On Sunday afternoon, July 27th, 2003, after a beautifully serene baptismal service in a crystal clear pool near the bottom of the Bass Lake waterfalls, my sweet Monica and I went for a motorcycle ride down curly Highway One with some friends. Since I had never driven that road on a motorcycle, much less driven it with a passenger, I was being scrupulously careful to follow the rules. We weren’t speeding or doing any sort of crazy stunt driving. I was trying to keep myself properly distanced and staggered from the other bikes. I tried so hard to follow all the rules, but I just couldn’t follow them well enough. Either I didn’t know them well enough or I was trying to follow the wrong rules at the wrong time but, whatever the case, curly highway 1 didn’t care about the rules I was trying to follow. To make a long story short, as I was trying to safely take the bike off the road to avoid just the tiniest bit of loose gravel on a curve, I hit a hole hidden in some tall grass and sent our motorcycle end over end at full highway speed. I flew the farthest and landed on the back of my head, but my little Monica somehow got hit by the flipping motorcycle, hospitalizing her with a broken femur and collarbone. While the motorcycle sustained less than $50 in damage, my attempt to follow the rules failed horribly.
Rules have failed me a lot. As a new pastor here, I’ve spent most of this year trying to learn and play by the curly rules of Elim Church. That isn’t easy when most of those rules are not written down. This church, like every church, is a curly, confusing highway filled to the brim with the most frustrating and difficult rules imaginable. Every time I enter this building, I must very carefully remember to play by the rules of proper egalitarianism. I must be diligent and constantly aware of church management, seeker sensitivity and church growth rules. I must be sensitive to the convoluted, often strange rules of political correctness and diversity. Then there are the often completely contradictory worship rules, fellowship rules, friendship rules, sociability rules, and historical rules of Elim. There are email rules and Facebook rules and voice mail rules and technological stuff. There are the rules of the modernists and now the post-modernists in the house. Chase all this with the myriad hermeneutical and exegetical rules I need to scrupulously follow whenever I prepare to teach something from the Bible here and you’ve got a very difficult situation. You’ve got an end over end in the ditch situation.
And yet there is no release from rules when I walk out these doors. I obey traffic rules, marital rules and parenting rules. Monica and I are now relearning the costly and frustrating rules of real estate and economics. All of these rules often leave me feeling like gory William Wallace, disemboweled at the end of Braveheart, near death but still screaming, “Freedom!”
I sincerely believe this is how the Apostle Paul could well have been feeling as he wrote his letter to the church in Galatia. After a glorious, powerful and genuine experience of the Holy Spirit, some very legalistic people moved into the fellowship and began to convince these mostly Greek, Gentile Galatian converts that they needed to follow the rules of Judaism if they were going to be good, genuine Christians. They encouraged them to be circumcised and to obey all sorts of other religious rules. And this made Paul angry. Paul was so frustrated by all this, he was calling down curses on people before he even got to the tenth verse of the letter! At one point in his letter, the Apostle sarcastically even wishes aloud that all these circumcision teaching opponents would go the whole way and castrate themselves completely!
Freedom! My dear Galatian friends, this following Jesus thing is supposed to be about joy and power, miracles, faith and freedom! We’re supposed to be zooming down the curly highway after our baptismal service, fully enjoying every moment of this gorgeous day. We’re supposed to be enjoying this trip. We’re supposed to be enjoying the muscular sound of the engine beneath us, happily focused on getting somewhere and very excited about it all.
You foolish [poor, silly, thoughtless, unreflecting and senseless] Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish [senseless and silly]?
After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by your observing the law, or by your believing what you heard?
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised [fall back into empty rules and legalism], Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
But Paul, rules are easier. I like rules. Rules make everything simple and clear. I don’t need to wonder and wander around in the dark. If I can simplify all of life down to an essential list of rules, I won’t have to live with doubt and uncertainty. I won’t have so many unanswered questions or ambiguous life situations. All I need to do is learn the rules and obey the rules.
But Kevin, that’s precisely the point.
That is why you’ve crashed the bike in this ditch today!
You can’t make up enough rules to keep pace with the changes you’re now constantly facing in life. Even though you cannot live without rules and structure, even though the rules themselves aren’t necessarily evil or bad, even though rules do help to clearly define the playing field, rules are not the answer. You can’t possibly apply all the old rules appropriately to all the new situations. This is not the same old highway.
Don’t you see, Kevin? Rules cannot get you where I intend for you to go.
We live by faith. We look into the legal mirror of the Ten Commandments, we listen to the endless list of Levitical laws, we hear Jesus explaining the heart of that Law in the Sermon on the Mount and we realize our utter inability to clean ourselves up by rules and human effort.
Our relationship with God only begins to be restored when we, by faith, accept the true Gospel story of the crucified and risen Christ. It is only when we realize the utter futility of our legalistic living that we are able to reach out in faith. This following Jesus thing isn’t about me agreeing to a laundry list of better ideas and newer rules. It is about me loving Jesus back for loving me anyway. It is about me coming to genuinely believe Almighty God loved me so much He sent His Son to die for my sins, for all my legalistic failures, so that I wouldn’t have to. And once that simple, genuine faith wells up in my heart, once I truly and faithfully believe, I will find myself energized by the rules instead of overwhelmed by them. Instead of being burdened and oppressed by all the rules around me, my heart will be so completely changed and charged by faith I will start obeying the rules without even realizing I’m doing so. My righteousness will begin to faithfully exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees and I won’t even notice! The rules will remain, not a jot will disappear from the Law, but my heart will be faithfully and forever changed. My obedience will no longer be driven by duty, drudgery and despair, but delight!
My first few years of Army physical fitness tests were awful. I could do push ups and sit ups all day, but I’ve never been much of a runner. I was always obsessively worried about my 2 mile running times. But then some older sergeants changed my attitude. They helped me to see my shallow, legalistic focus. They encouraged me to stop thinking about the rules and the minimum standards and start believing in what was truly possible. And once I started doing that, I never again worried about passing my tests. If you’re routinely enjoying 7 minute miles, you just stop worrying about your ability to run 8 minute ones. Once we begin to trust and faithfully believe in what God proclaims to be possible, all the rules become inconsequential.
We live by faith. As Paul said, we saw Jesus portrayed as crucified for us. We believe the Bible when it tells us Almighty God loves us and believes in us. We believe Jesus when He tells us it is possible to live miles above the minimum. We believe Him when He says we can run faster and jump ever so much higher if we’ll just let Him help us do so. We live by faith.
In chapter 4 of Galatians, Paul shared an allegorical application from the days of Abraham. He retold and reapplied the story of Hagar the slave woman and Sarah the elderly bride. After being told to faithfully believe in God’s promise of a child, Abraham took measures into his own hands and had a child with Hagar the slave woman. But that wasn’t God’s plan. That wasn’t the wonderful, faithful miracle God had planned for Abraham and Sarah. And just as Abraham was eventually told to “send away the slave woman,” Paul argued we too must send away any legalistic ideas we might have about taking this thing into our own hands.
Almighty God is not asking us to finally get off the stick and take this thing into our hands. God is asking us to finally release the stick and let Him take this thing into His hands. Do you see? Almighty God is not interested in producing “ordinary kids” and Ishmaels. God wants to give us Isaac; He wants to powerfully bring us laughter. Our God wants us to faithfully believe in His promises and His truly amazing possibilities. God wants us to leave all the legalistic minimums behind and trust Him for something spectacular; something truly beyond all we can ever ask or imagine. God is calling us to live by faith, not by sight.
But we also live spiritually. We not only live by faith, we live by the ever present Holy Spirit working within us. And we didn’t receive that Holy Spirit by learning and obeying a list of rules laid out for us. We didn’t receive the Holy Spirit because we heard some great sermon, followed a ten-step DVD training program or prayed the right words. We didn’t do anything to work or deserve the Holy Spirit in any way. We received the Holy Spirit because we faithfully believed what Jesus told us about the Holy Spirit and His on-going work in our lives.
And now the Holy Spirit guides us in all we do. The laws once written on cold, hard tablets of stone have now been peacefully and beautifully etched across our hearts. The terrible treaty has now become our tender tattoo. Where once we legalistically labored to satisfy some scary, angry, distant God hidden away in some stormy cloud on the mountain, now that powerful, personal God has come down from the mountain and entered our hearts. Now He leads us to faithfully want to obey. Now we hear His tender voice steering us down the highway, whispering to us instructions about the sharp curves coming up in the road ahead. Instead of our having our hard won rules and religion buffeted and blown about by the wind, now we are an integral part of that wind. Now we get to ride on and enjoy that wind.
While I’ve never had the opportunity to ride a hot air balloon, one comment I’ve always heard from people having done so relates to the lovely stillness of it all. Because you are riding the wind, supposedly you don’t experience it as you would almost anywhere else. I wonder if that isn’t a pretty good metaphor for our spiritual existence. Because the Holy Spirit indwells us, because we are riding the wonderful wind, because we are intimately connected to the true Source of all things, we shouldn’t struggle as hard with the rules affecting the earth dwellers. We’re not religiously taking life into our own hands; settling for Ishmael when we’re supposed to be faithfully waiting for Isaac. We’re not constantly working overtime, feverishly working, desperately trying to create new and better rules for ourselves to somehow help us keep pace with the spiritual balloon we see peacefully and rapidly moving across the sky. We’re already supposed to be in the basket, Paul says. We’re in the wind. We’re living spiritually.
And because we live by faith, because of this indwelling Spirit, we also live powerfully. Look again at verse 5 of chapter 3: “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by your observing the law, or by your believing what you heard?” In Acts 15:12, during one of the great Jerusalem councils where these difficult, controversial issues of circumcision and legalism were openly discussed, the whole conversation came down to power. Luke tells us “everyone listened quietly as Barnabas and Paul told about the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.” And because of these very obvious displays of God’s power, the leaders of the early church were convinced to embrace what the Apostles were teaching about our faithful, spiritual, powerful freedom in Christ.
Folks, there is supposed to be enormous power in our lives. There is supposed to be glorious, obvious power flowing out of our lives that cannot possibly be created by rules and religion. No amount of rules and religion will ever bring Isaac to Abraham and Sarah. Do you see? Only the genuine power of God can ever do something like that. We’re not supposed to be legalistically taking Hagar to the dance and religiously trying to make things happen on our own; we’re supposed to be faithfully, spiritually, powerfully holding out for the good stuff!
What sort of powerful surprises are we honestly expecting to see around here at Elim Church? What sort of powerful stuff is routinely happening in our personal lives? What things are happening here at Elim or in our individual lives that couldn’t happen without the power of God making it so? Are we faithfully waiting for the miracles and the laughter or are we still dancing with Hagar and religiously settling for Ishmael?
Folks, don’t be surprised if Jesus crashes the bike of your careful legalism or religiosity. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Do not settle for empty rules and religion; do not settle for more and more sad little Ishmaels! Do not think we’re ever going to be able to figure out, apply or obey enough rules to get us successfully through this very curly and difficult patch of spiritual roadway! It won’t happen. It can’t happen. We’ve never travelled this particular way before…we can’t possibly be ready to face everything this road is going to challenge us with.
I carry something a little strange in one of the many small pockets of my briefcase. You may think this a little odd or gruesome, but I carry around with me the $25,000 screw once used to help hold the rod in place inside Monica’s broken leg. I always carry this now sterilized little screw everywhere I go as a reminder to me of many things. It is a reminder that all my decisions have consequences. It is a reminder that I am not simply risking myself by the things I do in this life, but those I love. But perhaps more important than anything else this morning, it is a simple reminder to me that, even at my most careful best, I am not ultimately in control of this motorcycle. It is a reminder that all my careful rules and religion will only get me so far.
Almighty God is calling you and me to trust Him; to believe Him when He tells us how much He loves us and has plans for us. Trust Him when He tells us He has already forgiven us for all the stupid, sinful things we’ve done. Trust Him enough to not try to handle or Hagar this thing on our own. Trust Him not only with our eternity, but with our today. Trust Him enough to open ourselves completely to the presence, power and leading of His Holy Spirit. Trust Him enough to relax and enjoy the laughter He longs to bring us. Trust Him enough to reach well beyond the superficial rules and minimum standards of this world into the freedom of the next.
May we trust God today! May we allow the Holy Spirit to fill and guide us completely today! May we experience the full power and pleasure of God today!
Amen.
