Peace – Overcoming Anxiety
And let me just read to you the classic text in the Bible on peace and joy. Philippians 4, verse 4 to verse 9. Rejoice in the Lord always, I will say it again, rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put it into practice, and the God of peace will be with you.
And let’s end the reading of God’s word right there. Well, we’ve been doing the fruit of the Spirit. I’m going to do something a little different tonight. We’ve been doing a fruit each week. We did love one week, we did joy last week, and this is the week to talk about peace. But I want to talk about, I’ll talk a little bit, we’ll take about 10 minutes to summarize peace and joy and what… the Bible teaches about them, but I wanna focus a little bit more on the roadblocks to peace and joy. Lane, who was, didn’t Lane just pray?
Lane Arthur was telling me, had a typical example of how different life is in New York from other places. He was in a taxi, right? When was it, yesterday? And he was in a taxi, and when he was in a taxi, another taxi came up and rammed the end of the taxi that he was in. What did the taxi drivers do? What did they do? Nothing. Nothing. They just kept on going, you know? One guy rams and the other guy wham, boom, ding, and you know, what does he do? Put on a pedal and off, you know, off we go. You know, you say, well, just imagine any other town in which that sort of thing would happen. You imagine two people running into each other, you know, crash, so what happens? You’re a typical American town. Everybody goes, oh, no, oh, my word. Oh, and you either distress, you know, and it depends on your upbringing, of course. You know, you’re either very distressed, it’s the end of the world, how am I gonna face people, what a hassle, my word, oh, my goodness. You know, you get on out and you exchange cards. The other thing to do is to get out and say, what do you do that for? You get real angry. Here’s two taxi drivers say, oh, I had an accident. Well, you know. Uh, it’s not so bad. It’s been three hours since the last one, you know, as. Right, neither of them got out, isn’t that right? They just rear -ended. Okay, now, look, the reason for the difference between the way the one taxi driver, the taxi drivers in New York operate and the way, you know, two people in Richmond, Indiana would operate is because of expectations, expectations. The taxi drivers expect turmoil. They expect conflict. See, most places, when somebody runs into your car, you consider that a conflict. In New York, it’s not, yet. You see, your ability to, in New York, your expectations of having people in your face all the time, elbows in your face when you’re on the subway, you know, your nose in someone’s armpit, right? For a hundred blocks. You know, this sort of, the sort of things that, well, that doesn’t happen to me too often because of my size, but some of you I know right where you live. And I really wonder how you do it today. It’s a matter of expectations. You get used to a certain amount of conflict and you kind of get out there and you expect to be jostled around. You expect to have people try to grab your, you know, your wallet. You don’t even get upset. You say, nice try. You don’t get upset. It’s, it’s a matter of expectations. And the fact is, as you know, since so many New Yorkers are from somewhere else, when you first get there, your expectations have to do with other places. You expect a certain amount of sunlight, you expect a certain amount of space, you expect a certain amount of peace and so on. And as a result, it really is oppressive, tremendously oppressive, much more oppressive.
Our buddy C .S. Lewis says expectations are everything. If before I lead you into a room, I say, now before you get into this room, let me just tell you what this room is. This is a honeymoon suite. You say, okay, let me see it. You walk on in, you look around, what a dump, you say. But if before you go into the very same room, the very same room, if instead of telling me it’s a honeymoon suite, instead you say to me, I want you to realize this is a jail cell, you walk in with very different expectations, you look around at the same room and you say, pretty nice place. because expectations is the filter through which you’re reading and seeing what happens here.
Now, a lot of Christians are cast down all the time and are losing their peace and joy all the time because they don’t expect the attacks on peace and joy that are inevitable. I’d say one half, two thirds, maybe three quarters of the depression that we experience as Christians is depression over our depression. We’re sad that we’re sad. We’re surprised that we’re surprised. We’re upset that we’re upset. And if you weren’t so upset about being upset, you wouldn’t be as upset. At least a half of being upset is the anger and the guilt and the frustration. You say, it’s not supposed to be like this because you don’t have the proper expectations. Christians do not come into the Christian life with the proper expectations.
Think of it like this. Here’s a mother, well, we’re gonna be talking about this. I’m running ahead of myself. The Christian has got more enemies. You had more enemies than when you were non -Christian, and I’ll tell you why. You had one enemy when you were non -Christian. Who was that? Really, one real enemy was God. It wasn’t because he’s a mean person. It’s because you were at war with him, all right? You declared war, and so there was a state of warfare. But God is a mighty, wonderful adversary. He tries to save all the people that are trying to kill him. He’s amazing.
God reminds me, and God’s relationship to me reminds me very much of a scene I remember some years ago when there was a little kitten that nobody knows how he got there. He obviously was thrown into the river by somebody. And he was in, well, not a river, it was sort of a large creek. And he was on a stone, and he was scared to death. He was in a stone in the middle of the creek. And a bunch of young guys were trying to get him. them and they were going out to him and as they tried to get him of course what did he do you see he was at war with anybody who tried to get him I see somebody else trying to drown me I can just see it now and he bit and scratched fortunately was small enough that you know you finally one kid decided he would pick him up and he would just take all the cuts and he’d take all the scrapes he takes all the scratches and the little tooth marks they weren’t gonna be that bad he took it and he brought that and of course in comes this cat just absolutely screaming and kicking and trying to kill the person who’s trying to save him I mean that is the picture of the God that the Bible gives us of our all of our relationships to God in our natural state that’s the way we are born we’re born at enmity with God
Romans 8 7 the natural mind is enmity with God it cannot love the law of God it can’t submit to the law of God it cannot it’s incapable of it
the minute you get make peace with God, which is the we’re gonna see is the heart of all other peace, the minute you make peace with God Instantly, all of God’s enemies declare war on you, and they’re not nice enemies. You see, before you became a Christian, your main enemy in life was a good guy. Someone who loved you, someone who cared about you, someone who was doing everything he could to wake you up. Now, when you become a Christian, all your enemies are bad guys. And the three enemies are the world, the flesh, and the devil. Now, if you don’t have proper expectations, you are going to get mauled. Because, well, think of warfare. If you don’t come in with proper expectations into warfare, you will be mauled. If you overestimate or underestimate, if your expectations are off at all, you’re gonna be killed in a battle. If you overestimate the enemy, you will surrender or retreat too soon, and you’ll lose. If you underestimate the enemy, you will go in with inappropriate or insufficient resources. If you come into Christianity without, and unfortunately, many of you have, without somebody immediately telling you, you have got much nastier, meaner enemies, not greater enemies than you had before, but nastier, meaner, more spiteful enemies than you’ve ever had in your life. It was sort of like, you know, here’s Switzerland, neutral in the middle of World War II. And Switzerland is neutral during World War II, and the Allies are battling the axes and so on. And because they’re neutral, they might have some skirmishes around the edges, but basically they’re not at war. If they come into the war on the side of either one, they come in the war on the side of the Allies, immediately things heat up, because suddenly they’ve got half the world as their enemy before it wasn’t that way. Somebody’s gotta say to Christians, and I’m saying to you now, if you haven’t heard it before, you’ve got enemies. They’re called the world, the flesh, and the devil. Every one of them is essentially out.
If you’re a Christian, they cannot destroy your salvation. They cannot pull you out of God’s hands. Jesus Christ says, my own know me, right? And I have them. and no one can pluck them out of my hand. Now, that means that the enemies can’t pluck you out of Christ’s hand, they can’t destroy your salvation. So the only thing they can do is make you totally ineffective and miserable by destroying your peace and joy. That’s what they’re out to do.
Now, I wanna just talk a little bit more about the joy and the peace, and then I’d like to talk about those three enemies and talk about attacks on assurance. I mean, some of you are saying, boy, this is gonna be a somber sermon, one of those big SSs, the somber sermon. Not necessarily, but I would rather, instead of you thinking of it as a somber sermon, I would like you to think of it being a sobering sermon. Smelling salts are good things, right? Good drink of coffee, and when you’re trying to get sobered up is good. It’s not pleasant, it’s not sweet. Smelling salts when you’re knocked out on the ground aren’t pleasant and sweet, but you need it. And basically, I’d just like to give you a good smelling salts kind of sermon about a joy and peace. Now, first of all, let’s not forget what joy and peace is. At the top of your handout, this is a summary of last week. Don’t forget this. One, joy is what? Joy is a buoyancy, a spiritual buoyancy that comes when you’re rejoicing in God.
Second Corinthians 4, 16 to 18 is a terrific place where Paul’s saying, I don’t remember at all, but Paul’s saying, we’re down, but we’re not out. We’re crushed, but we’re not destroyed. He’s talking about buoyancy. He says, Christians have got a joy that doesn’t mean that we’re impervious to suffering. It means that we’re unsinkable. We’re constantly getting wet. We’re constantly being pushed down, but we don’t stay down. Or at least we don’t sink, see? There’s a buoyancy about it. We’re constantly being pushed down. The buoyancy comes from a focus on the unchanging privileges we have in God, and we said last week, the opposite of joy is not sadness. The reason that can’t be, the opposite of joy cannot be sadness because the Bible is constantly talking about the fact that you can be joyful when you’re sad. If you don’t know what that means, you haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. It doesn’t mean you’re not a Christian, but it really means you haven’t even begun to tap into the resources that are yours. If what I just said makes no sense at all, you may not be a believer at all. You may not understand at all. If on the other hand, it’s just something very difficult to grasp, it could be that you’re a believer, you just haven’t really gotten a hold of something that’s critical.
There’s a big difference between joy and happiness. Happiness comes from the comfort of having things that you want. Joy is a deep kind of rejoicing, an assurance, and a security, a mirth. I’m only gonna use the word mirth, but we don’t use that word much. But it’s better than the word happiness, I think, for our purposes. There’s a deep mirth, down deep, that says I’ve got the only… thing that really matters. And you constantly say that to yourself, and the more you say that to yourself, the more you say, hey, that’s pretty good. Now, you do that, frankly, in some small ways all the time. If somebody sits down and says to you, you know, one of your co -workers says, that was a lousy script that you wrote last week, that may make you feel bad. But then if suppose you had some award, suppose you won some great award for a script just this year, you say, well, but I know what I’m capable of. Yeah, that probably wasn’t a very good script. OK, you admit it. But because you fall back on something deeper, you’re able to deal with that particular unhappiness. Christians do the same thing. In fact, the opposite, therefore, of joy is not sadness, it’s hopelessness. It’s having nothing to really rest in.
1 Thessalonians 4, 13 says, I want you to grieve, Paul says, but don’t grieve as those who have no hope. And the counterfeit, we said, of joy is happiness, which rests in the feeling of comfort or pleasure, and it’s resting in the blessings, not the blesser. And Psalms four, verse seven says that I, there’s a place where David says, I have got more joy in my heart than they have when their corn is full and their wine abounds. And what he’s saying is they only have joy when the stock market is up, and I have joy all the time. Because their joy is in the stock market. My joy is in the one who owns all the wealth in the world and is gonna give me everything I need. And to rejoice in the blesser means that you can enjoy pleasure. That’s the most interesting thing. If you really have a joy, that means you can enjoy pleasure. You can enjoy good food. You can enjoy a comfort. You can enjoy physical pleasures. But you know what they’re there for. They’re simply little samples, the sort of cruddy little things that they stick out there and they say, here, come and taste something. And put little samples up in the delicatessen. Here, come and sample them. And you look at them and usually somebody else has already looked at them with their fingers and all that sort of thing. You taste them, they’re okay, but they’re stale. They’re not the very best thing you’re gonna get. Not the best dessert that comes out from the great restaurant. And even the best physical pleasures are just those kinds of dim hints.
And that’s the reason why our friend Louis says, and this was from last week’s talk, which I never got a chance to read. It’s from the handout. Louis says, a real Christian allows his mind to run up the sunbeam to the sun. He doesn’t sit and look at the sunbeam. He knows where it’s from. Run, in other words, you let your mind run up the blessing to the blesser. And that’s the way in which you can really enjoy the world. You can really enjoy a good meal in a way that actually makes you praise the one who you know someday is gonna have you sit down at the. the wedding supper of the lamb, and that will be a meal that ends all meals, and it’s never over. You’re able to do that. You’re able to run up, you know, let your mind run up the sun, being to the sun. So Lewis writes this. He says, if we are to shine like the sun, we are to be given the morning star. If we take the imagery of scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the morning star, as it says in Revelation, and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry so false as history is really prophecy. And then he says, at present, we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of mourning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splinters we see, but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday. God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, did you hear that? When human souls can be as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation, you know, the clams and the sun, they’re all doing exactly what God created them to do. That’s why they’re so glorious, you see. Clam is being perfectly a clam. That’s why it’s so neat. It’s just that you and I are not being perfectly men and women that God created us to be. So the clams have it all over us. And that’s what he’s saying. Now listen, he says, when human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or the greater glory of which nature is only a first sketch, which is hard to believe. The faint far off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter, in nature, when he made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures. Let me repeat that. The faint far off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when he made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures. And even thus filtered, these physical pleasures are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? We can’t handle sex. We can’t handle drink. We can’t handle food. We can’t handle any of the physical pleasures which he said are just far off dim echoes of the joy that comes from actually knowing not the blessing but the blesser. So he says, what will it be to taste at the fountainhead of that stream which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating, yet that is what lies before us? The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.
And as St. Augustine says, the rapture of the saved soul will flow away. over into a glorified body. And what he’s saying is a Christian should know more about joy than anybody else. Christian ought to be able to sit down and enjoy a good meal like nobody else can, because we’re thinking of the wedding supper of the land. We’re thinking of the God who created this incredible, faint, far -off, wonderful pleasure, which is so intoxicating, which is just a dim reflection of what it’s gonna be like to sit down at his feet. We should be experts in joy, and we’re not. We’re scared, see? We’re scared of joy. It’s partly because we focus on the pleasures. and the blessings instead of the blesser.
Now look at the summary of peace because I gotta move here. What does the Bible say about peace? Now we just read the classic text and frankly, it’s pretty simple. The Bible says number one, peace is confidence and trust in God’s wise control of your life. The opposite of peace is anxiety. You see, there’s a difference. Some people say, what’s the difference between peace and joy? And the answer is joy is the opposite of hopelessness. Joy has to do with the mirth. Joy has to do with actually being up. But peace has to do with the steadiness and the opposite of peace is not hopelessness or despair. The opposite of peace is worry or anxiety. And peace, therefore, has to do with confidence in God’s control of your life. And the way we can see that is right here. It says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God will result. Anxiety as opposed to peace.
And where do you get peace from? This is a great verse. It says, in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God. Now many counselors have pointed out something I’m gonna point out right now, which is really important about the verse. All your requests have to be presented with thanksgiving. What does that mean? How can you be thankful for something when you’re just making the request for it? The answer is, that’s the key, that’s the secret. The answer is you thank God before you make the request because you’re saying, Lord, whatever you do in response to this request is good. I thank you for it. If I’m asking for something which is at the wrong time and you don’t give it to me, I thank you for that. If you give me something the opposite of what I ask, even though it’s gonna be very, very difficult, I’m not gonna be happy about it, I’m not gonna try to force joy, that would be very wrong, but I know that you’re a God who knows what he’s doing and I thank you for your ordering of my life.
You see, to thank God ahead of time for the things you request of him is the secret. And here you have peace, peace, which… which obvious then is confidence and trust in God’s wise and good control of your life. A little note here, paragraph. There’s a difference in the Bible between the peace of God and peace with God. Romans 5 .1 says, we now, because we’re justified by faith, we have peace with God. And here in Romans, in Philippians 4, it talks about the peace of God. What’s the difference? They are distinct, but they’re never separated. See, the peace of God is a frame of heart that is completely constant and solid and confident no matter what the condition. And boy, do we all want that or what? We want that so badly. Everybody wants it, you know? That’s what they’re after in those S seminars. That’s what they’re after in almost all of these things. A person who’s got confidence and stability and sort of a calm, no matter what, that’s what we want. And I know that there’s, this is not what the, well, I should tell you in a minute here. There’s no doubt that the world doesn’t really understand that. What they really want is Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man, he’s always cool. He’s always lighting up a cigarette. He never changes his, he doesn’t really matter. People dying all around him, people giving the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yup, you know, it’s the same. But we only have, you know, we’re absolutely steady. I don’t let anything bother me. That’s a worldly version of it, because I might as well say it now, not wait a second later.
Don’t forget that the fruit of the Spirit is one. It doesn’t say in Galatians five, the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, it says the fruit of the Spirit. It’s singular. Love, joy, peace, patience, all these things are aspects of the whole. There is a way without the Spirit of God to artificially manufacture one or two of these fruit so it looks like you’ve got peace, but only at the expense of joy and love, you see. You can develop, as I put down here, you can develop a counterfeit of peace, which is actually cynicism. A saying like, well, there’s nobody around who knows better than me and I don’t even know and nobody really knows. I mean, there’s a kind of cynicism and apathy, a way of hardening your own heart so that you don’t care. And it can look like you’ve got peace. It can turn you into kind of a moral bro man. But the way you can tell that it’s not really the spiritual fruit is because it exists by itself. A person like that is not tenderhearted and loving and approachable and humble. Oh, no. You see, you can have what looks like joy and humility. Some people have that, but there’s no peace in their life. They’re just sensitive people, but they’re up and down all over the place and they’re all very emotional. And you know, if you catch them at the right times, they look like they’re happy and sweet and approachable, but they really don’t have any peace and they certainly don’t have stability and they certainly don’t have self -control. And then you’ve got other kinds of people that look like they got control. You know, yup. They got perfect control and they’ve always got peace and they’re real study and they’re very faithful and dependable, but when it comes to that joy and when it comes to that sensitivity and that sweetness and that kindness and that love and that generosity, they don’t have it. Because only the Spirit of God can create all these things at once.
Jonathan Edwards in his great book, Religious Affection says the only way you can really be sure that a person’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and all that is not counterfeit is that it happens all together. That’s the way, the only way you can tell that any one of these things is really of the Spirit and not being manufactured from some fleshly sources is because there’s a symmetry, he says, about them. They grow together and only the Spirit of God can really create them together. Only the Spirit of God can create an emotional, sweet, loving, tender -hearted, generous person who’s also a self -controlled, absolutely dependable, absolutely rock -solid, absolutely peaceful. Now that doesn’t, by the way, mean that we get there right away, but they all are growing together. And that’s why we say peace is confidence and trust in God’s wise and good control of your life. It’s opposite is worry or anxiety. The word, by the way, the word anxiety is a little Greek word, marimna, which means to be in pieces.
And there’s a play on this word anxiety in Luke chapter, what, 10, that tells us the story of Martha and Mary. This is a sideline, but I’ve just let you know this. You know, this is a great place where Martha and Mary, two sisters, have Jesus in to eat. And Martha’s running all around, running all around, and it says she was anxious, marimna -ous, with much serving, and the word literally means to have her mind divided and distracted and trying to get too many goals. And Mary’s just sitting there, listening to Jesus, and Martha starts to get a little bit merry. We’ve got work to do, and you’re having your quiet time. You know, what Mary got up and says, it doesn’t matter, the house is a wreck, and there’s a million. things to do, it doesn’t really matter. I’m getting my time in with Jesus. And now are you a Mary or a Martha? And Jesus actually makes a play on the word marimnous and he says, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, which is marimnous. Mary has found the one thing needful. Mary is single -minded. Mary has got one thing she’s looking at. You’ve got 300 things. I’m one of them. That’s nice, Martha. I’m glad I’m one of the 300 things you’re thinking about. But I’m not offended. You are in trouble until I’m the one thing. Because the opposite of anxiety is single-mindedness. And the opposite of peace is worry. And the counterfeit of peace is a kind of apathy and cynicism. And that counterfeit peace cannot coexist with the tenderness of love and joy and so on. How do you cultivate it?
Fairly simple. It says, verse eight, Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, think on these things. And then Paul says in verse nine, and do what I’ve said. Frankly, peace comes from the same thing that joy comes from. It comes from an assurance of your salvation. What do you think Paul’s saying? Focus, think. Jesus does that all the time. Jesus says, have no anxiety about anything but consider. If you are worried, if you are anxious, you’re not thinking. Worry is the absence of thought. Or we’ll put it like this. You can either talk to your heart or you can listen to your heart. You know, tomorrow your heart’s gonna start to say, oh my word, what are we gonna do about this? What are we gonna do about that? Oh my gosh, oh we’re gonna do that this way. Goes like that all day, doesn’t it, some of you? Now there’s two things you can do with your heart. You can sit and listen to your heart and you can go, ah, ah. Or you can talk to your heart. In Psalm 42, you can see exactly what happens. David in Psalm 42 is depressed and he says, why art thou cast down, oh my soul? Who’s he talking to? His himself, he’s talking to his soul. You know, why art thou cast down on my soul and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God. What he’s doing is instead of listening to his heart, he’s talking to it. He’s saying, think about this, think about this, think about this, don’t forget this, don’t forget that. Don’t forget who it is that made you. Don’t forget who it is that saved you. Worry is listening to your heart. Peace comes from talking to your heart. But it comes from telling your heart what? Not just talking in general. And not just saying, hey, I heard a funny story. You know, peace comes from talking to your heart about who you are in Christ.
And that’s where we get finally to the whole issue of the enemies. Essentially, the enemies are threefold. The world, the flesh, and the devil. Let me just sort of, instead of trying to follow an outline, let me just tell you what’s in my heart so I gotta stop. The world, the flesh and the devil, what are they? Well, first of all, the world is a mindset. It’s no individual. The world is a mindset of secularism. You know what the word secular means? It means nowism. Secular means now, the present. And the worldliness, I don’t know what you think it is. Some of you, you probably heard this all sorts of ways. I mean, you know, you’ve got MasterCard, so worldly, so welcome, remember that? That shows how old I am. That’s about 12 years old. You add people, say, oh my word, you’re living in the past. You know, the word worldly can mean a lot of things, but what it means in the Bible is a mindset that says the here, the now, the concrete, what you see right now is all that matters. Therefore, worldliness can have a lot of different forms. Number one, worldliness can have the form of this. You go into a, let’s go, you go into a beautiful restaurant and instead of letting your mind run up the sunbeam to the sun. You look around, somebody takes you out to a great restaurant, a place you could never afford to go. Whenever this happens, by the way, when you go to a restaurant that you could not afford to go, somebody else takes you there, you start to look around and you say, boy, wouldn’t it be great to live like this? Now you don’t say it consciously because you’re too, you can’t let yourself. You know, you’ve been, you’re not allowed to say things like that to yourself consciously because you, well, when you say it, you sound like a fool. And you know you sound like a fool. So it goes on a little deeper. You say, wouldn’t it be great if I made enough money? Or wouldn’t it be good if I just, in this kind of society, you look around and you say, I know what kind of people these are who are here. Wouldn’t it be great? I just feel good about myself being here. I’d love to be back here. How am I gonna be here? That’s worldliness, the now. Or when you’re in a classroom and everybody’s just laughing at anybody who even brings up anything metaphysical, anything about values, anything about morality, anything about religion, everybody just, you just sort of, they don’t ever argue against it. They’ll never give you reasons against it because they can’t, there aren’t any. But what they have to do is they just have this sort of, this sort of mocking, sconing attitude toward it that says the here and the now is all that matters. Or even when you, you know, you really hope that this person in the opposite sex who’s really good looking would ask you out or would be willing to go out with you. And you realize that they’re not interested at all in you. And you start to say, what good am I anyway? You know, you start to look in the mirror and say, well, heck, no wonder. But that’s worldliness too. You see, it’s just saying the here and the now, the physical, the appearances, the image, that’s all that matters. And that’s a mindset, the world.
Then you have the flesh. And the flesh is the selfish part of you that wants to be God. I don’t need you anymore anyway, but you’ll look silly down there, you know, oop, oop, oop. They feel unwanted. They realize that I don’t need them anymore. The flesh is not the body. When the Bible talks about the flesh, the flesh is the desire to be God. Be God, to call your own shots, to live for your own glory. And don’t forget, the flesh can have what you might call gross manifestations, or it can have subtle manifestations. And my favorite illustration is the one I used about four months ago. So, you know, a person who needs to be in charge, it’s one form of the flesh, one form of being selfish. A lot of you don’t need to have power, you just want everybody to like you. And that’s another form of it. But here’s a person who needs to be in charge. And so this person, maybe before they become Christians, here’s a guy who just feels the need to seduce anybody that he can get his hands on. And once he seduces the girl, then he loses interest in her. He knows that that’s sort of a way of making himself feel powerful, vaguely, but he’s also having a lot of fun, so he just goes on till he becomes a Christian. And then somebody says, you can’t do that, thou shalt not commit adultery, fornication, and so on. Oh, he repents, he’s dealt with his flesh, right? He comes into the church, and every time he gets into a Bible study, he completely dominates the conversation. He wants to be elected an officer, and when he gets in charge, you know, he shows that it’s his opinion that everybody’s gotta go by. You know, some people, Bum Phillips used to say, the road to the Super Bowl goes through Pittsburgh. It doesn’t anymore. And there’s a lot of officers that say, the road to approval goes by me. You have to get by me if we’re gonna be approved. And he’s a power -hungry person inside the church. What’s happened to his flesh? It’s gotten religious.
The world, the flesh, and then you have the devil. And the devil is a supernatural intelligence, an evil supernatural intelligence, who is the leader of a whole slew of millions of other supernatural intelligence called demons. Do you think, gosh, he sounds awfully intelligent. Why in the world does he believe that sort of thing? If you don’t believe it, I just want you to realize that you’re a fairly small number, you’re part of a fairly small minority of human beings in the history of the world and in the place of the world who don’t believe in that. Just want you to realize that. There’s not that many of you. Oh yeah, of course they all live in New York City. And they all, well, that’s not true. I mean, they all live in America in this time, but most people have understood this. Not only that, you can’t make sense of the Bible without it. And the devil’s job is to do the same thing that the world and the flesh wanna do, and that is to destroy your peace and joy. One thing you have to keep in mind that’s very important is that most every kind of church I know of and almost every kind of pastoral approach, and almost every kind of Christian tends to try to reduce people’s problems to one of these three things. Either they think it’s the world or the flesh of the devil and they don’t see that they all three always operate together. And therefore the reasons for your depression is always complex. See how it works, for example, the world tells you, the world shows you something called commercials. And after you’ve seen, what are the statistics? After you’ve seen umpteen million commercials by the time you’re 25 years old, you start to build a church. believe that if you are at all physically attractive, you’ve got to look like the people in commercials. That’s the world doing that. But then what happens when your flesh gets a hold of what the world told it? Your flesh gets a hold of it and it can do a lot of things. All kinds of nasty things to you. It can drive you to spend too much money on your appearance. It can drive you to eating disorders. I’m not thin enough, I’m not thin enough. It can drive you to the need to be sexually active and sexually attractive. And then after whatever, the flesh gets a hold of what the world told you. And then the devil comes alongside of you and the devil’s job is to lie and accuse you. The word diabolos, which, well, the word Satan is a word that means prosecutor. The main job of the devil is not to tempt you, but to prosecute you, to accuse you. And he comes alongside after the world and the flesh are doing its number on you and he aggravates things and he comes alongside and says, and you call yourself a Christian. That’s how it always starts, you always know. You call yourself a Christian. And you see, there are some kinds of churches and Christians that seem to think, they try to deal with your problems intellectually, they teach you the right doctrine because your problem is you’re thinking worldly and not biblically. And there’s other kinds of Christians that take a, not an intellectualistic, but a legalistic approach to your problems and say, you’ve gotta obey, obey, obey. You see, we gotta deal with the flesh only. The intellectual types deal with the world and the legalistic types deal with the flesh. And then there’s the, I would call them the superstitious type Christians who are always thinking everything is the devil, everything. And we’re gonna cast this out of this and we’re gonna cast this out of this and it’s just the devil, so it’s just the devil. And listen, friends, the fact is all three of them are right. But whenever you just identify one, you miss the whole group. It’s sort of like there’s a whole pile of enemies coming at you and they’re all intertwined and you’re just aiming for one. Therefore, just keep this in mind, the world, the flesh and the devil basically come after you to try to get your conscience to go crazy. They basically all comes down to accusation. And the main way in which your joy and your peace is destroyed is by the world, the flesh and the devil getting after your assurance of your salvation. You see, they come alongside of you and they talk about your past. They say, think of the things that you’ve done. You haven’t even noticed that you’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden something that you did a long time ago is incredibly vivid in living color and quadraphonic sound and it comes up right as you’re going along, huh? Or they can come after you about your feelings. They’ll say, well, why don’t you feel more for this? Remember when you used to feel love and joy and peace? Well, what’s going on now? Why isn’t it there? They don’t mention the fact, of course, that your salvation is result, pardon me, your feelings are the result of salvation is they’re not the basis of salvation. Your feelings come from being one with God, but they’re not the basis for being one with God. God doesn’t love you or save you on the basis. of how you feel, or they may come along and talk to you about your recurrent sins. They’ll say, hey, you should be better by now. And maybe you should, by the way. They may be right, that’s the point. Most of the lie has got a lot of truth in it. But essentially what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to get you to look more at your sins than at your savior. And this is the end.
The reason that you will lose your assurance is if they come alongside of you and they poison your conscience. There’s a great place in Pilgrim’s Progress where there’s a man named Mr. Conscience who’s a watchman around the city. And if anybody tries to break into the city, Mr. Conscience runs around saying, awake, awake, awake, awake. You know, there’s enemies. And what Satan does is he comes up and he poisons Mr. Conscience, not to kill him, but to drive him insane. So he yells awake, awake, awake when there’s nobody really coming in. And he goes to sleep when there’s somebody coming in. And that’s the way, all of our consciences are, and that’s the way the world of flesh and the devil tries to get at us. Tries to poison our conscience and get us to look more at our sins than our savior. What have you gotta do about that? Well, when it comes right down to it, you have to continually think of a couple things. One, the reason you’re so sad about your loss of joy and peace, and why some of you actually doubt your salvation, because you say, I should be better by now. My feelings should be better. There should be more things going on in my life. I should be growing more. How do I even know I’m a Christian? And the first thing I always say is, you give yourself too much credit. The reason you’re so sad must be because the Spirit of God is working at you. You don’t have the ability to want to be holy, unless God is helping you want to be holy. Giving yourself too much credit. You know, you should be realizing that your very sadness is a sign of the work of God in your life.
And secondly, you need to constantly come back and say, it’s not really my feelings, and it’s not my sins, and it’s not my record, but what makes me a Christian, what makes me accepted by Jesus Christ, by God, is what Jesus Christ has done for me. And there’s a sense in which the world of flesh and the devil will always try to keep you away from the gospel. And the only way to deal with the world of flesh and the devil is keep telling yourself the gospel and keep preaching the gospel to yourself. And the way you do that is you say, the reason I’m feeling so bad today is I’m still locked in works righteousness. I still want to feel that I have to be good enough to be saved, and you know what? I’m not, and I never was. And of course I shouldn’t have done this thing this week, but if I hadn’t done this thing this week, I still wouldn’t be acceptable to God. It’s only through the mercy of Jesus Christ. And that’s the reason why I can look at him and know that I belong to him. I put my faith in him, I look at him from Christ, and I say to myself, lay your deadly doing down. Down at Jesus’ feet. Stand in him and him alone, gloriously complete. The world of flesh and the devil are out. after you, but everything’s fine if you have the right expectations. Don’t be upset that you’re upset. Don’t be down that you’re down. Jesus was constantly a man of sorrows and weeping, and all the great Christians were constantly wrestling with these sorts of things. And frankly, you’re gonna get back into your joy and you’re gonna get back into your peace faster if you’re not so bummed out about the fact that you don’t have it right now. For everyone, look at your sin, take five looks at your savior, okay? The noble, the pure, think of these things. and the God of peace will be with you. Let’s pray.