Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Moral Inventory

Before I dive into this blog, let me lay down three defining principles that will help keep me and you on track:
1. I am using Alcoholics Anonymous’ Fourth Step as the platform for these thoughts. I’ve heard it said that A.A. needs the church, but the church equally needs A.A.
2. Unhealthy introspection leads to nothing…and I mean nothing! If I was the devil (and I’m not) I would have Christians preoccupied with deep and obsessive internal reviews to keep them feeling religiously active and spiritually neutered.
3. Too many people love to use the word, “morals” as long as they can emphasize their favorite ones to the exclusion of a wide variety of other, equally valuable morals. For instance, Romans chapter one lists homosexuality along with other deeds of the flesh such as slander, gossip and being unloving and unmerciful. Once you quote a list like this you surrender the right to pick and choose…its all or nothing.

Other than for taxes or financial reports, when a store conducts an inventory it is quite often for the purpose of simply knowing what sells. They are productively looking for the means of how to serve a larger customer base. When a grocery store notices that sugar coated “Sticks and Stones Cereal” has been sitting on their shelves for months while “Wilbur’s Wonder Cereal” is flying off the shelves, they act precipitously to stock what is selling and lose the dead weight inventory if they want to grow and keep their customers well served.

Galatians 5:19-26 offers a superb grid for a healthy moral inventory and the clarity of defining two value systems: “The deeds of the flesh are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and “things like these…” On the other hand, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

Allow me to play a couple of scenarios for you. Let’s say one of my church members comes to me today, stumbling drunk, and says to me, “I got drunk because the Obama administration is taking this country into a socialist state.” I will rise from behind my desk, walk over to them and say, “You are drunk because you are living out of the wrong value system. You are living in the flesh and outside pressures have exposed your erroneous priorities”.

Now imagine another member walks in my office, red in the face with anger, and they say, “I just came back from a town hall meeting and I am just so angry because the Obama Administration is taking this country into a socialist state.” Once again, I would rise from behind my desk, walk over to this church member and say, “You are angry because you are living out of the wrong value system. You are living in the flesh and outside pressures have exposed your erroneous priorities”.

Angry outbursts are no more or less acceptable than drunkenness! They both bear witness to our internal realities. When our internal realities are only within the scope of our own abilities, measured by our human reasoning and marginalized by fear, the “deeds of the flesh” WILL NOT BE FAR BEHIND.

Verse 21 of this chapter says, “…those who practice such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.” When our life is lived within the anemic framework of our own resources unplugged from Heaven’s Resources, we will miss seeing the transcendent supremacy of the Kingdom of God happening before our very eyes! The only thing we inherit is our frail limitation.

God is offering us a far, far greater bounty. When our internal reality is steeping in the River of the Holy Spirit’s unlimited power, out of us will rush, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law”.

And when we live this way, we will SEE the Kingdom of God trumping all inferior realities around us. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”. Conversely, this means that when we amputate truth from the soil of the Holy Spirit, it has the same outcome as compromising the same truth we say we hold dear.

After his home was fire-bombed Pastor King (I love remembering that this hero was just simple pastor) was taunted and admonished to join the radical militants of the civil rights movement. In response, he called the media to his front yard, stood on his charred and badly damaged front porch and proclaimed forgiveness to the perpetrators of that crime. He refused to allow his internal realities to degenerate into the obtuse limitations of the flesh. Instead he chose the unlimited power of the Spirit and His resplendent fruit.

My brothers and sisters, we are in a similar time, though in vastly different political dynamics. When we are wronged, politically or in any other way, we have a choice to transcend or descend. If we truly believe that the Kingdom of God will ultimately triumph over all inferior challengers, then we will live TODAY by seeding the world with the Kingdom’s Fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

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