Excerpts from "Me and My Shadow"
Romans 5:1-11

Why are we here this morning?  Why have you come to worship this day?
Whether you believe it or not, the Lord Jesus is here this morning as Lord of death and life. You may be here because you want to get somebody you love off your back. You may be here because you play the percentages, and just maybe there is a God whose good side you need to get on. You may be here because you feel better after you set aside a little time for spiritual things. In short, you may be here for every reason other than that you believe that the Lord Jesus is here as Lord of death and life today.

And I guess it really doesn’t matter why you are here. Chalk another one up for the Holy Spirit. He got you up and in the door this morning. Maybe, just maybe, today will be the day God finally gets past your resistance to His good and gracious reign. After all, whether anyone believes it or not, God is the boss. It may take all of us here until we draw our last breath to catch on. I hope not. But God will be God no matter what.

I have a confession to make—I have a shadow.  Some days that shadow is long as the sun is setting, some days it’s short when the sun is over head.  Me and my shadow—it follows me everywhere.  I can’t shake it, it’s part of who I am.  When I lie down, it lays down—when I’m up, it’s up.  Whether on a mountain top or a valley low, my shadow is always there to remind me that it’s not about me.  You see, my shadow is my sin, and my sin nature.

None of us can escape the sinner, but who is going to pay the price for my sin? I can’t pay it. In the Bible, we discover that God pays the price for our sins through the death of Jesus on the cross.  We hear such archaic words from the Bible as “expiation, propitiation, reconciliation, redemption.” Christ is our atonement. Christ is our expiation. Christ is the sacrificial lamb who dies for the sins of the world.  In other words, it is Christ’s death on the cross that pays the penalty through his blood. You can boil all these big fancy Biblical words into one fundamental concept: Christ paid the penalty for our sinfulness, and that is what we are going to talk about as we go to communion today.

Let’s look at our text. Romans 5:1-11

Me and my shadow, walking around.  I know what my shadow is capable of.  My shadow has hurt and disappointed people, and has let others down.  My shadow is proud, arrogant and restless.  My shadow always desires to be out in front, my shadow is all about me.  My shadow is ungodly.
But here is the good news; “Christ died for the ungodly. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:6,8) The Apostle Paul keenly understood that while we were enormously imperfect and sinful people through and through, Christ still paid the penalty for us.

And what is the reaction to this truth that our penalty is so great and our sins are so great that Christ had to die on the cross to pay for them? What is our reaction to this? Apathy?  Sometimes, it is boredom. Sometimes, we have heard this story over and over again, that Christ died for our sins. Sometimes, we have heard this story of forgiveness too often for it to be meaningful. Sometimes, we are not really grateful that Christ died for our sins. For example, in our everyday lives, sometimes we can become comfortable and complacent with someone’s kindnesses to us. A mother, father, brother, sister, friend can be consistently kind to us and gradually, we can actually take it for granted. So also we can become complacent and comfortable with God’s kindnesses to us, including when God pays the penalty for all our sins.

Why? Why are we not so grateful for the forgiveness of God? Because sometimes we don’t take our sinfulness so seriously, and we figure that God does not really take our sinfulness seriously either. We can wiggle our way out of it. We can be slippery and avoid the consequences.  Our shadow grows long.

As we approach communion this morning we need to be reminded that we are to put to death our shadow man—and that our friendship with God is not about us, it’s all about him.  
When we come to worship, it’s not about us. The songs we sing aren’t addressed to us. It doesn’t matter whether we like or dislike the music, whether we are bored or excited, whether we are moved or snoozing. Worship isn’t about us. Worship is what God uses to address us most directly. There is worship that is biblical, and there is worship that is narcissistic. There is worship that is godly, and there is worship that is a big show. If, when you come to worship, and God doesn’t get done with you what God intends, then you might as well have gone to a concert, a lecture, or a variety show. You may as well be fishing or on a bike hike.

Some of us have a propensity to misbehave in worship. In a sense, it’s an extension of the misbehaving that goes on in daily life. All that says is that we are walking around with the illusion that everything – not just Christianity – but everything is all about us. And it’s not. It’s about God – the God who loves us so much that He died to save us from ourselves!

Left to ourselves we go on self-destruct. It’s true of every human but in different ways. Have you ever noticed how some people just can’t seem to handle life when things are going well? It’s like they get afraid of success, so that just at the last minute they are able to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. People like that will sabotage a wonderful marriage. People like that will sabotage a good job. People like that will sabotage personal growth and improvement. It’s as if they just don’t believe they deserve God’s good grace abounding in their lives. And so they sabotage their lives with really dumb choices.

God longs for each one of us to become the person that He created us to be, but because of sin, our age old rebellion, we constantly sabotage what God wants us to have. I’ve met some very bitter people through the years that have never gotten that message. God has been trying to change their hearts and minds all their lives, but instead they are so focused on themselves that they never will be quiet long enough to listen to what God has been trying to say. God wants the old rebellious person—that shadow man inside to die, but they keep rebelling as if it were all about them. It’s sad to watch the on-going sabotage, sad to realize that more and more years are being wasted as the bitterness grows deeper and the rebellion becomes who they are. That’s a snapshot of hell. They could spend eternity in a way of being that God so desperately wants to save them from!

The truth about us is that we are creatures of the Most High God. We are mortal, because God was forced to impose limits upon His rebellious creation that keeps thinking it’s about us and not about God. We will die just like all the other creatures, and we will go to our graves dead in our trespasses if God does not save us from ourselves.

He has sent His only begotten Son to become human with us and for us – to die that we might live – to destroy the power of sin, death, and hell. He longs to baptize us into Jesus’ death and resurrection, longs to transform us from self-absorbed creatures into children of the Most High God. He longs to rescue us from self-sabotage and every snare of the old liar that would draw us further and further from God.

But we need to be silenced from persisting in the same old lie that it’s about us and not about God! We need to be saved from ourselves. That’s what God wants to remind us of in our worship. But worship has all too often been subverted from something godly to entertainment, empowerment lectures, and a kind of affirmation for who we are right where we are. In short, worship that does not carry God’s divine speech and action to save us from ourselves is not Christian worship.

True Christian worship does two things. It kills and makes alive, first by speaking God’s judgment upon our sin and then by speaking God’s mercy for sinners. Christian worship drowns us in baptismal waters again. Christian worship speaks the clear Word of God from the Holy Scriptures of Israel and the Church. Christian worship grounds us in the faith of the previous generations. Christian worship feeds us with the living bread and new wine.  There should be no doubt that we can and have experienced God’s truth that has been revealed to us.  Paul said that “God’s mysteries have now been made known.”

If worship does not carry God’s speaking and acting in that way, it is not Christian worship no matter how many times it says Jesus or God or Holy Spirit and no matter if the music has a good beat and you can dance to it.

When Christ sent the 12 out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he was sending them to bring God’s rule and God’s reign into the lives of those that had forgotten whose they were.
Today, Christ is sending us out to those that have fallen away from the ministry of God’s good news, those that have fallen away from actively participating in the Christian community. In the European churches, that is an even more daunting task than here, precisely because the European church has become the product of secularization.  It embodies multi-cultural correctness.  The church in Europe has spent it’s years trying to become relevant – as if it were all about us and not about God!

Here in the United States, there may be more attending Sunday worship than in Europe, but now, too we see that our churches are adapting to the same model.  Church leaders, teachers and pastors are becoming more concerned about trying to be relevant to the wider culture or trying to reflect the cultural values of a particular segment of American society, as in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party at prayer.  The church is becoming secularized from within.  The fastest growing churches in America today are being led by ‘deconstructionists’.  That’s just a word that means, ‘let’s pick and choose what is right about what we believe.’  After all, it’s all about us, right?

Here are just a few examples of a deconstructionist; The holy scriptures are not taken as the true source of God’s authority, it is being taught that we cannot really know what God’s truth is and truth is different for every culture.  Again, they miss the point. Worship is not about us. It’s about God. God wants us to die to the shadow man so he can make us alive – not entertain us, not butter us up, not affirm us no matter how messed up our lives are.

The European churches are dying, because they have forgotten that it’s about God, and American churches are playing catch up with them as fast as we can. And left to our own devices, we will succumb to the forces of error and evil, and all of Satan’s empty promises!

I would like to suggest a better alternative, yes, the mission of the Church – scattered reign! We need to recognize that God is calling us and sending us to scatter the Good News of God’s reign – God’s rule – to a world that is hell-bent on going to hell.

A number of years ago I heard the story of a pastor who asked his rural congregation to obey the call of Christ Jesus. He gave them all index cards in worship and asked them to write down the names of every family member, every neighbor, and every co-worker they knew that didn’t go to church anywhere. He stopped long enough for them to do just that in worship. When they got through writing, they had identified 1200 names.

Then the pastor asked them to begin to pray for all the people on their card – to place it on the refrigerator or in their Bible as a prominent reminder to pray daily for these people. Then he asked them to invite the people to come to worship, and keep inviting, and keep inviting, and keep inviting. That dying little church suddenly had new life, because the disciples in that little church had been sent to the lost sheep of their community!  Does the word, ‘go’ sound familiar to anyone here?

The Church is not about us. It’s about God. Church isn’t about worship style, power-point, three point sermons and who is that sitting in my pew?  It’s not about popularity, being relevant or trendy.  The Church is not about us.  It’s about God.  God wants to save us from ourselves. God knows who is sick and what’s ailing them. God knows who is dead in their faith and close to death in their bodies. God knows who is a modern-day leper and needs to be restored. God knows what kind of hold the enemy has on lives, and God wants to save people from hellish lives and from hell itself. And you may have been sleepwalking through worship so long that you don’t know that God cares about all that stuff!

Now you may not think that’s what a church is supposed to be about, and that’s because you’ve probably not been listening very closely to what God has been trying to do with you and with your loved ones and with a world filled with sin-sick people.  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, the most important thing to God are people.

Worship isn’t about singing your favorite songs or hearing your favorite pieces of music being played well or being told that we are basically pretty good people.  Because, frankly we’re not. Christian worship is about putting to death the old self-absorbed person in you and me. It’s about being transformed into the likeness of God’s servant Son Jesus Christ. We need to die to ourselves. That’s why the cross is up in front of the sanctuary most of the year. That’s why we need to be reminded that, whoever would save his life or her life will lose it. Only God can save us from ourselves, and that’s what He is up to in worship today!

As Christians we can fill our heads with biblical knowledge, right doctrine and exegesis of scripture.  We can attend Bible studies, seminars and symposiums.  But as to the practical day to day living and application of our faith—if we forget that our relationship with Christ is not about us—if the shadow man isn’t dying—we’re not doing a very good job at living.

If you have wasted a lot of years of your life thinking it’s all about you, then you need to fall down on your knees at the altar and lift up your empty hands to receive the body and blood of Christ. Say: “Come, Lord Jesus, fill me with your life. Change me from the kind of person that thinks it’s all about me.

Send me to be the kind of person that others can see that you are working on me and in me. Help me to stop lying to myself and to you. Help me to stop wasting your time on trying to be relevant and trying to fit in to a world that is dying. Good Lord, deliver this Church from the forces of evil, the enemy, and all his empty promises!”   We need A NEW ORDER OF LIFE.

The salvation that is in Jesus Christ is a new order of life. St Paul writes, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death" (Rom 8:1-2, emphasis added). Paul is here using a very specific word to identify the secret of our life which is "hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3:3): zoe, the eternal, uncreated life that originates in God alone.

Scripture identifies two types of life: bios, physical, created, mortal life; and zoe, the spiritual, uncreated, eternal life. Likewise, there are two types of death: teleute, physical death; and thanatos, spiritual death. Thus, it is entirely possible for a person to be physically alive (bios) while spiritually dead (thanatos). But the salvation that is in Jesus Christ immerses us into the hidden reservoir of divine love and power, bringing into our lives God's life (we) and forming us into communities of Jesus' disciples who are enabled to express his life and love through our own lives, individually and corporately.

Jesus declares, "I am come that they might have life (we), and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10 KJV). In his first Epistle, John writes, "God gave us eternal life (zoe), and this life (zoe) is in his Son" (1 John 5:11). And Paul writes, "For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life (we)" (Rom 5:10). Life. Life. Life. No wonder Dallas Willard comments, "the simple and wholly adequate word for salvation in the New Testament is 'life.'

This helps explain why the dominant message in Acts focuses on Jesus' resurrection rather than his death. While the cross of Jesus was never far from the thinking of the preachers of Acts, the accent was always centered on the resurrection of Jesus and the life that comes from him.2
"We are being saved by his life," declare the Apostles, and Jesus' resurrection convinced them that this life, this zoe, was indestructible. The glorious words, "He is risen," proved to the disciples that the new life that had been ever-present to them in the person and teaching of Jesus could not be destroyed by killing the body. That life, that zoe, continues on. It cannot be destroyed: "the gates of Hades will not prevail against it" (Matt 16:18). And it is this unquenchable, indestructible zoe that Jesus offers to all who trust in him-"life" here and now and on into eternity.