Word of Salvation – Vol. 31 No. 48 – Dec 1986

 

Why Am I So Miserable?

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 2.

Reading: Romans 7:7-25

 

Lord’s Day 2 deals with man’s misery.

In getting to know the a, b, c of the Christian faith, we also have to know about our misery.

Whilst preparing for this sermon I recalled meeting a young man a year or so ago who had come to the door asking for some money to buy cigarettes.

He came, in fact, several times and on one such occasion he seemed more lonely, more depressed than at other times.

I sensed he wanted to talk, bare his soul, so to speak, and so I invited him into the study.

There I heard that he had come to Australia as a young migrant from Yugoslavia.

He could have stayed home and helped out with the work on the family farm, and he could have married the nice girl whom he had known all his life from a nearby village.

But being adventurous, as young men can be, he came to Australia to work hard and make good money.

However, not knowing English well enough, and not feeling at home in a strange country, he was soon troubled by loneliness and despair.  He then got in with the wrong crowd, began drinking and became involved with women who did him no good.

One day he committed a crime which landed him in prison.

When released he found that very few people wanted to associate with him, for his prison term followed him around like a bad smell.

And so he drifted from one town to another, unemployed, lonely and homesick.

Now that young man in my study was a picture of misery.

He did not need me to tell him that forsaking God’s ways brings all sorts of trouble.

In fact he could tell me very clearly, in his broken English, the difference between good and evil.

Having experienced in his own life the presence of sin, he had begun to see for the first time what human nature is really like.

And because he had known evil, he also knew now what good was like and he wished he had more of it.  In all this he clearly saw his misery.

Knowing your misery is what LD 2 is all about.

As we deal with its scriptural contents, then we state our theme in the form of a question:

Why am I so Miserable?

            1.  Because I do not love God and my neighbour.

            2.  Because by nature I have a tendency to hate God and my neighbour.

1.  In the first place then the reason why we are so miserable is because we do not love God and our neighbour.

So here we are saying that our inability to love God and one’s fellow man is the reason why the human race is in misery.

But the trouble with most people is that they don’t see this.  We do not see that the world is in a mess because we don’t love God and neighbour as we should.

And because most people don’t know the real reason for their misery, they keep coming up with the wrong solutions.

Take the disease of AIDS for example.

Now we all hope that soon a treatment can be discovered that will help to cure people who are stricken by this deadly disease.  But we know that whatever treatment or drug it takes to overcome this disease, it is not the real cure.

The real cure is for people to stop homosexual acts.

To only use sex in the manner that God has prescribed in His Word.

But many people insist on sleeping around and committing unnatural acts, even defending their actions by saying there is love in it.

But in that way diseases continue to spread and all the misery that goes with it.

If people only know how to love their neighbour in the God-prescribed way, then they wouldn’t be doing so much harm to each other.

It all really boils down to a proper diagnosis.

People will not accept a cure until they clearly see their illness.

Your car may be making all kinds of funny noises.

And one friend tells you that this is what’s wrong with it and another friend will tell you something else.

It’s much better however to go to the expert and let him properly diagnose the problem and once it’s known what that is, you can go about getting it fixed.

But without a proper diagnosis of the problem, your troubles will continue and wrong remedies will only make matters worse.

Now everybody agrees that humanity is in trouble.

We see misery all around us.

And like that young migrant I talked about, we see the misery in our own person.

With him it was one thing, with you it may be another thing.  But basically it’s all the same – a kind of misery which makes us feel rotten because somewhere along the line we have gotten out of touch with God and with our neighbour.

And yet most people can’t see that.

They fight against their misery, looking for a solution here and there.

But the real solution they don’t know because deep down they don’t seem to realise that misery is brought about by man being out of touch with God and neighbour.

Now I don’t know if it has struck you or not, but has it ever occurred to you that people can describe their misery extremely well without hitting upon the real cause of their problems?

There are books and films and plays around that describe a miserable situation so well that people can really identify with it.

And those who produce such films and plays or write books that so accurately describe misery need not necessarily be Christian.

Also non-Christian writers, film-makers, artists and philosophers are very capable of giving us haunting descriptions of human bondage to misery.

People who are addicted to drugs and therefore in a miserable situation watch a film portraying drug addiction and say that it really describes their predicament.

Or, people with marriage problems or family problems can discover their own misery situation in a book or a film very well.

In fact, we all have seen or read something of which we knew that it gave us the truth about ourselves in a very real way.

We might have even been surprised that our problems were so clearly described and we even felt shattered that basically we are just the same as everybody else.

But it’s one thing to have your misery accurately described to you, it’s quite another thing to know what causes it.

How do you come to know the cause of your misery?

Well, the answer is: “The law of God tells me!”

The law of God…!

When we mention the law try not to think now of the different commandments but try to see the law of God as one thing.

Think of it as a master plan.

The master plan has the whole thing on it; the specifications give you all the details.

We’re now concerned with the master plan.

God has a master plan for the world and its people.

That makes sense, for He is the Creator who made everything and has determined how everything should function.

From the planets and stars in their different courses in space, right down to the way bees help with pollination.

It’s one will that rules all that naturally happens in the universe, all that lives on earth.

It’s the will of the sovereign God.

This sovereign will of God is there also for our lives.

If we would live according to the will of God for humans then we would be completely happy for we would live in perfect peace with God and others.

We would function in just the right way in all of God’s creation.

Perfect obedience to God’s will would make us work and sleep, eat and drink, play and love as we were designed to do.

Pilots must fly their aeroplanes according to the maker’s manual.  If they do things with their planes for which they were not designed, they would soon be in big trouble.

Now God so designed us that we are to be in continuous contact with Him if we are to be happy and stay out of trouble.  And God’s master plan says we are to love Him and our neighbour.

That’s the way we are to function.  We were designed to do just that – love God and our fellow man.  That is my will for you, says God.
            Love according to my will and you shall really live.
            Love me with your whole heart, with your soul,
                        with your strength and with your mind.
            I made you, I gave you your strength and your mind.
            Now love me totally with all that; and love your neighbour.
            Be as concerned about him or her as you are about yourself.
            Do this and everything will be just fine.

This double commandment of love – to God and to neighbour is further spelt out in the different commandments.

The different commandments are the specifications, the details.  But the requirements of all the commandments find their sum-total in this loving of God and loving your neighbour.

And that’s not only what the New Testament says, the Old Testament said the same thing.

I know, as you do, that the Old Testament contains a lot of laws which you don’t find back in the New Testament, like those that had to do with the temple rituals and the sacrifices, and so on, but right there in Deut.6:5 and Lev.19:18b you find the same commandment of love as you do in the New Testament gospels.

Love God and love your neighbour has always been God’s will.  Adam and Eve were told to do this, you and I are, and everyone else in between.

And the Lord Jesus came back to it time and again in His teaching and preaching.

And now our misery is that we don’t love God and we don’t love our neighbour as we should.

The structures that we build are not according to the master plan and that’s the reason our lives are crooked.

We have broken out of God’s ordered creation.

We haven’t followed the manual.

If you took a polar bear and put it on the Nullarbor Plain and told it to live there, then you know very well that the poor animal would be most miserable.

Polar bears just weren’t made for hot desert conditions.

God made man for loving, to love His Creation and all the other people with whom he is to live on the same planet.

But when we do things for which we were not made, then we become absolutely miserable, and if the situation is not corrected, we will die.

And that’s our trouble.

We don’t love God and our neighbour as we should.

That is the cause of human misery.

And, as we said earlier, many people in the world know exactly how to describe it in a book or picture it in a film.

But most of them don’t know what really causes it.

Do you know the biblical word for the cause of human misery?

It is the word “sin”!

When you don’t love God and neighbour then you sin.

Sin is known also by other terms in the Bible, like transgression, trespass, unrighteousness, iniquity and so on.

But basically all the names for sin fit into two categories.

The first category is transgression or trespass.

All people know what this is.

You trespass when you cross the line, when you wander into an area that is off limits, when you break the rules and do what you are not supposed to do.

The second category is what is known as “missing the mark.”  This is a figure of speech that is easy to understand.  The arrows that you shoot are to hit the bull’s eye on the target.  It’s the small circle in the centre.  But your arrows veer off target and you miss the mark.

Now think of life as consisting of many arrows.

One such arrow is the way you speak and the things you say.  It’s to reveal love to God and neighbour.

But this arrow misses that goal because you swear and say things that are not true about your neighbour.

Another arrow is your television watching or the videos you see.  It should all be to the glory of God.

But this arrow too has veered off target because you took pleasure in seeing things that fed your lust.

Another arrow is your life.

Is it on target or is it going to miss the mark?

To sin is to fail in reaching the goal.

All people sin, all miss the target, all fall short of the glory of God.

But sin is more than just doing bad things or thinking dirty thoughts or making mistakes.

That’s what small children think of sin.

And many adults have still a childish concept of sin.  The Christian understanding of sin, however goes deeper.  Sin is our inability to love God and to love our neighbour perfectly.

Sin is lack of love.

Our misery is that we know what the target is but our life is just not on a straight trajectory.

We know that sin is being crooked and unless God saves us we will just miss the goal altogether and end up in hell.  That’s the ultimate misery.

By nature no one can reach man’s true destiny – the perfect life with God.

We are straying arrows, ships that go all over the place because they have faulty rudders.

We just don’t have it in us to love God perfectly and our neighbours as ourselves.

As a matter of fact, by nature we hate God and our neighbour.

2.  Let us in our second point just look at that for a bit.  Why are we so miserable?

Because by nature we have a tendency to hate God and our neighbour.

We’re a bit hesitant to say that, aren’t we?

Hating God and neighbour is an extreme expression, we feel.  When I ask young people in catechism class – do you John, Sue, really hate God? – then they in all sincerity say, ‘No!’

And adults would answer in the same way.

They all in a sincere way look at themselves and find that they don’t spend their days hating God and their neighbour.

In fact, some could honestly say that there are times wherein they love God and even the neighbour.

Don’t we even go out of our way to help our neighbour?  Sure we do.

Maybe we are indifferent to God sometimes, and at times loveless to our neighbour.

But hating them?  No, that’s a bit strong.

However, the reason why we protest about this hating is probably because we have been brought up in nice, decent homes and because we live in a society that is in many ways still kind and tolerant and because our neighbours can be really good people.

In other words, our experience has not been so bad.

And do thank God for those conditions and pray that He may continue to preserve this decency.

However, one day when all those outer layers are stripped away then we will see that human nature can indeed sink so low that certain types of behaviour can only be best described as a hating of God and of our neighbour.

Just read the daily papers about the terrible things people can do to each other and the way they can joke about God.

And don’t think that it’s only non-Christians who can be like this.

One day you as a Christian may be in some kind of situation where you will come to see what evil there can be in the human heart, even in your own heart.

King David, the man who wrote those beautiful psalms, also made plans to have Bathsheba and kill her husband.

Yes, when you read the Bible then some days your heart will admit that it speaks the truth about human nature being quite able to hate God and neighbour in the midst of loving Him and fellow man.

I have a book called, “The Mark of Cain”, written by an Anglican minister, Stuart Barton Babbage.

It’s one of those books you keep going back to because it speaks about human nature so revealingly.

Babbage quotes a certain James Boswell who wrote in his diary in 1762:

“I went to St. James’ Church and heard a good sermon on, ‘By what means shall a young man learn to order his ways,’ in which the advantages of early piety were well displayed.
What a curious, inconsistent thing is the mind of man!  In the midst of divine service I was laying plans for having women, and yet I had the most sincere feelings of religion.”

Babbage says that Boswell was not destitute of religious instincts, he had a desire Godward; but he was not able to banish from his mind the seductive delights of sin.

The Apostle Paul, continues Babbage, knew what it is to be torn asunder by conflicting desires:

“I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self,” he insists, but “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.”  “I do not understand my own actions,” he explains unhappily, “For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate.”

“I can will what is right,” he continues, “but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

When he wants “to do right,” he explains, he finds that “evil lies close at hand.”

He lacks the strength, he sadly confesses, to do that which he knows to be right.

Paul, like David before him, knew that human nature is quite capable of hating God and one’s neighbour.

But before we end this preaching on man’s misery, we must point you to Jesus Christ.

He was the one person in this world who in His life reached the target.

He was the only One who stuck perfectly to God’s master plan.  Jesus loved His Father with heart, soul, strength and mind in a total way.

His was a successful life.

His arrow hit the bull’s eye.

None of us can do what Jesus did.

But God so loved us that He did not want us to go on, being off target.

He sent us Christ the Saviour and He gathers us, loves us, and teaches us how to obey the love-commandment.

The Lord Jesus enables us to go in the direction we could not and would not go.

Through His suffering and death Christ took on Himself the full consequences of our misdirected arrow, as though He was us.

And through His resurrection Christ redirected our arrow so that now, as we are in Christ and on course, we are heading truly for God.

We ourselves will at times still experience being off target, but that’s also the time to repent and believe that we are truly in Christ and cannot be lost.

Thus God, who requires from all that perfect total love, has given love in that He sent His Son to halt our wrong direction and to redirect our lives heavenward.

AMEN.