we are going to have the fruit of the spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control. For the Christian who walks in the spirit of God and walks with the spirit of God, they are being led by the spirit. If they are being led by the spirit, they will be able to exhibit self-control. That is why the spiritual disciplines are so important. That is why you need to spend time in prayer and Bible study and meditation and fasting and service. All those things are not mere exercises just to check off your list and say you did it. All those are for the purpose of you being able to keep that lifeline between your flesh and the spirit. Between your spirit and God’s spirit connected. Once you disconnect that lifeline, it is very hard to be self-controlled. You need to stay connected there. We talked a few weeks ago about how in Matthew Jesus went out right after his baptism and the first thing he did was go out in the wilderness and he was tempted by the devil. He was fasting. He was in prayer. I guarantee he was meditating on the scripture. In other words, he was practicing the spiritual disciplines. Even though he was at his weakest state physically, he was at his strongest state spiritually. So much so that when the devil came up and showed up and started tempting him, he was basically saying get out of here and the devil went away. We have to stay connected to that lifeline. You have to stay connected to the spirit of God. You do that through regular practice of the spiritual disciplines. So we need to be self-controlled.
But we also need to be alert. This is an obvious word. To be alert is to be awake. To stay awake. I hate to say it but a lot of Christians just wander through life. I will just go down this road and see what is down there. Something comes and all of a sudden blindsides them. It is like where did that come from? They act surprised. We are not supposed to be surprised. Just as the Hebrew people stepped out into the wilderness expecting temptations and enemies, it is the same thing. We can go out expecting that we are going to encounter things. If you are walking in your faith, I guarantee it. If you are trying to act like Christ in a world that is Christ-less, you are going to face choices and challenges you cannot avoid. I am not saying that to be paranoid, but I am saying be alert. As you walk out there and everything looks nice, you have all these little landmines out there. You are just walking along and you come near one. It could be something so simple like you are flipping through the channels and some TV show comes on that you shouldn’t be watching. That is a choice. It is a life or death choice. It is a landmine. You aren’t thinking about it and you watch something you are not supposed to be watching. Pretty soon you are watching too many shows you shouldn’t be watching. Pretty soon you are leading to death, possibly separation from your wife because she is tired of it, or something else. Or you are going through life and all of a sudden a compromising situation comes up. You find yourself with someone from the opposite sex in a situation where you shouldn’t be and you are caught off guard and you have to decide what to do. If you have your antennae up, you know that these things are out there. Satan is just waiting to knock you down. You have to have the antennae up. You have to be alert. More often than not, these things that you think are going to be so obvious are not obvious. In fact, sometimes they can be appealing. Especially if we are not in-tune with the spirit, when we are first approached by one of these things that attracts some of our base desires, at first it sounds kind of appealing. In many ways, it might even seem right to take the next step. Maybe to preserve a relationship or friendship or you don’t want to be laughed at so it seems right at this time just to go ahead and take that next step towards death.
The proverbs deal with that. There is actually a proverb in Proverbs 14:12 that says “There is a way that seems right to a man but in the end it leads to death.” There is another proverb that says something very similar. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” Same proverb, different passages. I was thinking why did he list that twice. Why did Solomon, if we believe Solomon maybe wrote the Proverbs, list it twice? Because he wanted to get his point across. Maybe he was speaking to all the teenagers out here who are about ready to go off into the world and may encounter things that on the surface seem so right. In the end, they lead to death. He wanted to impress on our mind like a branding iron that those things that seem like a good idea at the time, if you carry them out to their logical conclusion, they lead to death. Death of relationships. Death of finances. Death of emotional health. Death of spiritual health. All sorts of stuff. This is not rocket science. This is not Chuck trying to spiritualize things. People that were in this congregation or used to be in this congregation are no longer in here because they made bad choices in their life. That is the reality of it. It is the reality of any church. People choose death over life. This one you should post everywhere. Post it on your mirror. Post it on your car. Post it anywhere you are going to go. When you begin to get in that situation you are not supposed to be in, pull it out and say “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” We have to be self-controlled. We have to be alert.
Most importantly, we have to resist the devil. This verse says “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” Resist him. If you look at the underlying word here, this is another active word. This is not passive resistance. This is not when you encounter the life or death choice and you say I don’t think I will do this. You have to be active resistance. Going back to Jesus in the desert. His was an active resistance. When he was hungry, Satan said if you are the Son of God, why don’t you take these stones and turn them into bread. Jesus said “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Active resistance. He was throwing something back at him. Or when he said Jesus if you are really God, why don’t you just throw yourself off a cliff and the angels will take care of you. What he was doing was testing his pride. Jesus’ response was “Don’t put the Lord your God to a test.” He knew the scripture. Active resistance. Then he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and all the mounds of wealth. And he said Jesus if you would worship me and serve me, you can have all this. He was tempting his need for material wealth. Jesus said “It is written: worship the Lord your God and serve him only.” Active resistance. When you face something, don’t just resist. Actively resist. Push something back. Take a bit of truth that you know from the word of God because you are studying because you are doing the spiritual disciplines because you know the truth and the truth is what sets you free and you meditate on that and you can just throw those things right out. We know what happened to Satan in that situation. He left for a more opportune time, which means he was going to come back. He will come back. The more you resist him, the more he is going to flee from you. You have to have the active resistance to face the roaring lion known as Satan that goes around and seeks to devour you up. To eat the Christian life. To knock you back on your journey of life. He is trying.
As a side note, I know some people don’t believe in Satan and devils and all that kind of stuff. The older I get, the more I believe in Satan and the devils. I really do because I see it. Think about what happened in Tucson. That guy was either a maniac or maybe demon-possessed. Whatever it is, if there is no devil there, there is nothing that can be called evil. If there is no devil, there is nothing that can truly be called evil out there. You can’t say that was evil. There are manifestations of the devil all around us. I am not saying everything is of the devil. In fact, one of the errors that we have is that some people want to blame everything on the devil. There are other people who want to say there is no existence. C.S. Lewis talks about that in his book called The Screwtape Letters, which I highly recommend. When he writes “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” It is an error to disbelieve. It is an equal error to want to blame everything on him.
That reminds me of a funny story. There was a woman who wanted to buy a new dress. She went shopping. She knew she wasn’t supposed to buy the dress. She knew she wasn’t supposed to spend any money. She went out and spent $200 for a beautiful red dress. She gets home and she doesn’t know how she is going to tell her husband. Her husband happens to be a preacher. She gets home and says I don’t know how to tell you this. I know we are over our credit limit, but I just bought this beautiful dress. It was tempting me. The preacher says that was probably Satan trying to get you to buy that. Why didn’t you say get behind me Satan? She said I did but he told me it looked pretty good from that angle too! It is an old joke. We can put overemphasis on the demons. We can put under emphasis on the demons, but the reality is that the demonic is out there and it is trying to influence our walk with Christ. We are trying to go forward and we are facing all these temptations.
The thing I want to close with is really all the temptations we face are common to everybody. In a different flavor or format but there are not a lot of new creative temptations out there. They are the same old temptations that are just disguised in a new way. All these temptations are quite common. In fact, in Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians he writes: “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bare. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” He was talking about the trials and the persecutions that the people were facing, but he was also talking about the temptations that they would face. We get strength in knowing that everybody is facing the same thing. Collectively we can all stand firm in our faith and move forward towards the Promised Land or our redemption. We are part of God’s process of bringing in the new world. Not only is the temptation common to man, but God always provides a way out. I think we forget that. I think we are so quick to yield to temptation that we forget that there is always a way out. There really is. Sometimes it could be very simple. Switching the channel on the TV. Getting up and leaving that space when you are with somebody. Saying no to something that is going on at a party. There is always a way out of those things. If you get in a situation where you are just seeing those temptations overwhelming you and you can’t get past it and you are really struggling, you just have to look for that way. You have to lift your eyes up just enough and look for the one who says He was the way. When you think about John 14:6, which says, this is Jesus speaking, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is the way-maker. Jesus is the deliverer. Jesus is your savior. Jesus is the one who is going to be there at the beginning of your walk and he is going to be there at the very end. That is why in Hebrews they refer to him as the author of your faith and the perfector of your faith. He is the way. When you are struggling with finding the way. When you think there is no way out, you need to life your eyes and get your focus back on the one who says He is the way. When you think you are caught up in confusion and you don’t know what is true and what is false, you look the one who claimed to be true. When you are hoping to make life-giving choices instead of death-giving choices, you look at the one who came to give you life. In fact, the next verse says “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.” Right there it tells you the thief, which the thief refers to Satan, has one goal to rob you of what is yours. To kill you and destroy you. Destroy your faith. Destroy your family. Destroy your finances. Destroy anything he can get his hands on 24 hours a day. The one who is the way, the truth, and the life comes to give you life and he comes to give it to you to the full. So much so that we can’t even handle it, it is so full. I would encourage you as we walk out today and face those thousands of choices in life, remember our deliverance. Remember that if you are born again and have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, you have been delivered. And reminded that you are to walk in that deliverance. You are not to look back and go back to your old ways. You are not going to be like a pig who wallows back or longs for that old life. You are going to continue to walk forward. All the while knowing that occasionally you are going to mess up. But you know that God is faithful. If you confess your sins, he is faithful and just. He will forgive you of all unrighteousness. In Romans 8:1 “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” If you mess up, you confess and you move on. You get in there and begin to be self-controlled. You actively go after your own deliverance. You actively walk in your own deliverance. You exhibit self-control that comes from staying in-tune with the Holy Spirit. You stay alert, looking and knowing that the enemy prowls around and you actively resist him. You throw it back at him. You take what he throws at you and you take it and throw it back in his face. You do all this knowing that there is no temptation that is not common to all men and that God will provide the way. He will provide the way out because he is the way, the truth, and the life. Let us pray.
CG/eep
