Games People Play
“Life Without A Safety Net…”
Breaking the sound barrier is no big deal any more. When I was a kid, Air Force jets from the Air Guard in Pittsburgh used to break the sound barrier over my grandparent’s farm in West Virginia all the time (that was before laws prohibiting sonic booms over the US were in place). A couple of years ago, a SR71 Blackhawk spy plane was permitted to do it over the EAA Fly In at Oshkosh, but the pilot got the timing off just a few seconds, and at that speed, (over 760 miles per hour) instead of creating a sonic boom over Oshkosh, it occurred here, over the Horicon Marsh! With fighter jets and even passenger jets breaking the sound barrier all the time, it has become pretty routine for most of us. But there is a guy from Australia who is planning to break the sound barrier next year without the aid of an airplane!
His name is Rod Millner. Millner is a former Australian Commando and a member of the Army Reserve. His plan is to take a specially designed helium balloon (large enough to fit two jumbo jets side by side), up to an altitude of 25 miles. Then, from the very edge of space, he will jump out. It will take him 2 1/2 hours to get up, and about 10 minutes to come down.
No one knows if he will survive. No one has even been in a balloon at that altitude, let alone jumped out of one! He will be wearing a special astronaut-like space suit for the descent, due to the extreme pressure and heat he will face. The parachute will be similar to one that our astronauts currently wear, but it has never been tested. He will be wearing 12 cameras, to give an I-MAX like effect to the jump, and he will be monitored by scientists on the ground for the entire trip. He plans to land in the Australian desert within a 30-mile radius of his departure point. (I would hope that he lands on the Australian continent!)
Millner calls his jump “extreme science.” You and I may call it something completely different. He told the Daily Telegraph he’s doing the jump because, “there are no more mountains to climb, the seas have been done, so it’s time to go straight up…”
Okay…….
My wife thinks I’m crazy because I’ve told her that I would love to take a ride on the Space Shuttle! At least that is a pretty reliable means of transportation!
I always thought I would like to go sky diving until a couple of weeks ago while bowling at our league they had one of those Amazing Videos shows on the television, and it was all about people who had panicked during their dives, and gotten all tangled up in their chutes, and had to be rescued by another diver who caught them and pulled their reserve cord. Wow! I don’t think I want to do that any more!
Today we conclude our look at the Games People Play with the game Risk. We human beings seem to have a place in our psyche that loves risk, don’t we? It starts when we are kids. Remember swinging your child around and around and hearing him or her giggle and laugh? Remember how you wanted to ride your bike faster and faster, climb that tree higher and higher? I remember my kids making jumps in the driveway to fly over on their big wheels and bikes.
We want to drive fast, climb high - push the limits. It’s a part of us all – the rush of adrenaline, the “high” of survival, the euphoria of risk.
And if we don’t want to take the risk ourselves, we love to watch others do it, don’t we? We watch videos of people walking ropes stretched across skyscrapers. We gasp at acrobatic performers at the circus. We even tune in to see if someone will risk $500,000 to go for $1million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Risk is a part of life. There is no way we can live without it. Doubt me? Did you turn on a light switch this morning? You were within fractions of an inch of deadly electrical current. Did you shower? Many people die or are injured each year in bathroom falls. Did you drive here this morning? Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death and injury in people under 50. Eat breakfast? Drink water? Cross a street? Any one of those activities involves a certain amount of risk.
Have you ever been in that place of utter despair when you realize that the risk has caught up with you? Occasionally we risk a little too much, don’t we? Have you ever been there? Suddenly realized that you were indeed driving too fast for the conditions, and now you are out of control? Invested in that risky stock that you were sure was a solid investment, and now your retirement is gone? Thought you could beat that car at the intersection, and then in a flash realized that you had made a mistake, and you were about to get hit? My brother was killed 12 years ago when his semi collided with a van that was stopped in a lane of traffic on a freeway at 2:00am with no lights on. There were two cars in front of my brother’s truck. One veered to the right, one to the left, and there, suddenly, was this van, right in front of him, and he never even had a chance to hit the brakes. For a long time after the accident, I couldn’t get the mental image of my brother’s face out of my mind. I had seen him in situations throughout our life when he (or, more likely, we) had gone too far, and were going to get in trouble. Like when we would wrestle around, and break a lamp, and we knew we had pushed it a little too far. I knew that look in his eye, and in my mind’s eye, I could “see” the look on his face when he realized that the risk of driving had just caught up to him at 2:00am on that Labor Day.
Obviously, the trick to living a meaningful and somewhat psychologically balanced life is being able to understand and take some risks, while understanding and avoiding others. Wisdom is knowing the difference. Some, like Mr. Millner, seem to lack that ability.
But there are many of us who take an even greater risk. In fact, some of the riskiest behavior that can be taken by a human being does not take place 25 miles above the earth in the air in a balloon, or at 200 miles an hour on a racetrack. No, the most dangerous risk that many people take is done right here, in church. And like much of the risk we face each day, we are not sufficiently aware of it, and as a result face terrible consequences.
We live in a strange time. On the one hand, it's a time that is shot through with agony and catastrophe and tragedy and violence and suffering of every kind. We see it day in and day out in the papers and on the TV news. And those who are thoughtful and large-minded know that we are seeing the barest tip of an iceberg of hate and greed and injustice and brutality around the world, not to mention the millions upon millions of starving and utterly destitute poor in the world and the agonizing situations of tens of thousands of refugees.
But on the other hand, we do not want to hear about it.
While most of the world watches death every day without morphine or any medical help, and deals with deep gashes and amputations with no antiseptics or stitches, we gag at the sight of dead dear and grumble when 911 takes five minutes to respond instead of three.
In a time when we’ve all seen more violence than we care to admit, we’re all pretty much a bunch of wimps. We all know about the bad side of life, but we want to keep it at arm’s length.
And, what's most disturbing, though very few regard it as disturbing, is that when it comes to God, all we want to hear is the sweet side, the tender side, the warm side.
We think that we will have much better results if we talk only about the love of God, the grace of God, His mercy and long-suffering. And little by little we let that one-sided view (as unbiblical as it is) creep into our view of God himself, until we have no categories anymore to understand, let alone love, a God whose wrath is a fury of fire against sinners. I’ve had lots of people, including one this week, come into my office and open their Old Testaments and say, “What’s up with this God who is so angry and demands that his enemies be put to death?”
We have lost our sight of the judgment side of God. And when we do that, we are in a dangerous, risky place. We have a distorted image of God, and we fail to recognize Him for Who He is. You see it is true that God loves, and God forgives, and that He is not willing that any should perish, but if that is the only image we have of God, the we are at great risk.
Trust me, this is not a risk you want to take.
We must never forget that God is also perfect, holy and jealous. It is against His character to tolerate or overlook sin and rebelliousness. The Bible gives examples from start to finish of the awesome holiness of God. Of His judgment for sin.
Let me take you to a passage of Scripture this morning that I believe shows the perfect balance between God’s grace and God’s judgment.
Turn to the book of Hebrews, chapter 10. The book of Hebrews is a wonderful portion of the Bible. In fact, one of the ideas bouncing around in my head for this summer is to do a study of this book. But for our purposes today, as we take up the last of our “Games People Play,” let me direct you to the tenth chapter, where in just a few verses we celebrate the grace of God and are warned of the wrath of God.
In the first part of this chapter, the writer is telling his Jewish readers of the completeness of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. In verses 1-4, the writer tells us that the sacrificial system of the Old Testament was unable to take away the sins of the people. If it were, then they would not have had to return year after year and sacrifice another bull or goat for their sins. It was an imperfect sacrifice, that pointed forward to the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God for our sins, once for all. Look at verse 5.
Therefore when He came into the world, He said, “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure, Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come – in the volume of the book it is written of Me – to do your will, O God.’”
And verse 10:
By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
And verse 17:
Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.
Man, that is what the grace of God is all about! This is an amazing, wonderful truth! Think about all the people in the world today who are still caught up in the old trap of having to somehow earn God’s favor. There are still those who feel they must offer sacrifices to their gods to get a good crop, keep away evil, or placate their god. In some parts of the world people will have themselves nailed to a cross to as a sacrifice to God. Even in our own society there are those who feel they need to go through religious rites, say certain prayers, give lots of money, do community service, all in the hope that God will take note on judgment day and overlook their sins. But we can be free from all of that! We can come to God, not based on the rituals we have accomplished or the prayers we have said or the good deeds we have done, but on the finished work HE has done!
The writer then tells us that because of the finished work of Jesus, we can “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” We now have access to the Father! We can boldly enter into the Holiest through the blood of Jesus! Man that is Grace!
And that is where most of us stop. That’s where most churches stop. But the message goes on.
Immediately after telling us that we can go directly to God, that we no longer need a priest to intercede for us, we are told that we need to be going to church – to fellowship with other believers, to “hold firm” to our faith. Look at verse 23,24 &25:
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good woks, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching.
You see, the writer knew that “He who promised is faithful,” but he also knew that we, as humans, tend not to be. We tend to waiver, to stray, and to be unfaithful. We can fall so easily back into a lifestyle of sin, and we need the encouragement and the accountability of fellow believers to check that tendency in our lives.
For if we do not check that slip, and allow ourselves to continue to waiver in our firm stand in the faith, we can develop a callousness toward the grace of God, and a tolerance for sin in our lives that is a risky place to be indeed.
Look at verses 26 and following:
For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fiery indignation, which will devour the adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses’ law dies without mercy on the testimony of only two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he is sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. And again, “The Lord will judge His people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
We don’t hear those verses preached on a lot in America today. We don’t want to consider seriously the words that are written here. But they are words that should send a chill down the back of every person. They are words that call sin, sin, and words that warn of the incredible risk of turning our back on God.
So the obvious question is: Who is it that is at risk? For whom is there no longer any sacrifice for sins? If God is a God of wrath and vengeance and judgment and fury, "when there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins," then we must ask, it would be crazy not to ask, for whom is there no longer a sacrifice for sins? In this text, who is at risk?
Let's look first at who these people are. There are at least five descriptions:
1) Verse 26: they go on sinning willfully. Both the tense of the verb, (in Greek it would read, “they go on sinning,”) and the word "willfully" show us that it is not any one particular sin in view here. It is the extent and willfulness that is in view here. The unpardonable sin is not a particular kind of sin, but the attitude of sinning against God’s grace.
2) Verse 27: at the end of the verse they are called "adversaries." The fury of God's fire will consume the adversaries. This means that he is talking about people who have rejected God and are now his opponents.
3) Verse 29: they have trampled under foot the Son of God. The Son of God laid his life down for them to receive as their substitute, and instead of receiving him as their life and hope, they paused, got some religion, and then stepped on him and went on to other things.
4) Verse 29b: they regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant. "Unclean" is not quite the best word. They regarded it as common, ordinary, nothing special, not sacred or precious. They drank the cup of the new covenant, said, "Nice juice," and went away to sin, as if it were not the most precious reality in the universe.
5) Verse 29 at the end: They "insulted the Spirit of grace." They tasted the grace of God in their lives, were influenced by it in some measure, but then they began to turn it into license and used it to justify their love of sinning, and eventually threw it away as unnecessary.
And for these people, the writer says, God is a consuming fire.
The writer describes at risk of God's wrath not just in terms of what they had become, what they are, but also in terms of what they once were, which makes their condition so much more guilty.
1) They had received a knowledge of the truth. Verse 26: "For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins." These ones at risk, who trample the Son of God, know the truth. These people had received the gospel. They were walking away from Christ in the broad daylight of truth.
2) They are described as part of "God's people" in verse 30, "The Lord will judge his people." I take this to mean that these were people who from all outward appearances were part of the church. It is like in the Old Testament, when there were people who were part of the Nation of Israel, but they were not obedient to God, and did not trust in Him. Paul says in Romans 9:6, “Not all those from Israel are Israel.” God says in the Ezekiel 34:17 “As for you, My flock, behold, I will judge between one sheep and another, between the rams and the goats.'" There are many people in the church today who have all the outward appearance of a child of God, but are not. Many of these people will be eventually caught up in willful sinning, and will not want to worship.
3) Finally, in verse 29 he says that these at risk of God's wrath were "sanctified." "How much greater punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean (or common) the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified?"
These were people who had at one time been separated from the world. They had come out from the pattern of the world. They had enjoyed the fellowship of believers, they had perhaps even been baptized, taken communion, and worshipped in harmony with believers. But now, they consider that blood as no special thing.
Now, this is a place where it would be very easy for us to enter into a debate about the security of believers. Were these people ever really saved, and turned their back on Christ, or did they never truly make Jesus the Lord of their life, they just went through the motions?
You know what, that is not the important question. I could tell you how I believe about it, but that doesn’t change the condition of these people.
No, the important thing is this - Take heed to yourselves. You have received a knowledge of the truth. You have heard it proclaimed. The Son of God has laid his life down for you to receive the payment for your sin. You have come under the sway of many sanctifying influences – church, parents, the Word of God. Do not trample the Son of God or make light of his blood or insult the Spirit of grace that is blowing over your soul even now.
As haunting as that image in my minds eye of my brothers face when he realized that the risk of driving had caught up with him, it is nothing compared to the image of a face of a person who realizes too late that they were just playing the Christian game. During the Sermon on the Mount, which, by the way, was preached to those who were following Jesus, He said,
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast our demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me you who practice lawlessness!”
Can you imagine the look on the faces of those people? Those who played the Christian game, who took a chance that they had done enough, who bet on God’s love and grace, and forgot about his holiness and his righteous judgment.
Today the series Games People Play ends. Next week the window will have some other decorations in it, and we will move on to other topics. But for many, the games will go on. Hear me, and hear the word of God. You don’t want to be playing a game of Risk with God Almighty.
Let me close with the word of God from Hebrews 10, verses 32-39. These words are a call to commitment, to action to holiness:
But recall the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great struggle with sufferings…knowing that you have a better and enduring possession for yourselves in heaven. Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise:
For yet a little while,
And He who is coming will come and will not tarry.
Now the just shall live by faith;
But if anyone draws back,
My soul has no pleasure in him.”
But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but those who believe to the saving of the soul.
Let’s pray.
Father, it is not my desire here today to create any sort of hysteria. It is not my wish that any here would have an unjustified doubt of their faith. But, O God, if there are any of us here who have been just playing the Christian Game, and who are at Risk of your judgment, will you bring conviction on us right now? Would you, by the Holy Spirit, give us that awesome warning in our souls of the great peril we face, the great risk we take, when we have not really given our hearts to you? Grant it Lord, that none would leave this place without having done business with you right here, right now. We ask it in Jesus’ holy name. Amen.