Sermon from 2-5-06
Second sermon in series on Weird Christian Beliefs. For the text of the sermon see
Genesis 3:1-13
Romans 7:14-8:2
During the hours before D-day, three chaplains-Reverend Paul Peterson, Father Mike O'Connor, and Rabbi Henry Birnbaum-sat together and solemnly discussed the possibility that one or more of them might be killed in the next few hours.
"It makes one feel the necessity of unburdening one's soul and making confession," said Father Mike. "I must own up to a terrible impulse to drink. Oh, I fight it, I do; but the temptation haunts me constantly, and sometimes I give in to it."
"Well," said Reverend Paul, "I don't have too much trouble with liquor, but I must own up to the terrible sexual urges I feel toward attractive women. I fight this temptation desperately, but every once in a while, I fail to resist."
After that, there was a pause. Finally both turned to the Jewish chaplain and one said, "And you, Henry, are you troubled with a besetting sin, too? What is your persistent temptation?"
Rabbi Birnbaum sighed and said, "I'm afraid I have a terrible, irresistible impulse to gossip."
Most of us don’t like to talk about sin, don’t like to think about sin. But the Christian community has always insisted that the human condition can be described as sinful. So let’s think about what this weird doctrine of sin might involve.
People I know tend to have one of three reactions to the idea of sin.
1. The first reaction to sin is that it doesn’t really exist, or it is, at the very least, an outdated and slightly offensive concept. After all, human beings are basically good; any bad has to do with societal influences or negative circumstances. And people like you and me aren’t “sinners,” we usually do the right thing. Furthermore, one doesn’t need to believe in a God in order to be a good person, look at all the people who do perfectly well without God. People can be moral creatures because that is what is best for them and for society. In other words, it isn’t necessary to believe in God to know that if we allow murder, then society will rapidly break down.
In addition, it is somewhat offensive to good people to call them “sinners” so we have to find another way to approach it. One large and successful ministry, Joel Osteen ministries, has found a way to limit what it says about sin: On his website he states that WE BELIEVE…Jesus died on the cross and shed His blood for our sins. And yet he also affirms that WE BELIEVE…as children of God, we are overcomers and more than conquerors and God intends for each of us to experience the abundant life He has in store for us.
In a sermon on “Feeling Good About Yourself”, Osteen says,
We all have weaknesses, but as long as we are pressing forward, God is pleased with us. One of the worst things you can do is beat yourself up over your shortcomings. You are the apple of God’s eye, so shake off your self-condemnation and learn to say positive things about yourself.
Another sermon on “Don’t Get Stagnant” says,
It is easy to get stuck in a rut. Many times we just sit back and learn to live with things that are less than God’s best. But you can stir your faith today to rise up higher, be happier, have a better marriage and live a more fulfilled life. We’ve got to learn how to shake off complacency.
So what we used to say was “sin” is now a “weakness” or being “complacency.” (I am not really picking on Joel Osteen ministries, he happens to have a website that is easily accessible!)
Many feel that this is a more appropriate way to talk to our children, because, after all, we don’t want them thinking they are bad people; that might lead to self-esteem problems.
2. The second reaction is that sin is popular and a tremendous amount of fun. Not only is sin fun, but if you aren’t involved in some kind of sin, you are probably a little weird and you need to get with the program. After all, think about all the shows on tv. From “Desperate Housewives” to “24”, from the Evening news to “Entertainment Tonight,” what we watch are shows that take sin for granted, and in many cases make sin an odd kind of virtue. If you are not involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage then you must be cold and unfeeling. If you aren’t willing to torture the bad guys then you aren’t patriotic. If you aren’t reporting on scandal or involved in scandal, then you aren’t marketable.
Maybe we don’t really want to have an affair with the kid who cuts the lawn or blow away the bad guys, but isn’t there something just really satisfying about watching people who do?
Furthermore, if you are beautiful or wealthy or famous, then the ordinary morality of the lesser mortals really doesn’t apply to you. Or maybe it’s just that you do so much good speaking for the children of the world or contributing money to AIDS research or whatever it is, that your “goodness” outweighs your “badness”.
There is a country song by Brad Paisley, called “Celebrity” that captures this notion beautifully:
Someday I'm gonna be famous, do I have talent, well no
These days you don't really need it thanks to reality shows
Can't wait to date a supermodel, can't wait to sue my dad
Can't wait to wreck a Ferrari on my way to rehab
1st Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
You can act just like a fool
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
I can throw a major fit
When my latte isn't just how I like it
When they say I've gone insane
I'll blame it on the fame
And the pressures that go with
Being a celebrity
I'll get to cry to Barbara Walters when things don't go my way
And I'll get community service no matter which law I break
I'll make the supermarket tabloids, they'll write some awful stuff
But the more they run my name down the more my price goes up
2nd Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
No matter what you do
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
I can fall in and out of love
Have marriages that barely last a month
When they go down the drain
I'll blame it on the fame
And say it's just so tough
Being a celebrity
Bridge
So let's hitch up the wagons and head out west
To the land of the fun and the sun
We'll be real world bachelor jackass millionaires
Hey hey, Hollywood, here we come
3rd Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
No matter what you do
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
Being a celebrity
Yeah celebrity
---------------------------------------
2003 EMI April Music, Inc./Sea Gayle Music (ASCAP) All rights controlled and adm by EMI April Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
3. Reaction #3 to sin is to say “who cares?” everybody does it anyway. Despite Christians talk about sin, it is really just being human. And we can’t escape being human. If we say that God made us, then it’s God’s fault anyway that we are this way, so why should we take the blame? Sin isn’t all that bad, it is just a fact of life, so live with it. I have a friend like this. His attitude is that he is a sinner, but that he can’t really change and if God is mean enough to punish him for that then that’s just too bad.
If you listen to rap music you will see that this “who cares” attitude is prevalent. For instance a brief excerpt of lyrics from the rapper Eminem:
Soon as the verse starts, I eat at an MC's heart What is he thinkin? How not to go against me, smart! And it's absurd, how people hang on ev-ery word I'll probably NEVER get the props I feel I ever deserve But I'll never be served, my spot is forever reserved If I ever leave Earth, that would be the death of me first Cause in my heart of hearts I know nothin could ever be worse That's why I'm clever when I put together ev-ery verse My thoughts, are sporadic, I act, like I'm a addict I rap, like I'm addicted to smack like I'm Kim Mathers But I don't wanna go forth and back in constant battles The fact is I would rather sit back and bomb some rappers So this is like a full blown attack I'm launchin at 'em The track is on some battlin raps who want some static? Cause I don't really think that the fact that I'm Slim matters A plaque and platinum status is WACK if I'm not the baddest -- The Eminem Show
An interviewer asked Eminem about the people who try to limit the profanity in rap songs and the rapper had this to say:
Eminem:
I don't want to get into another argument with them, but you can't take a line out of my song and put it in the paper out of context. It's not fair. You have to listen to the album as a whole. One of the things I'm saying in "Marshall Mathers" is, "Look, I'm a product of what you made me." Many rappers have done that. Ice Cube, for one. In the song "Criminal," I spell it out when I say, "Half the [expletive] I say I make it up to make you mad."
Proof (a fellow rapper):
We're just looking at the world. We're not inventing anything.
We are not inventing anything, we are just telling it like it is, like we see it. If you want to know something about how a portion of our young people view the “human condition” then listen to the rap and hip hop music.
In contrast to those viewpoints listen to what the Discipline has to say about sin:
The created order is designed for the well-being of all creatures and as a place of human dwelling in covenant with God. As sinful creatures, however, we have broken that covenant, become estranged from God, wounded ourselves and one another, and wreaked havoc through the natural order. We stand in need of redemption. Discipline
From the Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church
Article VII -of Original or Birth Sin
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually.
Article VIII - On Free Will
The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us [preceding us], that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.
From the Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church
Article VII Sin and Free Will
We believe man is fallen from righteousness and, apart from the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, is destitute of holiness and inclined to evil. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. In his own strength, without divine grace, man cannot do good works pleasing and acceptable to God. We believe, however, man influenced and empowered by the Holy Spirit is responsible in freedom to exercise his will for good.
So, what does it mean to be a sinner, in today’s terms.
Many different images have been used for sin: uncleanness, inability to see and hear, illness, disobedience, spiritual death, brokenness, and separation from God (the current theological favorite).
Part of our problem with sin is that we understand the “human condition” in a different way than either the biblical times or Wesley’s times. We know that there are genetic and biochemical reasons for things that people do. One of our pastoral care professors is fond of saying that every mental illness is a biopsychosocial disease. In other words, part of the explanation for mental illness is physical, part is psychological, and part is social. We are responsible for our own behavior, but only up to a point. We have gotten used to blaming negative male behavior on testosterone, negative female behavior on menopause. We blame crime on poverty, we blame drugs on lack of parental involvement, we blame teenage pregnancy on advertising. But wait a minute. If we will go back to Genesis for a moment, maybe we will find that the bible was smarter about human nature than we might of thought. After the story in Genesis is a story about where to place the blame for behavior. And what it says about human beings is that we are blamers, buckpassers. The very act of blaming all our negative behavior on a physical, or psychological, or social cause proves the very point that the bible is trying to make. We don’t want to take responsibility for our actions and yet we want to feel like Gods.
Has anything really changed? Doesn’t that describe the human beings that you know, including yourself? On the one hand you want to think that you know what you are doing, but when something goes wrong you find someone or something to take the blame. Sometimes you blame yourself; but not your sinful nature. When we turn blame on ourselves and say, well, I am just not good enough, then essentially we are blaming God. “God, you didn’t make me good enough.” The Christian view of the human condition is that wanting the privileges of God’s while denying the responsibilty for our own actions is what we name sin. But blame is not the answer to our difficulites in life. It never has been, it never will be.
So here is another way to look at it; a modern day metaphor, if you will:
We are designed to walk on two legs. But we are like people born with only one leg and the only way to get the other leg is to ask God to grow it for us. Now God is perfectly willing and able to do this, we just have to ask. However, most of us try to find a way around this leg difficulty. We don’t realize that we were designed to have two legs, or we simply accept that that is the way things are. So we can do a number of things:
We can decide to hop and we can even get really good at hopping, so that we can move forward and get where we want to go with only one leg. We can use crutches, or a wheelchair; with some chairs, we might be able to move faster and with less effort than if we had two legs. We can ask someone to carry us, or support us while we move around. But after a while we become dependent on that person and feel bereft if they desert us. We can make a prosthetic leg. Some of the prosthetic legs seem even better than real legs; they are “bionic” legs and have power that real legs don’t. They also don’t hurt and get tired like real legs, so that might seem to be a great solution. Or, of course, we can sit around bemoaning the fact that we only have one leg and blaming God for making us that way.
Or, we could just ask God to grow our leg. Because, no matter how good the alternative solutions, the fact is that we were made to walk on two legs; in fact, we were made to run with two legs. The fact that we have only one leg to begin with is not the state of sin. Not realizing or ignoring the fact that we were made to have two legs is the state of sin.
Because we only have one leg, we fall down more often than those who have two legs. That would be equivalent to the acts of sin that we commit.
If I as pastor, let you go on thinking that one leg is good enough, then I deprive you of the ability to walk and run on your own two healthy legs. If I give you any other solution than letting God grow that leg for you, then I have helped you to remain crippled. That is why John Wesley said that you must acknowlegde your sin in order to be Christian. This is our particular view of what it means to be human. And this is not intended to make you feel miserable for the rest of your life, but to let you know that you don’t have to go through misery forever. Growing a new leg might be a bit painful. You will have to learn to use it. You may have to use the crutches or lean on other people while it is growing, but in the end, you will be able to run free.
I think that, if you will reflect seriously upon your life, you will realize that, like Paul, you sometimes do things that you really don’t want to do, but you can’t help yourself. If you will reflect seriously on your life, you will realize that sometimes you have a tendency to shift the blame. But like Paul, I hope that when you come to the rail this morning for communion you will be able to say “I know that there is no condemnation for me in Christ Jesus because my Savior has freed me from the law of sin and death.” I hope you will ask God to grow in you the faith that enables you to walk and run free.
Genesis 3:1-13
Romans 7:14-8:2
During the hours before D-day, three chaplains-Reverend Paul Peterson, Father Mike O'Connor, and Rabbi Henry Birnbaum-sat together and solemnly discussed the possibility that one or more of them might be killed in the next few hours.
"It makes one feel the necessity of unburdening one's soul and making confession," said Father Mike. "I must own up to a terrible impulse to drink. Oh, I fight it, I do; but the temptation haunts me constantly, and sometimes I give in to it."
"Well," said Reverend Paul, "I don't have too much trouble with liquor, but I must own up to the terrible sexual urges I feel toward attractive women. I fight this temptation desperately, but every once in a while, I fail to resist."
After that, there was a pause. Finally both turned to the Jewish chaplain and one said, "And you, Henry, are you troubled with a besetting sin, too? What is your persistent temptation?"
Rabbi Birnbaum sighed and said, "I'm afraid I have a terrible, irresistible impulse to gossip."
Most of us don’t like to talk about sin, don’t like to think about sin. But the Christian community has always insisted that the human condition can be described as sinful. So let’s think about what this weird doctrine of sin might involve.
People I know tend to have one of three reactions to the idea of sin.
1. The first reaction to sin is that it doesn’t really exist, or it is, at the very least, an outdated and slightly offensive concept. After all, human beings are basically good; any bad has to do with societal influences or negative circumstances. And people like you and me aren’t “sinners,” we usually do the right thing. Furthermore, one doesn’t need to believe in a God in order to be a good person, look at all the people who do perfectly well without God. People can be moral creatures because that is what is best for them and for society. In other words, it isn’t necessary to believe in God to know that if we allow murder, then society will rapidly break down.
In addition, it is somewhat offensive to good people to call them “sinners” so we have to find another way to approach it. One large and successful ministry, Joel Osteen ministries, has found a way to limit what it says about sin: On his website he states that WE BELIEVE…Jesus died on the cross and shed His blood for our sins. And yet he also affirms that WE BELIEVE…as children of God, we are overcomers and more than conquerors and God intends for each of us to experience the abundant life He has in store for us.
In a sermon on “Feeling Good About Yourself”, Osteen says,
We all have weaknesses, but as long as we are pressing forward, God is pleased with us. One of the worst things you can do is beat yourself up over your shortcomings. You are the apple of God’s eye, so shake off your self-condemnation and learn to say positive things about yourself.
Another sermon on “Don’t Get Stagnant” says,
It is easy to get stuck in a rut. Many times we just sit back and learn to live with things that are less than God’s best. But you can stir your faith today to rise up higher, be happier, have a better marriage and live a more fulfilled life. We’ve got to learn how to shake off complacency.
So what we used to say was “sin” is now a “weakness” or being “complacency.” (I am not really picking on Joel Osteen ministries, he happens to have a website that is easily accessible!)
Many feel that this is a more appropriate way to talk to our children, because, after all, we don’t want them thinking they are bad people; that might lead to self-esteem problems.
2. The second reaction is that sin is popular and a tremendous amount of fun. Not only is sin fun, but if you aren’t involved in some kind of sin, you are probably a little weird and you need to get with the program. After all, think about all the shows on tv. From “Desperate Housewives” to “24”, from the Evening news to “Entertainment Tonight,” what we watch are shows that take sin for granted, and in many cases make sin an odd kind of virtue. If you are not involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage then you must be cold and unfeeling. If you aren’t willing to torture the bad guys then you aren’t patriotic. If you aren’t reporting on scandal or involved in scandal, then you aren’t marketable.
Maybe we don’t really want to have an affair with the kid who cuts the lawn or blow away the bad guys, but isn’t there something just really satisfying about watching people who do?
Furthermore, if you are beautiful or wealthy or famous, then the ordinary morality of the lesser mortals really doesn’t apply to you. Or maybe it’s just that you do so much good speaking for the children of the world or contributing money to AIDS research or whatever it is, that your “goodness” outweighs your “badness”.
There is a country song by Brad Paisley, called “Celebrity” that captures this notion beautifully:
Someday I'm gonna be famous, do I have talent, well no
These days you don't really need it thanks to reality shows
Can't wait to date a supermodel, can't wait to sue my dad
Can't wait to wreck a Ferrari on my way to rehab
1st Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
You can act just like a fool
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
I can throw a major fit
When my latte isn't just how I like it
When they say I've gone insane
I'll blame it on the fame
And the pressures that go with
Being a celebrity
I'll get to cry to Barbara Walters when things don't go my way
And I'll get community service no matter which law I break
I'll make the supermarket tabloids, they'll write some awful stuff
But the more they run my name down the more my price goes up
2nd Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
No matter what you do
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
I can fall in and out of love
Have marriages that barely last a month
When they go down the drain
I'll blame it on the fame
And say it's just so tough
Being a celebrity
Bridge
So let's hitch up the wagons and head out west
To the land of the fun and the sun
We'll be real world bachelor jackass millionaires
Hey hey, Hollywood, here we come
3rd Chorus
'Cause when you're a celebrity
It's adios reality
No matter what you do
People think you're cool
Just 'cause you're on TV
Being a celebrity
Yeah celebrity
---------------------------------------
2003 EMI April Music, Inc./Sea Gayle Music (ASCAP) All rights controlled and adm by EMI April Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
3. Reaction #3 to sin is to say “who cares?” everybody does it anyway. Despite Christians talk about sin, it is really just being human. And we can’t escape being human. If we say that God made us, then it’s God’s fault anyway that we are this way, so why should we take the blame? Sin isn’t all that bad, it is just a fact of life, so live with it. I have a friend like this. His attitude is that he is a sinner, but that he can’t really change and if God is mean enough to punish him for that then that’s just too bad.
If you listen to rap music you will see that this “who cares” attitude is prevalent. For instance a brief excerpt of lyrics from the rapper Eminem:
Soon as the verse starts, I eat at an MC's heart What is he thinkin? How not to go against me, smart! And it's absurd, how people hang on ev-ery word I'll probably NEVER get the props I feel I ever deserve But I'll never be served, my spot is forever reserved If I ever leave Earth, that would be the death of me first Cause in my heart of hearts I know nothin could ever be worse That's why I'm clever when I put together ev-ery verse My thoughts, are sporadic, I act, like I'm a addict I rap, like I'm addicted to smack like I'm Kim Mathers But I don't wanna go forth and back in constant battles The fact is I would rather sit back and bomb some rappers So this is like a full blown attack I'm launchin at 'em The track is on some battlin raps who want some static? Cause I don't really think that the fact that I'm Slim matters A plaque and platinum status is WACK if I'm not the baddest -- The Eminem Show
An interviewer asked Eminem about the people who try to limit the profanity in rap songs and the rapper had this to say:
Eminem:
I don't want to get into another argument with them, but you can't take a line out of my song and put it in the paper out of context. It's not fair. You have to listen to the album as a whole. One of the things I'm saying in "Marshall Mathers" is, "Look, I'm a product of what you made me." Many rappers have done that. Ice Cube, for one. In the song "Criminal," I spell it out when I say, "Half the [expletive] I say I make it up to make you mad."
Proof (a fellow rapper):
We're just looking at the world. We're not inventing anything.
We are not inventing anything, we are just telling it like it is, like we see it. If you want to know something about how a portion of our young people view the “human condition” then listen to the rap and hip hop music.
In contrast to those viewpoints listen to what the Discipline has to say about sin:
The created order is designed for the well-being of all creatures and as a place of human dwelling in covenant with God. As sinful creatures, however, we have broken that covenant, become estranged from God, wounded ourselves and one another, and wreaked havoc through the natural order. We stand in need of redemption. Discipline
From the Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church
Article VII -of Original or Birth Sin
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually.
Article VIII - On Free Will
The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us [preceding us], that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.
From the Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church
Article VII Sin and Free Will
We believe man is fallen from righteousness and, apart from the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, is destitute of holiness and inclined to evil. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. In his own strength, without divine grace, man cannot do good works pleasing and acceptable to God. We believe, however, man influenced and empowered by the Holy Spirit is responsible in freedom to exercise his will for good.
So, what does it mean to be a sinner, in today’s terms.
Many different images have been used for sin: uncleanness, inability to see and hear, illness, disobedience, spiritual death, brokenness, and separation from God (the current theological favorite).
Part of our problem with sin is that we understand the “human condition” in a different way than either the biblical times or Wesley’s times. We know that there are genetic and biochemical reasons for things that people do. One of our pastoral care professors is fond of saying that every mental illness is a biopsychosocial disease. In other words, part of the explanation for mental illness is physical, part is psychological, and part is social. We are responsible for our own behavior, but only up to a point. We have gotten used to blaming negative male behavior on testosterone, negative female behavior on menopause. We blame crime on poverty, we blame drugs on lack of parental involvement, we blame teenage pregnancy on advertising. But wait a minute. If we will go back to Genesis for a moment, maybe we will find that the bible was smarter about human nature than we might of thought. After the story in Genesis is a story about where to place the blame for behavior. And what it says about human beings is that we are blamers, buckpassers. The very act of blaming all our negative behavior on a physical, or psychological, or social cause proves the very point that the bible is trying to make. We don’t want to take responsibility for our actions and yet we want to feel like Gods.
Has anything really changed? Doesn’t that describe the human beings that you know, including yourself? On the one hand you want to think that you know what you are doing, but when something goes wrong you find someone or something to take the blame. Sometimes you blame yourself; but not your sinful nature. When we turn blame on ourselves and say, well, I am just not good enough, then essentially we are blaming God. “God, you didn’t make me good enough.” The Christian view of the human condition is that wanting the privileges of God’s while denying the responsibilty for our own actions is what we name sin. But blame is not the answer to our difficulites in life. It never has been, it never will be.
So here is another way to look at it; a modern day metaphor, if you will:
We are designed to walk on two legs. But we are like people born with only one leg and the only way to get the other leg is to ask God to grow it for us. Now God is perfectly willing and able to do this, we just have to ask. However, most of us try to find a way around this leg difficulty. We don’t realize that we were designed to have two legs, or we simply accept that that is the way things are. So we can do a number of things:
We can decide to hop and we can even get really good at hopping, so that we can move forward and get where we want to go with only one leg. We can use crutches, or a wheelchair; with some chairs, we might be able to move faster and with less effort than if we had two legs. We can ask someone to carry us, or support us while we move around. But after a while we become dependent on that person and feel bereft if they desert us. We can make a prosthetic leg. Some of the prosthetic legs seem even better than real legs; they are “bionic” legs and have power that real legs don’t. They also don’t hurt and get tired like real legs, so that might seem to be a great solution. Or, of course, we can sit around bemoaning the fact that we only have one leg and blaming God for making us that way.
Or, we could just ask God to grow our leg. Because, no matter how good the alternative solutions, the fact is that we were made to walk on two legs; in fact, we were made to run with two legs. The fact that we have only one leg to begin with is not the state of sin. Not realizing or ignoring the fact that we were made to have two legs is the state of sin.
Because we only have one leg, we fall down more often than those who have two legs. That would be equivalent to the acts of sin that we commit.
If I as pastor, let you go on thinking that one leg is good enough, then I deprive you of the ability to walk and run on your own two healthy legs. If I give you any other solution than letting God grow that leg for you, then I have helped you to remain crippled. That is why John Wesley said that you must acknowlegde your sin in order to be Christian. This is our particular view of what it means to be human. And this is not intended to make you feel miserable for the rest of your life, but to let you know that you don’t have to go through misery forever. Growing a new leg might be a bit painful. You will have to learn to use it. You may have to use the crutches or lean on other people while it is growing, but in the end, you will be able to run free.
I think that, if you will reflect seriously upon your life, you will realize that, like Paul, you sometimes do things that you really don’t want to do, but you can’t help yourself. If you will reflect seriously on your life, you will realize that sometimes you have a tendency to shift the blame. But like Paul, I hope that when you come to the rail this morning for communion you will be able to say “I know that there is no condemnation for me in Christ Jesus because my Savior has freed me from the law of sin and death.” I hope you will ask God to grow in you the faith that enables you to walk and run free.