Dr. Steven C. Riser

Introduction

I don’t know about you, but I like the name of our church -- New Beginning! It’s a wonderful thing to be reminded that God gives us a new life in Christ, his mercies are new every morning and one day we will dwell in a new home in heaven! It’s nice to be able to begin each day with a clean slate.

Morning often symbolizes newness. One writer complained he got up the same kind of person he went to bed.... I suppose that complaint could be made by many of us. We’re tired of certain attitudes and certain behavior patterns, and within us there is a yearning for newness. If, somehow, we could discover the wings of the morning and dispel the tiredness of the night, that would make us different. But we often don’t seek these wings until our life has grown stale, we've gotten into a rut and we wonder where our zest has gone.

Many times I've yearned for a sense of newness. There was a bone-weariness of spirit and I wished renewal could have come immediately, but often times there was a period of waiting. When you are listening to an audio tape on a portable player and the batteries which operated the recorder run down, all you have to do to get it going again is to rechange the batteries. Wouldn’t it be nice if life were that simple when we experience a weariness in our spirit? It would be nice if, in the everyday routine of our lives, we could just plug into some current and immediately receive the energy of joy and inspiration to feed and enliven our spirits

What are you thirsty for?

Time and again, I've been surprised by how suddenly the Spirit can move to refresh our lives. And it usually comes at a time when we're desperate when we’ve come to the end of our rope. The scripture bears this out; it is only when we hunger and thirst for God that we are filled.

A man had an operation, and the doctor, by mistake, left a sponge in him. A friend asked him if he had any pain because of it. "No," said the man, "but I sure do get thirsty."

Our thirst for newness reveals a great deal about us. In the desert one can become terribly dehydrated and thirsty. What you long for is cool, clear water. Our thirst does reveal something about us. What are we thirsting for? What are we yearning for? The scripture tells us that we are thirsting for living water. And yet we try to substitute for this in so many ways: living for pleasure, money, and for a human love that is self-centered until we discover that pleasure becomes a fever, money becomes a bondage, and love becomes a succession of disappointments, because there is no real spiritual life-force at the center of these yearnings.

No matter how "odd" some may "deem" it, the fact that God is the force at the center of human yearning seems evident. And with the Psalmist we are brought by our yearning to cry, "As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God."

What does it all mean?

If it is newness we yearn for, what does it all mean? How about being for ourselves? Some of the worst times of my life are when I feel life I am living against myself. Martin Luther said, "Self-indulgence will turn a man's self against himself." That truth stands. Are there ways in which we can be for ourselves?

A hermit lived near the Salmon River for forty years. He had killed bears and grown his own food. And then someone invaded his privacy and wrote a book about him. Now he is no longer a hermit. People found their way to his doorstep and he began to like company. He has discovered late in life that he needs others to be for him. This is a universal need. We need the affirmation of others as well as that of ourselves.

Oscar Wilde said, "Bernard Shaw had no enemies, but all of his friends disliked him." If Shaw's eccentricities made him applaud himself, people endured that. Oscar Wilde, however, found that his greatest enemy was within himself and he did not know how to deal with that enemy. So, in debauchery he raged against himself. And, eventually, so did others. Broken, impoverished, and enslaved, Wilde wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves."

We all have the need for affirmation. Affirmation can be likened to positive reinforcement. One young man said, "For me to have a good day, I have to have ten 'Atta boys' to one 'You're a jerk.'" That isn't true for just a teenager; it is true for us all.

We are constantly building our inner house. We furnish it with all sorts of things. Much of the furnishing is self-defeating; the entire decor may have a self-defeating motif. We have a piece of guilt here, some recrimination there, a stand of self-doubt, and a fixture of self-hate. We look at these furnishings and wonder why we are miserable.

Carl Rogers said that when a person gets himself in this state, it’s hard to walk out of the house and it’s only when there’s a knock on the door and we open the door and someone says, "Come out and walk with me," that the inhabitant finds freedom. We need to walk out and shut the door on our self-defeating interiors. Rogers says there are ways they can be locked forever, and that's good news.

How can we avoid self-defeating behavior?

Christians view that good news through the freedom God gives us in Christ. We don't have to live in a house where we constantly put ourselves down. We don't have to live in a house of self-defeat. In Christ, God is saying, "I am for you. Come walk with me. We'll lock the door and we'll never go back in again." If God is for us, we can be for ourselves. "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ." (Romans 8:1) When we realize that, we experience a new quality of life.

Have you ever experienced a period in your life when, from overload, you were actually living with a self-defeating mind set? I have. There is no way we can get rid of the past, of course, but the past doesn't have to have power over us. To begin to unload excess baggage from the past, we must stop justifying it. We must release it and say, "All right, so I messed up, so I was wrong in some things, but I've had my regrets and God has forgiven me; now I want to go on."

In an institution for the care of the mentally confused, there is a sign that says, "Do you want to be right or do you want to be well?" Self-justification says, "I want to be right/" But we can't always justify some of the things we did in the past. We must admit to ourselves that it wasn't right. But we must also go a step farther. As God forgives, we must accept His forgiveness. We don't find it easy. John Steinbeck wrote, "We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way." Why is it that we have a tendency to rehearse those moments when we failed? Are we disappointed with ourselves?

A girl in counseling was told by her counselor that she should receive an A for her past. He said, "If I were to grade you, I would give you a good A because 90 percent of you has been wholesome and you have been concerned and caring. Only 10 percent of your actions have been below your expectations." The counselor also noted that she kept wanting to rehearse the 10 percent and forget about the 90 percent. Isn't that true of so many of us? We have become museum keepers. We cling to the old things that have been hanging around for years. We are really afraid to clean house.

But unless we find ways to deal with the past, until we can forgive, forget, and go on, there can be no really good present or future. The person who is full of new life has a clear conscience and is always walking forward - excited about becoming the kind of person that God has created us to be!

Are you having some trouble hitting the golf ball? If you are a right hander, you need to lean against your left side on the down swing. There has to be a forward thrust to get your hands into a position for a good hit. This is as true of life as of golf: If there isn't a forward thrust, nothing goes right. Everything goes wrong. If we are to receive newness, we must leave the past and march forward.

What is the good news of the Gospel?

The good news of the gospel is that God did something for us that we couldn’t do for ourselves in sending Christ to die on the cross in our place. But, the scripture teaches that we have to die to be born anew - we have to repent of our sin before we can place our faith in Christ. We have to be willing to let that part die that has no right to live. Newness means letting those things die that are inhibiting growth. Jesus said if we would come after Him, we must deny ourselves.

To go a bit further, when God renews our life and our spiritual needs are met, we must not only say "Yes" to God, but we must also say "yes" to the needs of others. Genuine faith expresses itself in the form of good works for all people. This means the downtrodden, the oppressed, and those who are not "our kind of people." If this is not the case, we slip into a kind of spiritual self-indulgence.

Some spiritual renewal groups work toward only the renewal of self and not toward the renewal of the church and the community. Paul said, we should do good to all men but especially to the household of faith. We need that attitude to keep our spirituality from becoming narcissistic.

We constantly need this balance in our lives. We desperately need others for us. But, on the other side, every day we live we need to be concerned about being for others. Peculiarly, as nothing else, this balance of others being for us and our being for others renews both ourselves and the world.

What is the heart of the Gospel?

The heart of the gospel says that it is in Jesus Christ that we become new creatures. Thus, this newness is not something we can invent or manufacture. It’s given. Christ stands where we fail, offering His renewing forgiveness and transcending mere moral idealism. His newness is given by the Spirit. It caused John to exclaim, "Behold what manner of love that Father hath bestowed upon us." Newness begins when we behold the quality of that love, but it comes more fully when we begin to say, "Yes, I want to be renewed in Christ." It begins with a spirit of surrender.

New life comes when we surrender ourselves. "Belief clings, but faith lets go," wrote Alan Watts. Faith lets go and then we become liberated. We are released from the burdens of always trying to prove we are always right; We are released from the hostility and hatred; We are released from the futility of trying to live in our own strength. We let go. We say "Yes" to the power of the Lord. And then we are free. To take the first step, we must say, "By the grace of God, I want to be a new person in Christ."

Concluding Illustration

In the midst of a nervous breakdown, a beautiful young mother was taken to a large hospital in St. Louis where she resisted all therapy. She was hurt that her husband and mother would permit her to be confined to a psychiatric ward. For weeks she was sullen and uncooperative. One day she was standing by the barred windows of the ward, looking out over the highway that turns by the hospital. Suddenly, it seemed that she heard God saying to her, "Ruth, I love you. You don't have to live like this. Stop struggling and let me have your life and all the resentments in you." In this awareness of God's love and Christ's presence, something in her broke and she felt released. There was surrender. And the newness began at once. That day there was such an astonishing change in her that the doctor called her husband. She was released the next day. She went home to live a new life with a new center and a new sense of self-worth.

God says, "I love you," to all of us. He says, "Let me have your life. Surrender your resentments. Surrender the things that keep you tied up. Surrender the urgent human needs unmet and the many useful tasks undone and experience my peace." New life can come to all of us. (2 Cor. 5:17)