When I was young, and riding a bicycle, we didn’t wear helmets. Nobody had thought of such a thing. And even if they had, no government was telling us we had to wear helmets. I haven’t even worn so much as a hat since I reached the age of 13, much less a helmet. So when we spilled, we spilled, we hit our silly heads, and took the consequences.
I see some of you right now nodding and saying to yourselves, “That explains a lot of things.” Maybe so.
At any rate, I never thought much about helmets until a few years ago, when my son was a teenager, and Margaret and I were enlisted to take our church’s youth group on a ski retreat. We were supposed to make sure everybody’s teenager survived the slopes, and were all geared up to provide first aid in case the unthinkable happened.
Well, the unthinkable did happen. There was an accident. Word came that one of our youth had taken a bad fall, and had been knocked semi-conscious. We rushed out to where it had happened, and, wouldn’t you know it, it was our own son who had taken the fall. Bryan was semi-conscious, staggering around in the snow, looking dopey, and sounding kind of goofy. We asked him if he was all right, and he just looked blankly at us. We put our arms around him to steady his walk, and his knees went limp. We got him back down to the lodge and asked again if he felt all right. He said, “Where am I?” He couldn’t remember much of anything and couldn’t seem to respond. When after “Where am I?” came “Who am I and who are you?”, I really did get worried. It turns out he had had a mild concussion. Potentially very dangerous. My son might have been seriously hurt. He might even have been killed. I found out that if you go out on to the ski slopes, if you ride a bike on these concrete streets without a helmet to protect your head, you might not be a survivor.
And if we go out into this world without what the Bible calls salvation to protect our life direction, we may not be survivors. When we go out to do battle in this world without salvation to protect us, we may not survive.
Salvation is the standing we have before God. Whether we stand before God full of sin, unclean, all out of joint; or whether we stand before God forgiven, cleansed, put back together – that is the fundamental fact of life. The difference is between surviving and being cast away and lost. Whether we have come into a relationship with God that is clear and certain and firm; or whether we are not sure that we know Him or that He knows us – there is the basic issue of life. It’s called salvation.
Salvation is like a helmet. A helmet protects our brains in the risky circumstances of life. And salvation protects our sense of who we are, because all of life’s circumstances are risky. Without that fundamental standing before God, everything we try to do will mess up, even when it looks good. We must gain confidence about our salvation.
Paul had been a Christian for quite some time. He had conquered a great many problems and had struggled with the meaning of his life. Paul had gone on to do lots of good things. He had founded churches, he had taken the gospel to new places, he was writing letters of profound wisdom to other Christians. Paul had a lot of things to which he could point and say, “Look what I have done for God.” “Look at what a good life I’ve led.” I don’t imagine too many of us would want to put our lives up against Paul’s and endure the comparisons. And yet, isn’t it interesting, after all his accomplishments, after all he has done, Paul is still talking about maybe being lost? About maybe not having salvation? He is still concerned about being a castaway. Is there a little anxiety in his heart?
So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air;
but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be [a castaway].
It’s a complicated sentence. But in its simplest form I hear Paul saying, “I have to watch out, because in my hurry to tell others what to do, I might lose the way myself. In my rush to be the good guy, I might miss the whole point.” I might not survive, I might be a castaway. I might be lost.
Can we face that question? Are we survivors or are we castaways? Which am I? Am I saved or am I lost? Which are we? Wearing the helmet of salvation, with life’s meaning protected? Or out there on our own, with our senses likely to be scrambled when the tough times come? Which? Survivor or castaway?
Paul gives us some litmus tests. There are ways you can determine whether you are wearing the helmet of salvation. There are ways you can test whether you are surviving or are on the way to being a castaway. One of these tests deals with our relationship to God; another deals with our relationship to others; and the third deals with our relationship with ourselves. God, others, self. Are you wearing the helmet of salvation? Are you a survivor or are you a castaway?
I
First, Paul says that if you are a castaway, your relationship to God is all wrong. If you are a castaway, and do not have salvation, you will be an idolater. Castaways worship false gods. Survivors stand in the presence of the living God, knowing that His love has received them. But castaways turn their eyes to false gods, and become idolaters.
Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play."
What is idolatry? Idolatry is not just following some wacky religion. Idolatry is not just bowing down to a fat Buddha statue or playing with voodoo dolls. Idolatry is making ourselves the center of everything. Idolatry is judging everything by whether it makes us feel good. When Paul says that some of us sit down to eat and drink and rise up to play, he is saying that all that matters to some of us is having a good time, indulging in our creature comforts, doing whatever makes us feel good.
So many of the things we do are not really wrong in and of themselves. But the reason we do them, there’s the issue. The importance we attach to them, there’s the question. Food and drink. Is there anything wrong with good food and drink? No. Is there anything wrong with playing, with sports and recreation? Of course not. But the issue is the motive. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with food and drink and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with fun and games. But the issue is the direction of our life: is everything calculated to satisfy our wishes, our feelings? Or is everything turned toward God and His will and His way?
Idolatry: don’t think about little statues up on the shelf or Buddhas somewhere in Asia. I doubt very much whether that is your problem or mine. But I can tell you what an idol is: it’s what gives me the sense that I am somebody, look out, world, here I come! A person’s god is whatever he invests with ultimate meaning. It’s what you won’t give up for anything.
I struggle with a personal idolatry. I am not prepared to give up the image of being a together, knowledgeable, doing-a-good-job person. I have to look as though I know what I am doing. Take that away from me and you have smashed my idol. I’ll protect my know-it-all image at all costs. If you don’t think so, come visit my study. I can sit there surrounded by 2800 books, some of which I have actually read, but mostly they are there to tell me I am a student and a scholar. If you don’t think my idolatry is in my do-a-good-job image, then come watch me struggle over getting these sermons just right, because I am NOT going to flounder in front of 250 people on Sunday morning!
Idolatry. Whatever we will not give up. Nothing wrong with being a student, nothing wrong with trying to do a good job. But the motive is to look good. That’s an idol. Salvation means I expose that idol, I smash that idol, I break its power over me – and, vulnerable as I am, I put on the helmet of salvation. I just trust the love of Christ, nothing more, nothing less. I don’t really have to prove how much I know, because it is nothing in the infinity of God’s knowledge. I don’t have to prove that I can preach or teach or do anything else. Salvation means I just trust His love, nothing more, nothing less. Salvation means I will survive even my own idolatry and will not be cast away.
II
Second, Paul tells us that castaways have trouble with their relationships with others. Specifically, castaways have trouble with intimacy. If you don’t have salvation, it will show up in severely damaged interpersonal relationships. Paul’s R-rated way of saying this:
We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did.
Oh, here’s a juicy moment! The pastor’s going to talk about sex! Well, yes, because when we are not secure in our relationship with God, we are also not secure in our sexual identities, we are not secure in our relationships with others.
Of course I could give you a long lecture about what’s right and what’s wrong in sexual behavior. Of course we could discuss what’s going on with sexual patterns in our time. But that’s not really the point. This is not the time for the do’s and the don’ts. The Bible’s point is that when we do not have a secure relationship with the living God, we will reach out and make a mess of our most intimate human relationships. We will try to find love in all the wrong places. But we’ve missed the fact that love is right there, right in front of us; God offers us His love, and taking it, that’s salvation. Rejecting God’s love, trying to find on our own something that makes us feel loved, that usually gets expressed in destructive intimacy. That shows that we are castaways.
I’ve been around a few years. I’ve seen a bunch of church leaders fall into this. I’m not thinking so much about the highly publicized televangelists as I am about ordinary people in Baptist churches in this town, folks who look and sound distressingly like you and me. I’ve known too many who went far afield, looking for intimacy, getting sexually involved with somebody. Now they had done all kinds of things for God; they had worked hard for God’s Kingdom. But one thing they did not have to protect them. They did not have an ongoing, intimate, satisfying, life-shaping relationship with God Himself. They knew of God, they talked about god, they even worked for god. But they did not truly know God. They did not trust God to give them love. They did not have salvation. They were castaways.
Please hear me. It is not my aim today to point fingers. It is not my intention to comment on any particular sexual behavior. I am saying, however, that sexual behavior has meaning. It is not just plumbing. Sexual behavior has meaning. And when it goes beyond the bounds of marriage, it means that we are not secure in the love of God. It means that in a very real sense we are not saved but are lost. When we lust after someone, or when we get caught up in the lures of our sexy culture, it means that we are not captured by the love that will not let us go.
Do you hear me? I am not screaming, “Don’t do this and don’t do that!” That would just be putting Band-Aids on the symptoms and not getting to the disease. I am not merely clamping down on sexual behavior. I am instead reporting that when we act out, it means we are hollow within. We have not let the love of God flow through our souls. I am saying that sad indeed is the castaway who wants so much to be loved, wants so much to be intimate, but has not found that the only way to survive is receive the abundant love of God Himself. God’s love, in all its purity, is enough. Anything less is not salvation. Anything less, and we are not wearing the helmet of salvation that protects our very lives.
III
But then, finally, Paul teaches us that when we are castaways, when we do not wear the helmet of salvation, we are even in trouble with ourselves. Not only are we idolaters, in trouble with our relationship to God; and not only do we damage even the most intimate of our relationships with others. But when we are castaways, unprotected by the helmet of salvation, we don’t even deal well with ourselves. When we do not have a clear sense of our standing before God, we don’t even like ourselves very much. He puts it very succinctly:
And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
Complaint. Complaint is the behavior of a chronically unhappy person. The sort of person for whom nothing is ever good enough, nothing is ever right, nothing is authentic. You know the sort of person I’m talking about – who, if you give them a gift, want to know why you didn’t give them one last year and why this one isn’t from Tiffany’s instead of from K-Mart. Complaint is a way of life for some people.
But again, my task is not simply to admonish you not to complain. My role is not to criticize people who criticize or to grumble about grumblers. My assignment is to get right down to the heart of the matter and say, with all the fervor at my command, that when we fall into the pattern of complaint, it means that we don’t like ourselves. The lostest of the lost are those who are not comfortable in their own skins! Those who cast away their own worth. Those who are so chronically dissatisfied, so constantly unhappy with themselves that it pops out as complaint, criticism, negative spirit, harsh and judgmental.
Again, please hear me. I am not castigating that. I am not admonishing you not to complain. I am reporting that if that’s who you are, you just need to hear the love of God. I just want to insist that the love of God is broader far than tongue or pen can ever tell. It stretches to the widest breadths and reaches to the lowest hell. At the moment you may think you are nobody’s nuthin’, but I tell you Jesus Christ loves you. He died for you. Jesus Christ lives for you. Salvation means that you live in the light of God’s love and not in the shadow of self-hatred. Salvation means that your heart finally accepts that you have been made right -- whatever you’ve done, you’ve been made right – whatever you feel, you’ve been made right. Salvation is finally waking up one morning to the indisputable and wonderful reality that whoever comes to Him, He will in no way cast off! You have survived your own heart’s condemnation. I pray that for you. The helmet of salvation that protects us even from self-inflicted wounds. Survivors and not castaways.
Have you watched some of the new so-called reality TV? The shows where they put a bunch of folks on a desert island and ask them to survive – but they do it by undercutting one another? Or the “Big Brother” situation, where strangers are cooped up in a house and have to deal with one another’s annoying habits? What happens? Everything comes out, doesn’t it? Everything. The things they won’t give up, their idolatries. Their hunger for intimacy, even when it’s all wrong. And their complaints, their petty complaints, their huge complaints; they vomit all over one another.
So what do they do on these shows? They vote each other out. They make each other into castaways. And the few that remain at the end, the so-called winners, the survivors? What did you think of them? They were the most repulsive human beings I’ve seen in a long time! They survived, if that’s what it is, by putting others out.
But I’m so glad today that with Jesus Christ, whosoever will may come. I’m so glad today that I have a friend in Jesus, who takes me in and does not turn me away. I’m so glad today that in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, we only vote to take people in and never vote to put people out. I’m so glad today that when, in my heart of hearts, I see what God is offering me in Jesus Christ, I can know I am a survivor and not a castaway. I can know that I am saved and not lost. I can wear the helmet of salvation, and it protects me against every blow. I am His and He is mine, forever and forever.
