Rev. Dr. M. Taylor Bach

Colossians 3:12-17 John 6:29-35

A young girl was talking to her classmate. She was probably in her early teenage years. She said she had just been to church and had been saved. The classmate said to her, “Saved. What were you before you were saved?” She said, “A sinner.” “And what are you now?” “A sinner,” she answered. And the classmate said, “So, what is the difference?” She said, “The difference is before I was saved I was running after sin. Now that I am saved, I am running from sin.” That can pretty well describe all of us but it is not quite the whole picture. God likes positive action. Not only does He want us to run away from sin but He wants us to run towards Him. How do we do that? How do we run towards Him? The Bible describes the process. The process of going towards God is a process of learning to think like Christ and behave like Christ. As we think like Christ and behave like Christ, we become one with Him and one with God the Father. In that sense, the more we accomplish this in our spiritual life, the more we move towards God and towards our final goal of heaven - eternal life. So it is an exciting prospect. Then the question is&how do we become like Christ? How do we think like Christ? How do we behave like Christ? First, we learn to think like Christ by studying Christ in the Bible. One of the things that I did years ago, and it was kind of fun, was to obtain one of those Bibles that had the red letters in it. The red letters are the very words of Christ. I decided that I was just going to read through all the words of Christ in one sitting. I was going to skip all the in-between stuff& the narrations, the descriptions, the places where they walked& and I was going to see if I could incorporate the very words of Christ into my mind so that I could think like Christ. I did that. I spent time just reading the red words of Jesus Christ. I found that it was an interesting experiment. I recommend it to all of you. It will enable you to think more like Christ.

There is an interesting phenomenon that is captured in Proverbs 4:23. It is great psychology written 1,000 years before Christ and way before our modern psychology. The gist of this proverb is that our thinking will determine the shape of our life. What psychology tells us today is that as we think, we become and as we think, we will behave. It works like this. There will be an event and we will think about that event. In fact, we will give it an interpretation of some kind. Based on that interpretation, we will generate a feeling in our self. Then based on the feeling that we have in our self, we will do some kind of behavior. If our thinking is like Christ thinks, it will make a big difference. I brought some maybe comical props here. (Holding up a screen and some paper.) I was afraid I would fall into this and strain myself. (Laughter) This is a screen. It kind of looks like a schmoo  the shape of it. I found it downstairs. It represents that all of us create a filter in childhood. It is our world view. It makes some of us positive and some of us negative. Ideally, the filter should be open and the Word of God, the grace of God should flow easily through it. That's when we have created a Biblical world view. But based on our life experiences, our filter gets blocked up. It especially gets blocked up when we sin. (I'm placing paper over the screen to illustrate blockage.) The longer we sin, the less God can get through to us and the less we can relate well to others. Then we are in trouble. Now His Word, His grace, can only go around the blockage. Then if we are baptized, if we are not baptized as an infant or if as a grown up, we repent and remove the sin, the grace of God and the Word of God begins to get through more easily. Since some sin is habituated, we have to work at getting rid of that. Once we clear ourselves of sin, we still have the filter in place that we created as little kids. The filter determines also how we view life. The goal is to have a clear filter. If our filter is negative, we will see things from a negative perspective. If the filter is positive and God is positive, Christ is positive, then His thinking, His words will get through to us. How do we keep our filter clear? We keep our filter clear by learning to think like Christ. Let me give you an illustration of this. Paul says that in Romans 8:28, “All things work for good for those who are within God's purposes.” If we have that mindset which determines our filter that all things work for good, we are going to start interpreting all events, even the ones that hurt us,& it could be illnesses, it could be relationship damage, it could be injuries that we have received growing up,& but if we understand as Paul would have us understand the mind of Christ, we would see all things working for good. As we have that as our filter, we begin to see things in a different light. No longer are hurtful things that happen to us in life all that damaging. Someone said to me when I was recovering from my illness, “How did you do that? You were so calm?” And the answer was, “My filter is pretty good but it has taken 68 years to get there.” In that sense even when being ill, I was able to know that I could let God through, that I could be supported by God and I could let people through. I could let my wife's love come through and her care come through. And I wouldn't fight it. So it sustained me and it helped me handle things much more calmly and peacefully. Therefore, we can determine what our life filter is. We have power over that. It is decisional. We can decide what we want to let through. Will we let through the grace of God? Will we let through the words of God? Will we know the red letters? Will we study the words of Jesus so they become part of our mind, our world view? Again, out of your thinking flows a feeling. Out of your feeling flows a behavior. So if we are thinking like Christ, we will feel like Christ and we will behave like Christ. That is one of the things we really want to work on.

There are some dramatic examples of this. Do you remember in 2006, there was a group of Amish children in a one room schoolhouse? An insane man came in and took them captive. He held them hostage for a while. Then he ended up letting the little boys go and shooting the five little girls. He then committed suicide. Do you remember hearing that on the news? A fascinating thing happened. First of all, the Amish community tore down the schoolhouse. They couldn't bear the site of it any more and so they built a new one. That was not so surprising. In normal life, people will do that. But they did something that shocked most people. Instead of being revengeful, instead of being bitter, instead of rising up in anger against this man's family, one of the grandfathers of one of the girls who was murdered invited the parents of all the girls who were murdered to go and minister to the family of the murderer. That was operating in the mind of Christ because the mind of Christ is that we forgive those who harm us. Jesus said, “Love your enemies. If a man strikes you on the right cheek, don't retaliate. Turn to him the left. If a person steals your cloak, give him your tunic as well.” The world doesn't understand this kind of thinking. But it is the mind of Christ. As we take on the mind of Christ, we will feel like Christ and we will behave like Christ. That Amish group managed to pull that off to an amazing degree. What a wonderful witness.

My wife frequently will read something spiritual and say, “Can I read this to you?” Last night, she was reading a spiritual book and said, “Ah, this is an interesting example.” It was about the little girl that had her arm bitten off by a shark fairly recently. A thirteen year old girl was surfing and as she was surfing, she laid down on her surf board to paddle out to catch a wave (apparently a surf board looks a whole like food for a shark). A 14 foot shark came up and grabbed her by the arm and actually bit right through the arm and ripped it off. She managed to be rescued. The bleeding was stopped. She was taken to the hospital. They were not able to save her arm. I suppose it was in the belly of the shark. Every time they interviewed her on television, maybe it was the Today Show or Good Morning America, she witnessed that she got through this horrible physical situation because of her faith in Jesus Christ. She had the kind of filter in place that was taught by her church and her family, those who loved her, so that she was able to let the words of Christ sustain her during this horrible shark attack and sustain her in her recovery. As would not be so surprising for someone who thinks and acts like Christ, within months, she was back on her surf board and in her 16th year of life, she won a national championship title as a surfer. Amazing. But when we think like Christ and we end up behaving like Christ, we can accomplish amazing things. After all, Christ was the second person in the trinity. He was God. So as we think like Christ and feel like Christ and behave like Christ, we have His power within us; we have the power to do some amazing things. We have the power to rise far above our human weaknesses and our human frailty, even our suffering, and accomplish great things. If we are accomplishing great things through Christ, we give glory to God because Christ's whole life here on earth was to give glory to God the Father in Heaven. Jesus came to save us from sin and to erase all the sin that clogs our filter and then we can give honor and glory to God. So this morning, I'm thinking, “OK. How do we learn to do that?” Then it came to me that there is something that Christ did that we can do. Back in His time, they didn't have cars or buggies, but they had camels and donkeys. Mostly everybody walked wherever they went. Jesus taught while He walked. I bet He meditated while He walked and talked to His Father in prayer. Of course, there were big groups of people that walked with Him. Then it dawned on me, why don't we, because we are all temples of the Holy Spirit and we need to keep moving and be healthy, why don't we here at Pilgrim start a reading-walking-praying campaign. You can see in your bulletin a suggested format for this reading-walking-praying campaign. If we read a bit of scripture before we start the walk and meditated on that as we walked and talked to God in prayer and did it for 40 days, we would walk 40 miles. It is just one mile a day. If you are in bad shape and have never done that, start with a short walk for five minutes or ten minutes. Then as you get toward the end of 40 days, you can add distance. Check off each mile that you walk. As you get to the end, you might double up and walk two miles or three miles to make up for your slow start. 40 is a highly Biblical number. As you may know, Christ spent 40 days in the desert to begin His ministry. The Israelites roamed for 40 years before entering the Promise Land. So 40 seems to be a really important Biblical number. It is also good psychology because it takes about 40 days to develop a habit! So those of you who are physically able, let's get on a reading-walking-praying campaign and see if we can walk 40 miles in 40 days. Let's see if we can as we do this while absorbing sacred scripture, the red words of Jesus that are found in the Bible, and make them a part of us so we are thinking like Christ, we are feeling like Christ and we are acting like