Have you ever heard somebody say, “I had the craziest dream
last night!”? And then they go on to tell you about something that
makes absolutely no sense? I have a question. Have you ever had a
dream that did make sense? Have you ever had a dream and the next day
said, “Hey that was a good idea. I’m gonna try that.”
Somebody real briefly tell me about a crazy dream you had.
I remember a while back having a dream that Indians were chasing
me down a snowy mountain and we were all on skis. And they chased me to
the top of this building and they started shooting me with BB guns. And
then I woke up. Where does that come from? I hadn’t been thinking
about Indians, skiing or BB guns. How does that stuff get into our
heads? Do you ever wonder that?
I have had a couple of horrible dreams just here lately and I woke
up thinking I needed to go the psychologist. I must be mentally disturbed
to have dreams like that. It was awful. Am I the only one? Or
sometimes maybe you just have some thought pop up in your brain and you think
how horrible that is and that you really don’t feel that way. You would
never do that or talk that way or want whatever it was that flashed through
your head.
And when I get to Heaven…I am not going to bring that up! I
don’t really want to know or even talk about it but if I did want to, God would
know. He would know the answer to my question of where does that stuff
come from. He would be able to tell me that it was a combination of the
news I watched, the conversation I overheard and the late-night pizza I had
eaten, or whatever it is.
But whatever causes that kind of dream or thought, I am glad to
know that God understands where that stuff comes from. I’m glad to know
that He understands my thoughts better than I do and that He knows my motives
and that He knows my heart. Because there was that time back in about
1982 that I had good motives for that one deal and I want credit for that.
But I will also tell you that it scares me to death to think that
God knows my heart and sees my motives because of all those other times.
He has seen those other times when I was prideful or bitter. He knows
that I was sarcastic when I gave that compliment. He saw me being obedient
with teeth clenched and fists balled up. He knows when I’m fake. He
knows when I’m lazy. He knows when I have a bad attitude. He sees
all of that in me just as plain as day. And it scares me, but does it
change me?
As we end our series on being authentic, I want to look at one
last proverb that talks about how God knows our heart, our motives, our
thoughts and we will see what it takes to have authentic thoughts; thoughts
that are wholesome and pleasing to God. I don’t know it but I hope that
when our thoughts become more authentic then maybe our dreams will even be
better as well.
Turn again to the book of Proverbs and we will look at Proverbs
15:11. We have seen what it means to be authentic, worship
authentically, live authentically and trust authentically even when God
disciplines us. Today we see what is involved with having authentic
thoughts in Proverbs 15:11.
“Death and Destruction lie open before the LORD-- how
much more the hearts of men!”
Somebody tell me what it’s like to be dead. Somebody tell me
how it feels to be in the grave. Somebody tell me how you are going to
die, how I am going to die. Somebody tell me where Moses is buried.
Somebody tell me who is in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can’t but
God can. All of that is as open to God as an old book. He knows
all, sees all, reads all and is Lord of all.
Martin Luther said, “Even the devil is God’s
devil.” God knows what Satan is going to do next and while Satan may
be the lord of this world (for now); the Lord of the devil is God, Yahweh,
Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And God even knows the
thoughts, understands the motives and sees every action of Satan himself.
And that ought to scare the fire out of him but it doesn’t. And it ought
to scare the fire out of you and me, but does it?
Just for grins I googled, “What is it like to be dead?”
I wondered if anybody else had ever thought of the question that way.
Come to find out, I’m not the first. The most common answer compared it
to being asleep. One agnostic person said we have nothing to fear because
we didn’t exist before we were born just like we won’t exist when we die.
And that is very similar to Mark Twain’s thoughts on it. He said, "I do not fear death. I had been dead
for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the
slightest inconvenience from it."
I like Mark Twain and consider him to have
been a pretty smart guy but Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads
to death.” Isaiah 55:9 says, “As
the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and
my thoughts than your thoughts.” What the grave is like, what death
is like, who is there and how it happens only God knows and He has known it
before He created it.
But Solomon’s point here is not to just say that God knows all
about death, the grave and Hell. His point is that since God knows all of
that and we can’t conceive of any of that beyond what He has revealed to us in
His Word, God knows every thought, feeling and motivation that we have.
And as I said, that should give us peace knowing that the good we have in our
hearts, our good intentions and warm feelings we get when we do something for
someone else; all that counts for something.
But it’s the other side of that coin that can and should concern
us. If He knows all the good then He also knows all the bad. I hear
people all the time say the way to get to Heaven is if your good deeds outweigh
your bad deeds and they are happy with that, comparing themselves to all the
really bad people they can think of. But not only is that horribly faulty
theology, I think for most people it wouldn’t turn out any better if that were
true.
If it weren’t for the cross of Christ and that our salvation comes
through faith and by grace and if God really did judge us according to all our
thoughts and deeds, then most of us would wind up smashing through the gates of
Hell like a sled on ice. But as believers we know that we have God’s
grace and mercy and forgiveness and so we don’t have to worry about having bad
thoughts even if God does see them, right?
Of course that’s not true. We saw from verses 8, 9, and
10 what God thinks about sin, even of the believer. He detests
it. He calls it evil and He says there will be stern punishment for
it. When we looked at those verses, I brought out that all sin is a
choice and we know that all choices start out their lives as thoughts.
You have heard the quote that thoughts become words and words become actions and
actions become habits and habits become character.
All sin starts with a thought. And 2 Corinthians 10:5
says, “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
And we read that and we believe it and we quote it and rely on it and we do everything
but make a plan for how to do it. We are going to try to capture
something; something that is fleeting and difficult to even describe some time
and yet we fail to make any plan of action on how to do it. We go to
battle without a battle plan.
Well, we are going to make a battle plan today. When Jesus
was tempted in the desert, His response always started out, “It is written…” and then He would quote
scripture. Scripture is our only offensive weapon according to Ephesians
6 and that is what our battle plan is going to be based on today:
scripture.
The first thing we have to do is guard our hearts and minds.
Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything
you do flows from it.” My big dog, Bo, likes for me to leave
the back door open so he can see what’s going on in the neighborhood. And
when he sees somebody walking down the road, even from a long way off, he
starts to growl. The hair on the back of his neck starts to stand up and
his upper lip starts to curl and the closer they get the more intense he
becomes until he barks his big-boy bark and runs them off. And then he
looks at me like, “Look what I did.”
Well, we ought to be the same way when it comes to our thought-
life. When those detestable thoughts pop into our heads, we need to
recognize them immediately as threats to our very life, because they are.
And we need to run them off. Let me give you one way of doing that.
I hate to ask you to think one of those thoughts but consider it
the practice you need for the hand-to-hand combat you are going to face when
you leave here. I want you to think about that pet sin in your life; that
sin that you struggle with day after day. Whatever it is, make a mental
picture of it right now. It’s a picture with a glass frame. Now
take that picture of that sin and throw it on the ground and stomp on it until
it is destroyed, unrecognizable.
We are guarding our hearts and we know that every sin is a choice
and those choices start out as thoughts and so destroy that thought completely.
You have taken that thought captive and have given it no mercy. That’s
step one. But you have to do step two. You have to do step 2
because if you just take that thought captive and destroy it, all of its
relatives will come back and take its place.
So you have to replace that thought with another thought.
You have to think of something else, put something in its place or you’ll lose
the battle. And with step 2 we look at Philippians 4:8.
Most of you are familiar with that beautiful verse that says, “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.”
I want to give you a copy of this verse to take home with
you. Put it on your mirror or in your wallet or wherever you need it so
you can get to it in a hurry when you need it. A soldier going to battle
doesn’t leave his gun in the barracks. He takes it with him and has it at
the ready. This is your offensive weapon so keep it handy. Now,
when everybody has their own copy, I want us to go over it word by word.
I tried to leave some space around it so you can write on it and I
want you to write on it this morning. Where it says to think on whatever
is true, I want you to think of something that is true and write that next to
the word “true”. In fact, I want you to holler out something that is true
right now. See, the problem with this verse is that in the heat of
battle, sometimes it’s hard to think of something that is true or noble or
right and it’s sort of like having a gun that you can’t get the safety button
off. You have the weapon but it’s not doing you any good.
So, what is something true? Be specific and think of
something that is true that will help you replace that bad thought. Now
go to noble. What is something noble? And so on…
Ok, now we move on to the 3rd step.
Step one was guard your heart. Step 2 was to replace the thought.
And step 3 is to practice it. And we see that in the verse after Philippians
4:8, verse 9. In Philippians 4:9, Paul says, “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.”
Rubenstien, the
great musician said, "If I omit practice one day, I notice it, if two
days, my friends notice it, if three days, the public notices it." I
want to tell you that if you don’t practice this then Satan will notice it and
jump on you with both feet. He can’t fight against God’s Word but if you
don’t practice it he will attack. But when you practice it then Paul says
that the God of peace will be with you. And that leads right into
the 4th and last step.
What I am trying to get us to do is not an easy thing. If it
were we wouldn’t need to spend this time on it, obviously. In fact, I
have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can’t do
it. You can’t do any of these steps on your own. But the good news
is that you can’t do it. But the Holy Spirit can, through you. And
as Paul said, God is with us. Our 4th step comes from Galatians
5:16 that says, “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify
the desires of the flesh.”
Yes, we have a responsibility in this. We have to do the
first 3 steps but we also have to know that we will never succeed without the
Spirit’s help. Unless we are abiding in Christ, spending time in His Word
and in prayer, saturating ourselves with Him through worship, music, fellowship
with other believers and then just being still and knowing that He is God; if
we don’t do those things and allow the Holy Spirit to work through us, then we are
wasting our time and we are doomed to continue struggling with those same sins
over and over.
“Walk by the Spirit” Paul says. And that is the secret to
being authentic, to authentic worship, authentic living and trust and authentic
thoughts. Walk by the Spirit and allow Him to do it through you.
Quit struggling. Quit worrying. Quit having to go to God time after
time asking for forgiveness of those same old sins. Take every thought
captive and replace it with Him. That is authenticity.
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