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MILKSHAKES AND OBEDIENCE #4
IS FAKE GOODNESS BETTER THAN NONE?
Humorist Art Buchwald wrote a tongue-in-cheek article
many years ago where a psychiatrist said to him, “If you don’t vent some
of your anger, your feelings of turmoil, you’re going to have an ulcer.
If you’re mad, sound off. Don’t be a nice guy all the time.”
Well, in a way, that advice goes right onto the therapy couch where WE’VE
been sitting all week. If we have bad desires and sinful tendencies, should
we fight them or just live them out in reckless abandon? I mean, if looking
on a woman lustfully IS the same as adultery . . . may as well go to a
motel and commit the physical act too. Right?
Anyway, Buchwald went home ready to follow doctor’s orders. His wife tried
to give him a kiss at the front door, like she always did, and he snapped
at her. “Stop kissing me all the time. We’re adults. We’ve been married
a long time. We don’t always have to be kissing like a couple of kids.”
His wife turned red in the face, went in the house, and slammed the door.
“I felt better already,” he wrote.
That evening at supper, his son Joel said, very politely, “Please pass
the potatoes, Dad.” “What are you interrupting for?” “All I said was,
‘Please pass the potatoes.’” “That can be considered an interruption.”
“Don’t start on HIM now,” the wife said.
“I’m sick of being Mr. Nice Guy,” Buchwald told them. “First it’s potatoes,
then he’ll want to borrow the car, and go out with girls; pretty soon
he’ll be drinking and smoking. Somebody has to draw the line somewhere.
He’ll thank me someday for not passing the potatoes.”
So all evening long, Buchwald vented his nasty temper on everybody, right
down to the paper boy who came collecting for the newspapers. The next
morning, he went to his doctor and said, “Your advice was terrible. My
wife wants a divorce, my son has run away, I can’t get newspapers delivered
anymore, and the whole neighborhood hates me.” And the doctor says, “Hmmm.
I guess you’re right. Maybe you should take up golf instead.” And Buchwald
responds: “Now you tell me!”
Well, it’s a cute story, but it’s actually more spiritually REAL than
maybe we want to admit. Again, here’s our series title: MILKSHAKES AND
OBEDIENCE. If God commanded us to drink five milkshakes a day, we could
easily obey Him in THAT. But He asks us HARD things instead. “Love Him
with all our hearts.” “Don’t desire what our neighbors have.” “Keep your
mind pure in this R-rated world.” “Honor heaven in what you eat and drink”
– speaking of milkshakes. “Kiss your wife and be sweet to your kid even
when your radiator is boiling over.”
The hard-as-nails question is this: what should we do with this ongoing,
lifetime-struggle-dichotomy between the commands of God and our base desires?
“Be ye perfect,” God says. Well, we’re not. “Love the holy things of God.”
Well, we don’t. “Love your neighbor and do good to those who spitefully
use you.” Well, we don’t feel like doing that. We feel like turning the
hose on him and stealing his pretty wife and his new HDTV television.
We mentioned the other day a concept called “true obedience.” Or “NATURAL
obedience.” That’s the kind of obedience where you WANT to do the good
thing. You WANT to read the Bible . . . so it’s easy to do that. You WANT
to sing praises to God in church — so, no problem. You WANT to worship
only God; you WANT to love others. There’s no huge merit in doing the
things that come naturally, but some folks seem to have that advantage.
The rest of us, like poor Art Buchwald, want to “smack people upside the
head,” as the old saying used to go.
Well, friend, let’s put one Bible principle on the table right now. There
is NO salvation, and no victory to be found, in simply gritting our teeth
and doing good things. If you don’t hit your neighbor, and if you don’t
drink that forbidden milkshake by simple, raw willpower . . . there’s
no salvation merit in doing so.
“By observing the law no one will be justified.”
That’s Galatians 2:16.
Okay. So what’s principle number two? Here it is. TRUE obedience — where
good deeds come naturally, and where sinful temptations are UNappealing
to us — can only happen by living in relationship with Jesus Christ, and
allowing Him to transform our minds. Which – we studied this yesterday
– might be the slow process of a LIFETIME. But Jesus promises to stay
with us FOR that lifetime; He gives us assurance of salvation every mile
of the road . . . IF we’ll stay with Him the whole way.
If Mr. Buchwald — to keep picking on him for a moment here — will ABIDE
in Jesus all the way to the heavenly finish line, he slowly but surely
will WANT to kiss his wife, and be loving to his son, and pay the paper
boy what he owes. It will come naturally to obey. I remember a Christian
writer observing: “Sin will BECOME hateful to us.”
All through the book of Romans, Paul writes about this. And remember,
he confessed that HIS desires ran in the opposite direction from God’s
holy Law too. “I do what I DON’T want; I DON’T do what I DO want.” Remember
that one? “Woe is me”? But he also writes eloquently about “the obedience
that comes FROM faith.” Faith in who? Jesus, of course. And certainly,
faith COMES by being in relationship, by learning to love and trust. Romans
1:17 puts it this way:
“A righteousness that is by faith FROM FIRST TO LAST.”
A great old book people in my Adventist denomination
dearly love is entitled Steps to Christ. Here’s what the writer says on
this topic. Art Buchwald, take note. Lonnie Melashenko, you take note
too.
“Christ changes the heart.” P.S. It might take a lifetime,
but He changes the heart. “He abides in your heart BY FAITH. You are to
MAINTAIN this connection with Christ by faith and the continual surrender
of your will to Him; and so long as you do this, He will work IN you to
will and to do according to His good pleasure. . . . Then with Christ
working IN you, you will manifest the same spirit and do the same good
works — works of righteousness, obedience.”
And now — the good news — you will obey NATURALLY.
Like a husband who is madly in love with his wife and finds it easy to
shop for her, easy to dote on her, easy to want to please her. When’s
the last time someone gritted their teeth on their honeymoon?
But now . . . what about in the meantime? What if you’re a brand new Christian,
and you feel like hitting me over the head for something I’ve done to
you? Or you feel like taking my wife? You’re walking with Jesus, but the
relationship hasn’t yet “kicked in” to the point where those desires have
faded away. To NOT hit me — by gritting your teeth and counting to ten
— would be, in a sense, FALSE obedience. Should you just go ahead and
do it then?
Well, friend, forgive me for hoping that you DON’T! If you’re wanting
to hit me, or take my car or my wife, I can’t help but think that false
obedience is better than none. And I would suggest to you that in this
arduous Christian walk, our FIRST effort certainly should be to know Jesus
as a Friend. But our SECOND effort should be to obey, to do what God asks
us to do. Not to GET saved, but because we ARE saved. “Obeying in a new,
less worried way,” is how C. S. Lewis puts it. If you have to grit your
teeth, then grit them. Because it’s better to not hit our neighbors than
to hit them, even if you FEEL like hitting them. And if the veins on your
neck stand out in anger — better the veins than the flying fists of fury.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit more on this issue of what to do when you don’t
FEEL like being good and holy. Notice:
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your
neighbor; ACT as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the
great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will
presently come to love him.”
Maybe this is a kind of “holy hypocrisy”; I don’t know.
In business, they say: “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Lewis goes on:
“[People] are told they ought to love God. They cannot
find any such feelings IN themselves. What are they to do? The answer
is the same as before. ACT as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture
feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I
do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”
Then he shares this wonderful news:
“Nobody can ALWAYS have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings
are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards
God or towards man, if an affair of the WILL. If we are trying to do His
will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’
He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them
for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing
to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, HIS love for US
does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore,
it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of
those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Himself.”
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