Is Your Ladder Leaning Against the Right Wall? Here's How You Know.

I really like quotes.   Heck, I have over 200 pages of the things I've collected over the years.  But I found something surprising in that list this week.  One quote was missing.  You see, years ago, I read this quote that I haven’t been able to forget.  Its words come to me all the time.  And yet, I never added it to my quotes list.  I checked.   Maybe it’s because the tragic image it gives so haunts me that I hadn’t needed to write it down to remember it.   So what is the quote?  The monk, Thomas Merton said it.   He said:  “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

There were times in school when I got an assignment wrong.  I read the wrong chapter or did the wrong set of problems.   I hated that.   I had spent time and energy for something that didn’t even matter.    But what if you do that with your life?  To get that assignment wrong, how devastating would that be?   Who wants to get to the end and realize that?   

But every day, I see people do it.    I see them pursuing things that in the end don’t ultimately matter.  At the same time, they ignore the things that do, things that in the end will give them the very life they seek.  How do you make sure that isn’t you?  How do you make sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall?   In these powerful words from Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, God shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 12:1-8

So how do you make sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall?  Here, the great Christian leader, Paul, tells you.  You make your life, body and soul, a living sacrifice to God.  In the end, in Paul’s words, God is telling us that is the only right wall there is.  But what does that even mean, a living sacrifice to God?    In Greek, it sounds even weirder.  The word for sacrifice Paul uses here, actually means killing.   So how can you be a living killing?   Isn’t that a contradiction? 

Let’s talk first about what the words don’t mean.  In ancient times, everyone knew about sacrifices.  Every religion did them.   And in every case, they did them for pretty much the same reason.   They used them to deal with guilt or wrong, to placate the divine, to avoid the gods’ wrath.  But this sacrifice doesn’t mean that at all.  Paul knows.  Jesus’ death ended the need for those sacrifices forever.   Because of what Jesus has done, our guilt is gone.  When God looks at us, all God sees is beauty and goodness, all our wrong has literally been washed away.   Paul with this sacrifice talk, doesn’t means an offering for guilt but an offering of gratitude for God’s infinite love and grace.

And that gift means this sacrifice doesn’t end in death, like all the other sacrifices did.  No, it opens you to life like never before.    Still, Paul does use the word sacrifice.   And that has to mean that something dies.   And something does.   To be a living sacrifice, means you take your hands of your life.   You give over the right to live your life as you choose to God.   You die to that.  Why?  You trust that whatever God will do with your life will be way better than what you could do.  Now what does that look like, to take the hands of your life?

I remember hearing a story about a young man who joined the army during World War I.  He ended up fighting in the trenches.   Now his mother, as she listened to the news, heard how awfully muddy these trenches became.  She wrote to him, concerned for his well-being, how he was dealing with the mud and mess.    And the son wrote back.  “Mom, I belong to the U.S. Army now.  And if they want their feet to get muddy then so be it.”    That man realized.   He didn’t belong to himself any more.  He had given that over.   While in that army, others determined the direction of his life, even if it cost him his life.  And it did many.  We will remember that next weekend.    

And Paul is saying much the same thing.  Do you want a life that is truly a life?  Then let go of it.  You have to give that life over.  You have to lay that life down, in trust that God will do more with it than you ever could.

But come on now, why would anyone do that?   Why give your life over to God when you can keep it for yourself?    Because you can’t keep it for yourself.  Nobody does.  If you are not giving your life over to God, you are giving it over to something.   

No one said this better than the writer, David Foster Wallace, in his speech to the graduates of Kenyon College.            

He began that talk with a joke.  Two young fish were swimming along one day when this old codger fish swam by.   He called out to the young’ uns.  Howdy there! How’s the water, boys?   The two young fish nodded and smiled and swam on.   After a moment, one of them turned to the other and asked.  What the heck is water?   Why did Wallace tell that joke?  He was making a point.  He was saying.  We are those fish.   We don’t see the water in which we swim, and the water in which we swim could be killing us.  How?  Here is how Wallace put it.  

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, Wallace said, there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – Wallace said, a non- Christian ……-- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. ……Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.  Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship, Wallace said, is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.  

In other words, they're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

Right now, if you’re not sacrificing your life to God, you’re sacrificing your life to something.  You may be sacrificing it to your parents’ ambitions or to your own.  You may be sacrificing it to your fears or insecurities.  You may be sacrificing it to the opinions of your peers or some image of success.   But none of those things give you life.   They drain your life away.  They consume you.   Only when you give your life over to God, do you get more life.   That is what makes it a living sacrifice.   This death opens you to life, to a life more abundant than before.   But this taking your hands off your life, it can’t happen through fear or compulsion.  Paul calls it an offering.  That means you give it freely, not because you have to, that it’s some duty.  No you give it freely.    What does that look like?

The preacher Martin Lloyd Jones tells a story of a man who had a dog that he dearly loved.   But he wondered.   How much does this dog really love me?  So one day, he decided to find out.   When they went on their walk in the park, he took the dog off the leash.   Immediately the dog dashed off, running who knows where.   The doctor began to grieve, fearing he had lost the dog he dearly loved.  But within a few minutes or so, the dog came dashing back to walk by his master’s side.   From that day forward, the doctor and the dog walked in that park, but the dog never wore a leash again.

What did that dog do?  He offered himself.    He gave his life over to his master.   No leash held him.  He gave it willingly.   Why?   He trusted the master, his love, his commitment to him.

Now why would you offer yourself to God like that?  Because God has offered himself like that for you and more.  Jesus didn’t have to lay down his life.  He freely offered it.  In John 10, he put it this way.  “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”     Now why did he do that?    Why did he go through infinite suffering?  Why did he become not just a living sacrifice, but a destroyed one?  Why did he take his hands off his life?  Hebrews 12 tells us that Jesus, endured the cross, disregarded its shame for the joy that was set before him.   What was that joy?  That joy was us.   He offered himself so he could bring you home, so he could give you life.   He took his hands off his life and became a dying sacrifice, so that when you take your hands off, you become a living one. 

That’s why Paul calls this offering a reasonable worship.  If God, the infinite creator of everything, has given his life for you, how can you not do the same?   This God laid down everything so that he might give you everything.   And when you trust him with your life, he will renew you, your mind; your soul.  And he will shower you with gifts to bless you and others.   

That’s why being a Christian isn’t a spectator sport.  It means laying down your life for others, every day, in any way God tells you to.   And if you’re here, and you haven’t found a place to do that in this community, that’s a problem.   For this is one of those places where God calls you to lay down your life for God and one another.  But if it isn’t here, where might it be?  Where are you holding on?  Where do you need to take your hands off your life?  What do you need to die to so that you may live?