Title: Simplicity, the key to Harmony
Place: Oakdale Wesleyan Church
Date: January 23, 2005
Series: Living the Uncomplicated Life
Introduction
I am not a chemist or physicist but have you ever noticed how many fascinating things are around us everyday. Take for instance water. Water is completely unstable. It separates, moves, or reforms itself with ease. Water, unlike this piece of glass, is unstable. It will move and act a certain way today, and move and act a totally different way tomorrow. It is the source of life and yet as many found out the day after Christmas Tsunami, it can be the source of death. Water is a fascinating thing!
Not only does it easily shift its shape but it also easily changes form. If you add a little heat to this water it boils and evaporates in the thin air. Oh, it is still there, it is still water, it has just now become invisible to the naked eye. Or if you add a little cold to it, like the cold days we had last weekend, it become ice, frozen solid. In this solid state we can build with it (like in the ice palace last year), shape it, walk on it, fish through it. So water is very susceptible to its surrounding environment. Water, doesn’t know what it should be but instead allows its environment to shape it. This look at water probably would not be the best way to illustrate how a Christian should live. In fact, it is probably the opposite of how Christians should live.
Today we are going to begin taking a look at our first concept in this series, “Living the Uncomplicated Life.” That concept is going to explore the Christian’s singleness of mind.
Has there ever been a time in your life when what people saw on the outside didn’t really match what was on the inside. Do you understand what I am asking? Example: You knew you were red hot mad at someone but they didn’t have a clue you were mad at them, and when you were around them, you acted as if everything was hunky dory, but as soon as they left and were no longer around, rant, rant, rant…. So what was on the inside was not matching what was on the outside? Has that ever happened to you regardless the particulars? One of the worse and yet easiest and biggest ways that we tend to complicate our lives is by living in Duplicity. I had to slip at least one big word in today. Duplicity is simply living the double life. It’s living by one set of standard or outward appearance in certain circumstances and living by totally other standards in other circumstances. May-be when you are at church you avoid all things sensual, but in your private life, ouch, not so clean and not so holy. So duplicity is the opposite of simplicity.
So this morning that is what we are going to explore, Singleness of mind, the first step towards Christian simplicity.
OPEN IN PRAYER
While there are several passages that deal with the double minded man, I want to look specifically at James chapter 1 verse 2-8
1. Our Goal: The Singleness of Mind – the inward life will match the outward life
In our passage this morning James talks about some pretty heavy issues. Look at the opening line… “Consider pure joy my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” I don’t know about you, but I can find that a little difficult to do at times. But he doesn’t stop, James explains himself, “..because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Now I am sure these are all things that many of us want out of our Christian life. James continues, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who give generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.” So James tells us how to gain this great things he just mentioned, ask God. “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts I like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.” What a warning to end with, “a double-minded man is unstable in all he does.”
Why does James talk so sternly about the double minded man? In fact, in Psalms it states that God hates a double-minded man. If a Christian is to live in simplicity then it should be our goal that we have singleness of mind. Another words, our insides match out outsides. Hey, that’s a good first point for the sermon – OUR GOAL – Singleness of mind!
Being double-minded is the opposite of what we are to be as Christians but how does it hurt out Christian lives. Let me give you an illustration when I was a child my parents told me that lying will only find you out. I loved a good story and I remember clearly in Kindergarten telling some really good stories but my stories included me as the hero and used real life situations and were not presented as fictional stories but things I had really done. Like ride the fire engine to help put out a fire, I was learning to parachute and on and on went the stories. Well, mom and dad did find out about my lying webs that I had created from my teacher and needless to say, I got into some big trouble and never really like parent teacher conferences after that.
I remember one of the lessons my mom taught me. If you tell one lie, chances are you will have to tell another lie to cover up the first lie. And after that, you will probably have to tell and even bigger lie to cover that lie up and on and goes the web of lies until you come to the point that you don’t even know yourself what is the truth any longer.
Duplicity takes place in our lives when our inside does not match our outside. When who you are in the quite recesses of your life does not match who you are sitting here in the sanctuary this morning.
Richard Foster states, “The Christian Discipline of simplicity is an inward reality that results in an outward life-style.” This is the basis for Holiness. God changes our hearts and it results in an outward change of lifestyle. But if we live in Duplicity, if what is on the outside never matches what is on the inside or vise versa, We move ourselves far away from Christian simplicity.
2. A Warning Point – Simplicity attacks Legalism
Let me give a legalism warning at this point. Whenever we deal with holiness it is very easy to jump over to legalism, but what is legalism? Well, that is exactly the opposite of what I am challenging us to this morning. Legalism takes place when we have an outward appearance of righteousness but our inner life does not match it. In other words, without God’s working in our hearts, we have set up rules or systems of action without the heart to back it up.
Legalism often sets in when we work hard to do all the right things in order to somehow have the inside of our hearts changed. Another words, it is doing just the opposite of what we should be doing. While holiness is allowing God to change my inward life and that results in an outward change of lifestyle, legalism is attempting to change the outward lifestyle without allowing God to change the inward life. So legalism is primarily going at Holiness exactly backwards and it just doesn’t work. It results in rules, bad feelings, anger, frustrations, and resentment and a whole lot of confusion.
2. Three Roadblocks to Single-Mindedness
Now that we have talked about the goal of single mindedness and looked at the warning of legalism lets take a look at four very real road blocks that keep us from being single minded and have chosen these four because they are especially true to our American culture.
A. Secret Sin
The first huge road block is that of secret sin. This roadblock probably effects what I would call “Churched” people more than anyone else. Churched people are those who have been educated in the ways of the church. Another words, you grew up in church, you’ve been around for a while, you know the ins and outs of church life pretty good. In your informal “churched life” educational program one of the things you were taught was what a Christian is suppose to look like and right along with that you were taught what a non-Christian is suppose to look like so as never to confuse the two. Here is where the roadblock comes in.
Knowing that you are a Christian you find yourself stuck in a sin that you only non-Christians are suppose to have, and so you go underground with the sin. Instead of confessing the sin to God and to other believers, instead of being accountable to a brother or sister in Christ you fear your reputation and you hide the sin, you keep it covered up, and yet all the time that sin grows and keeps devouring more of your Christian life. Before too long you are being eaten alive by the sin and you realize this is becoming like a cancer and so you have to hide and learn even better camouflage when you are at church. You feel guilty, ashamed, worthless, and a whole lot of other adjectives. Beyond that, you know that your relationship with God and with fellow Christians is being severally damaged. Then you hear Holiness sermons that talk about God completely healing you and even though you pray and pray and pray, may-be even fast, that secret sin just won’t go away and it grows even more but now you feel like God doesn’t like you, like something is wrong with you…Am I hitting anywhere close yet?
The eventual end is you through Christianity away or even worse, you become psychotic and literally can begin to have multiple personality disorders. Because duplicity has ravaged your life.
With each of these roadblocks I want to give you a hint as to how to get around them. With this one, you need to strike right at the heart of that puppy. The very thing which you think will kill you, is what you must do. Why is this a secret sin – FEAR. You must strike a death blow to fear and the best way to do that, is simply no longer keep it secret. Come out in the open with whatever the issue is. Bring light to those dark hidden corners. Tell a trusted Christian friend your struggle, find a trusted group to be able to share your ugliest parts with. I tell you, one of the most exciting parts of our church right now is the developing small groups where this is taking place, from our men’s purity group, to the purpose driven life groups, to OO – all these places are giving Christians a place to be real and to find forgiveness, accountability and strength. But you, with God’s power, have to take the first step, we can’t force you into it. But what freedom when you move to bring light to the dark, ugly recesses of your heart.
B. Things
We have things all around us. We live to accumulate things. We buy things, use things, acquire things, spend great quantities of money and time to have things. We fill our houses with things and stuff our attics with things we might someday once again use. We are mesmerized by mass media of the things we must have to make life easier and better and we are given the promise that if we have the right things, then we will have the good life. Often times this is referred to as the “Rat Race.” Have you ever meet someone who has won the rat race? The rat race is an unwinable race of accumulating things.
Have you ever wandered why we Americans are so bent on buying things? Let me read an expert from the book “Man in the Mirror” by Patrick Morley.
“In 1957 Vance Packard wrote a book, The Hidden Persuaders, which shocked and alarmed the nation. He discovered, and blew the whistle on, a large-scale effort to channel our unconscious habits and manipulate our purchasing behavior. The Madison Avenue pin-stripers formed an unholy alliance with practitioners of psychology to manipulate the American consumer.
At the end of World War II, our industrial machine had the capacity to produce far greater amounts of products than people were buying. So the pin-stripers probed the question of how to stimulate people to buy more, and the science of motivation research was born.
Have you ever wondered why, after only two or three years, you begin to itch for a shiny new car? Why don’t we simply drive our cars until they stop running before we buy new ones? The answer, a creation of the unholy alliance, is termed psychological obsolescence.
Madison Avenue figured out how to make us feel ashamed to own a slightly used car. We are programmed to consume, because the dominant economic theory employed in America is that a progressively greater consumption of good is beneficial.”
Everyone of us is pre-programmed and influenced by our American culture to have things.
Yet, what did Jesus have to say about things…. “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” Matthew 6:24
One of the goals we are going to look at further in upcoming sermons is how to learn to live without things. This is not a call to sell everything you have and go live like a hermit but is rather to learn to rise above the need for things to actually deprogram our minds of the need for things. Foster made an interesting comment, “The sheer fact that a person is living without things is no guarantee that he or she is living in simplicity.” He goes on to mention that often times those who are poor or do not have things struggle the most with simplicity because in their heart they desire things. Again, the inward life has to match the outward life. So we find that things or the pursuit of things often times blocks us from living simply. I’m not going to give a solution to this one right yet, because we are actually going to spend several sermons just on the topic of things accumulation in a few weeks. But for starters, why don’t you spend some time this week just considering how need for things consumes you. You might be surprised at what you find.
C. The inner monster of our Psychotic culture
I love the way once author put the next road block, “Facing the inner monster of our Psychotic culture.” The next road block to living in single mindedness is the very culture in which we live. I have read this quote in two different places this week and I had Robin put it up on the church sign. “We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.”
The gas that turns our American Culture Engine is Consumerism as we just saw above. But how has that impacted us personally or psychologically? In culture you are made to feel out of step with reality if you do not have the latest gadgets, fashions, or automobiles. There are millions of dollars spent every year to make you feel the pressure that if you do not have the latest fashion trends then you are simply not in step with reality.
Richard Foster gives us an interesting wake up call. He states, “It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.” While America may be the world’s greatest power, that does not mean that it is not flawed. In fact, with consumer debt at an all time high and only going higher, with people living way beyond their means, you could rightfully say that our culture is sick and if we are working to conform ourselves to a sick culture that means that we are sick. So our American ideology of wealth and accumulations of goods is a huge road block to simplicity.
That’s a mouth full, let’s bring that right down to everyday reality. If your goal is to have a good retirement plan, if your goal is to have the easy life, or to have the nice car, or the good house, our the toys that everyone should be able to have and if you don’t have them you feel less about yourself, then chances are you have been influenced by our sick culture and you may very well be sick yourself.
Again, none of these things in and of themselves are bad. They are bad when they become the driving force of our lives and we begin to feel we have a right or entitlement to them. We will explore in a future sermon the proper attitude on possessions but as a aid towards a cure, may I suggest and ideas. Begin exploring Christ’s ideology of thing ownership. We must come to a place in our lives that we realize, we really do own nothing. Come on folks, we fool ourselves when we think we own it, you get to last 60-100 years and you are gone, then who owns it? To beat this Psychological Monster of our Culture, remind yourself often, I’m temporary, and I really don’t own it.
D. A wrong value system
The final roadblock to Singleness of mind is working from the wrong value system. The world’s value system states, people are valuable if they can produce wealth. Once a person, or group of persons, are no longer able to significantly produce wealth then they are no longer valuable. It is at that point we shuffle them off to retirement centers, we ignore them, we set them aside in order to focus on the next generation of wealth producing individuals.
This wrong value system eats at the heart of Singleness of mind. But how does it do it. If you claim to be a Christian what is the one over-riding value that all Christians are to share? Love. Does love show favoritism? Does love work off of a value system? Does love depend upon wealth or the ability to produce wealth?
So on one hand you are professing that you live in Christian love, yet on the other hand your inner value system is based upon the world’s value system that one is only valuable if they can produce some kind of wealth. Whether be for the greater good of man or for you personally. Example: Someone is valuable if I can gain something from them. If they make me feel good, if they do something for me, if they help my life be better, then they are valuable, if they don’t, then they really aren’t valuable.
Can you start to see where this eats at the heart of the church and begins to make us live in duplicity? When we devalue people, just for being people, we start to show favoritism, we begin to hold the Christian gospel back to only people we think or valuable. It can get bad. BUT PASTOR, the church never does that? Really, let me ask a few questions, how does the church treat the elderly? How does the church treat people of different ethnical background than ourselves? How does the church treat people of different cultural backgrounds (culture being even aged specific cultures)? How does the church treat people of different economical status then us? How does the church treat people who live differently then we live? How does the church treat people who are sinful and really don’t want to change for God?
Your answer to each of those questions significantly displays how we can live in duplicity barrowing from the world’s value system. The first step to a cure on this one, is simply awareness of our value system we have in place, to take the blinders off and be honest with ourselves as to how and why we value other people.
Conclusion
I want to end with a very fun illustration that shows in reality the result of the double minded verse the single minded.
Piano illustration.
