Starting With The End In Mind

We have everything we need to live a life that pleases God. It was all given to us by God’s own power, when we learned that he had invited us to share in his wonderful goodness.  God made great and marvelous promises, so that his nature would become part of us. Then we could escape our evil desires and the corrupt influences of this world.  (2 Peter 1:3-4, CEV)

In Stephen Covey's book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, there is one chapter titled, "Beginning With The End In Mind."  Covey has you picture yourself at the end of your life.  Even your funeral.  Imagine being invisible at your funeral service, hearing what people are saying about you and how they saw your life.  Seeing how people are grieving, or not grieving your loss.  How they are having conversations at the reception afterwards about your contribution to life, or lack of contribution.

As Covey takes you through that time of guided imagery, he begins to ask some important questions, and offer some thoughtful guidance.  One of those pieces of guidance is to begin today with the image or picture of the end of your life as your frame of reference by which everything else in your life is examined.  How you end up, the kind of person you end up to be, is descriptive of your whole life.

So the strategy is to use that vision of your end as your starting point now.  If you don't like what you envisioned as your end, then envision a new and different end.  Then start working now to make that end happen.

Begin to ask questions like, "How does each day of your life contribute in a meaningful way to the vision you have for your life as a whole?"  Not just the compartments of your life, like your job or business, not just your family, not just your recreational self.  Your WHOLE life.

Some people are about doing things right.  They want to live towards an end in life where people describe them as going through life not making waves, but living in a way that did things the right way, according to their own rules and laws.  But there are others who want to be known for doing the right things.  There's a difference between doing things right and doing the right things.

Or there are people who want to be known, in the end, as having lived their lives by a road map.  They mapped out the kind of people they wanted to be, they drew the lines, and then they never varied from those lines, never allowing themselves to think there are other lines that could have gotten them to the same destination.  Another option to living a mapped out life, is living by a compass.  You set a certain direction you want to go in life, and you live by the compass, not a road map.  You decide what’s going to be your true north, and you keep living by that direction. True north has more to do with your core values than a direction or destination, or lines on a map. That way, each choice you make will have to do with either staying on the lines, or staying true to your self.

Covey is a big promoter of the practice of writing a mission statement.  I've talked about these before in different sermons and classes.  A personal, or couples, or family mission statement can help you stay focused on where you are going, what kind of person you want to be.  It's important to have an underlying statement upon which your being and doing are based.

That is where we start our deeper journey this week, the first week of Lent.  We start with the end in mind.  Where is it we are going in this deeper journey?  The subtitle of the book I'm asking you all to read during Lent is, "The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self."  So we could say the end we're moving towards in Lent is "discovering your true self."  I want to make that a little more particular.  I'm going to tell you what the end is, by the time we get to Easter Sunday.  The end we are moving towards has two parts.

The two parts that make up the end, the journey that this book is describing for us, I'm taking from the scripture reading this morning:  The first end we are starting with involves escaping our evil desires and the corrupt influences of this world.  What this assumes is that we will have to face, we will have to admit, that there are "evil desires" and corruption that is deeply embedded in who we are.  Those evil desires and corruption is what makes up what our book calls, "the false self."

By the end of this journey, you will be forced to look at your individual false self.  You will be taking a long, sobering look in the mirror at yourself.  You will confront certain ugly truths that you may quickly be trying to shove into a closet of your mind and heart right now.  This confrontation with the false self is not going to be fun.

Ray Bradbury, famed and prolific science fiction writer (who died a couple of years ago) made the point in most of his books and short stories that humanity would always be humanity — violent, cruel, self-destructive — whether on earth or anywhere else in the universe.

For example, in his book The Martian Chronicles, the story was about the red planet, Mars, which became just another venue for human colonization, war-making and bickering. People who moved to Mars brought their old prejudices with them – their sick desires and fantasies, and tainted dreams.  In summing up Bradbury’s work, one writer described it this way: "He showed me that the most exotic adventures in life always lead back to an examination of our original sin — the space in our hearts that are as inky black as outer space itself.”

There’s the old saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”  In other words, you can’t escape your self.  You can’t run and hide from your darker self.  Like your shadow, it’s stuck to you and whether you like it or not, always visible in the light.

It is confronting and dealing with this shadow side of the self, once and for all, that is the end we will move towards in Lent.  The end in mind that we will start with is that everyone of us here is living out of an entrenched false self.  The end that we are going to move towards is the utter and absolute death of the false self.  That will be the hardest part of this journey.  Realize we are starting with that end in mind.  I can almost guarantee you that you will be kicking and screaming the whole way, trying to do anything you can to keep from killing your false self.  Because there are only two options:  either kill the false self, or hold on to it until you die.  You need to know that confrontation is coming.  Soon.

I said, earlier in this message that the end in mind that we are starting with has two parts.  I just told you the first part.  The second part of the end in mind is that God's nature would become who we are.  If we are going to have to put to death our false self, then that opens us up to being filled with our true self—which is being filled with God’s nature.  You can’t have the second part without the first part.  You can’t be filled with your true self in God, until the false self has been put to death.  We can’t be like Jesus if we are still ruled by sin.

A master of karate was trying to explain something to a student. This student was not a brand new student, but a student who had advanced through the different colored belts of karate. He had knowledge and experience aplenty to draw upon. But each time the master tried to explain something new to the student, the student kept trying to hold it up against his own notions of what he had already learned from other masters.  The student was unable to see the lessons in what the new master was trying to teach him.

Finally, the master poured a full serving of tea into his own cup, and into the cup of the student. Then he told the student he wanted to give to him some of the tea from his own cup. He began pouring tea from his cup into the student's cup, but the student's cup was already full, and all the tea from the master's cup spilled out over the student’s cup onto the surface of the table.

The student said, "Master, you can't pour anything into my cup until I empty it to make room for what you are trying to give me.”

The master replied "Yes I know.   And I can't teach you any new lessons until you clear out some thoughts that are already teeming in your mind to make room for what I have to teach you." Then the master paused for a brief moment, meeting the student's eyes with his own knowing look and calmly but sternly said: "If you truly seek understanding, then first, empty your cup!”

That’s what we are about in this “deeper journey”.  The end in mind, and the place from which we begin, will have to do with first emptying our cups—that is, pouring out our selves, our false selves, our own ego.  After the emptying has happened, then we can be filled with the fullness of God, filled with God’s nature.

The great evangelist Dwight L. Moody was to have a series of revival meetings in England. An elderly pastor protested, “Why do we need this ‘Mr. Moody’? He’s uneducated and inexperienced. Who does he think he is anyway? Does he think he has a monopoly on the Holy Spirit?”

A younger, wiser pastor rose and responded, “No, but the Holy Spirit has a monopoly on Mr. Moody.”

That’s where this journey is heading:  to allow the Holy Spirit to have a monopoly on our lives rather than our egos and our false self.  Are you ready?