Grace, mercy and peace be unto you …
Today’s sermon is based on the book of Luke, Chapter 12, verses 49 to 53.
Have you ever … made Peace with … yourself? Does that sound sort of strange , maybe??
making Peace with yourself???
What would that look like?
Let’s take that picture we may have been carrying around with us that sometimes shows up in cartoon
or movies.
There’s such a scene in one of my favourite comedies, the 1978 film, “National Lampoon’s Animal House”,
where we see a picture of the hero standing there with an angel on one shoulder and a demon or the Devil
standing on the other …
And what’s going on? Like in the cartoon or the movie, the angel and the devil are arguing with you about
what you should or shouldn’t to do in the situation at hand.
Maybe when you were a teenager, and your parents were out, your dad forgot to hide the key to the liquor
cabinet.
Or maybe, like Tom Sawyer, you’d rather go fishing with Huck Finn, but Aunt Polly wants you to whitewash the fence.
Say you side with the angel … you’ll find that the Devil might cross his arms and fume… momentarily.
But true to his nature, he’s only waiting for a more opportune time to hit you with his temptation… again …
all the harder.
Have you been there?? (pause) I sure have.
Or say you side with the Devil instead of the angel … say you give in to his temptation. Oops!
Well, in that case the angel becomes your guilty conscience… the one that keeps reminding you, and reminding you….
that what you’re doing is wrong.
It would seem that you can’t have peace either way, doesn’t it?
You either have to live with a sneaky, crafty devil who won’t go away … or a guilty conscience who won’t leave you alone, either.
How can you find peace then? Well …making peace with yourself would be finding a way to make peace between the angel
and the devil.
Let’s call it a compromise. What would that look like?
Let’s take an example. Say the situation at hand is the Sunday morning alarm clock going off.
The angel is urging you to get up and get ready to go to church while the Devil is making a pile
excuses for why you should kill the snooze button and just roll over and go back to sleep.
Obviously, there’s some conflict between the two responses.
Now, you could tell the angel: “Go away! I’ll go to church next week. After all, I’ve been there three weeks
in a row already!”
That excuse was a favourite line of one of my uncles, who lived at home with my grandma.
That said, you go back to sleep… and the point goes to the devil.
And the angel is on your case the rest of the day for missing church.
Or, you could say, “Heck with you, devil, I’m getting up!’ The point goes to the angel.
And the devil says, “Ha! Just wait and see… I’ll distract you all through church with the kid in the
pew behind you … and you’ll be so frustrated, I’ll win next week for sure!”
Or, lastly … you could try to make peace… Say, you’ll sleep-in one more hour and then get up and
watch worship on TV. A compromise.
But then … the devil’s not happy because you might hear God’s Word proclaimed …
And the angel’s not happy because you’re going to miss the Lord’s Supper … and all those friends
you have at church are going to miss you
But for yourself … you have made a peace… of sorts. No more plaguing temptation… and a somewhat
assuaged guilty conscience.
But, what does God call this?
In the Bible, God calls this being double minded.
Another description that God uses that fits this ‘making peace with yourself’ is calling it “lukewarm.”
That means, figuratively, we’re not being “hot” towards worship, by getting up and being an active participant …
and on the other hand we’re not being “cold” towards worship, either, by missing the experience entirely.
Fortunately, for us … God doesn’t buy it.
He doesn’t buy our being “lukewarm”.
He doesn’t buy any compromising with sin.
In the Book of Revelation God says to a particular church: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot.
Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are Lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
You see, if you’re hot, God knows how to lead you and use you in His kingdom.
If you’re cold, God knows how to bring you to your senses.
But if you’re “lukewarm” … apathy has set in. Ambivalence.
You’re not of much use in God’s kingdom, because frankly, you look an awful lot like the rest of the world. Blah blah blah.
But on the other hand… since you have just finished justifying and rationalizing to yourself that you are not cold,
those things that God might otherwise use to bring you to your senses … are ignored as not applying to you.
And so … the Lord … figuratively … spits such a person - it could be you or me or anyone - out as… lukewarm…
Now. All that we’ve said so far is really an introduction to today’s Words of Jesus as He speaks to us in the Gospel reading
for this Sunday.
There, as you may recall, He speaks of not bringing peace … but division.
The picture He paints is division within the closest human relationship structure there is … namely the family.
Perhaps we excuse ourselves from taking these words of Jesus to heart because we hear them speaking to us about
persecution for our faith…
or warning us that because we are Christians, we can expect grief from those outside of the faith, as is happening right now
in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood persecuting Coptic Christians …
or even from non-believing immediate… or married-into … family members.
And since most of us seldom experience a high level of persecution for our faith from those parts of our family …
we just file these words away for future reference, should that occasion arise.
But, the problem is … these words also apply to the double-minded tendency of our own hearts.
When our own hearts become persecuted for Standing Up for Jesus. Persecuted by the Devil and our sinful human natures.
That’s why that passage from the Book of Revelation was noted. God in Christ Jesus permits no rivals for our heart’s ultimate affection.
Nor does He allow any compromises.
Just as He claims He will cause the division between family members …
He will not not permit peace by compromise, when it comes to our heart’s allegiance to Him.
So, likewise … He is the One who will not permit us to make peace with ourselves.
And so instead of this passage being irrelevant …or inconvenient … or a nuisance… it should be of some comfort.
The comfort being that God cares about each of us enough to cause a division. He cares enough to break our phony peace.
He cares enough about you and me …to shoot holes in our compromises … even to the extent
that His work may make us “cold” … so that in such a state… He can bring us to our senses… and make us hot again.
He cares enough about us that He will not judge us to be completely worthless, and beyond redemption, and be done with us.
Or in cartoon or film imagery, or in words … spit us out of His mouth.
So … like the 1960’s British rock group, The Animals, sang: “bring it on home, to me/you: how’s your house?
Do you find that your heart is divided?
Guess what? You’re not alone. We all find our hearts divided.
One of the gifts of the Reformation was the understanding that in faith, each of us lives in this world as both saint and sinner
at the same time.
Or in other words … that picture of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other is not far from the truth.
Probably closer to the truth is that … those two cartoon figures, if you will, are a reflection of the consequences of God’s pure
and perfect Holy Spirit coming to live in a human heart which is sinful by nature.
Fortunately, in faith … God’s design of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection makes Jesus’ purity cover all our sins.
And so, our failures to put our allegiance with our Lord first … are forgiven. But those failures still have their consequences.
As a result, our lives are not what they could be … nor what God would intend them to be … all because of our double-mindedness,
our saint/sinner ‘split-natures’.
And so … our passage from Luke for today tells us that the solution to this problem is not for us to figure out how to make peace
between that saint part of us and that sinner part of us.
That’s not why Jesus came.
Jesus came to bring peace with God through His death and resurrection… but not by making peace with the Devil.
Jesus earned our forgiveness by conquering the devil… which is the pattern He has set for us, as He has given us His Spirit so that
we can live our lives in Him.
And so. To bring that thought home this morning… think of that song. “Stand UP, Stand UP for Jesus, ye soldiers of the Cross.”
That traditional Hymn is of the category of Christian Warfare.
Not warfare against those who oppose Christ …
but really against those portions of our own hearts that want to stand up for ME, or you, or Aunt Mildred, or cousin Elizabeth, or Grandpa Jones…
instead of standing up for (pause) Him.
That part of my heart that wants that extra hour of sleep…
that part of your heart that wants that money that you pledged to Him as your first fruits …
that part of all our hearts that want that time that we’d rather use for yourself than for Him … or for others in His name.
That’s the major warfare that goes on within us. And it will go on until He calls us home.
But, thanks be to God for sending us his Son to intercede for us, to be with us, and for sending the Spirit to be within us until we are called home.
Our Lord Jesus Christ says, “Don’t.”
He says today, “Don’t make a peace treaty with that side of you that won’t stand up for ME.”
Don’t find yourself becoming “lukewarm”.
“Don’t let the Devil fool you into complacency, apathy or ambivalence.
He says, “By the Power of MY Spirit, say no to the Devil and Stand Up, Stand UP for Me.”
It is, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be… All about Jesus!
In His Name we pray,
Amen.
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