"God's Antivirus Program"

     Dear Friends in Christ,  

   How many of you remember the good old days when only people contracted viruses?  Remember when terms like parasite and worm were applied to living organisms like germs or bacteria or maybe even little brothers?  It wasn’t that long ago that viral infections were treated by doctors and quarantine was a practice reserved for animals or human beings who had highly contagious diseases.  But times have changed.  Nowadays computers get sick.  Just for the fun of it, how many of you have ever had your computer infected by a virus?  It’s a frustrating experience, isn’t it?  It’s been especially frustrating for my wife whose computer at work has contracted a virus a couple of times in recent months, causing poor Marilyn who already hated computers enough to hate them even more.

   Well, a virus attack on your computer is one thing.  But what about the attacks on our minds that you and I face every day?  Computer viruses have names like Anthrax and Armageddon, Leprosy and Lockjaw.  The mental viruses that attack us have names as well like anxiety, bitterness, anger, guilt, shame, greed, and insecurity.  They can worm their way into our system and diminish or even disable our ability to think clearly and to think godly.  Author Max Lucado has come up with an interesting name that he likes to use for them.  He calls them the DTPs.  That stands for “Destructive Thought Patterns.”

   So how about it, my friends?  Are you battling any DTPs right now in your life?  Let’s take a little inventory.  How about when you see someone who is more successful than you are?  Do you find feelings of jealousy welling up inside of you?  Or, what about when you see someone who is not as successful as you are?  Do you get prideful?  If someone hurts you, what is the likelihood of you ever forgiving that person?  As you look to the future, would you describe yourself as more of a pessimist than an optimist?  If you can answer yes to any of these or similar questions, then you suffer from the DTPs.  And though some of us here today may not be battling any DTPs right now as I speak, I’m sure we all know what it’s like to be infected by this destructive virus. 

   Which brings up a very good question.  Can you imagine what your life would be like if you could get rid of all those DTPs?  What would it be like to wake up each morning free of guilt, free of lust, free of bitterness, free of fear, free of worry, free of anxiety?  What would you have then that you don’t have right now?  No doubt you would have more sleep, more energy, more friends, more joy, more peace, more of a lot of other positive qualities.  And that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?

   So let’s spend some time this morning talking about these DTPs as I get back to my sermon series that I began preaching earlier this year about Jesus entitled “The One and Only.”  And let’s see what God can do to help us overcome those Destructive Thought Patterns.  And the first question I want to address is, where do they come from?  I mean, I don’t think any of us wakes up in the morning and thinks, “What thoughts can I entertain today that will make me feel miserable?”  So where do they come from?  Well, I believe they can be traced all the way back to the beginning of time, to Adam and Eve’s fall into sin.  It’s because of sin that our minds are often full of these dark and destructive thought patterns.  Paul speaks of this in Rom. 1:21-22 where writing about unbelievers he says: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” 

   Paul’s point is clear.  Sin messes with the mind.  Sin leads to what I like to call stinking thinking.  And since we are all sinners by nature, we all find ourselves afflicted with that stinking thinking from time to time.

   But what would it be like if we could somehow rid our lives of all that sin, if we could somehow live a life that was in perfect harmony with God’s will?  What would such a person even look like? What would such a person act like?  Well, we find the answer to that question in our text for today in this familiar story that many of us learned in our Sunday School days about the 12 year old Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem.  But before we look at that answer, let’s consider what led up to this memorable event in the life of the pre-teen Christ.

   Mary and Joseph had taken Jesus to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration.  And when it was time to make the return trip back home to Nazareth, they thought, they assumed Jesus was with the group they were travelling with.  But in reality he had been left behind.

   Have you ever done anything like that?  I won’t say who did it, but some years ago we had something like that happen on a Sunday morning here.  A husband and wife had driven separately to church that day and each thought that the other had one of their children when they left, but when they got home – SURPRISE!  No child.  So they called the church and found that she was still here, though I think she was completely oblivious to the fact that she’d been forgotten.

   Well, the same thing happened to Mary and Joseph, but with one huge difference.  They were already a day into their journey before they realized Jesus wasn’t in the caravan with their relatives and friends.  Can you imagine how they must have been feeling as they hightailed it back to Jerusalem?  Here God had entrusted his Son to their care, the long-awaited Messiah, the One who was to be the Savior of the world, and they’d lost him.  They’d forgotten him.  And according to our text – are you ready for this? – they didn’t find him for 3 whole days.  Talk about frantic!  Talk about panic-time!  But when they finally did locate him, what was he doing?  He was in the temple sitting in the midst of the teachers of the law, the most highly educated men in Jewish society, and he was wowing and amazing them with his incredible knowledge of Scripture.

   Now how do we explain that?  How do we explain such unusual brilliance in this 12-year-old boy?  Well, I find it interesting that the Bible never tells us anything about Jesus’ IQ.  No reference is ever made to him being highly intelligent.  But the Bible does have plenty to say about something else concerning Jesus.  And that is that he was sinless.  He had a purity of mind that no other human being has ever had.  Paul tells us in 2 Cor. 5:21 that Jesus “knew no sin.”  In I Peter 2:22 it says, "He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth."  The Apostle John, who was perhaps closer to Jesus than any of the other disciples, came to the same conclusion in his 1^st epistle where he writes: “In him there is no sin.”  Pontius Pilate could find no fault in him. Judas confessed that in betraying Christ, he had betrayed innocent blood.  Even the demons recognized the sinless state of Jesus when they declared in Luke 4:34: “I know who you are – the Holy One of God!”

   But perhaps the loudest testimony to his perfection came in the form of the silence that followed a question that Jesus asked his accusers in John 8:46 when he said, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” Now push the pause button for a moment here.  What if you asked that question of those who knew you, not just your enemies but even your friends?  What if you said, “Can you think of any time in my life when I did something wrong?”  Might there be just a slim chance that they would have an answer, or perhaps several.  Might they say something like, “Remember the time you…And what about the time you…And I’ll never forget the time you…”  But when that question was asked of those who knew Jesus, no one spoke up.  No one said a word.  In spite of the fact that Jesus was more analyzed and scrutinized and criticized than any other human being who has ever walked this earth, not one person could remember him ever doing anything wrong.  He was never found in the wrong place.  He never said a bad word.  He never told a lie.  He never disobeyed his parents.  Now that’s not to say he was never tempted.  Heb. 4:15 tells us that he was “tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin.”  Jesus faced it all.  Lust wooed him.  Greed lured him.  Power called him.  But the One and Only Christ stood fast and firm and resisted it all. 

   So Jesus was sinless.  And because he was sinless his mind was stainless.  He was free of the DTPs. 

   Now you may be sitting there thinking to yourself, “Well, that’s all fine and dandy, Pastor.  It’s nice to know all that about Christ.  But really all you’ve told me so far in this sermon is that while his mind was perfect, mine isn’t.  My mind is still cluttered and full of those pesky old DTPs.  So where’s the hope, the encouragement that I was hoping to find when I came to church this morning?”

   That’s a good question and that’s why I want to conclude this message with 3 important applications for you to take home with you today.  First of all, because Jesus was sinless, you can face the present with peace.  You need to know that there is a brilliant mind unclouded by sin, untainted by evil, untouched by the DTP’s of life running the universe and especially your little world.  Because if you don’t know that, if you don’t understand that there is an all-wise, all-powerful, and all-loving God working behind the scenes to bring good out of the bad and order out of the chaos that sometimes invades your life, you’re going to get to feeling pretty hopeless and pretty helpless when your world gets turned upside down.  And I guarantee that will happen sooner or later.

   So you can face the present with peace.  Then secondly, you can face the future with power.  By that I mean power for renewal.  In other words, you don’t have to remain a victim of the DTPs.  In fact, I can assure you that God doesn’t want you to remain a victim of the DTPs.  Somebody once said, “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you that way.  He wants you to be just like Jesus.”  And like we talked about in one of my other sermons in this series, with the sinless Son of God living inside of you, you have incredible power at your disposal to overcome all those DTPs that seek to infiltrate your thinking.  With his help you can do what Martin Luther spoke of when he compared these destructive thought patterns to birds.  He said, “You can’t stop the birds from flying over your head, but with Christ’s help you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair.”

   Then one more thing that the sinless nature of Christ means is that you can face your past with confidence, knowing that no matter what you’ve done, no matter what destructive thought patterns you've allowed into your mind, they can be covered first of all by the precious blood of Jesus that was shed on Calvary’s cross to pay for your sins, but you can also be covered by the perfect righteousness of Christ that God freely gives to all who place their faith and trust in him.  It’s been a number of years ago that Larry Rezba of our congregation caught me after church one Sunday and said he had an incredible thought when following Communion that morning I covered the elements on the altar with that white cloth, like I do every time we have Communion.  As that cloth floated down over the Communion ware, he said he saw it as a beautiful picture of what God does for us whenever we receive the Lord’s Supper.  For he not only forgives our sins through the shed blood of Christ, but he also covers us with the gleaming white brilliance and perfection of Jesus.  Ever since he shared that with me, I’ve never been able to do that part of Communion without thinking of that.

   So what are you waiting for, my friends?  Don’t you think it’s time that you apply God’s antivirus program to your thinking from now on and get rid of those nasty DTPs by taking refuge in the perfect, sinless Son of God, the One and Only Jesus Christ?  For then and only then will you be able to face the present with peace, the future with power, and the past with confidence.

    Amen.