Well, here's the last part to my thoughts on your private life. Yes, it has been as comfortable as hugging a cactus, but it's been worth it, right. So far, I've focused on the really hard stuff... but today I want to focus on the potentially amazing aspect that can flow from your private life. Remember, I first asked if your private life was really yours? I suggested, "No, it isn't." Then I asked if your private life was really private? I suggested, "No, it isn't." An now here's the final question for you:
Is your private life really a
life?
The
answer to this question is “Yes.”
Is your private life yours?
No. Is your private life
private? No. Is your private life really a
life? Yes. Your private life is a life. It is precious. It is special. It is unique. It is beautiful.
It reveals the image of God.
So your private life is to be cherished and treated well. Your private life is not to be
saturated in sin as if it is yours to trash or throw away or to hide in destructive
indulgence.
Dan
Leffelaar is my right-hand man in the young adult ministry at Brentview. Since the first weekend I was on staff,
Dan has been my partner in ministry here.
He really should be in full-time ministry, he’s got God’s call on his life. And that’s not a private call. But until the opportunity opens, he’s
working in the meantime at the Heart and Stroke Foundation. In his role, Dan makes presentations on
how to care for your heart. He
shares about habits that we should develop in order to keep our heart strong
and healthy and our blood flow clean and unobstructed.
One
of the things Dan presents to people is this Vat of Fat. It’s nasty. It is meant to make us sick about the bad stuff we take into
ourselves that restricts our heart from working and our blood from
flowing. According to the Vat of
Fat, if we take in an extra serving of fast-food French Fries beyond the
calories and food groups what we’re supposed to take, every week, we will add
to our bodies 36 pounds of solidifying fat that goes beyond what we can burn
off in a year. If we take in an
extra glazed donut beyond what we can handle, we will add to our bodies 22
pounds of fat. An extra soda a
week beyond our daily calorie needs will add 17 pounds of this stuff. And so on. Disgusting isn’t it?
Too much of this stuff clogs our arteries and attacks our heart. And that limits what we can do, limits
our enjoyment of life, limits our enjoyment of time with others, and eventually
will steal our life away from us.
Now
imagine doing this to your heart and soul. What we take into our heart, into our private life, impacts
our ability to live free from obstruction. We can’t truly live free if we keep saturating our life in
junk and excuse it because it’s our life or pretend like we can keep it hidden
because it is done in private.
Eventually, the clot will reveal itself and it will be destructive to
you and impact everybody.
Your
life is supposed to be free from the obstructions that keep you from truly
enjoying the abundant life that God wants for you. Proverbs 4:20-27 says: “My
son, pay attention to what I say; listen closely to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep
them written on your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health
to a man’s whole body.” Above all
else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Put away perversity from your mouth;
keep corrupt talk from your lips.
Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before
you. Make level paths for your
feet and take only ways that are firm.
Do not swerve to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” Proverbs 3:3 says, “Let love and
faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the
tablet of your heart.” Proverbs
6:21 says, “Bind them upon your heart forever; fasten them around your
neck.” Proverbs 7:3 says “Bind
them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart.” Psalm 37:31 says that when the law of
the Lord is in your heart, your feet do not
slip. Letting God’s ways shape
your private life impacts every aspect of how you live.
When
we go to God and present to him our life, God accepts us, forgives us, and
begins the work of recreating us from the inside out. His Spirit begins working in our heart to help us to live
according to the pattern he has set out for us. No matter what’s in your private life, God wants to help you
have the wellspring of life flowing within you.
I
have not said anything today without including myself in the mix. If you were to follow me around 24/7
with hidden cameras, you would certainly discover some sin that God already
knows about. I don’t say that to
astonish anyone. My point is
simply that none of us is pure.
Proverbs 20:9 asks it correctly: “Who can say, ‘I have kept my heart
pure; I am clean and without sin.’”
The rhetorical answer is “No one can say that.”
The
Good News is that the heart-clogging, soul-clotting stuff that we have been
hiding can be expelled and exchanged for the heart-freeing, soul-cleansing word
of God. Just because you have
hidden bad stuff doesn’t mean you need to keep carrying that junk in your
arteries. Or just because you have
been caught doing something that you did in private, doesn’t mean you have to
have a spiritual heart attack. You
have an opportunity to restore your private life to what it should be. Psalm 51:10 cries out, “Create in me a
pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 101:2 says “I will be careful to
lead a blameless life—I will walk in my house with a blameless heart.”
The
conclusion to all of this is simple: Your private life is God’s to shape, not
yours. Give him back your private
life. Let him shape you from the
inside out. Let him help you truly
live with all the joy and abundance and strength and integrity and confidence
that you can have as he lives within you.
Are you convinced yet that your private life isn't private? Well, maybe the second part of the second question regarding your private life will convince you:
We assume that as long as what we do in private stays private, then we are entitled to keep it private. But here's the second problem with this idea:
Problem
number 2: Your private life is not private because your private life impacts
others. What you keep private actually effects people. Think of the tension that existed in
the Garden as a result of Adam and Eve trying to hide their sin. The whole of creation was
impacted. Sin changed the game;
over just one screw-up. We can’t
be too hard on them; how many times each day do we sin and try to cover it
up? How many times do we change
the game because we try to hide what we’ve done?
What
you keep private and to yourself effects others. Think of the marriage where the husband is addicted to
pornography. Think of how that
impacts the way he views his wife, the way it impacts their sexual
relationship, the way it builds temptations of thought and action that run
counter to the promises he made in his vows. Think of the way his wife is not receiving the lavish-ment of
love and the encouragement of her beauty that she deserves from her
husband. And still, the husband
pretends to himself that he’s faithful because he hasn’t physically touched
another woman and it hasn’t really hurt anybody because it’s done in the so-called
“privacy” of his mind and own body.
If he ever was to be caught, it would change the game. And so, the husband, every time he
erases the history on the browser, covers things up with fig leaves. But he has not covered up the impact.
We
know the book of Proverbs is about wisdom, but do we know that a huge portion
of this book deals with hidden sexual sin. If there is one thing that trips up wisdom, it’s the lusting
libido. All of chapter Five,
chapter Seven, and numerous other verses throughout the book deal with this
hidden problem.
If
someone were to ask you, “What do you have hidden in your heart?” What comes to your mind? What would you not want to reveal? What do you have hidden in there? When we’re asked that question, we
assume it is a negative answer: “What are you hiding in your heart?” “Oooh, you
don’t really want to know that.”
But the Good News is that we don’t have to answer negatively. We can answer in freedom. Our private life can be exposed without
it being embarrassing. What do you
have hidden in your heart? Psalm 119:11
says, “God, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against
you.” In all of those deep hidden
crevices of our lives, we could actually plant God’s word there. Can you imagine, if you struggle with a
private, hidden sin or a worry or a secret anger against someone or a certain
destructive behavior, what if when you went to open that password protected
closet, God’s word was residing there?
Wouldn’t it be good to answer the question “What do you have hidden in
your heart?” with an abundant sense of freedom and joy and strength and life
and truth and love and hope and faith because “I have God’s word hidden in
there.”
And
as a result, when God’s word resides inside of you, you can’t help but to
reflect that on the outside. Psalm
40:10 says “I do not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do
not conceal your love and your truth from people.” God living in us was never meant to be a private
affair. Seriously, is your faith
private? That’s a disgusting idea.
If God is living in us, then the inside of our life is to be shared because
it’s good. Imagine keeping your
faith private and meanwhile your neighbors’ lives could really use your
encouragement of faith. Our hearts
are not supposed to be hidden and private. Our hearts are supposed to be lived openly and freely for
God and for others. Look, the
truth is, your private life is not really yours and it is not really
private. It is God’s. God sees it. God shapes it.
It is supposed to overflow with his pattern to positively impact others,
not be covered up to the detriment of others.
Look,
I know some of you are feeling a bit protective right now and saying, Ken,
there are some things we should keep to ourselves. I’m not saying you should start airing your dirty laundry
for everyone to see… but I am saying you need to do the laundry otherwise it
piles up. You do need to air your
soul, your heart, your mind, and your strength to the Lord so that he can
refresh you and prepare you to display his love to this world.
Okay, so yesterday I forced your private life on you and suggested that YOUR private life is NOT really yours. Today I want to continue antagonizing you... for the sake of protagonizing you, of course. So I've got a second question for you regarding your private life... and I'm going to explore it in two parts. Catch that? Second Question. Two parts. First part of the second question starts now. I want to ask:
We
like to think that our private life is to remain private. A politician or a major sports hero who
gets caught having affairs might make a public statement like, “In this
difficult time of my life and my family’s life, we would ask you to respect our
privacy.” Well every reporter
blows that request off. There is
no way any privacy is going to be respected. We like to think that our private life should be private,
but do we really believe that?
It’s interesting that when someone else gets caught doing something
wrong, we expect them to fess up and divulge everything they’ve done
wrong. I mean, Tiger Woods is a
golfer. A golfer. He hits a little white ball around the
grass. And yet people are saying
he needs to have a public press conference where he deals with his marital
infidelity before he should be accepted back on the golf course. Seriously, does what he does in the
privacy of his own life impact whether or not he can hit a sand wedge? Wait a second, I thought you thought
that your private life was private?
We
seem to have a double standard here.
We assume that as long as what we do in private stays private, then we
are entitled to keep it private.
But there are two problems with this idea:
Problem
number 1: Your private life is not
private because your private life is known by God. Psalm
44:21 asks, “Wouldn’t God have discovered [what you’ve done], since he knows
the secrets of the heart?” Proverbs 5:21 states, “For a person’s ways are in
full view of the Lord, and he examines all the person’s paths.” Your life never really was private,
ever. To God’s eyes, your private
life is a window. He sees
everything. He’s not a
paparazzi. He’s not following you
around in secret with cameras looking to dig up the dirt or catch you in the
act, “Ah ha! I knew it! I had a hunch you were up to something
evil.” It’s not like that. God is out in the open about it. He can’t help it. He simply sees all things; he knows all
things. And there will come a day
when what God sees and knows will become seen and known by everyone. Jesus said in Luke 12: “The time is
coming when everything will be revealed; all that is secret will be made
public. Whatever you have said in
the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed
doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear, [and I would add]
whatever you have texted to your mistress will be publicized by TMZ. Look, nobody is happy that your private
life will be publicized. But part
of the problem is that we assumed that a private life is private… when it never
really was. God sees and God
knows.
In
the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve did something wrong and they tried to cover it
up. They didn’t want God to know,
so they hid and they covered up their bodies. Before sin, everything was out in the open. As the great philosopher, Cosmo Kramer,
once said, “I’m out there, Jerry, and I’m loving every minute of it.” But ever since then, we have turned
inward, we have become quite capable of thinking we can hide things. But God knew what they had done. And when he presented himself to them,
Adam and Eve put on leaves started making excuses. We were naked, Adam said, so we hid. And so God asked them, “What’s wrong
with being naked- that’s how I made you?
Did you mess something up?”
From the beginning, people have tried to hide and keep private those
things that they don’t want others to know. Adam and Eve, male and female, created in the image of God,
had nothing to hide, until they did wrong and then they became addicted to
privacy. We’re just like
them. We like to pretend that we
can cover up our privates, but we really can’t. God sees. God
knows. Your private life is public
knowledge to God.
Nobody is really happy about this... but I'm going to pause for a moment to talk about your private life. You may not think I have the right to talk about your private life and so might take issue with me airing all of your behind-the-scenes details all over the internet. It is, after all, YOUR private life, isn't it? It's not mine. And it is, after all, your PRIVATE life, right? You haven't publicized all the hidden inner stories of your soul. But that won't stop me. I'm going to talk about your private life anyways.
I have three questions I'm going to ask over the next few days that I hope will bring us to one conclusion regarding your private life. First question:
Is Your Private Life Really Yours?
You probably
assume that your own private life is yours and not somebody else’s. But is that really true? As far as our own life is concerned we
seem to believe that we have the right to keep things to ourselves that we
don’t want other people to know about and that that should be okay. What’s mine is mine and my life is
mine, isn’t it?
We
have a serious conflict here.
Jesus seems to think that our life is his. All of John chapter 17 is a prayer from Jesus where he
refers to people as “his own” and he calls people “mine.” Jesus thinks we are his. In Luke 14 Jesus says that he expects
us to give up everything for him.
We surrender and become his.
You could try to keep hold of your own life, to control it, to seize it
and try to run it, but Jesus says that’s useless. He thinks your life is not really yours. In fact, Jesus thinks that your life is
his and that it’s to be lived in service for other people, not so that the
world can revolve around you.
Jesus thinks your life is about God and about others. Romans 14:7-8 says “For none of us
lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if
we die, we die to the Lord. So
whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” The passage goes on to say that when you belong to the Lord
then you live for others because that’s God’s heart for you.
Look,
you are very special. God knit you together with painstaking care and love. God loves you so much he created you so
that he could be with you. He
wants to live within you. You were
created to be his residing place, his home. God wants to be at home in your hearts. He wants your life to be his. And whether you feel depreciated in
value or like the market has overextended itself on you, the truth is that
Jesus cherishes you and wants you to be his. He wants to have you as his very own. He created you for that purpose. 1
Corinthians 3:16 asks, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and
that God’s Spirit lives in you?”
In 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul asks, “Do you not know that your body is a
temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.”
This
is where the conflict within us lies.
We don’t want to be owned by anyone other than ourselves. This is my life. As the great philosopher Bobby Brown
once said, “It’s my prerogative.”
So if our life is to be God’s home, does this mean that God has ownership rights to our life? That we have to play
by God’s rules? Well, yes. That’s right. But which one leads to freedom? Keep our life for ourselves, or letting God have it?
Luke
9:24-25 says that whoever wants to seize their life will lose their soul… What good is it for a person to gain
the whole world, and yet forfeit his very self? As we live as God’s people, then we gain abundant life from
God. As the inside of our lives is
being shaped and directed by God, then we begin to live in the way we were
created to live. If we go against
that pattern by trying to steal our life away from God’s hands, that’s when we
start to feel restrained in ourselves and we feel strained with others. We were
created to share our life with God forever; to give him ownership of our
breath, of our thoughts, of our days; to give him rule in our hearts; so that
we could truly have life. That’s
what we were created for. If we go
against what we created for, we will have conflict within us, we will have a
divided heart, a heart that struggles to pump.
As
parents, we try to establish this pattern in our home with our children. That’s the goal of every parent,
right? Children are expected to
live according to the patterns set up at home. Kathy and I tell our kids over and over again, “Look, if you
follow the ways we have given you, then you will live free and enjoy life and
your relationships will be abundant.”
But every time they go against those patterns, or cross over the
boundaries, or exhibit destructive behavior, or seize the shape of their life
in their own hands without us, their success rate goes down and their self-joy
becomes restricted. Their life
doesn’t flow quite right. As our
children, they should live according to our ways because they are in our
hands. We as their parents are
striving to shape them and love them and enable them to fully live. They are our kids. We are entrusted with the
responsibility to give them life to the fullest. To the degree that we do that according to God’s ways, if
they reject our hands, if they resist our shaping, if they think their life is
theirs alone and that we have no right to interfere, if they think their
private life is no business of ours as their parents, then they will never
learn to live free.
Our
seven year-old recently asked me if he could drive the car. It’s a manual, a stick-shift, by the
way. I said no, I can’t let you
drive the car. First of all, you
don’t know how, second of all, it’s against the patterns established in our
home, and third of all, you’re seven with an adventurous-streak that scares the
breath out of me. He was mad at
me. “You never let me do
anything!” he yelled at me. Well
first of all, I said,
I let you do a lot of things… if that’s not true I’ll take away the
Wii. Second of all, this is a
silly conversation. Third of all,
someday after you mature and I teach you how, you’ll be driving soon enough all
over the place. Trust me. “Well,” he said, “sometime I’m going to
take your keys and drive off to my friends.” I said, “Okay, but I have to warn you, I don’t think that
will end well.”
You
are child of God. Your private
life is God’s to shape and to pattern after his heart. And if you reject that idea, your
private life isn’t going to be that fun.
In your pursuit of freedom you are going to feel restricted and
restrained and antagonistic and ashamed and you’re just going to want to sneak
it around and it’s not going to end well. Is your private life really
yours? No. It’s God’s to shape and God’s to
prepare for the blessing of others.
I feel blessed. God has opened a great door for us. I'm not one to seek attention through good things that happen. I usually stay somewhat reserved when something great happens... choosing to confide in those closest to me. But I feel prompted to open up a bit more this time.
Last weekend God gifted me with a great time of teaching, connecting, sharing, laughing and searching with a new group of friends and followers of Jesus. I travelled to Calgary and then out to Camp Caroline in the Rockies for a retreat with the young adults of Brentview Baptist. The snow was gorgeous, the pool was warm, the tubing hill was the essence of painful exuberance, and the worship and fellowship was encouraging. I can't tell you how thankful to God I am to have the opportunity to be a "pastor" in such a group.
The focus for my teaching was on the first three chapters of proverbs. Wisdom. How Solomon got it, messed it up, and eventually truly embraced it. Wisdom, I've concluded, is fearing God, seeking God, and trusting God. It was great to see the Spirit working in so many of our lives as we face huge life-changing situations (jobs, moving, relationships, etc). It was great to be a part of Andrew's baptism, participate with Dan in worship, and to have had so many deep-life conversations with so many. It was also encouraging to be surprised by Ruth tagging along for the retreat!
Anyways, I could write so much more. I look forward to what else God will be doing over the next several years. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for me, Kathy and our family during this transition period. Please keep it up!
The book of proverbs is pro-action. Wisdom expects movement. Stationary, non-descript living is not acceptable. This book is not called Pronouns. It is called Proverbs! The reader is to be the subject who acts with the wisdom that is learned through Solomon's teachings. Wisdom is not slothful, lazy, inactive or dead. Wisdom is pro-ductive. Wisdom moves like Ladanian Tomlinson. Wisdom makes its way through the streets and charges through crowds.
Proverbs expects the reader to move. Chapter 2 gives us at least six things we are to do in order to obtain wisdom.
THEN, after actively acting, will we understand what it means to fear the Lord and to begin grasping true knowledge.
Image by Ralph Brandi (c)2003
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