Victorious Living through Christ, First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY

Victorious Living through Christ:
Preface to this series
First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY 1/09/2011

I would like to say at the onset of today’s message that we are going to start a series of messages dealing with our personal growth that comes through Jesus Christ. There are many avenues that one can take in an attempt to grow as a person – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. But, I think that when we choose to take the path that deals with Christ at the starting point and leads to God as the ending point, we have taken the most complete path possible for total personal growth. For what goes on within us “spiritual” affects every other aspect of our lives. It affects our energy, which affects our willingness or ability to be physically active; it affects our mental abilities, which will guide how we process information, as well as our outlook and attitude toward various things, to name just a few examples.
I hold a strong conviction that we all need to grow within our lives. As we grow from infancy to maturity, we need to work intentionally on our psyche and spiritual maturity. Over the next number of weeks we are going to examine specific steps that can lead us to living a more holistic life; emotionally and spiritually, based on the “twelve step program.” You might be thinking, “I’m not an alcoholic, why would I need to use the twelve steps program?” First off, the “twelve step” program is a “spiritually” based program, this is the reason that so many people over the decades have found recovery from their addictions, and as a “spiritually based” program, we within the church can benefit by studying and working it.
Mainline Denominational churches over the past several decades have been losing not only numbers in membership, but more alarmingly, have found it harder and harder to create a vision of what it’s purpose should be. There is a correlation with the decrease in church attendance with that of the individual Christian not nurturing their personal Spiritual and emotional growth.



“I can do it Myself” part 1
Based on Matthew 3: 13-17 and Romans 7:7-25

Children are a great source of information that as adults, we can learn from, if we take the time to observe and then think upon the lessons that they so unselfishly offer to us. This is one reason why Jack Linkletter’s “Kid’s say the darn-dest things” was such a popular segment of his T.V. program. Children are so full of energy and physical activity; you can almost see them wiggling inside their own skin! More times than not, when a child decides that they want to do something, they just do it, not thinking through how that might affect the world around them. As a parent, this becomes the challenge of how do you let your child grow, experience the things that they wish to do, and yet keep them safe in the process and more importantly, not crush that natural will of “self?”
We don’t have a lot of information about Jesus when he was a child, so it is very difficult for us to know what he was like as a child. Was Jesus a typical boy, getting into fights, throwing stones at birds, playing soldier, those things that we tend to associate in general behavior of little boys; or was he more of the sensitive type, interested in reading, music, overly obedient and polite?
We do have one story that does give us just a little insight about Jesus as a child. It was when his family had gone to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage and as they were journeying home, couldn’t find Jesus. In a panic they retraced their 3 days of journey back to Jerusalem and finally found Jesus sitting with the elders at the temple discussing theology. On the surface of the story, we tend to think highly toward the actions of Jesus, and less favorably about the reaction of his parents as they scolded him for not being with them. Yet, the story implies that Jesus is still under parental care of Joseph and Mary, and that Jesus didn’t tell his parents of his intensions, or possibly, he asked if he could stay and being told no, directly disobeyed. We don’t know what actually happened behind the scenes, but the fact is, Jesus’ actions, created a huge distress to his parents.
Paul gives us a clue as well into human nature when he writes as a confession, “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do: No, the evil I do not want to do, this I keep doing.” We too often think of the disciples as well as the Apostle Paul and others that are mentioned within scripture as being “saints”, which generally translates into an image of a person who never did anything wrong. We know that isn’t true, but from a subliminal thought process, this often is the case. Of course we all know what the true definition of a saint is, “A person who we no longer have to put up with.”
The church has done this with Jesus. We read story after story with the lens of two thousand years of theology and we don’t always detect the “humanist” of Christ and that there were things he said and did that really are not consistent with Christian-Judeo Theology, making Jesus not human. Yet, Jesus himself understood the need to go through the ritual of being baptized, even to the protest of his cousin John. If Jesus was God, and never knew sin, then why would the king of kings need to go through baptism? The reason is, by going through baptism, you are surrendering yourself to a higher power, and this is why we look to baptism as a sacrament.
As Christians, we tend to think that once we have been baptized, especially if we do this as a teenager or an adult, that we will magically become Christ like and that we will not have struggles with those things that we perceive as “negative behavior” or feelings that we previously recognized as the reason to be baptized. Then comes the reality that we still have the old behavior, that old nature within us and we can become dis-allusioned about the saving grace that comes from God.
Again, if we look at the stories about Christ, we can gain insight that after Jesus was baptized, he was confronted with his demons, while he was out in the wilderness for forty days. He had to deal with those things within his grasp that could have turned his mission into self gain and not a greater good. We see time and time again, where Jesus went off into solitude, so he could reconnect with the power that was greater than his; to re-align himself with God.
Paul, who was the early churches most aggressive evangelist, points out in his letter to the Romans, that as Christians, we still fall short of what God desires for us, which is the reason why we need to be in constant prayer with God. The truth that comes from what Paul is sharing, is this, “We all struggle with sin issues – whether we are Christian or not. We all are plagued with not living in harmony with God’s desires for us. Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks are to God … Through Jesus Christ our lord.”
Paul is telling us there is hope and there is a rescue from sin, it is Christ. What we, especially as Christians need to do, is to go back to our first love. Christ! To be able to do this, we first need to admit that we are truly powerless over sin in our life and that our spiritual lives are unmanageable. This is the starting point for us to become healed children of God and live what we call a victorious life.
The first step is confession. One of the acts that the Roman Catholic church encourages is going to the confessional each week. We as protestants tend to resist this action, out of a theology of what we call “Priesthood of believers”, which means that we as individuals can go to God directly and plead our case and not needing to go to a Priest to intercede for us before God. Yet, there is truly a healing value by using a third person in the act of confession.
In AA meetings, the very first step to recovery is to stand up before everyone and admit to all that you are an alcoholic. The success of this first step only comes by admitting this condition before another person. The sin issue that plagues our life is no different than that of a drug addition, healing and growth only starts with admitting that issue, not just between you and God, but by including another person. Many Christians use their pastor as this third person, but it doesn’t have to be; this person could be your best friend, a parent, even your hair dresser. The difference for the Christian is when doing this in prayer, admitting we are powerless over that thing which controls us, that is when Christ is able to enter in and start working in the healing that is promised to come to us, through the holy spirit. “Hi, everybody, my name is Steven and I’m a sinner.” Amen.