TOTAL LIFE WORSHIP, PART 1: SEEING DIAMONDS

Romans 12:1-2, Selected Texts (NASB)
David Bruce Linn, Pastor-Teacher
27 October, 2002
All Rights Reserved

I. PIGBALL

Jimmy landed stomach first on the squishy pigball so hard that it seemed his insides would explode. "Finally!" Jimmy thought jubilantly. The rush of excitement from finally getting his hands on the ball shot his blood pressure through the roof. Other teens piled on to try to grab the ball. Out squirted the greased pigball from Jimmy's clutching hands. The kids on top of him stepped on his head, back and hands to jump after it again. "Shoot!" he cried as his jubilance deflated. "Just when I was about to get it!" The game had no points, and no real goal other than getting possession. The pattern of running wildly, leaping on the ball, feeling the head-splitting rush of fulfillment, and then having the ball pop out of hand for another player to grab repeated itself until the players lay panting on the grass, unable to move.

Jimmy had been hearing about the game of pigball from the other kids for a long time. He waited eagerly for the day when he would be big enough to play. Boys who had actually gotten possession of the ball spoke of the experience in reverent, glowing tones: "It was brilliant!" cried one boy. The girls were less outspoken about the game but they were always there to play. They leaped upon the pigball at least as often as the boys.

Little was said of the downside of the game. Rumors kept reappearing that the grease used to make the ball slippery was causing some people to get sick. Whispers of serious, even life-threatening, injuries circulated. But the game was so much fun kids played in spite of being sick or injured. If anyone accused them of being less than their best they would give firm replies like: "No, I'm fine!" "Not sick!" "No problem here!" But Jimmy noticed that some kids never came back. It was odd. They more they played, the less likely they were to return. He asked some kids about it, but no one would say anything. "I guess it's just not polite," Jimmy thought.

None of this was as troublesome to him as the pigball itself. It was shaped like an uneven American football although it was about the size of a fist. The surface of the ball was mottled in color and texture. It was wet and cool and smooth to the touch, and when greased was impossible to hold securely. That was the fun! The ball would wear out periodically from being clawed and flattened under piles of ecstatic kids. "Pretty weird ball," Jimmy thought. "I've never seen one like that before. I wonder where they get them?"

One day Jimmy followed some of the kids who had set off to get a new ball. It was all very secret and very exciting! The kids went to a large brick building and hid behind a wall and waited. Jimmy crouched behind a bush and watched for a long time. Finally a van sped up and screeched to a halt near the building. A man and a woman jumped out, and the man ran inside. Just as the woman opened the rear doors of the van, one of the girls jumped from behind the wall and began to writhe on the ground as if having a seizure. The woman from the van rushed over to her, knelt down and said: "Are you all right?" As the kids gathered around to watch, one of the boys grabbed a cooler with an odd label from the van and ran off. At that moment, the girl on the ground jumped up and said: "I'm fine!" They all ran away laughing and giggling at their prank.

Jimmy followed the kids to a little wood where they opened the cooler and dumped the contents on the ground. Chunks of ice splayed in a fan shape over the woodsy brown carpet of old leaves, and out tumbled a plastic bag with a small eggplant-shaped object inside. "Hooray! A new pigball!" they shouted. Jimmy blanched as the kids tore open the bag and held up a beautiful human heart.

II. DIAMONDS IN THE SNOW

If you were to take a handful of diamonds and cast them into freshly-shoveled snow beside the busiest sidewalk in town, what do you think would happen? Would there be shouts of exhilaration as the first person walked by with his coffee and immediately discovered the great treasure? Would there be a miniature gold rush as the office buildings emptied out for everyone for look for diamonds in the snow next to their building?

No--the diamonds, in spite of their purity and shocking beauty, would be virtually invisible against the backdrop of snow. There would not be enough contrast for our fallible human eyes to pick them out. Additional light would not help. The more the sun was shining the more difficult it would be to see them. On top of that, no one would be looking for diamonds in the snow beside the sidewalk! Our assumptions about the presence or absence of breath-stealing beauty and precious value would be completely in error.

Now picture what would happen if that same handful of diamonds were set carefully on the black-painted cover of a municipal trash can. They would be obvious to the first passer-by. The more the sun shone the more brilliantly they would sparkle against the black backdrop. The character of God is light itself, like the gleam from a million diamonds, or better yet, the unviewable blazing of light from a trillion white-hot stars. If we looked directly at God we would be blinded, or more accurately, we would be killed, for God tells us in Scripture: “...You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” (Exodus 33:20). So God chooses to shine out of everything that we see on earth: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made...” (Rom. 1:20a). In other words, since we cannot see him, he shows us his effects.

Paul says that the pure light of God shines out so brightly from his creation that no one can deny his reality: “...they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God...” (Romans 1:20b-21a). Apart from the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart we are all like people on the sidewalk of life walking right past mountains of diamonds set against the black backdrop of the world. It’s that bad! We are all born in a state of suppressing the knowledge of God. We “suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within [us]; for God made it evident to [us]”(Rom. 1:18b-19). We should be shrieking: “I’ve found diamonds! I’ve found God!” but we walk by in spiritual darkness, intent on making our way without him.

Recently I met an artist who draws and paints nature scenes of the Adirondacks. I was having my morning quiet time in the living room of an inn when she came in and began working on a sketch for a painting. We eventually began talking, and because I was reading the Bible the subject turned to spiritual things. She seemed open to God but had some bad experiences in churches. She had tried to read the Bible. Then she said the most common thing I hear about the Bible: “People can make it say anything they want for it to say.” In other words, she had looked right at the clearest possible revealing of who God is and not understood it or received it.

So I looked over at her sketch which was a beautiful, lifelike drawing of a horse in the woods. I asked: “Do you do representational art?” In other words, does her art look like the things she is drawing, or does she look at a horse and draw a weird lump with legs sticking out at all the wrong angles? I knew she tried to draw things so they looked like themselves. She said she did representational art and I then dropped the other shoe: “The Bible is representational. There are many difficult things to understand in it, but God has spoken so that we can understand what we need to know.” My prayer is that the Holy Spirit will open her mind to see the Bible with new eyes and see God.

That’s how much trouble we have seeing God and his works, and that’s why worship is so hard for us, so unnatural. God is not hiding diamonds in the snow but we still don’t see him. And that’s why the Bible often goes to great lengths to paint the backdrop of truth black so that we can see God’s treasures in the contrast. Diamonds are best displayed on black velvet. That sounds fine until we see how much of the blackness is in us.

III. SEEING DIAMONDS

Jesus said: “‘The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:22-23). At first these verses sound like we have nothing to do with whether we will be full of the light of the knowledge of God or not: “Hey, it’s not my fault I can’t see God--I have a bad eye!”

But the next verse gives the key to having a good eye: “’No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon’” (Mat. 6:23). Choosing to follow Jesus Christ only is what gives you a good eye. Following God instead of some idol--in this case, mammon, or money--is what gives you a good eye. Obviously, the mere act of our choosing to worship the true God does not itself transform our spiritual darkness into light. Without getting into the deep matters of divine working it is obvious that only God can heal our eyes. Our decision to follow Christ is a part of that mysterious process of regeneration. It’s the only way to see the diamonds. If we keep ignoring the many ways God is revealing himself to us, we get darkness within and we spend our lives walking right past the diamonds oblivious to what we are missing.

Jimmy’s friends were spiritually blind! They were able to take a beautiful human heart designed to give life and turn it into a pigball. They were able to commit the heinous act of depriving a transplant patient of his only chance for life and not see the evil of it. At least in Jimmy’s case he participated without knowing what he was doing. He was mortified to discover what evil was being perpetrated by children in a game they had made up to please themselves. So Jimmy was already softer toward God than his friends.

As a young man I once jumped out of an airplane for fun. Before they let you do that you have to go through a full-day training session where they teach you what to do. Dealing with parachute failures is among the most important things you can learn. The worst one is when you jump, pull the ripcord, and nothing happens. Or the chute pops out, twists around itself and doesn’t open. The instructors called that Total Chute Failure, or TCF. When TCF happens you are plunging toward the earth at close to 120 miles per hour--which they don’t call “terminal velocity” for nothing! You have only a few seconds to fix your main chute or yank the ripcord on your backup chute. Otherwise the jumper with TCF has a very well-defined appointment with the ground.

All humans live in Total Worship Failure, or TWF. Romans 1:28 literally says that we all do “not see fit to have God in knowledge.” We are freefalling through life with a failed god of our own choosing, and we have an appointment with an immovable object sooner than we think: the God whom we have denied. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

IV. PIGBALL OR WORSHIP?

The blindness of Jimmy’s friends was not someone else’s fault. It was not an accident. They had willfully chosen to take something which God made and used it for their own pleasure. We have all done this. That is the basic choice we must make in every area of life. Will we take everything God has given us and worship him, or will we use it all for our own purposes? Will we be pigball players or worshipers of the One True God?

The main thing God has given us control over is ourselves. We can’t make anyone else worship him. We are each responsible for ourselves. The same Apostle Paul who paints such a bleak picture of human darkness in the first chapter of the book of Romans explains what to do about it in chapter twelve. The intervening chapters explain that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” They explain that we can be made right before God only by faith in Jesus Christ who died for our sins and rose from the dead. They explain that all of this is an act of grace and mercy from God and through no merit of our own.

Then Paul, knowing that we are thick, tells us what to do about it. He says, in effect, God gave us two parts of ourselves. We have a solid part, called the body, and we have an invisible part, called the mind. The second part has more divisions and the two parts have a complex relationship, but Paul is simplifying it so we don’t miss the diamonds. After twelve chapters of explanation he says: “Let’s start with what to do with your body:” “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship” (Romans 12:1).

In other words, take every area of life related to your body and worship God with it. Where you go, what you eat, how you take care of it, with whom you have sex and when--everything! The Bible is full of good instructions on how to do this. Take the commandment to rest on the seventh day. God says: “I only made your body to work six days a week. Give your body a rest once a week as an act of worship. Get up and take your body to church.” “Man was not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man” (Mat. 2:27).

Then Paul explains what to do with the invisible parts of us: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). Not only choose to worship God with your whole body, but with your whole mind. Choose to think God’s way about everything. Hearts are made for pumping, not for pigball!

V. CONCLUSION

Were you shocked and offended by the story “Pigball?” God is the one who said that we are all playing pigball, not me. Think of how grieved and offended Christ is when we take what he has given to us and instead of worshiping him with it, we abuse it. We will never see the importance of worship and set ourselves to do it unless we see the horror of failing to worship God.

Is your life in TWF: Total Worship Failure? Then change it! The ground is coming up fast! Dedicate your whole self, mind and body, to the worship of God in Christ. Confess the sin of being a pigball player and receive the forgiveness which Christ bought for you with his death on the cross. Then go diamond hunting! The treasure of God has been revealed in everything around you.

If you have already made the decision to worship God with your life I challenge you to renew it. Wake up every day with the awareness that God has carpeted your life with the diamonds of the knowledge of himself. They are yours for the taking--if you can see them. If, as a believer, you use God’s creation for your own purposes you will be blind to his treasures. Instead, start every day with a prayer like this: “Lord Jesus, use my body this day for your own purposes. Take my mind also and renew it for your purposes. I relinquish them to you today.” When you do that, you had better have some sunglasses handy, because you are going to be blasted by the light of God glinting off of diamonds all around you! There are no earthly treasures which can compare to the treasures of the knowledge of God, and only his worshipers can see them.