February 3

Essence of the Core: Vim & Vigor

February 3, 2008 Rev. William “Buck” Day

Good Morning. I want to turn to our scripture for today. We are looking at a couple of scriptures, one from 1Timothy and then one from Philippians and then Proverbs. So I invite you to follow along as we read God’s word this day.

1 Timothy 4:7-9

Train yourself in godliness for while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance.

Then from Philippians 2:5

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

And finally, Proverbs 16:3

Commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established.

God’s word for us this day!

Would you pray with me please?

Lord we ask that you would, by the power of your Holy Spirit, quicken our hearts to hear what you have to say. Let those things fall deep within our hearts. Lord we ask that because you are, in fact, our Lord and we give you the glory in your name. Amen.

Well, I am a little bit late to this party, but it usually starts around the first of the year. People begin to look at their body and they realize that they have perhaps overindulged a little over the holiday. They begin the work of loosing weight and getting in shape. The truth is I am no different. I am like everyone else. I am overweight and the doctors consider me obese. You think that’s funny, don’t you. …..perhaps a little bit too many Christmas cookies and candy…. But boy they were indeed good. But I am also a little bit luckier because I have been working at this for a while. I am not starting from scratch in terms of my workout regiment. I have been working out and walking on a regular basis now. But it wasn’t enough to stop that holiday spread. So, I knew I had to kick it up a notch. So I began to modify my food intake and began to focus more of my workouts on building muscle mass, because I know as you get older you begin to lose some of your muscle mass and I did not want that to happen. So I began to workout. Part of my regiment has been working on what are called the core body muscles. They are predominately your abdomen, your back and your gluteus muscles. These are the core muscles to get in shape into what experts call ‘fit’. It’s now: you don’t want to get strong, you want to get fit. That’s kind of the new word. So as you work on your core muscles, when that happens, it seems like everything else in your life just kind of begins to fall into place. You start feeling better; you’re sleeping better, lots of good things happen. It also keeps those middle age aches and pains at bay, when you begin to workout.

So as I began to think about that, I began to say, “You know what? The core is the key in lots of different fronts.” As I began to get my head around Chris’s deployment and realizing I would be doing this a little bit more often, I began to go to God and say “O.K. God, what do you want? What do we need to hear from you going forward?” What I heard is that we need to continue this connecting emphasis that we started. I’ll give you a little context that maybe will help some of you. Connecting is one of those pieces that come out of the 40 Days of Purpose, out of The Purpose Driven Life. We use a little different terminology than the book, but that’s where it comes from. I know some of you say, “Well, we did the 40 Days of Purpose a couple of years ago, now”. And we kind of say “Well we kind of put it on the shelf. We kind of forgot about it.” Well I would say, no not really. We haven’t necessarily forgotten about it. It is still part of our framework here at Faith. We began kind of this connecting emphasis last fall, and we began by looking at this idea of connecting with each other here at Faith. Our Welcome Home pledge drive was a part of that. Our Hoedown, our picnic and even the messages were all around this notion of connecting with each other.

But now we move on to the next step, and that is to connect with God. We want to connect with God and then later on we will talk about how we connect with the world. Now connecting with God, I think it can be argued as perhaps the most important and the starting point for all the other connections that we have. If we don’t get connected to God in ways that provide health for our spiritual life, the rest of our connections will be, at best, incomplete and unsatisfying; and, at worse, self-centered and destructive for those around us and even ourselves. Our connection with God is that the core of our being as followers of Jesus Christ, and the deeper and the more intimate our connection with Christ, the more we are able to live out the great commandments. The great commandments can be boiled down very simply: Love God, love others. It is as simple as that.

So what we are going to do over these next four messages is we are going to look at this process of connecting with God. We are going, if you will, kind of begin to lay out a roadmap for how we do that. How do we begin to connect with God; and, then later on this spring, we will take the next step and apply that process of connecting to God to who we are as human beings. What I mean by that is how do we apply the roadmap that we are going to talk about over the next four weeks, how do we apply that to our mind, to our thoughts, to our feelings, to our bodies, to our social context? And we will be looking at those. That series will be called Transforming the Core. This is the Essence of the Core, the Roadmap; then we will talk about how we change our core in more specifics.

Now if you are wondering how I brought this all together, and in the interest of full disclosure, I want to let you know that a lot of what I will be talking about is based on the works of Dallas Willard. Dallas Willard is a professor at the University of Southern California (Fight on Trojans…) and he is one of the foremost thinkers in Christian spiritual formation. He says “We are all being formed spiritually; the question is, how are we being formed spiritually?” So he has done a lot of work and a lot of thinking in this area. One of the books he has written is called Renovation of the Heart and it is going to serve as a resource for a lot of my thinking in this upcoming series. In addition, I don’t want this to simply be a Sunday morning kind of thing where we come, we talk about it, we think about it, and then “O.K. Great! Let’s go home.” But I want it to be something that we can connect with God on a daily basis; because if we are really going to connect with God and really make that happen, it has to be an everyday kind of thing. So one of the things that Willard has done is he has written a companion book for Renovation of the Heart, it is called Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice. What this is, is basically sixty daily kind of snippets that come out of the book. He kind of breaks it down into more manageable, more understandable kind of chunks. Then on top of that, he gives you an experiment for you to try to begin to apply that particular area into your life. I think when we do that, when we seriously apply the things that are in here and the things we talk about, we will in fact deepen our relationship with God. We will transform our core, so to speak.

So I want to let you know that I have a few copies of this book, so if you want one, let me know. Otherwise go to Amazon, they are probably cheaper than trying to get them somewhere else. But I wanted to show this to you and say that this is a good take home resource to begin to apply some of the things we talk about. It covers a lot more than we are going to talk about, but it covers some of the things we will talk about as well.

So we are going to begin this process. So now let’s begin to turn the page and look at this notion of Vim and Vigor, which is really spiritual change… how do we grow spiritually? For when we connect with God, it is really a call to transformation, and that transformation is complete when we have the same mind, the same thoughts, the same character, the same action as God, as much as it is humanly possible for us within our limited abilities. The best example of what that means and what that looks like is found in the person of Jesus Christ. He is not only our example, He is not only the One who sets the bar for us, but He is also the One who opens the door for us and invites us in. He becomes the way for us to become transformed as well. In doing that he invites us into a relationship with him – that’s the invitation. We are invited to come as we are, no holds barred. It is an unqualified invitation. He doesn’t care about our past; he doesn’t care what’s going on in your life right now; everyone is welcome. Once we have received that invitation and have taken it in, at that point, God’s love begins to flood into our lives; flood into our lives and, slowly at first, begins to allow us to see how great God’s love is for us. Over time, we will see that this love is so manifesting itself in us that we will begin to see that Christ doesn’t want us to stay where we are. We are welcome to come as we are but God doesn’t want to leave us there. He wants us to move on. He wants us to move more toward His character and away from our own self-centeredness. That is really a definition of spiritual transformation. It is to move toward Christ’s likeness and away from self-centeredness.

The measuring stick of “How are we doing? How do we know when we are doing that?” is simply to ask the question, “Am I loving God and loving others more today than I did yesterday? Am I taking on more of Christ today than I did yesterday?” And that begs the question: “Is it possible? Is that really possible to become like Christ?” I mean the truth is, when we look around our world, we don’t see a lot of good examples of it, do we? We don’t see a lot of people living truly transformed lives. Most of us have probably not seen it and most of our experiences have probably been more around failure than transformation. The statistics bear that out. George Barna is one of those Christian researchers who take a look at the church and those who follow and live in the church. Every time he comes out with a new sturdy, it once again shows that there is not that much difference between those who claim to follow Christ and those who do not. It typically, when he looks at those things, is around issues like divorce rates; it is around life style issues like wealth, like busyness, like lack of joy in your life; it goes right down the line. When you look at those, you go: There’s no difference. We know that, because many of us are experiencing that.

Layer on top of that, the all-to-public blowup of many public Christian leaders and we begin to go: Is it possible? Can this thing that God wants us to have, is it really possible? And I think the answer is “Yes” to that. But we must also acknowledge that we all too easily fall into a trap. The trap is that we believe that spiritual change happens on the outside first and then it works its way inward. That if I just act the right way and say the right things, then my heart and my attitude and my thinking will all begin to kind of fall into place. That just isn’t that case. Transformation is just exactly the opposite of that. It starts at the core of who we are, the innermost part of who we are, our heart. Then it begins to move outward. So our actions and our words may be the very last things that begin to conform to Christ’s character.

When we will our way to kind of act and talk as we believe that truly transformed Christians are supposed to talk, it gets us to, and perhaps through, the pseudo transformation door. That thinking says that if I just do the right things, I will be acceptable to God. I will get the praise and respect of the people around me, and we know that that is the case; but in our heart of hearts, if we really take a look at ourselves and are really honest with ourselves, we know that that is just a front. We know that God more importantly knows that as well. Jesus had a word for those kind of people – he called them Pharisees. God is the one who takes that kind of thinking and blows it right out of the water; for God says, “You know what? I don’t care what you look like. I don’t care what you do. What matters for me is what is going on inside.” Your heart is the starting point. Your heart is what matters and then everything else will fall into place after that, not the other way around.

I think the other thing that holds us back from this spiritual transformation that we are seeking is what I call worm theology. Worm theology says I am a miserable sinner. There is nothing I can do about that until I die. If I wasn’t such a miserable sinner, I could get my life together and I could do what God wants me to do. Do you see any problems with that? There is lots going on with worm theology. But when it becomes part of our thinking, one of the things it does is it gives us an excuse not to have to change. “I am a sinner. I can’t do anything about it. Oh well, I don’t have to change. I’m off the hook.” It’s like saying, “I’m overweight. I don’t have to exercise.” And while it is true, we are indeed sinners, and we need to understand our depravity, our sinfulness, and how deep it goes within our souls. It does not mean that we cannot act; our sinfulness speaks to our unwillingness to act. So while we are sinners, we are forgiven sinners. Jesus died to give us that freedom; but that freedom from sin is not only when we get to heaven but it can also be here and now. So don’t let our thoughts of our sinfulness kind of drag us back down into the muck. Cast off those chains. So the good news is that I believe that spiritual transformation is possible and you know what? It is something that God desires. God wants you to be transformed. The best part of this is that it starts with God, not with us; because we can’t and we won’t on our own do what it needs to take. But when we are in union with God, things can begin to happen. That process of working in union with God is a gift of grace. It is God’s grace poured out for us, given to us as a gift once again. You see, God is opposed to earning – He is not opposed to effort.

So this is as much a gift of grace, working in union with God for true transformation as being made right before God, justification that we all have because of what Christ did for us and not of what we did for ourselves. It is as much a gift of grace. You will find as we begin this process of spiritual transformation that in fact grace will become more abundant in your life. It is not just a one time thing but grace will continue to pour itself out on us. Grace upon grace upon grace.

So we want to look at a pattern of change for spiritual transformation. This is the roadmap that will give us the way in which we should go. This pattern of change can be applied to any area of personal transformation but for our purposes we are going to focus it on our spiritual transformation. How well we succeed at following this pattern will determine the degree of success that we have in transforming ourselves to become more like Christ. As we follow this pattern, we will have a greater chance of success. This pattern is an acronym: VIM. It stands for, as you can see, Vision, Intent and Means. If we follow our VIM, we will have Vigor in our spiritual lives. Vision is that clear understanding of what we want to accomplish; it helps build desire, it brings value and it speaks to what we want to accomplish that is good. The Intention is the decision that we need to make to fulfill that vision. Then the Means is what is available to help us act on our intention. Over the next three weeks that is what we are going to look at. We are going to look at the VIM. So I invite you back for that. But let me give you an example of what this might look like outside of a spiritual formation kind of realm, so it can help you understand how it works.

A few years ago Les and I had the opportunity to go to Hawaii for a week. We spent a week on the beach in Maui. It was wonderful. As part of that we began to notice these guys kind of flying around on these kites. They were on skis or what we later learned were more like wake boards and they were flying over the waves. They were cutting through the water and what they were doing is called kite surfing or kite boarding. The more we watched them the more I became intrigued by watching them fly over the waves and catch air. It was just fun to watch their freedom and the joy they received by just flying over the water. It was like, man, this would be great. So I began to picture myself as a kite boarder. I began to think about wow, wouldn’t it be great jumping the waves and leaning into the wind. Aaahhh, yeah, it would be great. I had a vision of myself becoming Kite Boarder Boy. Man, can you imagine, Kite Boarder Boy. That was my vision. Then I had to begin to think about the intent. Did I really want to be Kite Boarder Boy? I began to think about it. I thought how bad do I want it? Do I really want to make that plunge? As I thought about it, the answer came back, no. But if I had said, yes, then I would have moved to means. That would have been, well what does it take to become Kite Boarder Boy? Where do I get the equipment? How and where do I get lessons? How am I going to pay for it? --All of those kinds of things. That is an example of VIM in action. It allows us to see how that process can maybe begin to be applied to our spiritual transformation.

So I invite you to join me, to join me as we work on our spiritual core muscles, as we begin to put on the character of Christ.

Would you pray with me please?

Lord God, thank you. Thank you that you have called us to become like you, and you have not left us to our own means to do that but you will walk with us every step of the way. Oh Lord, thank you for that. Thank you for that. Help us to see clearly what that vision looks like then choose to follow it and put on your character and then learn what it means, the nuts and bolts. Lord we hold that before you, in your name. Amen.