Love your neighbour as yourself.

I have never heard a sermon on this before. And let me tell you why I think that is..

There are a couple of beliefs about ourselves that need to be put in check. The first is that we are terrible people because of our sin which based on the verse from Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?”

and the second reason is because we dare not blow our own trumpet for fear of being proud.

Tonight I simply want to put a check on these things before we look next week at some of the basic hindrances there are to loving ourselves.

Jeremiah 17:9

“The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?”

It’s true. The heart is wicked. It’s really wicked, so wicked that in fact it often surprises us when we have a violent or angry outburst, turn our attention to putting others down. It’s strange how we can have such violent reactions to other people’s ideas, differences of opinions, different religions, different politics. It’s amazing how impatient we are with the people we wait behind in line,

At the cashflow machine: “this guy is looking at his receipt. Why isn;t he looking at his receipt to the side so I can get in. now he’s put his card back in to do another transaction. Doesn’t he realise there are other people waiting? He should stand to one side and join the back of the line.”

or how intolerant of mistakes we are :

“I ordered this without the pickle. Excuse me, I ordered this without the pickle. And you gave me pickle. Didn’t I ask you not to give me pickle? It’s not that difficult. How are you gonna make this up to me? What you won’t give me free fries, I wanna see the manager.

“Yeah hi, look, I asked for no pickles. Right and this this employee won’t give me any fries to compensate for this. Now if you want me to come back here, you’ll jolly well give me fries and a voucher for a free coke too.”

Come back to the table and sit with your buddies, and recount the whole story again except with a few additions that turn you into the superhero of customer service justice.

Or when someone crashes a red light when your arrow has turned green : what satisfaction to honk the horn and breathe “what a plonker” under your breath as you watch them with your most evil and meanest stare. And if someone else is in the car, “did you see that? Man, that’s so bad. State of society today huh. Sheesh. That’s sooo dangerous.” While in the back of your head is the knowledge that you did it 5 minutes before — but nowhere near as bad.

We love to point out other people’s mistakes and I think it’s because it helps us feel better about ourselves if we can identify someone else’s problems. I am a much better critic of graphic design than I am a designer.

We are driven by impulses inside us that love to see other people’s weakness. Think about reality TV. We don’t necessarily want to see them because of the triumphs, we really enjoy it when they’re at each other’s throats. We want to watch conflict. We want to see people getting feral with other. Or, and come on admit it, see who’s gonna get it on with whom.

News is when something tragic happens. Something inside us is tickled when we have that little bit of extra information about these events. The news sells not because of happy fluff, but because of misery and despair.

Why are criminal justice shows so popular if not to titillate our darker selves? To let us know where the boundaries of our personal capacity for evil are? We can say, “there it is, I’m not as evil as that therefore I’m not so bad.”

What about the Gladiator fights of old? How are they different to violent movies? Well except for the fact that no-one is really getting hurt in the movies, but still we don’t mind seeing the bad guys getting tortured a little, or hurtling to a gruesome death on a spike. As a human race we know how to be barbaric. And in our ‘civilised’ culture there is no outlet for that except for the movies.

Why are some of us drawn to the ‘action’ genre? The need for arch-villains. Why are more movies being made where the good guy isn’t so good after all and the bad guy not so bad. Cases in point: Collateral with tom cruise, or man on fire with denzel washington. Detective Hartigan from Sin City.

There is an accuracy about these stories that connects us to them. And it’s that part of us that is disturbingly satisfied when it sees the tragedy of humanity in it’s explicit glory.

Make no mistake, we can all admit to these voyeuristic tendencies. Our inner selves triumph when we can say, “at least I’m not like that.”

We can grade humanity into the bad and the good by our own selves as a reference point. But the bible is at pains to say that this reference point is a little bit skewiff. Now last week I mentioned that we were now a benchmark for measuring appropriate living. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s true that we can make assessments as to what the right thing to do for someone might be. But that is different to the fact that we cannot judge the righteousness of people. Perhaps we can judge their sin, but even then, it’s important to be slow to do that for this simple fact:

“Why not take the plank out of your own eye before you attend to the speck in that person’s eye?” tread cautiously when assuming the role of judge.

There is a big section in the sermon on the mount where Jesus explains the simple fact that there is no line that demarcates those who are good from those who are bad. He goes to great lengths to explain this.

Have you been angry? That’s as bad as murder in my books.

Thought lustfully about someone else? There’s adultery.

Think you can do justice? Turn the other cheek.

You show you are righteous? Forget about it : if people can see you, then you’re showing off.

Don’t love money. It’ll rule you.

Don’t be quick to judge, because you’ll be judged by your own standards.

Don’t be light-hearted with your religion.

Now many of us will connect with these at a basic level. I don’t think there is anyone in this room who would say they haven’t sinned?

So basically, we’re all a bit stuffed really. How can we carry the burden of this stuffedness? One suggestion is that Jesus is setting the bar so high that not even the most religious people can make it on their own. We are incapable of being good enough to bear his label on our lives. That’s the condition of our fallen hearts. At the core of our being we really are not very nice.

BUT and as you can see, it’s a big but.

What I want to drive home tonight is the whole idea that God has not given up on us. We may have given up on ourselves. But he has not. For some of us, including myself at times, it’s impossible to believe. I stand before him and constantly say, but what about this, and this …and this? How can you still love me? How can you still believe in me? I’m just crap! How can you still see something in me to like? Don’t you see how I’ve treated that other person?

You know my heart?

And I hear in my spirit : “Stu, you’re actually ok. I really like you.” And you’d think wouldn’t you that this would in fact make me rethink things, but often it just ties me in knots. And there it is so complicated.

At times I want to the right thing for people. I want to serve them, be good to them. And at other times I couldn’t care less. And it’s not because I’m tired or anything like that, it’s just that I think I’m more important. and this conflict readily spills out into my life for all to see. And we’re all walking conflicts.

Paul talks about his struggle between flesh and spirit. and I feel that there are times when the fulfilling of my own selfish nature takes number one priority. Needless to say, at times this makes me near impossible to live with!

So I see this and feel down about it and tell myself that I’m a fraud and hypocrite, and that God doesn’t like me at all. And it’s a lie. You’d think the gentle voice of God telling me I’m ok, would be enough to transform me, but such is the power of sin in some situations and some environments, such is the power of temptation.

Now this is not defeatist. Some would say it is not talking about victorious Christian living. But I don’t think we win every battle, that’s clear isn’t it? This is the murky life we live!

There is a lie that I tell myself, and it’s a lie that we all probably tell ourselves, that God only likes us when we’re good. That God is only loving us when we are not sinning. That’s a lie and let me tell you why.

I suspect that the victory in our lives is not that we’ll never sin, though that is probably the outcome of the victory, but that we accept the Truth! And that is what will set us free. The truth is this:

That God loves us, so much that even in his agony over our state, he sent Jesus to this earth to make things right for us, proving that he will forgive our sins, to prove that he loves us more than we can imagine. That mere fact says to me that there is nothing that will separate me from God’s love. God’s disappointment in me, does not alter his love for me.

And I think that’s the thing that is hard to comprehend.

I wish that I could somehow show that to you. Somehow embrace you with God’s embrace to let you know. But it doesn’t work like that.

[some personal comments to conclude]