You Are As Healthy As Your Secrets

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on the Letter of James.  Focus on how our health is totally dependent upon the secrets we keep and what happens to our health when we come clean about them with ourselves and others.

The book of James was written to examine the life of a disciple of Jesus to see whether that life walked the talk or simply talked it. The letter of James looks at our actions as being the clearest sign of our faith in Jesus. He looks at our use of words as a determinate to our faith and now he looks to our motives as a determinate to our faith. In effect he’s saying: Look you can run, but you can’t hide from God.

Being faithful to God isn’t easy. It requires hard work and discipline. It’s a whole lot easier to let our faith simply slide – To let ourselves fall back into our own thoughts, wills and actions requires no work at all.

James points to five actions that we need to do in order to remain faithful to God – Submit, Resist, Draw Near, Cleanse and Purify. I have to practice these five things every day or things begin to unravel in my life. I have this pair of beige linen shorts that look better in a drawer then they do on me. You sit down and they immediately wrinkle. If I so much as slightly brush up against a car with them on – I’m dirty. The picture on the catalogue shows these really handsome guys walking on a beach with perfectly pressed linen shorts and I fell for it. Fool me once…

In the same way that we pick up dirt on our cloths, dirt collects throughout the day on our spirits. Dirt clings to our spirits. The Bible says to us, “Just as you cleanse your hands, purify your hearts. When I submitted my will to God and asked God to remove all of my character defects I thought all of this stuff would stop, but it doesn’t work that way. It keeps coming back at you. Things like resentment, irritability, anger where does all this come from and why does it keep coming back? I thought I dealt with all that.

James says, “Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. And when you ask you do not receive because you ask for the wrong things. You ask only for yourselves.”

The problems we have are not external to us. They come from within us. And James says they come specifically because we ask for the wrong things and then when we become aware of our true motives we end up trying to deny them by covering them over with excuses.

Guys do you remember high school gym class? For whatever reasons, not enough time, too much of a hassle, whatever, there were always some guys who didn’t want to take the time to shower. Instead they’d simply put on a ton of deodorant thinking that they could cover up their body odor. If you sat next to them afterward you know what I’m talking about.

Well the same thing happens when we try and cover up our truly self-centered motives for wanting what we want and doing what we do. That’s why Jesus says, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” (Luke 12: 2 – 3)

Let me tell you something – your sins will find you out. We become our secrets. We become victims of what we inwardly deny and cover up. Have you ever tried to cover a lie? Or hide things that you don’t like about yourself from those closest to you? The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s exhausting. We’re not wired for conflicted living. Keeping secrets is a major energy drain. It’s painful. It wears you out. And we become the victims of what we inwardly deny. You have to remember a lie. The cool thing about the truth is that you don’t.

Mike Slaughter the pastor of the Ginghamsburg church outside of Dayton, Ohio tells this funny story of his first thoughtful encounter with adult magazines. He says,

“When I was a kid you had to go into the store and make the decision to go over to the shelf and pick up the magazine to look at all the naked girls. You had to make this decision all the while trying to hide your movements from anyone that might know you. Then you had to go up to the cash register and make yourself known. It took a lot of guts.

Okay, you’d say to yourself. I’m going to take this magazine and I’m going to take it all the way up to the front counter, hoping not to have to stand in line, because you didn’t want anyone to know what you were doing. You didn’t like looking like a perv, but you had this battle going on inside. And as a result of that pressure a lot of us never made it to the front counter.”

The purpose of evil is to establish patterns in your life. Evil is not concerned with the individual acts of sin that we confess before God, repent of, and allow God to cleanse. Evil is concerned with those acts we don’t deal with. It’s the acts in our life that we cover up, that we deny, that we keep secret.

And in time we even come to believe in our own lies and cover ups and our relationships begin to disintegrate and we see this pattern in society where the truth is whatever I say it is or want it to be.

So the truth, while it isn’t always pleasant to face, is the only way to get free from the power of the evil one. When you live in the truth you are living in faith. And when you proclaim the truth you are also proclaiming the truth of God to the world. And when we proclaim the truth about God we are speaking about and acting on behalf of his son our Lord.

Scripture tells me that when I come before God with the truth about myself I will be forgiven. This is true, but if I don’t replace those destructive patterns in my life with something else, then evil comes back with seven times the force and I’m worse off in the end than I was at the beginning. To make our lives work we do not have the option of covering up, we must clean them up. This is hard work! Shifting from a self-centered lifestyle to a God-centered way of life takes a lifetime of daily habits.

Conversion is not a one-time deal. Conversion is a continuing daily process of bringing more of myself to God. And for daily cleansing we have to create reflective moments. That is why verse eight begins with, “Draw near to God.”

Until we create time for reflection there will be no cleansing of our hearts. In Lamentations it says, “Let us test and examine our ways and return to the Lord.” If cleansing is going to take place, I need to take time to look seriously at my life and listen to what God has to say to me.

So the first discipline we need to create in our lives is time for reflection. The work of the devil is to get us to hurry so we can’t reflect. The second thing we need to do is to realize that we need God to help us create healthy patters of living with each other. When I come here I’m under no pretense, for I can say with the Psalmist: “I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.” (Psalm 51:3)

When you’re in denial you know what everyone else’s transgressions are because you are projecting from yourself onto them, but when we come clean with God then we can own our own issues. The forces that keep us from getting to an abundant life are not external. What keeps me from an abundance of life is the disease of being turned in on myself.

And finally be honest with each other. Healing begins when we can be who we really are with each other, love each other through the process of change, and let healing occur naturally, meaning let each of us own our own stuff and take responsibility for it. So let the healing begin with me! Amen