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Mar 13, 2011

Code of Conduct

Passage: Ephesians 5:1-2

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Ephesians 4-6: Invading Enemy Territory

Category: Ephesians

Keywords: love, children, imitation, transformation

Summary:

Children are uniquely hard-wired to be imitators of others. This passage calls God's children to be imitators of God, particularly of his life of love. If we are to love well, we must be well loved. This message explores the love of God for us and what will need to happen if we are to be people actually transformed by the love of Christ and then people who live that love in holiness and righteousness towards others.

Detail:

Code of Conduct

Ephesians 5:1-2

Series:  Invading Enemy Territory—Ephesians

March 13, 2011

Connect Question:  What is something you learned or picked up from your father/mother by just watching and living around them that you feel blessed to have learned?  What is something you learned the same way but don’t want to be a part of your life now? 

INTRO:  Whether they’re preschoolers from Australian suburbs or Kalahari Bushmen, children copy adults to a fault, according to a new study. The findings suggest that over-imitation—in which a child copies everything an adult does, even irrelevant or silly actions—is a universal human trait that may contribute to our complex culture.

Researchers already knew that over-imitation was a human-specific quirk. In previous studies, dogs and chimps taught to open a box and retrieve a toy copied their teacher’s toy-seeking behavior only when it proved efficient. When the instructing adult added irrelevant actions, such as brushing a feather along the edge of the box before opening it, the animal trainees skipped them, doing only what was necessary to get to the hidden toy. But human children copied every detail, even the pointless brush of the feather.

“Animals focus on getting the job done,” explains Mark Nielsen, a psychologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “Humans seem to almost forget about the outcome and copy everything we see.”

      The study doesn’t explain why children over-imitate, she says. It could be that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitating, or that they assume adults do things a certain way for a reason, such as politeness.   [http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/05/kids-overimitate-adults-regardle.html]

Little surprise that Paul says in Ephesians 5:1, “1 Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

      You and I are, as humans, apparently “hard wired” to be imitators.  And that doesn’t always stop with childhood.  The only question is, who will we choose to imitate.  The reality is that as children, we don’t seem to really “choose.”  We simply imitate the adults closest to us.  That’s what makes parents (and other early childhood adult teachers) so formative.  And that’s what makes growing beyond our family dysfunctions so difficult. 

      When you grow up in a family, that family culture becomes your “norm.”  It may be a home with severe dysfunction:  alcoholism, other substance abuse, verbal, physical or even sexual abuse, raging anger problems, psychological disorders, absent or withdrawn parents, little to no love. 

      So as we grow older, we hopefully begin to grow in the capacity to see our own families through more realistic and objective lenses.  We begin to repeat some of those destructive behaviors in the important relationships of our marriages, family, churches and workplaces. And if you are humble enough, you begin to realize that you can no longer blame life’s problems on the people around you.  You begin to look in the mirror and start asking the tough questions about what really should be the right standard for what is a healthy person and healthy relationships. 

That’s when we really run headlong into the more basic question, “What should be our new standard of health?”  “Who should we be modeling healthy behavior, healthy thought life and healthy speech after?”  We can run from one person to another, finding wonderful qualities and characteristics that we think we should be emulating. And over time, even the most wonderful people will disappoint us and lead us unintentionally into dead-end streets.  Because nobody is perfect.  In fact, everybody is a LONG WAY from perfect. 

It’s great for every generation to want to do things better than the last one.  The problem is, what standard will we use in place of the one we previously took for granted was correct, our parents?  How will we really know whether a certain action, certain words or certain attitudes were right or wrong, moral or immoral, harmful or helpful?  Only the most arrogant of people would really believe that his or her own judgment about life and other people was the only true and infallible one around.  That’s probably what their dysfunctional parents thought one day too. 

  1.  We must have a standard that is fixed and true regardless of the times we’re in, regardless of the prevailing culture we find ourselves in. 
  2. And we must have the wisdom, discernment and humility to accurately and faithfully judge behaviors that are either in or out of line with that perfect standard.

That’s where God comes in.  The Christian says that there is only one God in this universe who is perfect in every way:  in power, in love, in justice, in mercy, in knowledge, in wisdom, in everything anyone ever needs, God is perfect to the highest, absolute and  possible degree of perfection.  He now becomes the measuring rod for human behavior and character, thoughts and words.  When our lives conform to His, we are healthy.  When they do not, we are sick and sinful. 

This is THE most fundamental question of all time:  WHO will be the ultimate judge of what is good…and that ultimate “judge” must be the ultimate “good”…or we will never escape the spiral of sin we are all trapped in. 

Every call and command to goodness and righteousness can be traced directly back to the good and righteous nature of God himself.  The flip side of that is that every evil in human experience can be traced back to our fallen and imperfect nature as human beings.  Find the fruit and you will probably find the tree.  Every moral/immoral act has its roots in either a moral or immoral being.  Just as good can be traced ultimately back to our God who is good and perfect in every way, so evil can be traced back to the nature of rebellious sinful humans or spirits. 

ILL:  Remember back in 1993 when 4 children died and hundreds of people got sick after eating at Jack’s place (as in “…-In-the-Box)?  Researchers traced it back to contaminated and undercooked meat and the e-coli bacteria. A similar outbreak just last year led to the recall of 124 tons of beef in 16 states.  Identify the illness and you can usually trace it back to the source. 

But the opposite is also true:  find the good fruit in human behavior and character and you will always be able to trace it back to who/what God is.  People may not know it but the goodness we want others to treat us with is the goodness God is all the time. 

God is not asking us to do something we haven’t seen done before.  We may come into marriage not having seen a good marriage modeled for us in our home as kids.  But we do not come into the family of God without having experienced, at least to some level, the greatest modeling of love the world will ever know. 

      When Paul calls us to imitate God, the first thing he points to that God has modeled is Christ’s love. 

      “…as dearly loved children,…live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us….”  Three times in a handful of words, we’re asked to live a certain way because that’s the way we’ve been treated.  Modeling is magnetic…especially when it is at the very core of who we are and who our Creator is. 

This is a really important reality.  God knows that THE critical success factor when it comes to really loving people is not to somehow drum it up with our own willpower.  Telling myself “love them…love them…love them” 99 times before falling asleep at night is not the key to loving people.  THE critical success factor to being a good “lover” is being well loved.  Love is transformational.  And the more genuine, God-like, unselfish, self-sacrificing love I have experienced, the better I will be able to love. 

      That’s why Paul said what he did 2 chapters earlier in Eph. 3:16-20:

16 I pray that out of his [the Father’s] glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

      Experiencing the love of Christ first-hand has the greatest transformational power of any relationship you will ever have.  More people throughout more of history have been able to love more because of the love of Jesus Christ than any other conceivable source. 

ILL:  Take Emil Kapaun, for instance.  The son of first-generation Czech immigrants, he grew up in a quiet little town in Kansas.  He always wanted to be a priest and would even “play mass” with his older brother.  So after high school, he went away to Catholic college and seminary to become a priest. 

      After years serving as a parish priest as well as Army chaplain, 1950 found him ministering on the front lines of General Douglas McArthur’s Army in the Korean War. On November 1, 1950 Chaplain Kapaun’s unit ran headlong into advancing Chinese Communist forces at Usan, North Korea, about 50 miles south of the Chinese border with North Korea.  For his bravery in that battle he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

      A portion of his citation tells the story.  “Chaplain Kapaun, with complete disregard for his personal safety, calmly moved among the wounded men, giving them medical aid and easing their fears. His courageous manner inspired all those present and many men who might otherwise have fled in panic were encouraged by his presence and remained to fight the enemy.

      As the battle progressed, the number of wounded increased greatly and it became apparent that many of the men would not be able to escape the enemy encirclement. Finally, at dusk on November 2, 1950, the remaining able- bodied men were ordered to attempt to break through the surrounding enemy. At this time, although fully aware of the great danger, Chaplain Kapaun voluntarily remained behind, and when last seen was administering medical treatment and rendering religious rites wherever needed.”

      The result was that Father Kapaun was taken prisoner of war by the Chinese and marched in the dead of winter for two weeks some 100 miles north to a POW camp.  Of the some 1,000 Americans taken to those camps, 500-700 of them died that year.

      It was here that the events began which made Father Kapaun unforgettable to the men who survived this Hell on Earth.  First, the men needed food.  On the miserable rations they had from the Chinese they were starving to death.  So Father Kapaun staged daring daylight raids into surrounding fields to scavenge for hidden potatoes and sacks of corn.  If he had been discovered he would have been shot on the spot.  Kapaun always shared his food with the other men no matter how little he had.

      Second, the men needed hope.  Throughout the camp, Father Emil was always there, praying, joking with the men, tending the sick, and burying the dead.  The Chinese instituted mandatory “re-education sessions,” where starving American POWs were forced to listen to lessons on the glories of Communism.  At the end of each of these classes, Father Kapaun would speak up and refute the lesson calmly.  The Chinese were furious about his courage.  His fellow officers were tortured until two of them confessed that he had a “disobedient attitude” towards the Chinese.    

      Dysentery raged through the camp due to the poor sanitary conditions.  Father Kapaun cleaned and tended the sick men.  He would often lead the men in prayers for food.  On Saint Patrick’s Day in 1951 they prayed for food and the next day they received liver from their captives, the first meat they had since the Chinese had captured them 5 months earlier. 

      Of course, the Chinese strictly forbade religious services and Father Kapaun, of course, ignored them.  On Easter Sunday 1951 he held a service for the men.  Lacking bread and wine, he could not say mass, but he had a crude wooden cross and a rosary he made from the barbed wire fence around the camp. 

      By now Father Kapaun was himself in very poor health, suffering from dysentery, pneumonia and an infection in one of his legs and his eyes.  The next Sunday he collapsed while leading another service. His Communist captors refused him all medical care. 

            His death was slow and painful.  On his last day with his men, with tears rolling down his eyes, he told them the story of the 7 brothers and their mother who perished during the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, prior to the Maccabean revolt.  He told them of how, after Antiochus had her sons put to death, their mother began to cry.  When Antiochus asked her why she was crying she said it was tears of joys because she knew her sons were in Heaven. 

Father Kapaun told his men that his tears were also tears of joy.  Christ had suffered, he explained, and his suffering made him feel closer to Him.  Now all of the soldiers in the barracks were whipping tears from their cheeks too. 

Soon the Chinese guards came to take Father Kapuan outside of the camp to the “hospital” which was really nothing more than a deserted shack were prisoners were left to die.  Father Kapaun lay on the dirt floor for three days, completely unattended, and died alone, except for God, on May 23, 1951.  His captors dumped his corpse in a mass grave on the bank of the Yalu river and no doubt thought that was the end of this troublesome prisoner.

Not quite.  His fellow prisoners never forgot him.  Through their years of captivity his memory remained an inspiration to each of them.  One of the prisoners, Major Gerald Fink, a Jew, spent two and a half months, every second of which he risked dreadful punishment, carving, in secret, a 40 inch crucifix in tribute to Father Kapaun.  When the surviving prisoners were released at the end of the war, they came out with story after story of the deeds of the man they had all loved and called “Father” no matter what their religion.  [http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/04/27/pow-servant-of-god/]

There is nothing as powerful as the love of God showered on us in Jesus Christ our Lord…nothing!

So the natural question is, how do we become people truly transformed by the love of Christ? 

  • Why is it that some people seem to be rocked to the core of their being by the love of God in Christ while others seem almost bored by it? 
  • Why are there some chapters in our lives when we really feel the love of God…and others when we can barely feel anything?

I honestly don’t have all the answers to that question.  (Some days I feel like I don’t have any of the answers to that question.)  So let’s think about it a bit deeper today and see if God doesn’t shed some light to all of us.

I John 4:19 says, “We love because He [God] first loved us.”  The context is a discussion about loving God and loving people.  That verse simply confirms what I’ve been saying, that in order for us to be people who walk away from being and doing what we used to be and do apart from Christ, we need to experience deeply what it is to be loved by God.  When the truth of being the object of God’s love really comes home to us, then we will become the kind of people who are able to live that love back to God and people. 

That happened to a woman in Luke 7.  Let’s read that story because there is no way to catch the emotion without hearing it all. 36Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38 and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

 39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

 40 Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”

   “Tell me, teacher,” he said.

   41 “Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

 43 Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.”

   “You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.

 44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”

Given the option between being like Simon the Pharisee who was cold as ice towards Jesus OR being the sinful woman who was completely overwhelmed by the forgiveness of God, which do you want? 

BEFORE you answer too quickly, stop and think about what made the difference.  (Ask for ideas.)

      Wasn’t it her realization of how MUCH she had been forgiven?  Wasn’t it a clear sense of her sin?  Wasn’t it not caring what others thought of her, how much they judged or despised her? 

      Are we ready to let God show us the magnitude of our sin?  The size of our “debt” of depravity?  Are we ready to be completely undone by the loving grace of God? 

      The problem is not with the love of God.  The problem may well be with the lack of really grasping the ugliness of our sin.  This woman’s sins were obvious to everyone.  She was probably the village hooker.  She probably earned that alabaster jar of expensive perfume from her sinful life.  Everything about what she brought to Jesus that day was stained by sin—lips that had kissed far too many men; hair that should never have been let down in the presence of anyone but her husband. 

      But her heart had been broken with the loving forgiveness of Jesus.  Maybe the tears were because of that brokenness and the realization that even the most valuable thing she had to bring to Jesus and pour out on his feet…the most lowly part of his person…was itself terribly unworthy of even touching God. 

There is a level of love that goes much deeper than romantic emotion or fond, warm feelings.  When you have been loved in the midst of your ugliest sin…when you have been the recipient of grace, kindness and humility in the midst of your gracelessness, your meanness and your pride…then you know that there is such a thing as love that does not love you because you are loveable nor even because you are needy but just because YOU ARE THE CHOSEN BELOVED. 

Getting to that place can be a painful process.  It was for this woman.  It was for the “prodigal son” too, right?  Simon the Pharisee could have found that love had he realized in that moment that his own pride and self-righteousness was probably a greater “debt” of sin before God than everything this woman had ever done in his town and his lifetime.  But there is no indication that he allowed the truth of Jesus story and encounter with him change anything, least of all his heart.   

Do we really want to experience the love of Christ?  Do we really want to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”???  Then one thing is certain:  we will need to let God break our hearts about the magnitude of our sin that took Christ’s life. 

ILL:  I remember when this began to become painfully clear in my own life.  We had given up wonderful ministry opportunities here in the U.S.  We had moved to another country to bring the Gospel to people without Christ.  We had left behind family and friends and gone to a place thousands of miles away “to do God’s will.” 

      And I began to fight against God.  I began to rail against the course he had set before me.  As he pried one self-gratifying thing after the other out of my hands, I became the kind of man I never wanted to become.  Anger took over my life.  Depression became my daily companion.  Rage erupted into terribly ugly and destructive temper tantrums.  I shouted at the people who loved me the most.  I shouted at God.  I swore at Him and at them. 

      It was in those years (yes, years) that God, my wife and my children showed me love that was totally undeserved.  I realized how desperately needy my own soul and life was.  I felt how deeply sinful I was when I demanded that life work as I wanted it to…and it didn’t. 

Our marriage has never been the same.  The innocence that couples have when they first fall in love and are married is gone.  In its place is something different, something deeper.  It’s the realization that I am loved, not because of anything attractive I may have thought I brought to the relationship, but that I am loved despite my deep sinfulness and in the midst of my great unworthiness.  I love my wife, my children and my God because they first loved me far more faithfully and deeply and grace-fully than I ever did.  Hopefully I AM a more loving son, husband and father because of the precipice God took me to and vision of myself that he enabled me to see while still the object of His love. 

Do you still want to see how deeply loved you are in Christ? I hope so.  It’s far better than being a Pharisee.  It’s far better than being an unrepentant prodigal son or daughter.  And it’s certainly better than being a bored, blasé, or even angry Christian who has lost (or maybe never had) the wonder of experiencing unconditional love when you least deserve it.   

“1 Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.