pastor steve: Fight for brutal honesty about yourself (Romans 7:24)

Cornerstone Mission Church, Sunday Sermon February 15, 2009

Last several weeks, I’ve been exploring the ways to fight against the disconnection between what we know to be true and how we live it out. It is a fight against hypocrisy. Today, I want to explore with you how learning to be brutally honest about ourselves lays down a firm foundation to fight against the rampant and insidious poison of hypocrisy.

1. Fight against feel good psychology of building up self-esteem.

I picked up a book this past week by Don Matzat, titled Christ-Esteem and subtitled Where the Search For Self-Esteem Ends. As the title and the subtitle suggest, the author seeks to establish the biblical case against self-esteem while affirming Christ-esteem. Self-esteem is looking inwardly to find solutions to problems in life while Christ-esteem is looking to Jesus as the solution to our problem and learning to love, adore, respect, honor and prize Jesus.

For now, let seek to understand why we need to fight against the feel-good psychology of self-esteem.

Self-esteem is about finding oneself and feeling good about self by improving one’s self image through positive-thinking and affirming self worth.

When I was a ninth grader in Korea, my best friend’s home room teacher established a ritual that could be heard through the walls of many classes. Every morning, and throughout each school day, this teacher would have all his students stand up and recite aloud in unison this phrase countless times, “나는 할수있다,” “I can do it.” By repeating this phrase 10, 20, 30 times and more day after day, week after week, through the whole school year, this teacher sought to raise positive and self confident thinkers who can positively solve all problems. I don’t know how much change took place because this teacher’s effort to boost the self esteem of his students. I did see my friend improving academically and in his leadership. Things got little confusing since this teacher reinforced his students’ positive thinking with fear of punishment from him for their substandard performance.

Here is my point. If I can achieve self-confidence and positive self image about myself and begin to really like myself and love myself, and be able to tackle life’s problems in stride, would I need Jesus after all? If I can become a good person simply by way of disciplined positive-thinking, telling myself, “I can be good, come on! I am going to be good because I can,” would I need Jesus?

Let’s be honest! We’ve all done this, haven’t we? Haven’t we tried really hard to fight off temptations that are common to us all and temptations that each of us find uniquely more vulnerable to than other temptations? We’ve peppered our earnest effort with good dose of positive thinking, “Oh, I can do this,” but only to find, “I cannot do this.” And, we find our expression in Paul’s words in Romans 7:18-19, “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do- this I keep on doing.”

If we could ever succeed in improving ourselves enough to be righteous by beefing up our self-esteem through thinking positively about our ability to be good, then Christ would have died in vain. Paul said in Galatians 2:21, “for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Christ died precisely for our utter inability to gain righteousness by trying to be good, to get better and to improve.

So, building up self-esteem, feeling good about yourself by boosting your own confidence through the self talk, “I can do it” may lead you to feeling good about yourself. But, when the moment of good feelings passes, you end up crawling right back down to the cycle of shame and guilt and increasing disconnection between what you know and how you live. Building strong self-esteem, self-confidence cannot take out the poison of hypocrisy. It only leads you to further shame, guilt and despair.

2. Fight for brutal honesty with yourself; you were the problem.

To detoxify the poison of hypocrisy, we don’t need to waste our time trying to like ourselves more, love ourselves more; building self-esteem only takes us further away from the solution to the problem. If you are serious about dealing with the poison of hypocrisy, if you are serious about demolishing the gap between the truth and the practice, then what you need is a real solution. And, the Bible teaches no other solution than Jesus Christ.

So, here is the game plan. If Jesus is the solution, we need to make sure we frame our lives so that we go to Jesus who is our solution. We need to fight against anything that would prevent us from drawing near to Jesus. We begin by naming the illusive danger of seeking to bolster our own self esteem.

What we need is to move away from being self-sufficient person with strong self-esteem to move towards growing in Christ-esteem that is finding our confidence, self worth, self-image, self-value in Jesus alone.

But, to move from self esteem to Christ esteem, from self-confidence to Christ-confidence, you and I need to learn to be brutally honest with ourselves, that we were the problem. Apostle Paul talked honestly about himself as being the problem in Romans 7:24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Let me explain this by telling you about a leaky ceiling in my house.

Some of you know that our living room ceiling has been leaking since last September. Whenever it rains heavy, or heavily accumulated snow starts to melt, water starts to collect above the ceiling and soaks through ceiling materials and leaks.

Last year, a patch of roof was replaced, it didn’t work. Lately, the effort has been to seal off the roof with tar stuff. Well, it still leaks. The patch work and the application of tar stuff have not worked because the problem is extensive.

I have this suspicion that the few hundred dollars of patch work and applying tar here and there will not solve the problem. Why? The problem is not about the little cracks and holes here and there. The problem is the roof. The roof itself has reached the point where no amount of small temporary fixes will be able to reverse its fate. The house needs a whole new roof because the current roof is the problem.

You and I were like my roof. We think that Jesus died to take care of the little cracks and holes of problems and sins here and there. We think that little bit of the blood of Jesus and his death would do to cover our problems and sins. But, the truth is Jesus didn’t leave the Father’s side to come down, to dwell with us, to suffer unjustly, to walk to the cross, to lay down his body to be crucified, to shed his blood, to be raised up on the cross, to hang on it and to lay down his life just because we had little problems and sins for him to deal with. The reality is that we were in much deeper trouble than my roof that needs to be replaced with the new one. We were more like a condemned house that needed to be bulldozed to make a way for a completely new house.

The truth is Jesus did what he did not because I had few problems, but because I was the problem.

Don Matzat wrote, “We erroneously believe that God is in the repair business; that he compassionately repairs human lives like a friendly father fixing his children's broken toys. We make up a list of our specific problems and go about seeking the Lord for specific solutions, but nothing ever gets checked off the list and it seemingly never ends.”[1]

Until I come to understand that I was the problem, I will not fully know that Jesus was, is and will be the solution for me, the problem. Unless I descend as Paul did to consider his life as wretched, whatever was to his profit to consider loss for the sake of Christ (Philippians 3:7), to consider them rubbish in order to gain Christ and be found in him (Philippians 3:8), I am only dealing with the surface of the problem, just the tip of the iceberg.

I was the problem that could not be fixed or repaired into a good shape with just few patch works here and there. I was the problem that needed to be crucified with the Lord, to be put to death. And, now it is not this crucified self, but the new me hidden in Christ that lives following his resurrection from the dead and ascending with Jesus to be seating at the right hand of God.[2]

And, this is why Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

My old self crucified no longer lives. This is why trying to build on our old self through building self-esteem makes no sense. It is like digging the grave and exhume the dead body hoping to revive it back to life, to repair it back to the old shape of life. God is not in the business of repairing our old condemned self. But, God is in the business of raising people who are in Christ, his Son, who find Jesus as their esteem, their confidence, their honor, their adoration, their hope, their everything, and their salvation and who will inherit his righteousness, his holiness, his joy and his peace.

Here is the tricky part about our old self. Paul says in Colossians 3:5, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature [that is the old self crucified and put to death]: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.”

Some one said, “The old life is dead; they must let it die.”[3] Although our old self was put to death with Jesus when he was crucified, the habits of sin die very slowly. Another scholar illustrates this by likening believers to immigrants who have moved to new country. In this new country with new culture, new way of living, immigrants have not yet become adapted to the new ways of life.[4] Or, another image would be to likening to a person who gets his finger stuck and drawn between rollers of a giant machine. “Another minute and he will be flattened to a shapeless bloody mass. He catches up an axe lying by and with his own arm hacks off his own hand at the wrist… It is not easy nor pleasant, but it is the only alternative to a horrible death.”[5]

When you and I see the habits of sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed creeping back from the old self that has been crucified, we are to be brutally be honest with ourselves and declare, “I was the problem, and I was crucified with Jesus, and the old me that was put to death on the cross with the death of Jesus, must remain dead.

Whenever we allow the old self, the problem that was slayed on the cross with Jesus back to new life hidden now in Jesus, it is like living the old movie, Night of the Living Dead.

When we recognize that we were the problem, and our old self, the problem had to be crucified with Jesus on the cross, now when we see the old habits creeping back to the stage of our new life with Jesus, we now have only one thing to do. Show no mercy to the habits of sin and do whatever it takes to let them remain dead.

3. Conclusion

Paul after recognizing he was the problem when he said in Romans 7:24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” He answers his own question in Romans 7:25, “Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

When we remember that our old self has been crucified with Jesus and we now live hidden in Jesus, it makes no sense trying to exhume the old, condemned, expired self by feeding the old habits of sin. When we fight for brutal honesty about our old self, then it only make sense to do all that we can to actively put to death the remnants of old habit of sin. And, it is more than possible in Jesus to put to death that which was already put to death by Jesus.

[1] Don Matzat, Christ Esteem: Where the Search for Self-Esteem Ends, 1990, p. 52.

pastor steve

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Fight for brutal honesty about yourself (Romans 7:24)

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