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Agape Love: Part 6

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Agape Love

Part 6

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Agape Love: Part 6

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Gary Petty's 8 part sermon series defining the very righteousness of God that we are to attain.

Transcript

Listen to 2010 version of the 8 part Agape Love sermon series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

[Gary Petty] Dale Carnegie, the famous businessman and public speaker and author who wrote many books about business, about success, and his books are still read today. In fact, in some businesses today, 60 years after he wrote, this is still required reading, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," his book on public speaking. He was asked a question, what was the most important lesson he had learned in life? And he answered, and this is from his book, "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living," he answered, "By far, the most vital lesson I have learned is the importance of what we think. If I knew what you think, I would know who you are. Our thoughts make us what we are. Our mental attitude is the X factor that determines our fate." Emerson said, "A man is what he thinks about all day long." How could he be possibly anything else?

Today, we're going to continue through our series on agape that we will pick up again and take a sermon or two after the feast is finished. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 13 as we go through the basic idea of the qualities of agape. 1 Corinthians 13. Review what we've covered so far, these aspects of God's nature, the divine nature that we are supposed to be having developed in our own lives, the very core of conversion. This is what the law is supposed to teach us. This is what all of God's ways are supposed to teach us about who we are as a person. Verse 4, 1 Corinthians 13, "Agape suffers long. It is kind. It does not envy. It does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked."

And then the next statement, and this is the one we're to, the next quality of agape is "thinks no evil." Thinks no evil. What we think about is who we become. Now, interesting enough, this phrase, thinks no evil, is actually translated in an amazing number of different ways in modern and older translations of the Bible, as authors would try to translate it into English and capture the whole meaning of what is trying to be said here in this phrase. The King James and the New King James, obviously, it's "thinks no evil." The Mawa translates this phrase, "love is never glad when others go wrong." And probably the most accurate translation you'll find in the New International Version of this particular phrase is, "Love keeps no records of wrong." Keeps no records of wrong.

What I want to do is look at this phrase into the way it's translated, and in doing so, we'll be able to capture what it really means. The heart of what it means, to me, "We think no evil." Remember, we are what we think, and that's the premise of what we go through here. What you think about all day long is who you are. If you think about angry thoughts, you become an angry person. If you think envious thoughts, you become an envious person. If you think about worry all the time, the things you're worried about, the things that could happen, the things that could go wrong, you become a person of anxiety. If you think about nothing but the evil around you, and this is typical of what we can do as Christians, we see so much evil around us all the time. We think about that evil all the time. And the problem is if we do nothing but think about the evil, eventually, we become angry, bitter, judgmental people.

Or we end up being like David was at times when he said, "You know, sometimes I think I might as well be bad." Everybody around us is bad. I've thought that, right? I know many of you have thought that. Why do good? Seems like the only people to get blessings are the what? The people who do bad. So we are what we think. And Agape thinks no evil.

Jesus taught us that the roots of sin lie in the mind. Now it's interesting, you and I live in a world, and we don't realize how much. I mean, I keep going back to Gnosticism all the time and the early Greek influences on the church. But you have to understand what happened in the second century, in the third century, and even in the first century, that Paul, especially, is fighting and combating in some of the churches here. Those influences took over, and it's common thinking today. So what many people believe is that they believe in the duality of human nature. You have a body and you have a soul. And the body is just a temporary housing.

Now, there's a little bit of truth in that, in that we talk about, you know, when we leave this body and we receive a spiritual body. But in this extreme duality that's believed by most Christians, the body really is immaterial to the soul. And so what you do in the body eventually really doesn't matter. You shouldn't sin, but if you do sin, well, it's the body that sins. The soul gets to go someplace else. When you're free from the body, you won't have those problems anymore.

Jesus taught us something different, and we don't realize how much that duality between soul and body has become so ingrained into the way we think. When you're back to that Hebrew concept of nephesh, that we are a complete being. To be conscious and alive, you have to have a body. You're either wired to this one or you're wired to the spiritual body at the resurrection, but you have a body. The spirit without a body is not conscious.

So when you start seeing that connection, then we realize our mind is a combination of the functions of the brain and the spirit that is in us. And that is our mind. And sin is in the mind. That's where it begins. Our bodies are, as what Paul called them, instruments of sin. Remember in Romans 6? He says, "Your members are instruments of sin." But what we tend to think is, no, our bodies are the source of sin. But they're not. The source of sin is in our mind. If we're going to understand agape, we must learn to think no evil. Because it's the evil in our minds that is the germ of what we do.

Look at Matthew 5, a section that most of you can recite from memory. From the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ summarizes the concepts of what His kingdom is all about. He says in verse 21, "You have heard that it was said of those of old, 'You shall not murder, and whoever murders shall be in danger of the judgment.' Now I say to you, the law was done away with." That's not what He says. See, but if you believe in this sort of this radical duality, what you get down to, well, what you do in the body may be bad, but it really doesn't matter. That's where you get into this idea of universal, not universal salvation, but once saved, always saved. Once you accept Jesus into your mind, into your heart, what you do with your body may be bad and you shouldn't do it, but it really has no eternal consequences anymore, because it's in your body. And once you're free from your body, your soul will be okay.

That's a totally foreign concept to the way the Scripture looks at human beings. And what He says here, "But I say to you that whoever's angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. Whoever says to his brother, 'Raca,'" you know, just, you foolish, worthless, nothing, "shall be in danger of the council. And whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be in danger of hell fire. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, go your way. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift." What's the point that he's making?

What is in our mind translates into action. So He says, "You've heard it said that murder is sin." He didn't disagree with that. Of course, murder is sin. He said, "But I'm telling you, the roots of murder in the mind." So even if you don't commit the act of murder, you can still be sinning. And so, if you have hatred towards a brother, we are required to do something.

So if we have hatred towards a brother, we are required to take actions to try to reconcile. We're required to. So that means we must be able to reason out in our minds because there's where sin begins. We must reason out, my hatred is a sin. Not just the actions. And because my hatred is a sin, I am required now to do a positive action. You know, when we went through not provoked, remember how I showed when not being provoked means that the right kind of anger will produce a positive action. Now, sometimes the other person will let you do a positive action, but that's their problem.

Agape always attempts to do what's right. And we see how, now, once again, all these start to fit together. If I'm going to think no evil, and I have evil thoughts against the brother, I am required to go deal with that brother. What we believe is those thoughts are acceptable, because the person was wrong, or the person did something bad, or the person is evil. And so we think that those are acceptable thoughts. The root of all sin is in the mind. When God made Adam and Eve in physical bodies, He did not say, "Well, their spirit is good, but their bodies are evil." He looked at them, this complete person of spirit and body, and said, "That's good." In fact, He says, "That's very good."

So there's nothing inherently evil with the human body. The problem is in here, what we do with what we have, how we process, how we think. He continues on here, in verse 26...well, verse 27, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery in his heart." He said, so even if you don't commit the act, and that's the point He's making again, all sin, there's no sin you can come up with that doesn't originate in the mind. It originates with what we allow our thoughts to do, where we allow them to go.

Now, here's part of our problem in developing agape. So many times, what we seem to believe is that God calls us so that we can be remodeled. I mean, when you repent and when you're baptized, you say, "Well, I need to change. I understand I need to change. I need to have my mind remodeled by God, restructured by God with His spirit." But to truly live 1 Corinthians 13, you and I don't have to be remodeled. We have to be totally torn down and reconstructed. Conversion is the matter of, you know, this house needs a little brickwork, maybe a little foundation work over here, it's basically fairly sound, and maybe a new roof.

When God called you, that's not how He looked at you. When God called me, that's not how He looked at me. Although, at the time, I thought that's how I did. I thought I needed a little remodeling. I had no idea when I was baptized at 21, or 20, that it was going to tear the whole house down. I thought I had a pretty good house built, right? I had no idea it was a bulldozer that came in and just ripped it up and then jackhammers tore up the foundation. And he says, "Now, I got to reconstruct you all over again."

And so what we do is we don't grow the way we should, because we believe we just need to be remodeled. You and I don't need to be remodeled. We have to be reconstructed. And that reconstruction isn't just our actions. It usually starts with actions. The reason it starts with actions is that, what do you do with children? You teach children actions. So the first thing you learn when you come into the truth is, "Well, okay, I'm going to keep the Sabbath, and I'm going to give up having crucifixes in my house because that's a form of ideology." So you do actions.

As time goes on, you begin to understand, "Wait a minute, this has to do also with envy and anger and not just acts. It has to do with lust, and it has to do with what I say and how I think." We have to be reconstructed from the foundation of, is the heart the core? You and I don't need a patched-up heart and spirit. What did the Old Testament prophets say would come with the New Covenant? I will give them a new heart and a new mind. I will give them a new spirit. Not a reconstructed mind and heart and spirit, it's a new one. And you and I are still trying to hold on. You know, God's building this beautiful house. We had the diamond analogy used this morning. You could say...you just use that analogy. God's building this beautiful diamond, and in order to get it just right, this big hunk of other kind of material that's stuck on this diamond has to be cut off. And what we're saying is, "Oh, no, no, I like it the way it is. I like a diamond half stuck into an ugly rock." God said, "No, I need to pull the diamond out of the rock." "Oh, no, no, no, leave the rock on. I like it that way."

And we're not realizing the enormity of what God wants to do with us. What He wants to do with us and what's remarkable is He will only do what we are willing to submit to. He'll only do what we're willing to submit to. And we are participating in it. We go through this dramatic change. What Isaiah said is true. The whole imagination...I'm sorry, this is in Genesis, in Genesis where God said, "The whole imagination and the purposes and desires of the heart are evil."

The whole imagination of human beings are evil. The desires of the heart. Now, we talk about, well, you know, as long as it comes out of the heart, it's okay. How many times have you heard that? Well, as long as the person is doing it with a good heart, but the desires of the heart are evil, that's what God says, they have to be educated into something else. This is the whole concept of conscience. I've been working on ideas for sermons after the feast. I have the next six months of sermons ideas already down that I want to cover. I want to cover Revelation 2 and 3, but I also want to do a series, at least two sermons, on the conscience, the development of the conscience, because that's what we're talking about here.

The development of the conscience. Because you and I, naturally, there's part of us that thinks we're right, and it is not. But we will defend it, because we believe we are right. And there's an enormous submitting to God that takes place if the conscience has changed so that we truly learn what God wants. And sometimes we don't know it. We don't realize how much massive the reconstruction is, and we get comfortable with a partly built house. We get to the place, we don't care that, "Well, we get two walls up. We'll just put a tarp out, and we'll live in this." God says, "I'm building you a mansion," and we're living in a partly constructed hovel. And we're actually...we feel good about that, not realizing what God truly wants to do with us. So that we think no evil.

Paul said that he was striving to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Can you imagine it? Paul said he got up every day and he tried to bring every thought into what Christ would think. Think about how random our thoughts are during the day. It is random. Flying around. Paul said, "No, I'm trying to bring every thought." Agape is the ability to bring every thought into what God wants us to think.

Psalm 19. Psalm 19. It's in Psalms like this that we understand why David really was a man after God's own heart. He had his faults and his problems, he had his sins, and yet, he understood, as he went through life, that he was in a process of learning. He was in a process of being totally reconstructed. Psalm 19:12, he says to God here, "Who can understand his errors?" You see, what human being can really understand when we're wrong and where we're wrong? "Cleanse me from secret faults." Interesting. What a prayer. Have you ever gone to God and said, "Show me the secret sins I have that I don't even know about. Show them to me?" Because almost all the secret sins have to do with the mind. Show me the secret faults that I have. "Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. And then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression."

Presumptuous sins. Another way to think about a presumptuous sin is you believe you're right. That's the whole idea about being presumptuous. I believe I'm right so I can do what I'm doing. Now, no one's going to go out and steal and say, "Well, I think I'm right." No one's going to go out and commit adultery. Well, I say that I've actually had conversations with people where they had convinced themselves that their adultery was a good thing. I mean, we can actually take the actions and convince ourselves it's a good thing. But presumptuous sins, many times, are things that are not that obvious. They're not the obvious ones. Because we believe we're right. We're so sure that we're right.

And David went to God and said, "Show me those things. Show me the secret faults. And if I think I'm right about something, and I'm wrong, show me that I'm wrong so that I will be free of great transgression." Because I realized, if I'm presumptuously moving forward, thinking I'm right, and I'm wrong, he says, "Then I will commit great sins," all in the belief of self-righteousness that I'm doing what is good.

He says in verse 14, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer." The meditation of my heart. Meditation is a very important concept in Hebrew thought, is what you really set and thought about. You know, as a shepherd, when he was younger, he's out taking care of sheep. Now, there are times when that means you're in the cold, you're in the rain. It means that you're taking care of sheep that are bogged down. I mean, the amount of work is enormous. You're moving the sheep from one place to another. There's an awful lot of work that goes into being a shepherd. There's other times those sheep are all standing there grazing, and it's a beautiful day, and you're sitting there, and they're happy, and there's no predators, and you don't have anything to do. You can sit there and you can think.

See, you and I live in a culture where we believe, somehow, there's something intrinsically lazy about sitting and thinking. So if we ever have time when we're not working, we fill it with entertainment. So instead of sitting and thinking, we must do other things. Now, I'm not justifying laziness, you know, the Socrates approach to life. Socrates just sat around and thought all day long, didn't take a bath, didn't have much money. Everybody fed him so they can hear him speak. And some ancient writings talk about his smell.

But there are times in life, in fact, there should be little segments of time, even every day, that you and I have time to think, to really think about what's important. David says, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to God." I guarantee that if we had this approach, there's a lot of things we say, especially about other people, we would not say. If, before we said it, we asked God, "Is this acceptable to You?" we wouldn't say it. There's a lot of thoughts we would get rid of if, on a regular basis, as we're in the middle of thinking something, we think, "Is this acceptable to God?" we would change the way we think.

David, asked God, "Help me so that in the depths of my heart, what I feel, what I think about, what I meditate on, in the words that come out of my mouth, let every one of them be acceptable to You." This is why he's one of the men after God's own heart. He was learning agape. Now, he didn't call it agape. He didn't speak Greek. But he was learning to be godly, as what he would have put it. To learn to be godly, like God, he was learning to be like God. You and I live in an evil world. It's difficult to do this. We can be overwhelmed with the evil so much. And yet, we have to clear our minds of it.

Philippians 4. Here, the apostle Paul advises the church in Philippi in Philippians 4:4. Philippians 4:4, he says, "Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice." He says, "Find our joy in what God is doing." Look at salvation. Don't look at the world around you all the time because if you do, you will be discouraged. Rejoice in what God can do, because the one thing we all come to grips with sooner or later is we can't fix where this world is going. We can't fix it. There is no way to fix where this world is going. God can. God will. So we can rejoice in what God is doing. Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand.

Verse 6 says, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God." So, go to God in prayer. Go to God in thanksgiving. Learn to deal with anxiety by taking our needs to God. Verse 7, "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Look what the peace of God does. It guards our hearts and minds. The peace of God helps determine how we feel and how we think. There are times we have to step back from the anxiety and the worry, and we have to step back and bask, if you will, in what God is doing. And let that determine where our minds are going to be, where our emotions are going to be.

Then notice, verse 8, he tells us how to do this. "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of a good report, if there is any virtue, if there's anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things." In the private moments of your mind, try to fill, Paul says, try to fill your mind with these things. You know, we're just so random in how we think. It's amazing to me how the human mind...I think it's because it's so fast, we process so much information. And then you have so many memories the older you get that it's just so random what's going on.

And Paul here has said, have the discipline that take time. When it is your time to peacefully think, instead of thinking about all the evil and the bad, instead of letting your mind being drawn towards sin, instead of thinking about what others have done to you, stop and think on these things. And the thing that gets me the most in this sentence is it has to be of good report. Good report. In other words, your thoughts are being reported to others. If you want to analyze your thoughts, stop every once in a while and think, "Oh, if my thoughts suddenly were out loud or, you know, I had a neon sign above me with my thoughts being blasted out, reported to everybody, would I want everybody to know what I'm thinking? Would I really want everybody to know that right now I'm thinking, 'Man, this sermon's going long, won't this guy ever shut up?'"

Now, I mean, "the sermon's going long" is not an evil thought. I'm just making a joke. Sometimes they feel like they go on and on, don't they? But you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about wrong thoughts. What if we would try and every thought would be a thought you wouldn't mind sharing, that no matter what you're thinking at any moment, if someone walked up and said, "Penny for your thoughts," you would not be ashamed to tell them what you're thinking? But that's tough.

This is what we're called to to strive for. Aren't you glad God isn't random in just the way he thinks? I am sure glad that he's not. Because He would be random in his actions. And if He was random and unpredictable in His actions, and He could do evil, eternal life wouldn't be worth having. It wouldn't be worth living. We know that God is not random. We know that God thinks very logically. He processes His emotions in such a way that what he does is always good for others. He never compromises with evil. He never does anything out of uncontrolled anger. That's the God we worship. And if we wish to become godly, we are to strive to take Philippians 4:8 and make that part of our lives. This is the way we think. We think no evil.

Psalm 77. You know, this is especially true. Sometimes we think of evil in terms of we think bad things, lustful thoughts, envious thoughts, coveting thoughts, greedy thoughts. But also, it can break down into the fact that sometimes all we see is evil in the world around us. I mentioned that earlier. We never see good at all. We never feel good about anything. Because we forget what God is doing, and we forget to see the good that's happening in our lives every day.

Verse 1 of Psalm 77, Asaph writes, "I cried out to God with my voice, to God with my voice, and He gave ear to me. In the day of my trouble, I sought the Lord. My hand was stretched out in the night without ceasing. My soul refused to be comforted. I remembered God and was troubled. I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed." Do you ever feel that way? Every human being has felt that way. And when you're in the middle of a serious crisis, you can feel this way almost every moment of every day. But he says, "I remembered God." He said, verse 4, "You hold my eyelids open so that I am troubled and I cannot speak. I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. I call to remembrance my song in the night. I meditate within my heart, and my spirit makes diligent search."

There are times when you and I wrestle in our mind. Sometimes this is where our greatest trials come from. Some of our greatest trials are not external. They happen inside ourselves. As we struggle with our own human nature, we struggle with Satan, we struggle with the evil around us, we struggle with our backgrounds, we struggle with things that have happened to us. And as we struggle with those things, that thought process becomes overwhelming, and we find ourselves just like this, maybe not able to sleep, hardly able to function at times. This is the way we are as human beings. How did Asaph pull through this?

He goes on, verse 7, "Will the Lord cast off forever? Will He be favorable no more? Has His mercy ceased?" He actually reached the point, he says, "You know, does God even care anymore? Maybe God just ran out of mercy for me." You know, he gave it to other people, but maybe one day God said, "You know, Asaph, that's enough mercy for you today. You're more evil than anybody else, so I've just run out of mercy for you." Is that what's happened? He says, "That's how I felt." "Has His promise failed forevermore? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He, in anger, shut up His tender mercies?" Is God just going to let me stay like this forever?

Every one of us has reached a point in some sickness or trial, or job problem, or marriage problem, or something that happened to you as a child and you're living through the consequences, or the death of somebody close to you, and there's some time in the midst of that, you get to the point, you say, "God just isn't going to do anything," just like He did here. And you think that, and you feel that.

"And I said, 'This is my anguish. But I will remember.'" He said, "This is how I feel." The whole point here is he didn't say, "Oh, God didn't say I'm evil for feeling this way." He acknowledged, "This is how I feel." He wrote it down very eloquently that, thousands of years later, we read this in hundreds of languages. And people are moved by Psalm 77. He says, "But I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the works of the Lord. Surely I will remember Your wonders of old. I will also meditate on your work and talk of your deeds." He just didn't think about God and His way and His greatness and His plan. He said, "I am then going to talk to others about it."

Now, there's a conscious reason for doing this. If I think about God's way, but I go talk about my troubles...now there's a time to talk about your troubles, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this is how he... He says, "This is how I learned to move beyond it." He says, "I learned to talk about God, not just about my troubles." I can talk about my troubles and then I can say, "But you know, I've seen where God has done this, that, or the other. Or I believe God will intervene for me. Will you pray for me? Will you pray with me?" He says, "When I talk, I've got to bring God back into it. When I think, I've got to bring God back into it."

"Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary. Who is so great a God as our God? You are the God who does wonders. You have declared Your strength among Your people. You have with Your arm redeemed Your people, the sons of Jacob and Joseph." So he says, "I was able to move forward because I went back to God."

Now, that wasn't an easy process for him. He didn't say how long it took. It didn't take 10 minutes, I can tell you that. People say, "How long does that take?" I can only tell you from experience. And in my experience, when we're like this and our whole mind is all just overwhelmed, and we have to say, "Okay, how do I deal with these emotions?" Well, okay, I have to change the way I think. How do I do this? How long do I cry out to God? How long does it take for God to break through? And the answer is as long as it takes.

Well, no, can't we get this down to, like, 90 minutes? It takes as long as it takes. And sometimes it's a long, hard struggle. Sometimes it's a long, hard struggle. You have to believe in the outcome. You have to have faith that God will change the way you think. But here's the problem, we want to keep thinking the wrong way, but we want a godly outcome. And that won't happen. You can't keep taking a hammer, smacking yourself in the thumb, yelling, "Ow, that hurts. God, please save me," and then pick up the hammer and smack yourself in the thumb again.

At some point, God says, "Put down the hammer." "Oh. But I find such purpose in this. My life has such meaning taking this hammer and smacking myself in the thumb. But changing the way we think, that's tough, that we think no evil. Agape thinks no evil. How do we do this? Well, part of it is training ourselves in meditation, training ourselves when we think. First of all, meditate, in other words, find time, and you can actually combine this with prayer time. So you're thinking and praying back and forth with God. But meditate on God, on His love, on His plan, on His truth, on His laws. I mean that's what you find all through the book of Psalms.

If you read Psalm 119, you'll find numerous places in there where David talks about, "I meditate on your law. I meditate on your ways." There's places in the Psalms where David says, "When I lie in bed at night, what I think about as I go to sleep is God and His ways. You know, what you think about at night is what you wake up with in the morning. It's what you dream about. It guides and directs where you go. He said, "I think about your ways." Find time during your busy...if your schedule is so busy that you don't have time for prayer and Bible study and meditation, then chuck something out of that schedule, because it's wrong.

If your schedule is so busy that you have no time for Bible study, God talking to you, prayer, you talking to God, and meditation, training your mind. If you have no time for those things, then find something in your schedule and get rid of it. Because I don't care what it is, if we don't have those things, everything else we do becomes worthless. Because if God's not involved, big deal. We can be successful at our jobs. We can have our kids involved in all kinds of things. We can be involved in everything in the community. And if we don't have time to have God in our lives, big deal. Big deal.

Second thing is find time. Now, we don't do this much. Find time to meditate on nature. You know, this is one thing where television can be a good thing. There are programs about nature on television that are absolutely amazing, and they help us understand God. And what's amazing is they'll always say, "And so evolution did this," and you'll be thinking, "No one in their right mind can believe in evolution and see what they just showed you." You can't. I mean, you have to really have...I don't know. Something's missing in someone's mind to watch the intricacy of God's creation and believe that it's all by chance. There's just no way that any... I don't know how people that intelligent can come to that conclusion. But they do.

We are so divorced from nature. We don't see God's handiwork. We don't see it. Most of us live in big cities. We live in houses cut off from nature. We drive cars cut off from nature. And we need to understand it, see it, think about it. And then the third thing is every day, you need to set aside some special time, part of your prayer time, part of your Bible study time. You know, when you're reading something in the Bible, there's a time to sit back and say, "God, what does that mean?" And then think about what you just read. Bible study isn't just a matter of collecting knowledge. There's lots of people who have a lot of knowledge about this book and have no more agape than a pagan. There's people who have a lot of knowledge about what's in this book, but have no more agape than a pagan. It's so much more than knowledge. That knowledge has power because it changes who we are.

Now, another thing about this idea of thinking no evil is that we have to be very careful about automatically jumping to conclusions about other people. In other words, in any situation, now, remember I've talked about this, agape is not naive, okay? Agape is very sensitive to evil. But agape doesn't automatically in us...now, God knows automatically a person's motive. But for us, we don't always automatically know a person's motive. So we should not automatically jump to certain conclusions.

Every time you're confronted with somebody with a difference of opinion or an action you don't understand, do you automatically jump to the conclusion that they're evilly motivated? They're motivated by evil. They must have some really bad motivation to do that. As I've said in marriage sermons before... We're married 10 years, and my wife said to me, "I need to apologize to you." She says, "I've been upset with you a couple of times in our marriage because I thought you were being mean to me." She says, "Now, I realize, you're not being mean to me. You don't know." I said, "I don't even know what you're talking about." She explained, and I said, "Oh, I won't do that anymore. I didn't know." She's a very wise woman, that's why I always use her as an example. She's a very wise woman. She always figures these things out. I'm walking around going, "Oh."

Agape looks and says, "Is this really evilly motivated? What's really happening here?" before always jumping. In other words, before always thinking evil, agape tries to find out if what is happening is really evil or not. You and I don't have the ability God has to know whether something's being motivated by evil or not. So we have to, before we jump to that conclusion, we have to find out, we have to think about it, we have to wait. Perfect example is in Joshua 22.

The Book of Joshua is about the conquest of Israel or the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. Joshua leads them and takes somewhere around five years. They conquered the Promised Land, and it's done. Now, unfortunately, they never really finished all of it. But it's done, they're happy, and now they're going to go back and settle down to where the tribes are supposed to settle. So they've been at war for five years. Give or take a little bit.

And remember that the Jordan River ran through there, and there were two and a half tribes who decided, "We really liked the land on the other side of the Jordan. So what we would like to do is that's what we would like to have and set up our tribes." And so they agreed. But now, those people are about to cross the river. Now, rivers are natural boundaries between nations. Rivers are natural boundaries. So now, literally, there's going to be part of Israel living on the other side of a natural boundary.

Joshua 22:1, "Joshua called the Reubenites, the Gadites, and half the tribe of Manasseh, and he said to them, 'You've kept all that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you and obeyed my voice in all that I have commanded you. And you have not left your brother in these many days, up to this day, but have kept the charge of the commandment of the Lord your God. And now the Lord your God has given rest to your brother, as he promised them. Now, therefore, return and go to your tents, to the land of your possession, which Moses the servant of the Lord gave you on the other side of the Jordan. But take careful heed to do the commandment and the law which Moses the servant of God commanded you, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments, to hold fast to Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul."

So he reminds them, you're going to that side of that river, but you're still part of us. So be sure and follow the commandments of God, and love God the way you're supposed to love Him. So now, tens of thousands of Israelites leave the main body, and they're going to cross the Jordan River. Let's go down to verse 10.

"And when they came to the region of the Jordan, which is in the land of Canaan, the children of Reuben, the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh built an altar there by the Jordan, a great, impressive altar." So they come up to the river and the first thing they do is they build this huge altar. Well, they weren't supposed to go around building altars. What's going on here? Now, the children of Israel heard someone say, this is verse 11, I want you to notice, they heard someone say... Someone told someone who told someone who told someone until all the other Israelites knew what was happening. At least they thought.

It says, verse 11, "Behold the children of Reuben, the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh, build an altar on the frontier of the land of Canaan in the region of the Jordan on the children of Israel side. And when the children of Israel heard of it, the whole congregation of the children of Israel gathered together at Shiloh to go to war against them." The only reason you would do this is to burn sacrifices to foreign gods. There was a tabernacle, remember, where the sacrifices took place. That Tabernacle wasn't only going to go on the other side of the Jordan. Well, they had even crossed the Jordan on the Israelite side of the Jordan where the other tribes were. They built this massive altar. And someone heard someone tell about it and someone heard and someone heard, and then the entire nation came to the conclusion, "There's only one reason you would do this. Now, we don't even get to go settle our lands. We have to go fight our own brothers because what they're doing is so evil."

So they send Phinehas and Eleazar, the priests to the children of Reuben, to the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh. So they show up, and they send 10 rulers, one from each tribe. So this delegation of rulers and priests show up. Verse 15. Then they came to the children of Reuben, to the children of Gad, to half the tribe of Manasseh, to the land of Gilead, and they spoke with them, "Thus says the whole congregation of the Lord, 'What treachery is there that you have committed against the Lord God of Israel, to turn away this day from following the Lord, in that you have built for yourselves an altar, that you may rebel this day against the Lord? Is the iniquity of Peor not enough for us, from which we are not cleansed to this day, although there was a plague in the congregation of the Lord,'" God had actually put a plague upon them because of the sin that they had done as a group at one point, "but that you must turn away this day from following the Lord? And it shall be, if you rebel today against the Lord, that tomorrow He will be angry with the whole congregation of Israel. Nevertheless, if the land of your possession is unclean.'"

In other words, he goes on, they go on, and said, "Look, if you don't like the land on the other side, or if there's something wrong with it, that's okay. Come live with us. But don't do this terrible sin. They go on and they talk about when they took Jericho, and that one man had taken things out of Jericho when he wasn't supposed to, when God had punished Israel. And he said, "Please, don't do this. This sin is terrible. And we have been sent to tell you the army has not been disbanded. They are at Shiloh waiting to march upon you and kill you all because of what you're doing."

Verse 21. Then the children of Reuben, the children of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh answered and said to the heads of the divisions of Israel, "The Lord God of gods, the Lord God of gods, He knows, and let Israel itself know, if it is in rebellion, or if it is in treachery against the Lord, do not save us this day." If we've done what you've said, then kill every one of us. If we have built ourselves an altar to turn from following the Lord, or if to offer on it burnt offerings or grain offerings, or to offer peace offerings on it, let the Lord Himself require an account. If we built this altar in order to start doing sacrifices, like in the Tabernacle, in other words, he said, "If we've done this to worship pagan gods, let us be punished. If we've done this to try to take over what's happening at the Tabernacle, let us be punished."

Verse 24. "But in fact, we have done it for fear, we've done it for a reason, saying, 'In time to come your descendants may speak to our descendants saying, "What have you to do with the Lord God of Israel? For the Lord has made the Jordan a border between you and us, the children of Reuben and the children of Gad. You have no part in the Lord." So your descendants will make our descendants cease from fearing the Lord.' Therefore we said, 'Let us now prepare to build ourselves an altar, not for burnt offerings nor for sacrifice, but that it may be a witness between you and us and our generations after us that we may perform the service of the Lord before Him with our burnt offerings, with our sacrifices, and with our peace offerings, and that your descendants may not say to our descendants, "You have no part in the Lord."'"

And they go on and explain even more. The point is they said, "We didn't do this to rebel against God. We did this to remind you that we have the command from God to come to the Tabernacle, and we will come to the Tabernacle. And this is to remind you, your children, when we're all dead, and their children, when they're all dead, that the people on the other side of the Jordan are Israelites too." They didn't do it in rebellion. They didn't do it for the reasons that they were accused of. They did it for the exact opposite reasons. They did this to remind them that we are Israelites too. And we don't want ever for there to be a break between the people on this side of the Jordan and the people on that side of the Jordan because we all have to go to the Tabernacle to worship. They all had to go to Shiloh to worship. The holy days. The leaders of those tribes were required on the holy days and the heads of households to go to the Tabernacle. And they want to make sure that that was never forgotten by either side.

Look what happens when you automatically assume the evil. They were about to go to war, and the people were actually doing the opposite of what they thought they were doing. Think no evil. But it's a proclivity of human beings. When we're faced with misconceptions, hurtful actions, words from another person, we automatically consider them to be evil. And sometimes they are. It's not being naive. It's not being, "Oh, everybody is basically good." Everybody isn't basically good. But agape goes in and says, "Wait a minute, let me make sure this person isn't just doing something through a misconception." Maybe I misunderstood what they were saying or doing, or maybe they're having a bad day, or maybe they just need the chance to repent. So agape always approaches with that original intent.

You come to church, and someone just ignores you. You go up and say hi to them, they just ignore you. You go up and try to shake their hand, and they sort of, "Hi, how are you doing?" shake your hand, and then walk away from you. And you say, "Well, they don't like me, and they're trying to treat me badly." They may be. But what if they're not?

If you decide, "That person's being rude," how are you going to treat that person? Well, probably, you're going to think about it all Sabbath afternoon and ruin your Sabbath being upset over that person. And then you're going to talk about your friends during the week about that person. And then the next week you're going to look at that person, and they weren't at church, so you're going to decide that that person probably isn't even keeping the Sabbath. And two weeks later, that person's going to be at church and walk up to you and stick out their hand, and you're going to say hi and treat them bad. And what are they going to do? "Well, boy, you ain't got a problem?" And they're going to ruin their Sabbath and then call their friends.

Well, maybe they are being rude. Maybe they do have a problem. What if they don't? What if there's something else on their mind? What if they're sick in their stomach and they're trying to get to the restroom? Yeah, I mean, things like that happen, right? What if it's something that simple? But what we usually do is we automatically think their motives are evil. This really happens a lot in marriages.

Norman Wright has written a great book called "Communication Keys to Your Marriage." It's an old book. It was probably written 30 years ago. But an excellent book. And in there, he gives this example. She says, "Honey, I was out shopping today, and I stopped in this cute little dress shop, and I had the best time." And he explodes, "What? You blew a bundle of money on some new clothes? You know we can't afford it." Actual situation, she tried on a few dresses and didn't even buy a thing. But the battle starts, right? All he had to say was, "Did you buy anything?" No, but I had a great time. Oh, good.

But since we automatically assume the motive is evil, we assume sometimes there's actions that aren't even there. I think of the poem by Carl Sandburg. A guy in a wagon comes to the top of a hill, and there's this village out there, and there's a man sitting there on the side of the road. The man's sitting there on the side of the road, and the guy stops and he says, "Wow, I'm on the road. This is my family. We're moving." He says, "We're looking for a new place to live." He says, "What kind of folks live down in that village down there?" The old man says, "Well, what kind of folks lived in the town you came from?" And he said, "Well, we left that town because they were mean, and they'd stab you in the back, and they lied all the time, and they were rotten folks, and we hated it. Dishonest." He says, "Well, that's probably how you'll find the people there." So the wagon moves on and goes around the village and keeps moving.

A few minutes later, another wagon comes up. Guy says, "We're moving from another town, and that looks like a nice town there. What are people like down there?" He says, "What were the people like where you came from?" "Well, they were honest, hardworking people, friendly people. We hated to leave. There just wasn't enough jobs. We had to move on." He says, "That's probably how you'll find people down there."

The point is, a lot of times, as we create what we all really have in our minds, seeking truth means seeking the truth. Now, there's lots of angry, rude people. There's evil people. There's people you and I shouldn't associate with. There's enough evil to go around without us making it up. There's enough evil to make your life pretty miserable at times without having to make more up. We think no evil.

The other way this is translated, and here, just five minutes, I want to just make a few comments about that, this "thinks no evil" is also translated, "keeps no records of wrongs." Keeps no records of wrongs. Agape recognizes that sins have long-term consequences. And so all of us suffer the consequences of sins. I'm suffering the consequences of sins I did 20 years ago. You are too. There's long-term consequences of sin. And yet, what agape does is not allow sins that have been repented of to interfere with relationship in the present time. It keeps no records of wrongs. So agape is willing to have relationship when sins have been repented of, even though that person may still be suffering long-term problems. I mean, I'll make up something, but this is not based on a true story, but it's something that actually is loosely based on something that I dealt with 25 years ago.

One person was in the church, and he had a venereal disease because of activity this person had done before they came into the church. And it was easy for people to hold that person at arm's length because of the past. The bottom line is that person's sins, that person was suffering terrible long-term physical results of those sins and will suffer until the resurrection. But there's no purpose for us to take anybody and say, "I cannot have a relationship with you because you're suffering the consequences of your past sins." Because if that was true, none of us could have a relationship with anybody.

How do we have the right to have a relationship with anybody? Unless you've never sinned, then you have that right. So if you've never sinned, hold everybody else at arm length. The rest of us sinners, better let everybody in, okay? We let everybody in, even when they're suffering terrible long-term consequences of sin. We still keep no records of wrong. In other words, we don't keep that from allowing us to have a relationship with them.

Now, the person you know that's an alcoholic, and they've struggled with that for years. Now, you're not going to invite them over at your house when you have your wine-tasting party, okay? So when you invite them over at your house, you just invite them for a meal, but you still invite them to your house. You see? You're still in life. We keep no record of wrongs, even though, like I said, you can't erase those long-term problems, especially when they've done something to us. I mean, many times, we're like Bill and Harry. Bill was dying. With time running out, he wanted to make things right with his friend, Harry. They've been best friends at one time, but Bill had become really hard to live with. Made fun of Harry all the time, put him down, griped about him all the time. In fact, he drove Harry away. And because Bill always had to be right. He's one of those people...you ever meet a person that always has to be right, no matter what, they're always right? And even if you prove them wrong, they're right. And finally, he just drove Harry away. Just drove him away.

So Harry, he finally says, "You know, I'm dying. I better have Harry come over." So Harry comes to the hospital, and Bill says, "You know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for always having to be right." And Harry was just overwhelmed, and Harry said, "I forgive you. Will you please forgive me?" Harry said, "This is all I've ever wanted from you, Bill, just to admit that you could be wrong and not keep all records of my wrongs. You know, it's like you would never forget anything I ever did wrong." And Bill said, "I do now. I forgive you, Harry." Harry goes, "This is so wonderful." Harry says his goodbyes, he's leaving, and just as he opens the door to leave the hospital room, Bill shouts out, "But remember, if I don't die and somehow get better, none of this counts." That's how we are sometimes. I will keep the record of wrong, but I really do. I really do.

So we have three applications of one phrase. Think no evil. Replace thoughts of sin, worry, and negativism with the truth of God. Never be glad when others go wrong. We refuse to dwell on the shortcomings of others, and we refuse to impute motives. And keeps no records of wrongs. We are willing to forgive because God has forgiven us.

 

Now, don't be discouraged when you say, "How am I going to do that?" This is difficult. This is conversion. This is being changed. Remember that you and I have been called to become godly. We've been called to become the children of God. And you and I are still in the process of being converted. That process is real every day in the decisions we make. That process is real every day in the way we treat others. That process is real every day when we decide to obey God and not human beings. It's every day when we decide not to sin, and it's every day when we decide which thoughts to hang on to and which thoughts to get rid of. And it is in this process that we are literally becoming the children of our Father in heaven.