Snakes and Doves II

Snakes and Doves – Part II
April 2, 2006
Romans 16:19-20

The first time that I ever went snow skiing was when I was an exchange student in Germany and fifteen years old. Winter came late that year – they accused me of bringing California weather to Southern Germany; but when it finally did came it came with a vengeance.

One day in early December the “Father” in the family where I was living offered to take me with him to the Black Forest for a day of skiing. He rummaged through the cupboard down in the basement of ‘our’ house in Breisach and pulled out a pair of leather ski boots, that had belonged to his son years before, and a set of very long polished mahogany skis.

I’m guessing that to see such equipment nowadays, you’d have to go to a museum; but there we were. We drove an hour or two through the winter wonderland of the Black Forest to a tiny ski resort somewhere outside of Freiburg, Germany.

But the strange thing about the trip was that when we got there, Herr Schwoerer would not allow me to purchase a lift ticket. He said it was too dangerous and insisted that I should learn to ski by walking up the hill instead. At the time, I had never been to a ski resort and never really known anyone else who skied on a regular basis and so, being rather naïve, I didn’t think much about it and I just did what he said.

He showed me a couple of things for about ten minutes or so down on the flat and then he disappeared up the lift and I didn’t see him until the afternoon. Meanwhile, I spent the rest of day trudging up the slope a few hundred feet and sliding down the hill to the bottom of the lift and then taking off my skis and doing it all over again.

At the end of the day, Herr Schwoerer appeared, watched me come down my little hill; pronounced my progress to be good – which made me feel good – and then we drove home together. And the truth is that I had a good day. Skiing turned out to be a pretty exhausting sport – much more than I thought it would be, but it was fun anyway.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later when my German brothers and sisters heard what had happened that day that I knew anything was amiss. They were scandalized when they found out their father had actually made me walk up the hill at a ski resort.

They told me later on that he was jealous of the attention his wife was paying me while I was there - and that, together with a little bit of residual resentment over World War II, gave him sufficient motivation to find ways to subtly torment me!

Of course, when I was a senior in High School, I got to go on a ski trip with friends and that’s when I found out what ‘downhill’ skiing was really about. You actually don’t have to walk up the hill. There are special mechanisms designed to carry you up instead – some of them fiendishly designed to dump you unceremoniously onto a steep slope in the midst of a bunch of experienced skiers who scowl at your inexperience; but still it is a LOT more fun.

In fact, I would guess that if ski lifts had never been invented and everyone had to walk up the slope to go skiing there would be far fewer skiers in this world – why? Because it’s much easier to go down hill than it is to go up! In downhill skiing gravity, which is an often problematic reality, is your friend.

All this was brought to my mind this past week as I read again the story of Noah’s Ark in Gen 6. Noah’s flood, as most of you know, was an expression of God’ s judgment on the people of the earth because of their wickedness. .

Listen to God’s motivation in Gen 6:5-6. It says, “… The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.” NIV

On the whole earth, there was only Noah who found favor in the eyes of God – only one man who went against the flow; who was determined to be righteous even in the face of the wickedness of the whole earth.

And so God preserved Noah and his family and wiped out all of the rest of the people on the face of the earth; but even at the end of the story – after the floodwaters had begun to recede and the Ark had come to rest on Mt. Ararat and Noah and his sons and daughters and all of the animals had come out of the Ark and Noah had built an altar and sacrificed to God, even then the promise of the Lord acknowledges the plight of humanity.

In Gen 8:21right at the foot of the rainbow God said, "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.” NIV This is God’s statement on the moral condition of humanity: “Every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood!”

Human hearts are like ski slopes. It takes tremendous commitment and effort and energy to slog our way uphill toward the goal of righteousness. It is a whole lot easier – frighteningly easy in fact if you fall– to slide down the hill toward evil.

The inclination of our hearts IS toward evil. G.K. Chesterton said that the depravity of man is the only basic Christian doctrine that is empirically provable. All you have to do is look around you at the state of society to see this truth in action.

The reason, for example, that power corrupts is because people are evil. If people were good, well, then when they achieved personal power they would use that power for good. Kings would use their power to bring justice to their people, not to amass mounds of gold in their treasuries; husbands would use their power to please their wives (not discard them and find more); dictators would wage peace and prosperity, not build war machines to conquer their neighbors.

If people were basically good, then Power would magnify that goodness; not corrupt it. But the problem is that the struggle for righteousness is consistently up hill. Rulers like George Washington, who willingly set aside his personal power in favor of what was best for his people, are rare indeed.

Instead, history has shown again and again that power invariably magnifies the evil in the heart of man. It turns apparently well-meaning revolutionaries into promiscuous power-mongers; it turns idealistic freshmen congressmen into cynical influence peddlers.

Power corrupts… and so does money. It is truly frightening to look around the world of professional sports in our day. Here are a number of young men, often from poor backgrounds, who are suddenly put in the possession of millions of dollars. All kinds of things that were completely beyond their reach, are suddenly within their grasp.

Now, sure you here the odd story of a newly rich professional football player who sets Mom in a new house or buys Dad a sports car. But all too often, instead, their new lives are nothing but a long litany of decadence and dissipation; filled with sex and drugs and mindless spending so that when their short ride with the NFL or NBA is over they are left with little more than what they started.

Power Corrupts because the inclination of our hearts is toward evil. Money corrupts because the inclination of hearts is toward evil all the time. And I’m pretty certain that if you are honest with yourself, you will have to admit that all too often the same is true in your own heart – even in basic and simply ways..

Think about food. I don’t know about you; but the inclination of my heart is toward chocolate chip cookies not broccoli; the inclination of my heart is toward a thick juicy steak and not tofu.

The inclination of my heart is toward salt and sugar and caffeine and cholesterol – and the truth is that if my appetite in this area were left entirely to its own devices, I’d probably weigh 400 pounds and have other health problems as well. It’s only because I consciously choose to eat healthy foods, that asparagus and Brussels sprouts are on the menu at our house at all!

Of course, I know that if I indulge every whim that I have in the area of food I will suffer – either with an upset stomach today or even more serious problems down the line – and it is my commitment to health and an understanding of the future that help inspire me to go against my desires.

And you can see this kind of inclination in so many areas of life. If we always went with the inclination of our hearts; chances are we’d read the funnies and never the Bible; chances are we would drive our cars and never walk; chances are we’d go to the beach instead of to work.

Sure, there are exceptions to these rules; but only because we have begun to understand the long term effects of going with the flow; only because there are so many immediately negative consequences to these preferred behaviors so that we eventually learn NOT to indulge.

It’s easy to go downhill. It’s easy to slide into sin. This is the depravity of man. It seems so obvious… and yet still this truth is beyond the grasp of many modern spiritualists; and it is a discussion that we are forced to have again and again with non-Christians.

They have read the book “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” and they desperately want it to be true. They have a kind of cock-eyed optimism about the state of the world. They are willing to hope against hope that humanity can usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity based upon the basic goodness of mankind. In spite of the evidence, they don’t want to believe that they are anything less than pretty good people.

And yet the depravity of man is a basic component of Christian theology. It is central to the theology of the Book of Romans. Rom 3:9-12 says, for example, that “… Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin.” (And then he quotes from the Old Testament. He says…) “As it is written: There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” NIV

The upshot of these verses is this: in order to please God, we have to learn to go against the inclination of our hearts; we have to learn to go against the flow; we have to strive mightily toward righteousness; and refuse to slide down the natural incline of our hearts.

And this is the message of our scripture for this morning, which is found in Rom 16:19-20. Let’s read it together, “Everyone has heard about your (that would be the Romans) obedience, so I am full of joy over you; but I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. “ NIV

Paul says, “I want you to be wise about what is good and innocent about what is evil.” I told you last week there might be a whole sermon in this verse – and lo and behold, there was.” And as I did last week, I would like to combine Rom 16:19 – or perhaps illuminate it – with the words of Jesus in Matt 10:16 when He commanded his disciples to be snakes. Remember this? He said to them, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” NIV

In these verses Paul (and Jesus) in very simple terms set forth two ways that we can GO AGAINST THE FLOW; two ways to follow God instead of the ways of this world – we are going to take them this morning in reverse order.

First, I would like for us to consider Paul (and Jesus’) command to “BE INNOCENT ABOUT EVIL;” to be DOVES in this world. This is not the common inclination of our age. In fact, innocence of evil is the opposite of the reality of today. Rather than being an admirable character trait in our time, innocence is often the object of ridicule. Witness the fact that as a society we are robbing our children of their childhood at an increasingly earlier age.

I have watched parents carrying two and three year olds into R rated movies at the theater – movies I wouldn’t see myself! I have heard a flood of four-letter words come out of the mouth of a five-year old child. Go to the average Middle School in San Diego County and you will see twelve and thirteen year old girls dressed more like prostitutes than pre-teens. Innocence is out of style.

A few years back, I went to a teen club down off Morena Boulevard called SOMA. It was supposed to be an alcohol-free place where kids could hang out and have fun in relative safety. I had a daughter who wanted to go, so I thought I would check it out.

I was not impressed. There may have been no alcohol for sale on the premises, but at least half of the kids looked stoned out of their minds anyway. There were also a lot of things going on in the hallways that were likely to produce babies if taken to their natural conclusion. These kids were fifteen going on twenty-five. They were obviously desperate to grow up… without the brain cells to take them safely into maturity.

And the aspects of adulthood that these kids and many others seek aren’t the good and admirable parts of maturity anyway –only the evil ones. Even ‘adult’ movies are really for people who have never grown up.

Stand beside the supermarket check-out counter at the grocery store and you get a feel for how inclined we are in our society to be ‘innocent about evil.’ The headlines on Cosmopolitan Magazine read like a porn flick. Magazines like The National Enquirer and even People pander to our basest instincts; to our insatiable desire to know evil.

You don’t see a whole lot of literature at the checkout counter that might inspire innocence! Why? Because the natural inclination of our hearts is a desire be wise about evil! For some reason, we are attracted to it like moths to the flame!

It’s an old picture, but it’s a good one. Set a bright light outside on a dark summer night in the countryside and you will invariably attract moths – they come from miles away – and they will beat themselves literally to death against your light. I’m not sure exactly what they are looking for – maybe it’s a mating opportunity or some kind of food; but it’s pretty certain that they will never find either of those things on your back porch.

And still they come; they throw themselves at the light with abandon until their wings are tattered and their bodies are burned and they fall senseless to the ground. So often people are just like that when it comes to evil. They find evil attractive, even when it brings them only pain. They are unable to set it aside; even though they know that it will never satisfy the longings of their heart.

Paul says, “Don’t let it happen to you!” Don’t seek after evil; or even the knowledge of it! “Do not love the world or anything in the world,” says John in 1 John 2:15-17. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”

Doing the will of God, means being innocent about evil! It is a theme the recurs again and again throughout the New Testament – let me share just two pictures that help illustrate this point; two verbs that can help you to be ‘innocent about evil.’

The first verb is the verb “FLEE!” 2 Tim 2:22 says, “Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” NIV

Notice there is no mention here about boys being boys. There is no permission for sowing wild oats – and I will tell you that those who have sown those oats and eventually come back to the Lord invariably wish that they had followed Paul’s advice in the first place. Evil is attractive and seductive from the outside. It promises us pleasure and satisfaction – but it delivers only ashes.

The end result of disobedience to God is always pain and suffering; it may appeal to the inclination of the heart for a while; but in the end it only separates us from the only real satisfaction, the only real delight, the pleasure of peace with God!

Jesus’ command to ‘be doves’ is appropriate here; birds are exceptionally good at fleeing. We have a lot of doves in our neighborhood. Last spring, a pair made a nest on top of the rain gutter beside our garage. I often come around the corner at the side of the house and find a dove foraging on the sidewalk in front of me – and you know what the first thing is that that dove does when it sees me? It flies. It leaps up off the sidewalk with a gentle whirring sound and flaps off into the trees away from danger.

My own parrot has exactly the same instincts, even though she has lived her whole life in a cage. My bird loves me and knows me very well, but if I walk by her cage with a broomstick in my hand or some other large object, she often falls off her perch trying to flee from danger. It’s a natural instinct.

And Jesus says that we ought to be exactly the same – anxious to get away from evil; ready to flee at a moment’s notice. We ought to be doves, not moths; legitimately afraid of danger; anxious to maintain the purity of our thoughts and the innocence of our minds! This is what it means to follow Christ!

If you are tempted by the magazine rack at the local convenience store then go elsewhere; if you can’t stop with one or two glasses of wine at dinnertime, don’t drink; if money runs through your fingers like water; then establish a savings account routine that cannot be violated without great difficulty.

The best thing that we can do in the face of evil is to flee from it – it’s a great way to obey Paul’s command to “Be Innocent about evil.” But there’s more. Not only should we FLEE evil situations… and we should also CAPTURE evil thoughts.

2 Cor 10:4-5 says, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and (now here it is) we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” NIV Don’t you like that? We take captive every thought.

The frontline in the battle for your soul is found – not in some distant city, not in the church or at the liquor store or at work or at school – the frontline of the battle for your soul is found in your MIND! The key to Going against the Flow of evil in your life is to take control of your thoughts.

This has been an ongoing theme of Romans. It was the message of Rom 8:6 where Paul said, “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace…” It was the message of Rom 12:2 – a verse that could be worked into just every sermon ever preached, “ Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

As Christians we can’t just let every thought run free – there are times when we have to take them captive! Arrest them! Throw handcuffs on them! Haul them off to a concentration camp! Lock them up and throw away the key!

In fact, taking our thoughts captive is one of the major themes of the Sermon on the Mount! Remember? Jesus said, (in Matt 5:21-22) “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” That’s taking your thoughts captive – before they have time to act on their impulse.

Seeking reconciliation instead of martyrdom; seeking to work things out instead of piling up problems; refusing to play negative tapes in your mind about someone you love – these are ways that we can grow together in the Lord. Take evil thoughts captive and harness your brainpower for good instead. And Jesus goes on.

In Matt 5:27-28, He says, "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Again this is ‘taking your thoughts captive.’ Looking at a woman lustfully is just one step down the broad road – and unless that thought is taken captive, then it will lead you in places you should not go.

Why? Because your mind is the front line in the war against evil. As Jesus puts it in Luke 6:45, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” NIV

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” You might as well say, “I thought, therefore I became” Our minds are the vanguard of our actions; they are an indication of what we will do in the future!

We should never invite evil into our lives by entertaining evil thoughts. It is far better to arrest them early and then haul them off into permanent captivity. Being Innocent about evil is a matter of FLEEING sin and CAPTURING evil thoughts.

But Being innocent of Evil is just one side of the coin. We are also called to be WISE about WHAT is GOOD! We are to be as Wise as Serpents when it comes to good things. We are to be crafty and ingenious! We are to be plotting good works on our beds at night and scheming about how to bring good things to pass during the day!

Again, let’s look at this point in terms of two New Testament verbs. First, HAVE… have the MIND of Christ. That’s Phil 2:5… “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus…” NKJV

Going against the flow isn’t just a matter of emptying our minds of evil thoughts! Even more important, it is also a matter of filling UP our minds with the goodness of God! It is a matter of concentrating upon the things of God.

Jesus actually warns us against cleaning our house without immediately filling it up with good things. In Luke 11:23-26 he says: