Experience the Grace You've Been Given
In this series we will dig out from Scripture God's Wisdom on Human Emotion.
What I want to talk about is making sure that God's grace and God's love become the main engines of everything else that is happening in our lives.
I want to talk about bringing the grace of God into the deepest part of your being. Way down inside, where you make your decisions and call the shots on your life.
By the deepest part of your being I mean your emotions. It is one thing to have a pretty solid knowledge of what the grace of God is in your mind. That is good and essential and non-negotionable requirement if we are going to grow deep with God.
But it is another thing to have the grace of God installed not only in your mind but in your emotions too. All summer long I want to talk about the Bible's wisdom and our emotional states.
I'd like to set this up by working through two places in the Bible today..
For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me When as yet there were none of them. (Psalm 139:13-16, NKJV).
CREATOR PRINCIPLE: God is the creator of everything in your being, including your emotional capacity.
He formed you... he created you. He didn't get the human racing going and then step back and let us take it from there? No.
Every person born into the world has still been formed by God. He formed your inward parts... The Hebrew word here actually means "kidneys" which is how the biblical world talked about
emotions.
God formed your emotions — the feelings in the pit of your stomach, the stuff you feel in your gut. God formed
your emotional capacity.
When God made you, he made you body, soul, and spirit. In your soul he made mind, will, and emotions. All of these things were woven into you from the moment of your conception, even in your mother's womb.
God made your emotions, so it follows that he knows best how they should run, don't you think?
COMPLEXITY PRINCIPLE: The depths and complications of human emotions are far beyond human comprehension.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made. The deepest science, the hardest math, could never explain the human heart. There is no formula to predict it. There is no math to define it. There is no test tube to replicate it.
The complexity of the simplest cell in your body is beyond the brightest minds of earth. There are more interconnections of neurons in your brain than there are stars in the universe.
The relationship between your material brain and your immaterial mind are far beyond the scope of all known science. Tell me what math, what formula, what equation, what chemical reaction can account for love?
You can pile up degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and neuropharmacology, but no one really knows the workings of the human soul. Only God.
MYSTERY PRINCIPLE: Only God can see the complex stitching together of body, soul, and spirit, mind, will, and
emotions, as your being was mysteriously knit together in your mother's womb.
That microscopic fertilized egg is already a fully formed human in ways only God can know. The baby grows and develops and the parts differentiate, but everything is there from conception. Life is there. The image of God is there. Sacredness is there. Eternity is there. Mind. Will. Emotions... already there.
This is the mystery of life. As smart as science is, it will never be smart enough to explain your life. We can't replicated it. Can't reproduce even the
simplest life form—because there is no such thing as a simple life form.
Your emotions were woven into you even before you were born. No one could see this happening. You can't put it under a microscope. However, God saw it all, and he had it all under control.
ARCHITECT PRINCIPLE: God is the architect of your happiness, your joys, your surprises, your laughter, your purpose, your meaning, your satisfaction, your mission, your maturity, your completion, and your total fulfillment.
He has all the blueprints in his mind, down to the finest detail.
There is something super cool in this verse that I never saw before. The Psalmist writes, "Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed..." The word "substance" in older English translations was translated by a word we never use. The word "clew." Do you know it?
First, let's talk about human DNA. The DNA in your cells is packaged into 46 chromosomes in the nucleus. As well as being a naturally helical molecule, DNA is super-coiled using enzymes so that it takes up less space.
Try holding a piece of string at one end, and twisting the other. As you add twists, the string creates coils of coils; and eventually, coils of coils of coils. Your DNA is arranged as a coil of coils of coils of coils of coils! This allows the 3 billion base pairs in each cell to fit into a space just 6 microns across.
If you stretched the DNA in one cell all the way out, it would be about 6 feet long and all the DNA in all your cells put together would be about twice the diameter of the Solar System.
BBC Science Focus Magazine says that the defining molecule of your physiology—and something that in some inscrutable way affects your psychology and mentality—is a wound up double helix molecular string science knew nothing about until the 1950s.
6Thirty centuries earlier, however, found 1,000 b.c., the Psalmist, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote, Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed...
Which is no big deal, until you know what substance means. For substance he used a Hebrew word that means... wait for it... "a ball made by winding thread."
That's what a c-l-e-w is.God saw you right down the coiled up DNA long before you were born.
Your Father in heaven didn't need a scientist, he didn't need an electron microscope, he didn't need a philosopher, he didn't need a psychiatrist — though we affirm our need of all of those people and things — but God didn't need any of them to know how we're made.
He is the architect of your soul. There is no one who can give you better advice for a healthy human emotions than him.
All of these principles of design woven into you by God come together for one singular central all important purpose. God designed you for love.
He designed you to receive love. He designed you to give love.
DESIGN PRINCIPLE: You were designed for love—you were made for dignity, honor, and respect, and it it's God's intention you show the same to others.
You were made forge connections. You were made to develop bonds of affection.
When Jesus summed up all the teachings of the word of God he said it was that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that you should love your neighbor as yourself. He was echoing Moses and the Old Testament which said exactly the same thing.
Paul said that the only debt we should have toward one another, is to love one another. He told us to put on love, which is the capstone of spiritual maturity. Peter said that we should love one another with a pure heart.
Lastly, John said in this is love not that we love God but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.
It was love that caused Jesus Christ the eternal son of God to divest himself of glory and privileges and honor. It was love that motivated him to come to earth and be formed in a virgins womb. It was love that by which he embraced lepers, resisted religion, and taught like no one had ever tried before. Above all else, it was love that sent him to an old rugged Cross, where he shed his blood and died to reconcile the world of lost sinners to God above.
The heart of the biblical message is that God loves people because of who and what HE is, not because of who and what WE are. We do not make God love us.His love exists in his own heart long before we do anything to draw it out from him. God is love even if I am bad. Right on down to the balled up strands of DNA in every cell in your body, God custom designed you for love.
But there is a problem with all this. There is a problem that interferes with love. There are forces in our world that get in the way of us giving and receiving love. There are forces that get in the way of God's perfect design.
This fallen world is morally broken pain machine. And the consequence is that love gets messed up. We suffer pain. We suffer hard ache. There is weeping, bitterness, anger, and sorrow. We are basically living a bad country and western song.
So, this second passage of Scripture will help us understand why the design for love in the first passage of scripture gets buried, and why our emotions are all over the place, and why we can even be dangerous to others.
For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another! I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. (Galatians 5:13-16, NKJV).
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FLESH PRINCIPLE: Our mind, will, and emotions have been twisted by the Fall and by sin. This part of our personality is called the Flesh.
You may have noticed that the day after you were saved you're pretty much the same person as you were the day before you were saved. God did not erase your memories or your instincts or your habits and start again with a blank slate. This means that you carry into your saved life a residue from your pre-saved life.
In addition, you're still bombarded every single day with lies and deceptions and the insanity of a world in rebellion against God. All of these things get collected in your flesh.
The flesh is the garbage dump of your soul. It is the dumping ground for your morally fallen desires, drives, thoughts, beliefs, instincts, and habits. This is all of the parts of you that resist God. Left unchecked your flesh trashes your life, contaminates your relationships, and spoils your achievements. Unless you are conscious of this every single day, your flesh will take over. Yes, it is that sneaky. Every single day. You must choose to rise above your inner mess.
Your flesh develops its own momentum. It has its own flywheel, and it's very hard to stop. When your flesh is in the driver's seat of your life, it is very hard even for willpower to overcome it. Your flesh is your Darkside. It is the part of you you'd like to keep hidden at church. This is the source of all addiction, dysfunction, despair, self-pity, and self-absorption.
Your flesh will cause extreme damage to your emotional life. This damage will mess up all your relationships. It causes people to bite and devour one another. Paul warns that it causes us to consume one another. Meaning to exploit or use or abuse other people. All of them stand in stark and bleak contrast to the love that God has called us to. To operate in the flesh is to be carnal — that's the Bible word for being a flesh-dominated Christian.
If you are ever going to experience the love God designed you for, and if you are ever going to give the love God designed you for, you have to understand the biblical process for rising above the flesh. You have to walk in the spirit so that you do not fulfill the lust of the flesh. The flesh is the Terminator of healthy emotions.
NEEDLESS DRAMA PRINCIPLE: Christians whose lives are naturally full of drama and conflict are usually operating in the flesh.
If you bite and devour one another beware lest you be consumed by one another.
Part of maturity and part of wisdom is not allowing yourself to be sucked into the vortex of other people's drama. Yes we care, and yes we love, but when they bring drama and adversity on their own heads again and again, we have to make space so that God himself can deal with them.
It is not loving to give money to subsidize someone's self-destructive behavior. It is not loving to give encouragement to cheer along somebody's self righteousness, critical spirit, or entitlement.
Where is Christ in their words? Where is Christ in their social media posts? Where is the spirit of Christ in how they treat other people? It is not a loving thing to support people who consistently create their own drama. Sometimes you need to let God's discipline play out in their lives, because this is the only way he can get them to a position of humility and of abundant grace.
Scripture gives us a clear test in these words. If you bite and devour one another. Think about that. Some Christians come across like snarling dogs, always with criticism, always with a complaint, always with a knock on their brothers and sisters in the faith.
This is the flesh on overdrive. It is not the spirit of Christ, and it is not faith. It is the opposite of the love of Christ being expressed through our lives.
Paul he goes on to say beware that should be consumed by one another. I think this is another great test of whether or not you're dealing with someone who is walking in the flesh. Do you feel like your life has been added to or subtracted from after an encounter with them? Are they givers or are they consumers? When you talk or hang out, has your life been enhanced or has your blood been drained? Again this is the opposite of love.
Throw out the mocker, and fighting, quarrels, and insults will disappear. (Proverbs 22:10, NLT).
This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. (James 3:15-17, NKJV).
It is this wisdom from above and this walking in the Spirit that I would like to teach and preach about all summer long. Pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Grace Powered Living... Christ in you, the Spirit in you, and the Word in you...
Grace Powered living for the win!
