MP3: here
Tonight I am just going to start with a simple question:
Do people ever really change? And if so, How?
One of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us in this room, at one point in our life, have probably undertaken some long term project of behavior change and…and failed. Either there was a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together: say carbon usage, porn, or procrastination - I mean, how many times have you told yourself, ‘next time, I am going to start writing my paper more than 12 hours before it is due.” Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (this quarter I am going to exercise more. And as you get older and start making money it will be what portion of your resources will you allocate for the poor and/or the environment instead of spending it on yourself). One thing we all have in common, is that we have all tried to change…and most of us have found it harder than it seems like it should be. It can get discouraging. You start to wonder “do people ever really change?” And if so, how?
Today’s passage seems to answer the first question with an unequivocal, YES. Look with me at verse 17:
2 Cor 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"
Now this is kind of an inspiring verse. Chances are that if you have been hanging around the church for more than say six months, you’re familiar with it. And it takes a definitive position on the first question I posed. Tonight’s passage holds out the brazen claim that Christianity offers the resources to motivate sustained, non-trivial life change. But the verse is a little fuzzy on the second question…how? So how do you motivate long term, sustained change? Well the famous verse 17 starts with a ‘therefore’, which means to find the mechanisms of this change, we simply need to look up. And sure enough, the passage includes not one, but 2 surprising answers to the question: ‘How do we motivate change?’ Look with me at verses 11 and 14
Paul offers two, motivations for substantial and sustained life change: fear and love. Does that strike you as odd? I mean, these hardly seem like compatible motivations. And many people would contend that they are not. In fact one of the great poets of my generation, Ben Gibbard of DCFC, articulated his resistance to this:
Machiavelli famously agreed. He said
He takes it as axiomatic that fear and love are not compatible motivations…a sovereign can only select one to motivate his kingdom…and was better off choosing fear.Commodus the Roman emperor depicted in the film Gladiator went the other way. Unable to inspire respect, he tried to win allegiance by making the people love them with ‘bread and circuses.’
So what happened here? Did Paul get confused? Are fear and love mutually exclusive?First, we need to ask if we really know what these words mean. Words have what semantic range. The meaning we attribute to them based on our experiences and background was not always the meaning the author intended. Take two examples from the retreat:
When we hear ‘fear’ and ‘love’ in terms of motivation we think ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’. We think God is holding out the cosmic Carrot and stick – what psychologists call extrinsic motivations – trying to coax us into good behavior with pie and spankings. But psychologists who study motivation suggest that punishment/reward motivators can generally only produce short term results. They don’t have the power to generate long term change.[1]So what is actually going on here? Christian motivation is not based in what God can do for me or to me…but in who he is. It is god centered. And from a God-centered perspective, ‘fear’ and ‘love’ do not refer to ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’, they refer to ‘awe’ and ‘affection’. God motivates change by capturing our imagination and will with awe and affection. But that brings us back to the question: can the same God claim both?
At the bottom of the question of whether we should be motivated by fear or love is a fundamental question of what God is like. There are two basic ways to approach God. The first is to stress transcendence. This is the approach taken, for example, by our Muslim friends. Stressing god’s transcendence stresses distinction. Got is totally other. He is characterized by qualities like omnipotence, and inscrutability and holiness.
The other basic way to approach God is to stress immanence. This is at the heart of the approach taken by our Hindu friends. God is literally everywhere…all around us, in us. God is indistinguishable from the world, and fundamentally is expressed in each one of us. God is fundamentally accessible.Transcendence stresses distinction, and the appropriate response is awe…and lots of it, so that the appropriate emotional response flirts with fear. Immanence stresses nearness. God is close, accessible. The appropriate response is affection. And so which way does Christianity go? Is the Christian God transcendent or immanent? The answer is ‘yes.’
Christians believe in a Trinitarian God. Who is entirely transcendent but fully immanent. He is holy, totally other, and morally inapproachable in his perfect justice in the person of the Father…but in the person of the Spirit, he is nearer to you than the person sitting next to you, giving you constant and total access. And in Jesus, God become flesh, the cosmic king of the universe soils his swaddle in a cold barn in a backwater town on the edge of the Roman Empire. He is simultaneously totally other and as identifiable as he possibly could be. That which was unapproachable invades our reality and works our salvation. Incidentally, that is what Christmas is about. In the incarnation, Jesus becomes the living embodiment of the transcendent immanent.
You see, some of you have a god like Commodus. You elevate his imminence at the expense of his transcendence. He is so in need of showing and receiving love that he has no moral seriousness. He is trivial. And so you are not inspired to serve him. Others of you have a god like Machiavelli’s prince. You elevate his transcendence at the expense of his immanence. He becomes so hard that you are terrified to cross him. You are scared of him. Eventually, this terror exhausts you, and you give up trying to serve him. But neither of those gods are worth service let alone worship.
So lets revisit the original question with these categories: what is the engine of real life change? What motivates the life transformation that Paul talks about in v 17? Awe and affection. Standing in awe of and cultivating affection for a God who is totally other, unapproachably holy, and perfectly just yet grants us total access and to the point that he is interested in our deepest hurts and our most trifling worries.
And what is the shorthand for Awe+affection in response to a God who is immanent and transcendent… Awe+affection = worship Actual, sustained change is wrought by worship. All sin is fundamentally a worship issue...a deficit of worship. You want to change? The carrot and stick form of religious motivation does not work in the long term. You need to cultivate a bigger awes and deeper affections. That is called worship. Worship (much more than, but including, corporate Christian musical worship) is the engine of transformation. Are you struggling with porn? Then your God is either not big enough or not near enough. Are you indeffeeent to the poor and the environment? Than your God either needs to be more just or more tender.
Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If you are stuck in a behavior that diminishes you or are trying to cultivate a behavior that ennobles you, strategies will help, but fundamentally, you need a bigger and nearer God. You need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. You need to cultivate more awe and better affections. You need to exalt in a fiercely beautiful God …so that our bleak lives of self centeredness looks as pitiful as they actually are. You need to worship.
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[1] See Daniel Pink’s Drive
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