FATAL NEGLECT

[Romans 3:19-24]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: In the first part of Romans 3, Paul talks about the law and the fact that none of us really measures up.

[Read Romans 3:19-20]

          We are going to come back to verse 20, but I want to make sure you hear it. He is talking about the law. We know about the law and about the desire that God has that we obey it, but here is what He says: “No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.”

[Read Romans 3:21-24]

Prayer for Illumination – Father, as we listen now to your voice, I pray that you would speak to each of our minds and each of our hearts. I pray that you would use even my words, if you will, but however you can speak to a particular heart where they need to hear, we ask that your Spirit would be unleashed in this place. Also, as those in our new member class prepare to share a brief testimony, I pray that you would make it clear to them and to us what the heart of that testimony is and that each of us will be called upon to reflect upon our own testimony to the grace of Jesus Christ at work in our lives. We pray this in your name through the power of your Spirit, AMEN.

Message

          For years, I carried around a little mole on my back. Not the cute little kind that burrows in . . . well, that’s not entirely true. In fact, if it does, you are in serious trouble! But I was not aware of this mole doing anything sinister like burrowing in. In fact, I was hardly aware of it at all. It was behind my back, after all, and I never really looked at it directly. As a result I seldom thought about it at all.

          Once in a while someone said to me, “You’ve got a lot of moles on your back.” “No worries,” I always replied, “just about everybody does, don’t they?” Occasionally it would bother me a little – nothing serious, just a little aggravating. I sort of wished it weren’t there, but with time I guess I got used to it – we’d lived together for a long time. We can even learn to live with pain, after all, it’s hardly worth troubling yourself over a little aggravation.

          A couple of times I did mention it to a medical person, but no one seemed to take it very seriously, so I determined I would not take it seriously either, and pretty much forgot about it. Anyway, truthfully, there never seemed to be a convenient time to take care of it. You understand how that is. Our lives are very busy.

          Last year about this time, during a routine physical, my doctor (a new doctor) said, “I’d like you to have a specialist look at this mole on your back.” I suppose I would have gotten around to it eventually, but he wrote out a note on the spot and told me to take it to his receptionist on the way out and have her make an appointment for me. I guess he understood more about me than I knew he understood. Thus a few weeks later a dermatologist was removing that mole and some surrounding tissue for testing. “Probably fine,” he said, “but we need to check it out.”

          A week or so later my phone rang. And, I noted, it was my doctor – not his receptionist or his nurse or an assistant, it was my doctor himself. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he told me. “Let’s start with the bad news. The tests have shown that this was a malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. We need to take it very seriously. The good news is that it does not appear to have gone too deep, but we will need to take more tissue to be certain.”

          So a few days later the surgeon had made an incision 8 inches long and a couple of inches wide in the middle of my back. It went down through (as some of you know who’ve been through this) three layers of tissue all the way to the underlying muscle. “Well,” I thought, “this guy is really thorough.” I wondered if it was all really necessary – it seemed like, if you’ll pardon the term, “overkill” to me – until he explained that a melanoma sends roots down from the surface and if they invade the lymph system, the cancer quickly spreads to other vital organs, primarily the brain, lungs, and liver; and . . . of course, it kills you.

          It had finally become clear to me that my neglect of even the smallest signs that something was wrong could well have proved fatal. It didn’t, by the way, as you can plainly see, but it has to continually be checked.

          Now perhaps you did not need a full medical report on my physical health, although it will not hurt to have reminded you how important it is to pay attention to what is happening in your body. We have spoken here before in fact that we are body, mind and spirit – that is the whole person. We have a stewardship, a responsibility for every aspect of that if we are going to be healthy. But the direct parallels in my story to our spiritual health are stunning if you stop and consider it. Let’s go back and trace them.

          I am certain that for many years, every one here in this room has been carrying around some innocuous-looking little sins on our backs. I’ll let you stop and think about yours, I certainly know mine. Perhaps it has never occurred to us that sins have a tendency to burrow in and, if you will, to make themselves at home with us. But we seldom look at them directly, and frankly spend very little time thinking about them at all. We’re busy with our lives.

          Once in a while someone may mention them to us, but we are generally dismissive, quite certain that everybody has their own little sins. There’s nothing unusual about mine. Occasionally those sins may bother us a little – nothing serious usually, just a little aggravation. And we get used to living with them, don’t we?

          If it ever comes up in conversation, hardly anyone else takes it seriously, and truthfully there never seems to be a time when it is convenient to deal with it. It’s entirely possible that this little habit of negligence may continue until it is, in fact, too late to deal with it. If we won’t do it ourselves, I hope there is somebody else who cares for us enough to make sure that we do deal with it.

          Because the reality is, sin is a malignancy! It often starts out looking harmless enough – just a little superficial aggravation. But it grows on you. And while you are not paying attention, it begins to send down roots from the surface. And those roots begin to spread the sin to other vital areas of your soul. And by the time you finally realize it, if you ever do, your sin has metastasized (that is an awful word, is it not?), and your life is in serious jeopardy. You cannot excise it yourself; you will need to submit to radical spiritual surgery.

          One of my roles, I suppose, is that of spiritual physician, or perhaps more accurately, physician’s assistant, for we all know who the Great Physician is, the One to whom each of us must turn. You, of course, do not have to do anything I say, ever, but my job is at least to call it to your attention, and perhaps even to make an appointment for you. And what I would recommend is a little diagnostic test. We did this in the New Member Class, so each of our new members knows where I’m going with all this. You have heard, I am sure, of the “7 Warning Signs of (Deadly) Cancer.” Well, we took a little time comparing our symptoms to the “10 Warning Signs of (Deadly) Sin.”

          What we did was take an hour or so to take a walk through the 10 Commandments and see if they revealed any symptoms of spiritual malaise in our lives. Have you ever done that? It is an excellent exercise. This is, after all, where we have arrived in our study of the book of Exodus this spring. So we asked ourselves these 10 questions. Listen because these are important questions, the 10 most important questions God wants us to ask ourselves.

1.       Do we have any priorities which absorb our time and energy and resources more than God? “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It’s a familiar word, isn’t it?

2.       Do we have our own preferred images of God – you know, tolerant and not judgmental, that sort of thing?

3.       Do we really take God seriously? Or do we take His name lightly?

4.       How are we doing with making it an absolute priority to nourish our relationship with God on the Sabbath? He thought it was one of the most important things we would ever be called upon to do.

5.       Do we concede parental authority in our families to the society around us? Let them set the standards and values for our lives?

6.       Do we let anger and resentment interfere with our relationship to others? Are there relationships that have not been healed because of your anger or your resentment?

7.       What about sexual sins? Do we let our corrupt, self-centered society set our standards here, or do we actually follow what God spelled out more clearly than most of us would like to hear?

8.       Does our personal goal of seeking every financial advantage justify cheating, unethical business practices, underpaying our employees, or failing to put in a good day’s work for a day’s pay?

9.       And what about gossip, carelessly impugning the reputation of others?

10.     Finally, are we content with and grateful for what God has given us, or are our needs and desires measured by the indulgence of the world around us?

          Maybe you didn’t recognize it, but those are the 10 Commandments, simply restated in terms of the challenges you and I face every day of our lives in our society and our time in history. What do they tell you about yourself? That is the important question. What do those 10 warning signs tell you about yourself and the condition of your soul?

          Some of us realized that we had failed this diagnostic test. A close look at the 10 Warning Signs of (Deadly) Sin showed us that we had been neglecting the health of our souls, and that if we did not do something about it, it would certainly prove fatal.

          That may be a new way of looking at the 10 Commandments for you. Mostly we think about a controlling God who doesn’t want us to do anything that sounds like fun. In fact, it is a diagnostic test to reveal the condition of our souls, what will keep us alive and healthy and growing and strong, or what will inevitably destroy us. That is certainly the way Paul treats it in Romans 3.

          Let me come back to the very heart of the text we read earlier. “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law [those to whom it applies], so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. [No more excuses. We are going to see what is really here.] Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law [nobody’s going to pass that test if you’re honest with it]; rather [here’s the purpose of this diagnostic test] through the law we become conscious of sin.” [Romans 3:19, 20]

          Do you understand what is happening here? Most of us deny that there is anything wrong with us. You are just like I was, spiritually as well as physically. We walk around saying, “Ah, we’re pretty healthy. We can handle anything.” God says that’s not in fact the case. There is a malignancy growing quietly in your soul. It is sending down roots and it will destroy you if you will not face it. God knows we have not kept His laws. This is no surprise to Him. In fact, He knows we are incapable of keeping these laws. That is the whole point. There is something wrong, there is something broken in us. Rather, He says, “through the law we become conscious of sin” – we realize something has to be done. When I finally faced the reality of what was happening in my body, I realized something had to be done and I could not do it myself. I had to turn to someone who could, and that is exactly the issue with our souls.

          It is at this point that we finally become conscious of our need for the Great Physician. We will not be able to do this alone. If we neglect our sin, we simply will not survive. You have God’s Word on that: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” he tells us in Romans 3:23. And remember, a little further on in that same letter, he states so succinctly, “the wages of sin is death.” That is the result. That is what is going to happen if we don’t deal with it. But that verse concludes, “but the free gift of God is eternal life [through] Jesus Christ our Lord,” [Romans 6:23] the author and finisher of our faith, the one who brings us life itself.

          It is only as we come to Jesus Christ that we can have our sins excised through his atoning blood on the cross, and only as we submit to his living Spirit in us that the righteousness we cannot muster by ourselves can be released in us. It is his righteousness which he releases through his Spirit within us. This is what we mean when we are finally humble enough and frankly realistic enough to admit our need for Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This is about realizing our need for God. Until we recognize it, we will not deal with the issues that are going to destroy us.

          It is the confession, by the way, which unites every true member of the Body of Christ. Indeed, it is the only way we can escape the fatal disease which has invaded our souls. And I am here to tell you today that I am delighted that the 10 people we are privileged to receive into membership this morning have recognized the symptoms. We took that diagnostic test – one of the new members was talking about it specifically at the first service – and we realized that we had failed and something had to be done. It is Jesus Christ, the Great Physician, and Him alone who brings us life.

Closing prayer – Father, you have spoken to us in your word, and we try to find ways around it; we continue our fatal neglect of our souls. The result is that we are bound for death. We are bound for an eternity separated from you unless we take seriously the word that we hear from you, our Creator, the One who loves us deeply, the One who died to redeem us from death, the One who rose again to put His life-giving Spirit in us. There is nothing like this in all the world’s religions. This is the only place where we meet you personally, and you say, We can deal with it. I’m not just going to urge you to get better when you cannot get better on your own. Rather, I want to release my Spirit in you. Come let me embrace you. Father, I thank you for each one here who has let you embrace them – not because we deserved it, but because we finally realized we could not do it on our own. That is when the transforming power of your Spirit is released in us and all things are made new. So we come to celebrate life, to celebrate redemption, to celebrate those who have stepped on that path to walk with you into life eternal. And we offer you our praise and our thanksgiving in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, AMEN.