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Change or Die 2 – 9.30.7
Change: What Works
Last week I said this in my sermon: In any crowd, “between the people with soft hearts (who are ready to change as soon as the Word is preached), and the ones with hard hearts (who won't change no matter what you say), lies the vast middle which in most crowds is the largest segment . These people are in some ways the hardest to come to terms with, as a preacher. They’re the ones who say things like: “Wow, the preacher really stepped on my toes today. He really hit it out of the park. I felt like he was talking right to me. There are some things I really need to change…but not today. I’m going to repent, but I need to make a little more money first; I need to get my head together; I need to finish school and find a girlfriend and get married, and THEN I will make that turn-around that I desperately need. For now I’m going to bookmark it and forget it.” I got a lot of comments last Sunday and during this week from people who said they really enjoyed the sermon, and don't think I don't appreciate it.
But what I really look for isn't appreciation for the quality of the sermon, but signs of real change. If someone can tell me that they heard the message of God's word, the word “repent” and point out some way they have changed, THAT is the fruit I hope for.
Last week I began this series called Change or Die, and I acknowledged debt to an article called “Change or Die” by Alan Deutschman in Fast Company, May 2005 and to Chip Eichelberger. Deutschman wrote a book of the same name which has given me some ideas for the framework of this sermon, but only in what can be backed up by Scripture.
We laid a lot of groundwork last week that I won't cover again (but you can catch up at morrisonhill.com). For the next two weeks (after today) my plan is to address the issue of our dying culture and how the church (and THIS church) needs to change to continue being faithful to Christ's mission. Today we're going to dig in and talk some more about personal change (which will lead us to the topic of corporate change) by looking at what changes people and what doesn't.
What
doesn't work: The Three Fs (plus an S) - Facts, Fear and Force
FACTS: Getting the facts straight is very important. I wouldn't be
a Christian if I didn't believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a
historical FACT. 2 Peter 1:16 says that "We
did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty."
And the Scripture with which we began last week, Luke 3, locates the
ministry of John the Baptist not "once upon a time in a land far, far away" but
"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate
was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee." The facts are immensely
important. But for most of us, they're not life-changing, not with
Christianity, not with health, nor marriage nor church. Change or Die may be
the fact of my existence, but so what? OR: If you argue to your brother-in-law
that he should quit smoking, and you lay out all the facts about lung cancer and
heart disease, you're probably just rehashing what he already knows. The facts
haven't changed him.
Well, then, how about a little FEAR? Fear may actually have a bad name these days, but it has a very legitimate place in getting us to change. What's the best-known Scripture on the fear of God? Maybe Proverbs 9:10 - The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. And listen to Acts 9:31 when it says that right after Saul's conversion, "...the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord." And Jesus said, in Matthew 10:28 - "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell." Clearly, a properly-placed fear of the Lord has its place. If we really believe that there is a Holy God and a place called Hell, we have to speak up and tell the fearful side of the message.
But fear, at best, only cracks open the door to change. It doesn't produce long-term change in most people. When John the Baptist preached in Luke 3:9 that "The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire," people responded with repentance and baptism, but not necessarily with a long-term commitment to righteous living. Fear tends to make us change, but only for as long as it takes to get comfortable again about what scared us.
When I was in grade school, someone spent a lot of money to educate us on the dangers of smoking. We watched a lot of filmstrips on the medical problems smoking causes and we saw photos of healthy lungs and smokers' lungs. Naive as I was, I couldn't imagine that anyone my age or younger would ever smoke. Maybe the older generations didn't know the dangers, but we DO. But we smoke too.
The third F is FORCE, which we won’t talk about much. Obviously if you have enough force, you can make people do your bidding, but you can’t really change them. You may TELL your son that he’s going to eat his broccoli AND like it, but in truth you can’t make him like it. Search the Scriptures and you’ll be hard-pressed to find an example where God uses force to change someone. Satan does it. We call it “demon-possession”. God does not.
So the three Fs – Facts, Fear, and Force have (at best) limited power to change people. For church folks, we should add an S – Shame. Surely if people won’t listen to the facts or respond in fear and if we don’t have proper force, we can at least shame them into changing, can’t we? Now it may be unpopular to say, but according to the Bible there are things that are shameful, that people should be ashamed of. Ephesians 5:12 says: “For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.” There are times when I look at our culture and see the things we celebrate and I know that we have lost a vital sense of shame. And yet, trying to change people by heaping shame on them is a futile task.
Picture an alcoholic, maybe someone you know. He won’t stop drinking. Yet he knows the FACTS, about liver damage and other health problems, and also about how much his family despises him and how much legal trouble he’s getting into with his DUIs. FEAR? If he lets himself think about it, he IS afraid – of dying alone on a street somewhere or in a jail cell, and he IS afraid of winding up in hell. But that’s too much to think about, so he doesn’t think about it – he drinks instead – and that’s why fear doesn’t make him change. FORCE? You’d probably use it to clean him up if you could, but you don’t have that much force and it wouldn’t change his heart anyway. And SHAME? He probably lives in shame more than you know, but it’s too much to face and he can’t stay there, so (as with fear) he suppresses it, mostly by drinking.
So what WILL work? How DO people change?
Let’s talk again about the anti-smoking campaign that I grew up with. Many years ago when I was a kid, the Surgeon General began printing a simple warning on packs of cigarettes: “Warning – The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is hazardous to your health.”
Since that time, they have branched out with more specific warnings about the hard facts of cigarette smoke, including…
Those are the hard facts that everyone, with the possible exception of cigarette companies, will agree with – and those facts are mixed with a little fear. There are others that haven’t yet been used that make a more emotional case, such as: SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: 100% pure tax. Or: SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Keith Richards is a fluke (but you probably don’t want to look like him). SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking during pregnancy can cause your baby to look like Yoda.
It is important to get the facts out there to give people the reasons for changing, for quitting smoking, and seeing these warnings for the first time may cause some appropriate fear. But facts and fear alone usually don’t change people.
Now here’s one more message (a real one) that when I first saw it on a billboard years ago, struck me as exactly what a smoker needs to know…
What’s different about that one? It offers hope. Tell a smoker about lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and she’ll say, “I know, I know, I KNOW! But what if I have been smoking for 25 years? I have probably sealed my fate. I might as well enjoy smoking now because, regardless, I’ll pay later.” This message says that it isn’t true. Quitting now greatly reduces serious risks to your health, even if you’ve smoked two packs a day for 30 years.
BUT there is still something missing, even in that more hopeful warning. It tells me that quitting now can reduce health risks and make me live longer. But what if I don’t want to live longer? What if (in my mind) I smoke because my life stinks and I really don’t want it to keep going on and smoking is the one reliable pleasure I have? Maybe I’d rather die than quit smoking because each pack contains 20 good friends who are always there for me. When you are depressed or hopeless, getting through the day matters a whole lot more than possibly sustaining your health for another decade.
What a smoker needs for change to happen is hope and purpose. If she can see that quitting smoking will make it possible for her to play with her grandkids without exhaustion or take a trip without worrying about chest pain or sleep through the night without coughing, and if she can deal with the cause of depression (and smoking itself may be a contributing factor as well as a coping mechanism) and find life to be worthwhile, then maybe she CAN change. Facts, fear, force, and even shame won’t change someone like hope and purpose can.
Now, in that light, will you consider the ways that Jesus calls us to follow Him?
MT 11:28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
MT 16:24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (That sounds pretty harsh, but here’s why…) 25 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.
And hear this description Jesus gives of his call to us: JOHN 10:27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. 30 I and the Father are one."
Rest. Eternal life. True life, not the fake stuff of this world, not the life that is destined to pass away. A relationship with Jesus where it can be accurately said that we listen to his voice and he is so strong in his protection of us that no one can snatch us out of his hand. That sounds like hope and purpose to me.
And consider the call to faith that we use most often in our church, Acts 2:38 - Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That’s the promise of God with us, God IN us, the ultimate in hope and purpose.
So hope and purpose draw people out and make it possible and desirable for them to change. But even with hope and purpose, change isn’t automatic. Briefly, there are three keys to change that Deutschman brings out that I find tightly tied in to the Christian message…
Three Keys: Relate, Repeat, Reframe
Relate – “You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider ‘hopeless’, you need the influence of seemingly ‘unreasonable’ people to restore your hope” (C or D, p. 14).
Change almost never happens in isolation. People change (for better or worse) WITH other people. When I think of all the changing interests that have passed through my life – astronomy, exercise, fishing, running – it’s almost embarrassing to think that they all came about from hanging around with friends who were interested in the same things. Maybe that makes me a chameleon, or especially subject to peer pressure. Whatever. The church is designed to take advantage of positive peer pressure. Consider Paul’s presentation of the Body:
1CO 12:12 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body--whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free--and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
That’s why one of our core values, spelled out in our SEVEN Rs on your bulletin is that people RELATE to one another through ongoing small group interaction, and that people will build deep spiritual friendships in small groups here – as pictured in Acts 2:46-47 - 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Repeat – The idea here is that change becomes real as we practice doing the new things that ARE the change we seek. The Christian life is about practices, disciplines – which never should be divorced from relationship with Christ to be sure – but disciplines nonetheless. I’m speaking of practices that we repeat in order to make the change in us a REALITY. Coming to worship; reading Scripture and meditating on it; prayer; giving and service, intentionally done in secret so that only God can reward us. Sometimes fasting, or entering a time of silence or solitude. But I fear sometimes that most Christians FAIL to live these practices because we hold back from community and do not relate to each other in any significant way.
HEB 10:25 Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Earlier in Hebrews, it says: HEB 5:12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
Reframe – “The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn’t have made any sense before you changed” (p. 15). It’s ironic that Deutschman uses such strong language in talking about people who decided to life a heart-healthy lifestyle but we have trouble using such strong language to describe the change in world view that IS Christianity. What I mean is that we act as if Christianity were a matter of simply getting a little forgiveness or cutting out some of our worse habits till we’re not as bad as our non-Christian neighbors. But the NT speaks of coming to Christ in terms of a total reframing of our reality, a new way of seeing the world and engaging with it.
RO 12:2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.
1CO 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."
1CO 1:20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.
I think it is fair to say that if you and I are living our faith in such a way that makes a lot of sense to the world, we’re not really sold out to Jesus Christ, our view of things hasn't yet been reframed, and we may be lying to ourselves when we call him “Lord”.
Real change takes place in us when our world turns over and reality is reframed, which is reinforced by the practices and disciplines that make us different, which is in turn inspired and sustained by a community of folks who “get it”.
I'll end today where I began last week. Some of us need to see that we're at a change-or-die-moment. We need serious change SOON or you'll lose your marriage, your job, your health. Maybe you need to admit that, given the way you think and act, there really isn't much of Jesus in you, and it doesn't really fit to call him Lord, because he isn't. Listen to HIS invitation. Hear love, hope, purpose:
MT 11:28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/01/change-or-die.html
Morrison
Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E.
Race St.
Kingston, TN 37763 (865) 376-5205
