What's In The Crawl Space?

The sermon study guide is here.

Philippians 4:4-9; Romans 12:1-3; Matthew 13:44-46

October 1/2, 2011 • Portage First UMC

INTRO VIDEO

John Ortberg tells about a Saturday night where his home was overcome by a smell so powerful and noxious it forced them to evacuate. Thinking it was a gas leak, they called the fire department, only to discover that the smell was actually a skunk that had gotten very close to the home. Ortberg says he tried to call some exterminators, but no one wanted anything to do with a skunk, so they put up with the smell until it went away. Actually, he says, they just got used to it and were only reminded of it when someone would stop by and say, “It smells like a skunk around here!” Wouldn’t you love to have that said about your house? Well, a week or so later, Ortberg got a call from his family saying the skunk had struck again. So he made some more calls, and finally found a specialist in skunk removal, a “skunk whisperer.” When the specialist arrived, he did a quick investigation and found not one, but two live skunks living in the crawl space under their house. What’s more, he also found they had a dead skunk in the crawl space. Now, if you’ve got three skunks occupying your crawl space, what do you do? Leave them there, right? I mean, eventually they’ll move on, hopefully, maybe. No! Of course not! Ortberg says he paid a great deal to get the skunks removed, but it was worth it. “You cannot,” he says, “get rid of the skunk odor without getting rid of the skunk” (The Me I Want To Be, pg. 89). Well, that’s an obvious truth, right? I mean, we know that to be true without even having to go through the experience of having a skunk living under our house. So if we recognize that to be true in the physical world, why don’t we believe that the same thing is true in the spiritual life?

This evening/morning, we’re continuing our series of messages on “The Me I Want To Be,” and we began last week by talking about how there are all these different sorts of “me’s” we live out, such as the me others think I should be, or the me that fails to be. But there’s also a “me” we want to be, and that’s the “me” God made us to be. God has put within you certain talents, passions, abilities so that you will become everything he dreamed of you being. And so last week I asked you to consider what it is that stands in the way of you becoming that person. What’s your “great wealth” that holds you back? That “thing” might be a sin or a way of life that is not pleasing to God. It might be something that “stinks up” our life like the skunk stunk up the house. It might even be something we’ve rationalized and made ourselves believe is okay. Whatever it is, maybe we think it will just go away. Or we can ignore it. But you can’t get rid of the smell without getting rid of the skunk. So this evening/morning, I want to ask a very simple question: in your spiritual house, what’s in the crawl space? What’s the thing you need removed in order to better become the person God has made you to be?

In his letter to the church at Rome, Paul spends quite a bit of time in the first several chapters outlining what it looks like when a person wanders away from God, when they let the skunks stick around. In the very first chapter, Paul says creation itself gives witness to God’s existence, that you can’t look at creation and not sense there is someone behind it all. You’ve experienced that, though you may not have said it that way. Why do we gaze at the beauty of a sunset? Why do we marvel at the majesty of the mountains? Every once in a while, I will turn off the lights in our kitchen and go out on the deck at night. And I’ll just sit there and stare up at the stars. Our subdivision is not so overrun with street lights that we can’t see the stars. And when I look out at those points of light, and I think about how long that light has travelled to get to me, how far away those stars are, how long they’ve been burning…it never fails to move me. I can’t look at creation and deny that there is a creator. The psalmist put it this way: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them” (Psalm 8:3-4)? Paul says we are “without excuse” because creation reveals God’s character, God’s nature. But then he recognizes what happens when we turn our hearts and minds away from God: “Although [humankind] claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts” (1:22-24). That’s what happens, Paul says, when we let the skunks live in the crawl space. It stinks up everything. It stinks up our lives. That’s the result of a worldly mind. And you can read, in the first eleven chapters of Romans, how Paul sees that all working out.

But then we come to our passage for this evening/morning, which is a call to a different way of life. “Do not conform,” Paul says, “to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2). Bible translator J. B. Phillips put that verse this way: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold” (qtd. in Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X, pg. 705). I like that. Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold. We have a choice, Paul says, between being conformed and being transformed, between having a mind that is shaped by the world (the sort of thing he’s described in the last eleven chapters) and having a mind that is shaped by God, and he says the end result of a transformed mind is this: “You will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (12:2). A conformed mind is like having skunks live in your crawl space. A renewed mind is in tune with God, enough to sense and know what God is calling that person to do and to be. A renewed mind represents a person that is becoming who God intended them to be from the very beginning because what we think—what hangs out in our mind—inevitably produces the way we live. So don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold.

Now, Paul is not saying that the whole world is evil, that everything in the world should be rejected and kept at arm’s length, though some Christians have chosen such a lifestyle. I’ve been reading the book Amish Grace, and while it’s primarily about their practice of forgiveness, I’ve learned how their lifestyle and their choice to live apart from the world is done so they can better follow Jesus. It’s their belief that all the stuff of the world is a big distraction, and to some extent they’re right. But that doesn’t make everything bad. There are ways to redeem what’s in the world, which is what a church in Georgia has been trying to do over the last few years by making movies. Their latest effort, Courageous, released this weekend. A renewed mind, like Paul is describing, is a mind that is decisively counter-cultural. We evaluate what’s going on and recognize when the world is trying to lead us away from God’s path. An unrenewed mind just accepts everything as it is; it hopes the skunk smell will just go away. A renewed mind can see an event or a lifestyle and say, “No, Jesus calls us to live this way, not that way” (Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part Two, pg. 69). A renewed mind doesn’t reject everything in the world, but evaluates it against the higher standard Jesus has called us to. Paul put it this way: “The mind governed by the flesh [or world] is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). A renewed mind seeks a way of life that is life-giving rather than hurt-bringing.

This takes effort and commitment, which is why in the very first verse of this chapter, Paul urges us to offer our body [which represents our life] as a “living sacrifice” (12:1). Now, a sacrifice, by its very definition, is something precious and valued that is offered to a god as a sign of commitment. In some ancient cultures, human sacrifice was practiced, but never in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And yet, here, Paul uses that imagery to talk about the sort of commitment we should be giving to God if we’re going to become the person God wants us to be. We give our very lives. We give up our wants, our preferences in order to become who God wants us to be. That’s the image of a living sacrifice. Give your life, everything you are, to the God who wants to use you, to shape you, to mold you into the person he dreamed you would become when he thought you up. Our “true and proper worship” (12:1) is giving ourselves to God so we can be transformed rather than conformed.

So how do we “renew” our mind? How do get rid of the skunks in the crawl space? Well, you know the old saying, “Garbage in, garbage out”? It’s much like that. Our minds are reflective of what we choose to put into our lives. Sometimes people say, “I can’t control my thoughts. I can’t determine what goes through my mind!” If that’s true, then we’re no different from the animals. The Bible says God has given the capacity to “set” our minds on certain things. In the letter to Philippians, Paul reminds us we can choose to focus on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable (4:8). We choose to focus on what is excellent or praiseworthy. But to do that, we have to first take the bad stuff out. If we want to get rid of the skunk smell, we have to first get rid of the skunk. And perhaps the biggest “skunk” in our world today is fear and worry. We live in a world that feeds on fear. We are surrounded by a culture that wants us to worry. The nightly news blares all the things we should be afraid of: the stock market went down, someone was murdered again in the next city over, the politicians who are on the opposite side of you might get elected, you might not have enough money to get by, the storms of life just might overwhelm you. The list of things that our minds worry about could go on and on. Trust me, I know. I’m a worrier by nature. I lay in bed, sometimes in the middle of the night, and listen to my own voice in my head telling me what I need to fear. Did I pay that bill? How am I going to have enough money to send my kids to college? What if this situation doesn’t work out the way I think it should? What if, what if, what if? You know what? We never ever have a picture in the Gospels of Jesus sitting around and worrying. Into the storm, Jesus says, “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39, KJV). To a group of frightened disciples, on a Sunday morning when they had discovered Jesus’ body was missing, he suddenly appears among them and says, “Peace be with you.” (Luke 24:36). Jesus brings peace, not worry or fear. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re always going to be in easy situations. Jesus’ life was not easy, nor was Paul’s. Paul faced shipwreck, arrest, imprisonment, and was nearly killed several times. “God rarely sends people into situations where their comfort level is high. Rather He promises to be with them in their fear” (Ortberg 116). Peace doesn’t come from an absence of storms in our lives. Peace comes when we allow Jesus to walk with us through the storms. The Bible says, “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). And who is it that brings perfect love? It’s Jesus. The first step in renewing our minds is to set our minds away from the bad stuff, from the worry and fear in our lives.

But we have to not only remove the bad stuff, we need to start putting in good stuff. The “good stuff” is the choices we make of what to focus on, to do particular things that will open our lives to God, that will allow God to work in such a way that we begin to become more the me we were meant to be. I want to suggest three things this evening/morning that we can put in our minds and our lives that will lead us along that path, and the first thing is to renew our minds with study. And, as you might guess, the “study” I’m talking about in particular is study of the Scriptures. Today, “Scripture has never been easier to obtain, and Scripture has never been more difficult to absorb” (Ortberg 105). On the “easy to obtain” end, you can find gobs of translations nearly anywhere, even at Wal-Mart! But you need a translation that makes sense to you, one you can understand, in modern language. I love the poetic language of the classic translations like the King James, but I don’t speak 17th century English and I need to be able to understand what I read. Here in worship, we use the New International Version, and if you don’t have a Bible and you don’t have the resources for getting one, let me know. We’ll make sure you get one. Or if you have a smartphone, there are apps that let you download the Bible for free. Some of them, like the one I have on my iPhone, even have a plan for reading through the Bible. Every day, it gives you passages to read. But the best way to study the Scriptures is in a small group. We continue to have a dream and a goal here of every person being involved in a small group of some sort. Maybe the groups that currently meet don’t fit your time frame. Well, then, start one. Get a few friends together. Pastor Deb and I are available and willing to help you find resources. Study a book, study a topic, study the stories of the Gospels. Read, ask questions, memorize passages so they’re in your heart, and come with an attitude of expectancy, believing the Bible has something to say to you. We replace the bad stuff like worry by inserting good stuff like the words of Jesus.

But once we’ve read and studied, it’s time to respond, and so a second way we renew our minds is by putting our bodies into action. We serve. And this next week, we have a fantastic way to do that. Jesus says one of the ways his followers are distinguished from the rest of the world is that they feed those who are hungry, and that by doing so we are feeding or serving him (cf. Matthew 25:35). This evening/morning, we’re launching another push of “Stepping Out, Stopping Hunger,” which is a week-long emphasis where we take grocery bags out into our neighborhoods and invite people to contribute food that will then be collected next weekend and taken to the Food Pantry. Well, I think this video explains it better than I can. Let’s watch.

VIDEO: Stepping Out, Stopping Hunger

So we renew our mind by getting our body in gear and serving Jesus by serving others. It’s a response to our reading of the Scriptures, of what Jesus calls us to do. I hope you’ll participate, and you can pick up your grocery bags at the end of the service today.

But there’s one other way I want to suggest that we can renew our minds, and that is through worship. I’ve shared this before, but in the darkest times in my own life, worship has been what has redirected my mind toward greater things, toward a greater God who knows what I’m going through and who, I’m always reminded, is walking with me through it. The writer of the psalms felt that way in Psalm 73, and agonized over all the things going wrong. He spent much time worrying over why those who were against God seemed to be getting away with it, and why the righteous, those who want to follow God, seem to be struggling. He writes, “When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny” (73:16-17). Worship changes our perspective. Worship enables us to begin to see the world the way God sees it. Worship renews our mind, and maybe at no other time more than when we come to the communion table. This bread and this cup remind us how Jesus came and turned the world’s thinking on its head. I mean, seriously, who in our world believes that suffering can be redeemed, that a cross can provide salvation, that the Son of God can take away our sins? It’s only found in this faith, represented by the bread and the cup. Worship and communion change us, they renew our mind by giving us God’s perspective. When I go a week without worship or a month without communion, I find that I shrivel up inside. I find that it’s easy to let my mind slip back into old patterns. It’s easy to let the skunk live and die in my crawl space. Worship renews the mind and transforms the worshipper.

In the gospel reading this morning (Matthew 13), there are two short parables, stories with a point, Jesus tells about the value of the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God. In the first one, a man finds a treasure buried in a field, and in order to obtain the treasure, he’s willing to give everything he has to buy the field. In the second parable, there’s a merchant who is scouring the earth to find a valuable pearl, and when he comes across it, perhaps in a side-street market, he sells everything he has to obtain it. The point of both parables is the same: being part of the kingdom is worth giving everything we have. It’s worthy doing whatever we need to do in order to renew our minds, to remove the skunks from the crawl space. The kingdom of God is worth everything. Jesus came and gave everything. He gave his life so we could be saved from our sins and enter the kingdom. He literally gave everything. So, therefore, “in view of God’s mercy,” I urge you to do whatever it takes to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:1-2). Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold. Instead, as we receive communion today, make a new commitment to doing whatever it takes to become the me you want to be. Let’s prepare our hearts for holy communion.