Choose One Chair!
A few years ago psychologist Ruth W. Berenda and her associates carried out an interesting experiment with teenagers designed to show how a person handled group pressure. The plan was simple. They brought groups of ten adolescents into a room for a test. Subsequently, each group of ten was instructed to raise their hands when the teacher pointed to the longest line on three separate charts. What one person in the group did not know was that nine of the others in the room had been instructed ahead of time to vote for the second-longest line. Regardless of the instructions they heard, once they were all together in the group, the nine were not to vote for the longest line, but rather vote for the next to the longest line. The experiment began with nine teen-agers voting for the wrong line. The stooge would typically glance around, frown in confusion, and slip his hand up with the group. The instructions were repeated and the next card was raised. Time after time, the self-conscious stooge would sit there saying a short line is longer than a long line, simply because he lacked the courage to challenge the group. This remarkable conformity occurred in about 75% of the cases, and was true of small children and high-school students as well.
One of the most amazing things about us as people is that it seems that we want to be liked by the world around us no matter what the cost. Everyone else can be wrong and we know it, but it doesn’t matter. We want to fit it, we want to go with the crowd and not look like we show up too much. You say, “Well that’s not true. I’m an individual and I stand out.” I got into a conversation with my sister once about this. We were comparing the preppy kids to these gothic kids who run around in the all black stuff. My sister told me that the preppy kids were just conforming to each other and they all looked alike. So I told her that the gothic kids were conforming to each other and they all looked alike also. She said no they were all individuals and didn’t follow the crowd. They may not follow the norm, but that doesn’t mean they’re not following the crowd. Every Goth kid looks as much like the next Goth kid, just like all of the preppy kids look alike. We want to fit into a group somewhere. And in order to do that, sometimes we just go with the flow. We conform to what everyone around us is doing.
I remember back when I was in high school. And let me assure you, I couldn’t conform to any group because there was no group like me in high school. I was my own group by myself. It was a rough 4 years. But that’s another message all together. But I remember a time when I had a chance to conform, but didn’t. I was in a World History class and I was getting excited because my teacher had said we were going to be studying the history of the Israelite people in the upcoming weeks. Now being a preacher’s kid and growing up in the church I thought I knew a lot about the Israelite people. So I knew I would do well on that test. The rest of them, well that’s up for debate. Well the time rolled around and we were discussing the Israelite people for a couple weeks. We began discussing the kings of Israel and you guys know who they were. Saul, David, Solomon. Those guys. Well, my teacher told us that David was the first king of Israel. And I don’t know what it was or why it happened, but something in my brain said, “Wait a minute. That’s not right.” So I started thinking to myself, “Who was the first king of Israel?” But I need to come up with it fast so he doesn’t move on without me. And it hit me. Saul was the first king of Israel. So I raised my hand and before I could even stop myself I said, “That’s not right. Saul was the first king of Israel.” And I mean everyone turned to look at me as if I had 4 heads. My teacher was like, “Excuse me? David was the first king of Israel.” I said, “No he wasn’t. It was Saul.” And we went round and round, it was funny. Well, the test was coming up and I said, “So should I put down the right answer to that question or your answer?” I don’t know where those guts came from, but that is not my personality type at all to go up against authority like that. But it came from somewhere. Well, anyway, on the test I put, “David, so that I get the points, but Saul was still the first king of Israel.” That was definitely out of my character, I just did it. But it was definitely not the way to conform.
And it’s funny that the Bible got brought into this conversation with my teacher, in the middle of class, because the Bible talks about this very issue. It talks about the idea of conforming. Did you know that Christians are not supposed to conform? We are supposed to be separate, set apart, different. We are not supposed to “fit in”. Let’s follow up with where we were last week. Turn to Romans 12:2. In the New Living Translation it states it this way, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is.” It says don’t conform. Don’t just blend in, don’t copy everyone else. Did you know that God’s people have had a problem with this for thousands of years? Oh yeah. God’s people have tried to blend in for thousands of years. That’s why Paul writes these words. And he lists it directly following Romans 12:1, which we discovered said what? Sacrifice your bodies, and he follows it with, don’t conform. You see, if you conform to the world, you won’t sacrifice yourself. You see, our world is not into sacrifice; we’re into easy and go with the flow. So if you conform to the world, then you can’t sacrifice your body to God like 12:1 says to do. See how they go together?
Paul says this because God’s people have always struggled with this. Let’s go way back into history, the history of the Israelite people, and see what was going on with them. Let’s read Joshua 24:14-27. "So honor the LORD and serve him wholeheartedly. Put away forever the idols your ancestors worshiped when they lived beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt. Serve the LORD alone. But if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD." The people replied, "We would never forsake the LORD and worship other gods. For the LORD our God is the one who rescued us and our ancestors from slavery in the land of Egypt. He performed mighty miracles before our very eyes. As we traveled through the wilderness among our enemies, he preserved us. It was the LORD who drove out the Amorites and the other nations living here in the land. So we, too, will serve the LORD, for he alone is our God." Then Joshua said to the people, "You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy and jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve other gods, he will turn against you and destroy you, even though he has been so good to you." But the people answered Joshua, saying, "No, we are determined to serve the LORD!" "You are accountable for this decision," Joshua said. "You have chosen to serve the LORD." "Yes," they replied, "we are accountable." "All right then," Joshua said, "destroy the idols among you, and turn your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel. The people said to Joshua, "We will serve the LORD our God. We will obey him alone."
Friends, I want to tell you this morning…
1. Commitment Begins with a Choice!
When I was a kid, my dad always had a rule. That rule was, “no quitting!” It didn’t matter what it was, if I signed up for it, I had to finish it. When I was in Jr. High, the thing I wanted to do more than anything else was play football. There was a league in Denver where I lived and I could sign up if I wanted to. They required shots and all kinds of other paper work ahead of time before I could play though. I remember the talk my dad had with me on my way to get my shots. He said, “Now you understand that if you do this, you can’t quit. If you don’t like it, that’s too bad. You have to stick it out. If you get hurt, I’m sorry, but you can’t quit.” I said, “Yeah I know dad.” But he meant it, I was just talking. If I started something, I had to finish it. This was a rule with my dad through high school and for my sisters as well. Any sport we started, there was no quitting. You start something you finish it.
Do you guys see that here? When Joshua asked the Israelite people to commit to God, he wasn’t talking about a week long commitment. He was talking about a life long commitment. When God asks us to commit to Him, he is asking us to commit with our whole lives.
Other passages in the New Testament talk about this same idea. Look at Hebrews 12:1, 2. It says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress. And let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterward. Now he is seated in the place of highest honor beside God’s throne in heaven.”
Run with endurance? Why would we need endurance if this was just a quick sprint? You need endurance for long races, not short sprints. While you are running this race of life, it is like a distance run and we need to have endurance. That means we are committing for more than just a few weeks or months. Then he adds, “From start to finish.” Commitment always starts with a choice. You have to choose what you’re going to be committed to. God or something else, those are your only 2 options.
But surely we can get through life without “fully committing” right? Well, the problem with that thought is something we see later in the life of the Israelite people. The Israelites had split and become to kingdoms; Israel and Judah. Israel had gotten in big trouble for their sins and in Jeremiah we find God warning Judah not to follow Israel’s example. Let’s read something there. Jeremiah 3:8. It says, “And I saw that for all the adulteries of faithless Israel, I had sent her away and given her a writ of divorce, yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear; but she went and was a harlot also.”
2. Lack of Commitment leads to Conformity
What has been happening in Israel and Judah’s history? The main thing is that they have fallen away from God. They have been intermarrying with the other people in the land which God said not to do. Israel was bringing other peoples idols and gods into their camp and worshiping them. And God sent Jeremiah to Judah to warn her not to follow in Israel’s footsteps.
View this verse as our warning as well. When we begin to lose our commitment to God and we start to commit to other things, God sees that. It’s not like He’s blind and misses it. No, He’s watching us in our lives, every day. But it just gets worse for us sometimes. And it got worse for God’s people too. Let’s look further in the story at Jeremiah 5:6-9. We read, “Therefore a lion from the forest will slay them, a wolf of the deserts will destroy them, a leopard is watching their cities. Everyone who goes out of them will be torn in pieces, because their transgressions are many, their apostasies are numerous. ‘Why should I pardon you? Your sons have forsaken Me and sworn by those who are not gods. When I had fed them to the full, they committed adultery and trooped to the harlot’s house. They were well-fed lusty horses, each one neighing after his neighbor’s wife. Shall I not punish these people,’ declares the Lord, ‘and on a nation such as this shall I not avenge Myself?’”
Here the people from Judah, God’s people in the south, are pushing God to His limits. He is talking about taking out His vengeance on them. Why? Because they weren’t committed to Him and He had given His all. He had fed them, He had given them land, He had given them freedom, and He had given them everything. He just put it in their laps, and they were committing adultery by looking at other gods and idols and conforming to gods they had no business conforming to. And I believe that we do the same thing. We conform to the gods of time and if we feel like we’re running out of time, then we devote what time we have to us first and then give God what we have left. If we are worshiping the gods of popularity, then we sacrifice our commitment to God to fit in and be popular. And the Bible says, “Don’t conform to this world.” Yet, God’s people have done it for centuries. We conform to the god of busyness and we get so busy with our jobs and our lives that we have no time left to commit to ministries that God may have called us to. We conform to the god of materialism and we put our self-worth on how much we have and how nice it is, rather than on God and how much He loves us. We are doing exactly what God’s people were doing in Jeremiah, just with different gods.
So what happened to poor Judah? Look at Jeremiah 25:8, 9. “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Because you have not obeyed My words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,’ declares the Lord, ‘And I will send to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land and against its inhabitants and against all these nations round about and I will utterly destroy them and make them a horror and a hissing, and an everlasting desolation.’” And what happens to us? We realize that our job isn’t fulfilling enough and we become work-a-holics trying to make it work. We realize we will never be popular enough because someone will always be more popular. We will never have enough time and we end up running ourselves ragged. There are consequences for us even today, when we aren’t committed to the right things. And the right thing is God. A lack of commitment leads to conformity.
Let me tell you something before we move on. You will conform to something in life. The question is what will it be? Will it be God or will it be something else? The answer to that question is up to you.
But a lack of commitment can take us even further from God. Let’s look a little further into the history of Israel. Ezekiel 23:37-39 which states, “For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. Thus they have committed adultery with their idols and even caused their sons, whom they bore to Me, to pass through the fire to them as food. Again, they have done this to Me: they have defiled My sanctuary on the same day and have profaned My Sabbaths. For when they had slaughtered their children for their idols, they entered My sanctuary on the same day to profane it; and lo, thus they did within My house.”
Allow me briefly to describe to you what’s happening and what in the world God is talking about. His people are at a point in their commitment level in which not only are they serving other gods, which God calls spiritual adultery, but they are also sacrificing their children to foreign gods. They are literally sacrificing their children as a burnt offering to the gods of Baal and Moloch. They wanted to make sure they had every god covered. And after they would sacrifice their children to these foreign gods then they would come into the temple of God and worship Him. Can you imagine that? Coming to the temple and pretending to be committed to God when you had just sacrificed your child to a foreign god, a child which by the way was supposed to be committed to the service of God and raised in the fear of Him. You know, maybe they should have just picked one. Do you see why God got so upset with His people? Do you see how their commitment wavered between many gods? Why? Their lack of commitment led them to conformity. They had conformed to the religions and gods of the land rather than getting rid of them. They conformed because they weren’t committed to the One True God. That’s because…
3. Conforming leads to Spiritual Adultery!
You say, “Well Stan, we’re not that bad. I would never do that.” No, not at that level, but we sacrifice our kids to a lot of things. We sacrifice them to social clubs, we sacrifice them to sports and we even sacrifice them to popularity. In our hearts and minds we have put those things above God as it relates to priority, then we come to church and sing songs to a God we only worship on Sundays. The rest of the week we are conforming. When we do this, we are sending mixed messages to our kids. We are telling them that anything comes before God and that church isn’t that important. Then we sit and wonder why when our kids go off to college, why they quit church and start doing whatever they want. Then they start their own families but they never come through the church doors until Christmas and Easter. Do you want me to tell you why? Because we aren’t instilling in our kids that God is the most important thing in life. We are telling them, even though accidentally, that anything can come before God because He’s just a religion. He’s just a Sunday morning thing.
Friends, I love you all. And let me tell you something that I want more than anything else. I want to raise my sons to know God. I want to raise them with the understanding that God is the most important person in the world to them, even more important than me. And you know what else? I want you as Christian families, to raise your children in the fear of the Lord. I want you to raise your children with the understanding that there’s nothing more important they can do with their lives than to give them to God and to be totally committed to Him.
There are so many things out there that are trying to get the family. Things that we don’t even recognize that are slowly taking our priorities off of God and putting them on other things. And that is why Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” If you are conforming to the world, then you can’t be committed to God. The Israelites tried it thousands of years ago and you see where that got them. And Christians try it today, and it still gets us nowhere.
Commitment begins with a choice. But if your commitment is not taken seriously then it can lead to conformity and conformity leads us to spiritual adultery.
"When I was a boy, my father, a baker, introduced me to the wonders of song," tenor Luciano Pavarotti relates. "He urged me to work very hard to develop my voice. Arrigo Pola, a professional tenor in my hometown of Modena, Italy, took me as a pupil. I also enrolled in a teachers college. On graduating, I asked my father, ’Shall I be a teacher or a singer?’ "’Luciano,’ my father replied, ’if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.’ "I chose one. It took seven years of study and frustration before I made my first professional appearance. It took another seven to reach the Metropolitan Opera. And now I think whether it’s laying bricks, writing a book--whatever we choose--we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, that’s the key. Choose one chair." Guideposts
As Paul said, “I urge you, I plead with you, I beg you,” I say to you as well. Please choose one. Please don’t play the middle with God. He will not be fooled. Because of God’s great love for you I ask you, I plead with you; choose the chair with God in it. Because of all that God has done for you, I ask you to choose Him. Give Him your commitment. Not just a one time thing, or a Sunday morning thing, but all of you. Your body, your heart, your soul, everything that you are. Choose one chair.
(for a better feel, listen to this sermon at www.godshere.org)
