Winning the Most Important Battle - The One With Yourself

(This first paragraph points to the fact that the day I shared this was our annual Kirkin' of the Tartans day - that's why you see all the Scottish references)

Did you notice that sword coming down the aisle at the beginning of worship?   Kind of impressive huh?  And it tells you something.    Scots often felt they had to fight just to keep their identity as a people.   That’s why, even as we lift up the heritage of Scotland, today we celebrate all the family identities from across the world that are this church family.  God has created us to be a mosaic, a tartan even, where all the different colors find their place and together make something beautiful. 

But from wherever you and I come from, we all have one fight in common.  We all are fighting the same enemy.  We are all fighting ourselves.    What do I mean?   Have you ever struggled with the gap between who you actually are and the ideal of who you really want to be?   You can see that ideal.  You can imagine it.  You can even get inspired by it.  But when it comes to living it, so often, something pulls you back.    The biggest enemy we will ever fight is right here within us.    But how do you fight that?  As one writer put it, “It is hard to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head.”  But more important than the fighting, how do you win?  How do you and I become the people we yearn to be, that God created us to be?  In these words, God shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Romans 7:1-25

How do you fight yourself and win?   How do you overcome the worst parts of yourself so that you can live more fully into the best?  How does that happen?   In these words, God shows us.   What does God show us?   That our problem is worse than we think, and that what we think will solve it will only make it worse.   So what do we do?   We realize that God has already given us the solution.   All we need to do is believe it.

So how is our problem worse than we think?  Paul points us to it, when he tells us that sin dwells within us.    The worst parts of you don’t parachute into your life from outside.  They live there right inside you, and what lives there is uglier than anyone of us likes to think.     

The writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scot by the way, probably gave us the best picture of what this looks like in his story, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.   Do you know it?   The plot goes something like this.        

This man, Dr. Jekyll, is constantly getting distracted by his baser desires.  They are holding him back from his full potential.  So he creates this potion to solve the problem.  Basically when he drinks the potion, it transforms him into the worst parts of himself, a repellent creature called Mr.  Hyde. Now why would he want to do that?  He figures if he can let his worst desires run free each night in Mr. Hyde, when he drinks the potion again in the morning to return to Dr. Jekyll, he’ll be free to live out of the best of who he is.   Great idea, huh?  

Now when Jekyll first drinks the potion, he discovers something.  As he puts it: “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked…and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”    He found out that he wasn’t just a little wicked.  He was a whole lotta wicked.   But how could this be?   Because the evil that lies within you is far worse that you like to think it is.   After all, why did Stevenson call this character, Hyde?  Because Jekyll had hidden this hideous part of himself away; he had hidden it even from himself.    

The singer, Sufjan Stevens, has this stunning song about the serial killer, John Wayne Gacy.   The song paints the awful picture of what Gacy did, of the boys he killed, of how he buried them under the floorboards of his house.   But the lines that make the song stunning come right at the end.   Stevens sings.  “And in my best behavior, I am just like him: Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.”    Wow?   Is that true?   Is Stevens right?  Is Stevenson right?   Are you and I really that bad?   Isn’t that stretching it a bit, maybe even more than a bit?   Or is it?

What if I could put up on that screen, the worst things you’ve thought just this week?  Think about it, the thoughts that came into your head, especially when you were under stress or when someone made you angry or hurt you or even inconvenienced you.   Would you want to be in the room to see that?  Would you want anyone to see that ever?  Let me tell you.  I wouldn’t.  Why?  Because when you’re honest, you know, some pretty ugly stuff dwells in you.  It may not often come out, but oh, it’s there, just like it was in Jekyll.

But how do you free yourself of the ugliness?  Well, Paul first tells you how not to do it.  He tells you don’t think that knowing the right rules will help.   That will just make it worse.   In verse 5 he puts it this way, our sinful passions, aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.  Now how can the law, in Paul’s case, the law of Moses, make you worse?  

St. Augustine in his autobiography, The Confessions, shares how when he was a kid, he stole some pears.   Now here’s the kicker.   Augustine didn’t like pears.  In fact, the pear he stole he gave to pigs.   So why did he take them?  Someone told him he couldn’t.    Think about it. 

When you see a sign that says, Don’t walk on the grass.   Even if before you had never thought of walking on the grass, doesn’t part of you now want to do it?   Why?  Some sign told you that you couldn’t.    Every human being has a voice inside that says.  Nobody tells me how to live my life.  Now some keep that voice front and center.  But most keep it hidden, but everyone has it.   Part of you hates being told how to live your life.  So once you hear the rules, that part wants to break them even more.

But our problem goes deeper than that.  Even if you try your hardest to keep the rules, to push your rebellious part down, it still doesn’t work.   And Paul knows.   How does Paul know?  He tried it.  He had been terribly good, a very devout, very religious man.   But then he tells us that one of the 10 commandments; you shall not covet, killed him.  How did it kill him?  It killed off any illusion that he was as good as he thought he was.   Why did that commandment do that?   Because all the other commandments of the 10, you can fool yourself into thinking that God is only interested in your external behavior.   So if you’re not killing or sleeping around or stealing, then you’re doing ok.    But to not covet has nothing to do with what is going on outside of you.  But It has everything to do with what is going on inside of you.   And when Paul looked there, he saw petty jealousies, selfish ambitions; arrogant self-righteousness.  He saw a lot of ugliness.   And it killed him.  

Here’s the shocking truth.   Following rigorously some moral code doesn’t free you from the worst parts of yourself, it actually feeds them.  

In the story of Jekyll and Hyde, when Jekyll learns that Hyde has actually committed murder, he resolves to never drink the potion again.  He goes on this huge do-gooder binger, supporting the needy, giving to charities, caring for his friends.   And what happens?   A few months pass, and Jekyll is sitting in a park.  As Jekyll writes:  “I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect.  And at the very moment of that vain glorious thought…..I looked down….I was once more Edward Hyde.”   How did that happen?  

Because, what feeds the worst parts of yourself is how you center your life on yourself.  And you can be obsessively centered on yourself by both being very bad, and very good.    When you’re bad, you’re obsessed with your own desires, appetites, wants.  You care little about others.  But when you’re trying to be very good, you’re obsessed too, just now with the rules and how you’re keeping them or at least look like you’re keeping them, but you’re still focused on yourself.   Your goodness may help others.  That’s nice.  But you are really focused on how it helps you, to get in good with God or feel better about yourself.   But inside you know the truth.  It’s not really helping you at all.   It isn’t giving you peace or joy.  It’s not even making you actually good.

So then how do you get free?   You get remarried.   Do you remember how Paul started with this stuff about you can get remarried if you spouse has died?  You might have wondered.  What the heck is that all about?    What Paul is telling you is that on the cross, your self-obsession with the law, either breaking it or keeping it died.   And that’s a good thing, because, whether you realized it or not, you were married to that. 

One of the things that has made all things Scottish a little more cool is the whole Outlander thing, this steamy historic romance series on Starz, that began as a series of steamy historic romance novels.  But what is fascinating is that all this steamy romance happens in the bonds of am amazing marriage, a marriage that profoundly shapes its two partners, Jamie and Claire, in beautiful ways.   It makes each of them far more than they could ever have been alone.  That’s what a good marriage does.  It makes you more.  But a bad marriage, on the other hand can make you far less.   That’s why Paul uses it as a metaphor for our relationship to the law.  Let’s be clear.  We need the law.  We need its guidance and wisdom.  But we can’t be married to it.  What does Paul mean by being married to the law?

It means you look to the law as the defining relationship of your life.   It gives you your identity, either as a law-breaker or a law-keeper.   So if you are a law-breaker, you say that I am totally lost and worthless because I have not kept the rules.   Or if you are a law-keeper, you say.  I must keep the law.  I must meet the standard.  Why? You look to the law to give you your self-worth.

But when you look to the law to motivate you, do you know what ultimately drives you.  Fear drives you.   You fear God’s disapproval.  You fear other people’s disapproval.  Heck you fear your own disapproval. You fear that someone will see what you desperately try to hide.  In the end, when Jekyll realized he was becoming Hyde, that fear literally killed him.  He killed himself so that others could not see that ugly truth.

But even in that death, he was still focused on himself.  And ultimately when fear drives you, that is always where it drives you towards, an obsessive focus on yourself.    Being married to the law doesn’t free you from yourself. It imprisons you there.  It’s why the other image Paul uses here is slavery.  

But Paul tells us that God has killed this old marriage off.  God has set you free.  How did God do that?  He took you for himself.  He won your hand.   In Jesus, he took on even your ugliness, your Hyde-ish nature.   In Jesus, God became as one from whom others hide their faces.  God became the despised one, the one held of no account.   And in Jesus, God bore your infirmities.  God carried your diseases.  God was wounded for your transgressions.  In Jesus, who had no sin became sin so that you might become the righteousness of God.  Why did Jesus do this?   He loves you.  He wants to be with you forever.  And the more you and I realize that, that his love defines you, nothing and no-one else.  Then the less power the Hyde in you will have.  And even out of your ugliness, God will make something beautiful.  And bit by bit, day by day, he will grow within you the glorious freedom of the children of God.   All you need to do is believe it.