SERMON MEDIA
Answers in My Identity III - Propitiation
We’re continuing our fall series entitled Answers in My Identity. And the point of what we have been discussing rests on the reality that our emotional and spiritual well being is tied to our sense of personal value. It is tied to us looking in the mirror and feeling that your life has meaning and purpose and value. It is richly answering the question ‘what is my life worth, does my life have any real value?’.
This is a fundamental question that influences all that we do. Most of human struggle, first on the individual level which then leads to the societal level, comes from our efforts to create a value for our lives. Whether you call it self esteem, self worth or self value, virtually everyone involved in mental, emotional and spiritual health will agree it all begins in finding value when taking personal inventory. One psychologist puts it like this:
‘The basic personal need of each person is to regard himself as a worthwhile human being’.
We are constantly struggling to create self worth trying to build our self esteem. This is why so much of the discussion in and around society, whether it's on daytime talk shows, in the halls of academia or the offices of counselors is around self worth, self value. Loving yourself before you can love others. Everyone agrees on the fact that you will not have a positive outcome if you do not have a positive sense of your own self worth.
And since that is the case, the premise of this series is you have to discover your intrinsic personal value or you will be faced to create, to pursue, value outside yourself, and when you do that you will inevitably fall into deep emotional and spiritual traps. As an example the first trap we discussed was a trap of performance. The second that we discussed last week was the trap of personal approval.
When you are pursuing your value on things and people outside yourself those metrics are ever moving and it is why people end up broken and devalued but, as we are expressing in this series, when you discover your value in your identity in Christ, that anchors your worth in not what you are doing or accomplishing but in what Christ has done to and for you.
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
Ephesians 2:10: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works
Ephesians 4: .put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness.
In Christ we find our true value in a new identity discovering that this new identity establishes the means of freedom from these earthly traps.
For the trap of performance, because of our identity in Christ, we receive the freedom found in justification. Romans 5 states:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand ) to counter the trap of personal approval we have freedom that comes from the gift of reconciliation…
2 Cor 5: 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself…
It is amazing God’s knowledge of us and His attention to us. knowing what brings destruction He, through His redemption plan, has provided us the answers (riff a little). and he doesn’t stop at the destruction brought by performance and approval with justification and reconciliation, he knows our complexity and has answered our needs.
This week I want to talk about a coping game we play that is incredibly destructive to our relationships and well being. In some ways it is a role playing game that is divisive and soul sucking, now that I think about it much like the game of ‘risk’. It’s the blame game.
When perceptions of success and failure become our primary basis for evaluating ourselves and others, quite often we believe that performance reflects one’s value and as a result failure makes one unacceptable and unworthy of love, under those conditions we will usually feel completely justified in condemning those who fail, including and most often ourselves.
The game of self blame is often the most efficient trap of destruction we can fall into emotionally and spiritually. The practice of self condemnation can be obvious when it includes something like name calling (I’m so stupid or I can’t do anything right. It's funny how often those represent direct quotes that have become embedded in our minds.) Or the practice of self condemnation can manifest more subtly... self deprecating jokes or statements, or simply never allowing room for error in your performance.
Quite often that internal game of self criticism draws others into the ring of blame and then we will become harsh with others… maybe even physically or verbally abusive or more subtly, through sarcasm or silence. However this manifests, the ‘teeth’ in the trap of blame wrecks destruction by communicating, either to one's self or others, ‘I will make you sorry, I will make you suffer, I will make you pay for what you did.’
Whenever I contemplate this destructive force that comes to bear on the mind, soul and spirit of people… I am immediately reminded of the title given to Satan in the 12th chapter of the Revelations where he is called the ‘accuser of the brothers’ or brethren in the KJV. (Satan uses the words of others, even our own thoughts, to level accusations diminishing in our hearts and minds our value. ‘You failed again, you’re just a disappointment, you will never do anything right’. And in that place our value is obscured, our freedom is lost and it is impossible to live in the victory we have in our identity in Christ.)
But it is interesting because when you look at the context of that statement in Revelation 12 you see the pathway forward from the trap of blame laid before us.
10 And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. 11 And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.
This passage points directly that the means of overcoming the trap of the blame game of accusations is found in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. expound a little.)
In fact the identity we have in Christ because of His work provides the perfect antidote for the accusations that enslave us. The same way the work of justification, because of our identity in Christ, frees us from the trap of performance, in the same way our reconciliation with the Father, because of our identity in Christ, frees us from the trap of personal approval, our place as a result of the propitiation of Christ, frees us from the trap of blame. Now propitiation is a big, theological word that's probably even more unfamiliar to our daily vernacular then justification or reconciliation. The easiest way to understand it is satisfaction or satisfied and not in the sense that a Snickers satisfies you but in the way in which you have satisfied a debt, the way a debt is paid off.
In fact in this regard that is exactly how we should understand it. Now before I venture further in explaining this I want you to frame your minds with contemplating these 3 questions:
1. Does God’s truth trump your truth?
2. Does what God say matter more than what you feel?
3. And does God exist to accommodate man or does man exist to accommodate God?
These are important realities with which to wrestle when contemplating the work of propitiation that sets us free from the trap of blame. If you dont settle on the reality that God’s truth is not dependent on my approval, that God’s creative plan does not bow to my emotional values, or that my Creator doesn't exist to serve His creation but that I live under His sovereign lordship, the beauty of Christ’s propitiative work inherent in our identity. I say this because too many people struggle to embrace the reality of the debt we owed and could not pay.
Here’s the important narrative that created the debt that required His propitiation. God is Holy. To be true to His holiness God punishes those whose ‘self righteousness’ does not equal His righteousness. Now, that might not seem fair to you. For some, many things God says about sin may not seem fair. You might think... God you are so big why not overlook some things? But God, his nature and what He does, is not up for office. God does not run for office because He is the office. His essence, makes the rules, His nature AS holiness, AS love, AS judgment, AS mercy establishes the laws of human reconciliation to a heavenly Father. HE is not open for debate and therefore neither are the rules.
And so we, in our sinfulness, in our moral failure, come under judgment and as the bible says ‘the wrath of God’. Romans 1 declares it distinctly when Paul writes:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
And we see it maybe even clearer in John chapter 3. right after John 3:16 where Jesus declares that verse we all have heard ‘For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son.’ we discover WHY he had to give His son.
36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
Understanding this is key to living in the freedom available because of our identity in Christ through Christ’s work on the cross as one author put it:
Only if we understand the horror of coming under the wrath of a holy God for our sins will we appreciate what Christ did on the cross. Every day our minds should be overwhelmed by thankfulness for what He did on our behalf. As I have often said, the value of our salvation is only realized when we understand what we have been saved from.
When Christ died on the cross He was our substitute, He took upon Himself the wrath of God that we deserved. The depth of God’s love for us, the SO in for God SO loved the world, is revealed by the extremity of His actions for us: The holy Son of God became man and died a horrible death in our place. Two passages state this eloquently. The first was written in anticipation of Christ’s coming in Isaiah:
4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
And the second if found in 1 John:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
There was a debt, a debt wrought by our unrighteousness, our sinfulness, our failure, that Jesus satisfied, erased, eradicated by His work on the cross. Because of our HIS payment, we live in our identity FREE from the burden of our OUR failure. Hear that again, you are FREE from the burden of your FAILURE.
For some of you, as I have been describing the theological argument for propitiation, you may have wondered if I wandered from the point of finding freedom from the trap of blame, the point IS the propitiation. There is no accusation that erases the work of the cross Christ did, central to HIs work is the acknowledgement of your imperfection and so there is no blame that should take root. The accuser has no platform.
When you understand your identity in Christ is there because He acknowledges your penchant for failure, all of our penchants for failure, you take out of the hand of your accuser, whether it is your own voice, the voice of your parents echoing from bygone years, the voice of boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife, of the voice of the Satan himself, the weapon to destroy your value and you find freedom.
I do not believe it is coincidence that Isaiah 53, the passage about Christ’s work on the cross, precedes Isaiah 54 for when it is declared about us, God’s children, remember this is our identity because of reconciliation and this is declared about us.
16 Behold, I have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose. I have also created the ravager to destroy; 17 no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed, and you shall refute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their vindication from me, declares the Lord.
So what do we do when we fail?
1. We own our failing and ONLY our failing. Not as a truth that crushes us but one that affirms our need for Christ.
2. We rejoice in the truth that Christs work, anticipated our sin and emancipated us from that sin, to not curse our humanity but rejoice in Christ’s divinity.
3. We should look full into Christ to find His provision for our spiritual growth and maturity.