Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: The Humility Highway (Step 7)
>> Someone gave me Bill Snead gave this hat to me because apparently I'm not openly patriotic enough and I flipped over the bill here and it's item number 149 made in Vietnam. And I just thought well that's just perfect, you know, that's just great. We have a little divine hour support group at the nine o'clock, nine o'clock before the nine thirty service and John a physician from who's here for a couple of years doing research extended to all of us forgiveness on the part of England for our rebellion and so he said they're finally over it now and we're released and we're forgiven and it's all right for us to be sovereign so thanks to John for that. You can tell this is my third service, yeah. But anyway, we're working on, oh, before I wanted to mention one, one other need that we have, Susie Zoltowski, our children's ministry, coordinator, director, person. Let me know that we have a couple of needs. We're trying during the summer months to spell our teachers who are so dedicated to teach our kids through the school year here at the weekend celebrations. We have a really devoted cadre of men and women who serve as small group leaders and teachers and those who care for the younger children in the preschool program and we want to spell them during the summer so that we still need to take care of the kids who have a special summer program for the kids and we ask every member of the church or anyone who's been here for like six months to consider signing up to serve for at least two weekends through the summer. And we have, we do have some continuing needs, we had some people sign up who weren't able to follow through both on Saturday night, July and August and also at the 11 o'clock service in July and August. So if you're able to do one week, one week, two weeks or even more, see Susie and you will make her day so it takes a village so we're processing this year through the, through the, I'm, I'm just afloat in liquids, thank you, but this has ice and we're working through the 12 steps the first weekend of each month in 2004 and the reason for our interest in the 12 steps that 12 steps made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous is that we're interested in pressing out the reality of Jesus brand spirituality and the measure of Jesus brand spirituality is a personal transformation and beyond of course but the transformation of people's lives changed for the better because of their practice of Jesus brand spirituality and the 12 steps is I think no doubt the most compelling, most fruitful example of a spiritual discipline that when applied leads to transformation of people's lives. You know before the 1940s when Bill W. and Dr. Bob got Alcoholics Anonymous started. If you were an alcoholic and you went to the doctor and he was being honest with you, he'd say there's no cure for Alcoholism. A few doctors began to recognize that people who had undergone something like a religious or spiritual awakening sometimes were able to kick the habit and so this is the insight that came to Bill W who is an alcoholic himself, I think Bill W's last request before he died was for a shot of whiskey though he was sober for many, many years that tells you the kind of grip that alcohol can have if you have the wiring for it. And Bill W. and Dr. Bob began to undertake a concerted effort to apply the lessons of the 12 step in recovery from alcohol and since that time there have been literally millions of people whose lives have been changed and if you know anything about just the disaster of alcoholism not only for the person but for the family, the ripple effect, there are just been millions of people who have experienced real transformation through these 12 steps. Now the elegance, the interest, the fascination of the 12 steps is not in just reading them. I mean they don't have the elegance of like E equals MC squared or something. They're not much to write home about from just an observer's point of view but the elegance, the beauty of the 12 steps is in the people's lives who have been transformed as they have worked these steps. So we're going to just in a paperback sort of way plow through each one the first weekend of the month. We're now on step seven, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. The little background, the counterintuitive genius of the 12 steps is also the genius of the gospel which is this, humility is the highway that leads to recovery. It's not just a step along the road, it's the actual highway that leads to recovery. Humility runs right through the 12 steps from first to last. In fact you could look at the 12 steps and see them as like an action definition of humility. Humility in all its varied aspects. For example, step one, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable. You don't do that without humility. Two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. We're great at determining what we don't believe but what the real challenge is and this is the one that requires humility is to decide what it is we do believe. Third, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. How could you do that without humility? Four, made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five, admitted to God to ourselves and another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. So if you think humility is like a nambi-pambi kind of quality, no, it's something that requires incredible nerve of a six, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character and then seven this week humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. A bit on humility before we tackle the specifics of step seven. Humility, biblically speaking, has nothing to do with what we call low self-esteem. I'm worthless is the voice of despair, not the voice of humility. In fact, humility is a divine attribute in the Bible. God is first pictured in, as it were, personal form in the book of Genesis kneeling down in the dirt, raising up humanity from humus, from the dirt of the earth, the words in English are even related to the word humility. And the picture of God in the Bible is a God of incredible wisdom and power and magnificence but also capable of incredible humility, Psalm 113, who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high and yet who stoops down. Or the great prophet Isaiah the Hebrew prophet chapter 57, I live speaking in God's name here, I live in a high and holy place but also with those who are lowly of spirit. Now humility is not just the road to recovery, humility is also the long and winding road that leads to our highest calling as human beings. Jesus paved the way for this as the penultimate human. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under His power. This is from the Gospel of John and that He had come from God and was returning to God. This is not someone who suffered from a low self-esteem. This is someone who knew who He was, was confident in His identity, was confident in His high calling and out of that confidence, He got up from the meal, took off His outer clothing and wrapped a towel around His waist and proceeded to wash the disciples feet, the task of a slave in that culture. James, the blood brother of Jesus, echoed the same thought. That is why scripture says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves therefore before the Lord and He will lift you up. In the John text we have honor preceding humility with Jesus, with us, humility precedes honor. Peter, the friend of Jesus, all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. This is obviously a dominant thought in the early Jesus movement. Humble yourselves under God's mighty hand that He may lift you up in due time. Five seven humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. Now we still have a little bit of work to do to clean the windshield so we can see what this is all about because some of us think that humility in a religious or spiritual context is all about adopting a kind of artificial, unrelenting focus on our shortcomings, on our sins. And that by beating ourselves up over sin, we are walking the way of humility. This is the religion that many people have rejected because it seems like leads you into the kind of behavior for which a person needs prozac. Much of sin-focused religion is just another expression of what Bill W called self-will run riot. We focus on our sin and we work like the devil to cure ourselves. The result of that approach, we get hard on ourselves. We get hard on each other and our vision of God gets hard. God, the unpleasable taskmaster is who we begin to serve. I walk this road and believe me, it does not get you where you want to go. You feel religious while you're walking this road but it does not bear fruit. Humility is not about an obsessive, paralyzing, unrelenting focus on your sin. But it is a freeing, empowering, unrelenting admission of our need for God. Humility is the gift by which we embrace reality. The reality of God, the reality of ourselves, the reality of one another, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. I love the tenderness of the twelve steps, it combines a certain severity with a certain tenderness much like God himself. Short comings is I think a very gentle, tender word. It is actually a wonderful translation for the biblical word sin. Here is the metaphor behind the biblical concept of sin. It starts in the Hebrew Bible with the word Torah which means the law of God or the word of God. Torah is derived from a Hebrew verb yahra that means to throw something so that it hits its mark. So a Torah, a word from God, is something that comes to us and when God speaks a word it lands, it doesn't return empty, when God speaks to you of His love for you and your heart receives that word you know that you are loved. When God sends a word of correction to you you know that you are busted, it is the dynamic of Torah. Now the Hebrew word for sin, hatea means missing the mark. You can see its connection to Torah, the word of God, the law of God, the Greek word that is most often translated sin in the New Testament, Greek was the primary language of the New Testament, is derived from the field of archery, it means missing the mark in archery. Do you think there is a golden thread running through this metaphor? Now the word short coming, so short coming is a great translation for the word sin but the word short coming begs another question, coming short of what? You know coming short of our own expectations for ourselves, coming short of the crowd, coming short of the social group, coming short of the family, most of us by definition run in the middle of the pack, you know, the statistics run in kind of a bell curve and there is outliers on either end but the vast majority of our in the great you know middle, middling kind of place and so when we compare ourselves to one another most of us are say well you know I know worse, I know better than any other, we have taken a certain kind of comfort from that but that just drains the meaning out of this word short coming. Short coming only finds its meaning as part of a much grander story, the context of the story line of the Bible, God and humanity, this story is a high adventure romance kind of drama, it's the story of God superintending our creation, I personally believe in evolution as a process but however you understand that it's a picture of God superintending creation shaping us like a potter shaping clay for a purpose, to image him on the earth that's our call, to image God on the earth to reflect the very nature of God in our relationships with one another relationship with ourselves and our relationship with him, to reflect his glory on the earth of all the species we are the God conscious species and that's the heart of our mission on earth why we're here, to bear witness to the whole universe of a personal God of love and holiness, our shortcomings in other words only have meaning in light of this very high and noble calling for humanity and this is reflected in Romans chapter three, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, fall short of the glory of not just fall short of ourselves or one another or some impersonal love that we fall short of our purpose to reflect the glory to shine forth God in the earth so humility is the highway out of exile toward our highest calling, step seven humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings, what step seven is the shortest of the twelve steps, seven words in step seven, simple enough ask God to remove our shortcomings but you have to understand what we're up against when it actually comes to taking the seventh step, what we're up against is this, the entire history of humanity, the structure of every human institution, the best accumulated wisdom of the whole human tradition dismisses step seven, pride which is the core instinct of our fallen human nature that we would rather do things ourselves, we would rather be alone from God than submit to him, all of that despises, belittles and ignores step seven, so when you go to take step seven, you're flying in the face of this whole enormous tradition and so we often relate to our shortcomings in every way except asking God to remove them, we catalog our shortcomings, we spend thousands of dollars to understand their development through insight therapy which is a valuable benefit from myself, we rationalize our shortcomings, we minimize our shortcomings, we beat ourselves up over our shortcomings but we never get around to asking God to remove them, that's what step seven is all about, if religion is our game we much prefer self will run riot religion to step seven, God let me show you how hard I'm working on my shortcomings, your preoccupation with your shortcomings, your bad feeling about your sin, your whipping yourself into a bloody pulp because of your follow ups, your greatest effort to put another arrow in the bow to pull back with the strength that you have alone to let loose and fire one more time at the mark, all of it amounts to nothing without step seven, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings but a huge step it is to actually ask God, oh my goodness, not to comfort us in our shortcomings, not to work around them but to actually remove our shortcomings, humans if nothing else are possessive, possessive of our treasures, possessive of our junk, possessive of all sorts of things and also possessive of our shortcomings, sure we have some shortcomings that we would just instantly get rid of if it were in our power but those are not the shortcomings normally that God is after first, he's after the ones that we have in a death grip, the ones that are debilitating us, if you grew up for example in an alcoholic family or in a family that for whatever reason was marked by just a lot of chaos, one of the things that children in a family like that will do is they'll be head up and they'll see that no one's in charge and they'll take charge themselves and what that can lead to if left unchecked is you can develop an out of control need to control, I'm not talking about the ability to control things, I'm not talking about just the ordinary need to control that we might experience but I'm talking about an out of control need to control like an alcoholic's hunger for alcohol, something inside has learned to say unless I'm in charge I am not safe, now the image for shortcoming removal in the New Testament is an agricultural image, it's pruning, Jesus in John chapter 15 quoted as saying, "I am the true vine, my father is the gardener," God appears first in the book of Genesis as a gardener interestingly, "every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will bear more fruit," pruning is if God is pruning it's a good sign, that means he thinks you're a reasonable investment of his, now the arts of pruning is not self-evident, it's a little counterintuitive, if you've ever not known anything about pruning and watched someone in the act of pruning you're like whoa what are you doing there because it doesn't seem to make sense, sometimes pruning involves the removal of what looks like perfectly good growth and that even seems to be bearing fruit, meanwhile to spin the metaphor with our shortcoming you know he completely ignores some shortcoming that's striving you up the wall and you're like, and he's like well we'll get to that and you're like well before the second coming I hope, I mean let's get on with it, I'm lousy at leading staff meetings and then I'm the senior pastor, every senior pastor I know leads their staff meetings and so when I finally realized you know I started as a pastor as a solo pastor no staff and me myself and I got along pretty well and we could work off the staff meetings and then you know the staff members slowly and so it wasn't that but then as the church grew and it's like whoa and I'm just not good at it and I thought man I'm supposed to be the one who's good at it because I'm the senior pastor and so God help me with this organizational stuff, help me with and just like no he's not all that interested apparently. He's over there not because it's not important mind you it is important but he's over there pruning my pride until eventually it dawns on me oh dawn could lead the staff meeting you know dawn is good at this sort of thing he went to UC Berkeley's intelligent he was an engineer you know at the University of Michigan in a PhD program he thinks in terms of systems he sees the beginning from the end and the middle dawn would you please lead the staff meetings he does a wonderful job and thankfully he gives me a little bit of he'll sometimes ask what I think ought to be talked about in his staff meetings just nice I appreciate that tip of the hat but anyway you know you really know it was in charge around here the thing about step seven is step seven means that you're no longer in charge of your own self improvement isn't that the ultimate indignity when you're no longer in charge even of your own self improvement the thing is you don't need to be when you ask him to remove your shortcomings you're passing the agenda on to God and I'm telling you he starts rocking and rolling he starts shaking and bacon he just he just mobilizes resources and and he starts stirring the pot and changing the equation and you better get ready for a ride how does God go about removing something like an out of control need to control well it depends how strong your death grip on that thing is just because you've asked him to remove it doesn't mean that you don't also have a tight grip on it hello I mean there's a gap between the brains instruction to let something go and the hands response to release it especially if you've got something in such a grip over such a sustained period of time that there's kind of a localized physiology taking over where the muscles of your hand and your forearm have been stressed out so much by gripping that thing so tightly you know as the muscles do their work they release toxins into the bloodstream in a localized kind of way and and that's what cramping is all about and so you tell your hand to let go of this thing but your hand is not cooperating there's a gap between our will and then the response of who we are as complicated human beings the removal of this sort of shortcoming ordinarily takes a combination of what feels very much like pressure a certain tugging of even feel like rending and tearing on the one hand and gentle assurance from God on the other you find yourself for example in situations where your need to control things makes it worse not better as a child in a chaotic family it made things better it's better for someone to be in charge and no one to be in charge but now in your marriage say or in your intimate relationships with other people that are meant to be mutual your auto control need to control is distancing you from people are probably driving your spouse totally up the wall across the ceiling and down the other side and so there's you find yourself in those situations where it doesn't work anymore you feel like a tug of kind of a something is you know against your will trying to take something valuable from you we experience that as pain we experience that as pressure in our lives it may cause the cramping muscles to clamp even further at first but then the words of gentle reassurance it's okay there's a new factor I'm here you can relax the beautiful thing about going undergoing pruning is that the pruner is in charge of the pruning the self pruning just doesn't cut it no pun intended it's like giving yourself a haircut it's good in a pinch when you are short of cash but you much prefer someone who has a better perspective on the morphology of your head when the pruner is pruning our only job is to keep going to him with the pain the confusion the pressure that we feel with the tech God this is hard I don't like this I prefer to be in charge my favorite for the moment Psalm the Psalm 55 verse 18 morning noon and night I will complain and lament and he will hear my voice do you not love that just what kind of a God is it that allows us as we are to relate to him like that morning noon and night I will complain and lament and he will hear my voice now as you are assured that he is hearing your voice as you pour out your pain as you express the pressure your feeling as this control is being rested from you as soon as you know that he is hearing your voice you will naturally relax ever so slightly in order to hear his voice you will return the favor you are in my hands I am not your alcoholic father this is not a chaotic family that you are in you can relax you can trust me and so we begin ever so slightly to let go he tugs and pulls we grip a little further he pulls a little more as we relax and eventually there is nothing to hold on to anymore of course that is a whole illusion of control isn't it the whole idea that you can make yourself safe by staying on top of things and controlling everything is just a great illusion of all time because 99% of our experience is related to things we can't control like the weather for example we are holding on to this 1% shred of what is going on in the universe you don't need to be involved in my pathology of my mind so we are going to wind down I know that because there is no more notes here and ask the band to come up and we are going to take some time for just responding to this this is again the 12 steps let's say this was a half decent presentation it is valueless to us unless and until we actually take a step and so one of the things we like to do at the weekend celebrations just offer time as we close with worship and an atmosphere of welcoming God's presence taking the time to focus on him out of our busy lives this area up front here anywhere we are doing here in the first row and off in the wings is available for people to just to gravitate forward and do business with God and we have a team of people to help pray with people who want prayer, prayer ministry team and they are trained not to be intrusive and not to push you down and make this a Pentecostal show or anything like that but to be respectful of you but to be there to pray in relationship with one another that we discover who we are and God has designed us not to be self-sufficient units so we express that we come forward for prayer so you know if I want to just extend an invitation if you have not done this with your shortcomings to take step 7 and to come before the throne of grace and boldly ask him to remove your shortcomings the asking itself is the beginning of letting go of your shortcomings it is the sure sign that you are willing to change and that is the heart of transformation without that the show stop maybe you have reached like a point of frustration in yourself with yourself you are internally chasing against your shortcomings you are running around the block over and over again and not finding any release of so much wasted energy just redirect that pain and frustration into a simple request of prayer may seem very insignificant to prayer but it is a prayer of faith that can move mountains I think especially since we have been talking about the auto-controlled need to control I saw a few like nodding of heads in the congregation and I am not quite sure if they were the heads of a spouse or a roommate or probably most of the head nodding going on they might have been a nodding of the head for yourself you may have been just recognizing this thing and I just feel that God would want to give us grace as we are struggling with that it is like anything else you admit it has got to be that a power greater than yourselves can restore you to sanity and then you ask God to remove it that is your job just ask God to remove it so if you have not taken that step especially with that control problem I encourage you to do so and then oh yeah I think that is easy and I want to ask the prayer ministry team to when they are praying for people on that control thing to really consider just blessing them with peace and praying for a release of God's peace over them that is just a wonderful medicine for this control thing inside of us God's peace and he will just give it to us sometimes as a gift it is almost like a surrounding presence of God that you could almost like you know touch and it is tangible it can be in some sense felt by our spirits by our souls even by our bodies sometimes so yeah let us stand up Kathy you have some. Ken knows me as a recovering control freak I just want to say that there is tremendous freedom tremendous freedom in everything that you just heard and I'm still in the pruning severely pruning stage but I'm beginning to experience the fruit and freedom that I never ever would have guessed was possible so it's all real stuff and I mean our life's been very challenging as Ken can attest to so we were one of the harder cases but there's freedom for me honey there's freedom for anybody in this room. (audience clapping)