Living In Two Worlds
Following Jesus, prt. 4
October 23, 2005
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
Matrix day. You’ll realize today that all of our clips come from a span of the film that encompasses only four minutes of the total length of the movie. If you hated the movie you might think, “Why didn’t you just have us watch those four minutes.” But you’ll realize that those four minutes would be completely meaningless to you if you hadn’t seen the film. This film can teach us more about spiritual reality than anything else I can think of, if we will allow ourselves to look into it for a moment, and that’s what we’re going to spend our time doing this morning.
Morpheus says, “You have sensed since you were born that something is wrong with the world.” We believe that sense that there is something wrong represents spiritual hunger. We also believe most people have it and that it is a sign of God’s continuing efforts to make contact with us. Our theologians have a term for this – it’s a lofty term called “prevenient grace.” That simply means that God has placed a longing in all of us to know Him – a God-shaped hole. Through this longing God reaches out to us because we are incapable of reaching out to Him.
Romans 5:6 (NLT)
6 When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.
Romans 5:6 (MSG)
6 Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway.
Utterly helpless – far too weak and rebellious to do anything. In other words, in our sinful condition, we cannot reach toward God unless God helps us reach toward Him. We believe that God has given us enough of his grace to know that we need Him, to be aware of this God-shaped hole. We believe people sense this deeply as a feeling that our lives are not what they should be – that all is not right with the world, at least not with OUR world. It’s a vague sense, but it’s there for many of us.
I love the way Peterson says, “Even if we hadn’t been so weak and rebellious, we wouldn’t have known what to do to reach God anyway.”
Romans 5:6 (MSG)
He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway.
That leads right into our next point this morning. Even if we were not in some kind of rebellion against God, we still would not be able to reach him because of spiritual delusion.
This clip illustrates spiritual delusion, or the state of spiritual “lostness” better than anything I have ever seen. Why can we not reach God? What keeps us from moving toward Him? Spiritual delusion, or you could call it spiritual blindness. Spiritual blindness keeps us from seeing our need for God. It keeps us from making sense of this hole inside of us. And how exactly does that work? It works by presenting itself as insight. Think about that. Spiritual delusion works by presenting itself as insight – something that blinds us to the fact that we are blind.
Jesus spoke of this rather frightening phenomenon of spiritual blindness on several occasions. Here are two of the clearest.
John 9:39-41 (NLT)
39 Then Jesus told him, "I have come to judge the world. I have come to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind."
40 The Pharisees who were standing there heard him and asked, "Are you saying we are blind?"
41 "If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty," Jesus replied. "But you remain guilty because you claim you can see.
Notice what Jesus said. He came to give sight to the blind, and to show those who think they can see that they are blind also. In other words, everyone is blind. Unless we approach God fundamentally from a perspective of blindness – God, show me the truth, show me who I am, I cannot properly understand myself without you – we can never learn to see.
Matthew 6:22-23 (NLT)
22 "Your eye is a lamp for your body. A pure eye lets sunshine into your soul.
23 But an evil eye shuts out the light and plunges you into darkness. If the light you think you have is really darkness, how deep that darkness will be!
I didn’t prepare this clip for you this morning because of time, but after Neo is “awakened,” after he emerges from this waking dream he has been in, he asks Morpheus, “How come my eyes hurt?” And Morpheus replies -- what does he say? “Because you’ve never used them.” You just THINK you’ve been using them all this time. Jesus captured it, didn’t he? “If the light you think you have is really darkness, how deep that darkness will be!”
It’s ironic that in the spiritual world, the very first thing the spiritually blind must learn to see is their own blindness. And that’s what the Matrix is, isn’t it? It’s a story about a guy who has this hunger – this sense that all is not right with the world, but no real clue what’s wrong. But he’s willing to pursue the questions and see where it takes him. He prefers the truth to his delusions, even though sometimes the truth is pretty hard to take. The Matrix is the story of a man on a journey that really begins for him when he’s willing to allow someone to show him how blind he has been – that he has been deluded.
Which leads to point three. Through this delusion he has remained in a kind of slavery for all of his life.
Let’s look more closely at this spiritual slavery.
Romans 6:17-22 (NLT)
17 Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you have obeyed with all your heart the new teaching God has given you.
18 Now you are free from sin, your old master, and you have become slaves to your new master, righteousness.
19 I speak this way, using the illustration of slaves and masters, because it is easy to understand. Before, you let yourselves be slaves of impurity and lawlessness. Now you must choose to be slaves of righteousness so that you will become holy.
20 In those days, when you were slaves of sin, you weren’t concerned with doing what was right.
21 And what was the result? It was not good, since now you are ashamed of the things you used to do, things that end in eternal doom.
22 But now you are free from the power of sin and have become slaves of God. Now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life.
The important thing to realize here is that Paul is saying that until we realize we are sinners in need of a Savior, until we realize we are blind and that our spiritual light is darkness, we are slaves to sin. In that state we sin naturally. We sin as a way of life. “…when you were slaves of sin, you weren’t concerned with doing what was right.” In that state we sin without understanding it even to be sin. We sin without awareness that it springs directly from the slavery that we are in to that way of life. Paul writes, “Before, you let yourselves be slaves of impurity and lawlessness. Now you must CHOOSE to be slaves of righteousness so that you will become holy.” The difference is that once we realize we have been slaves to sin, we have the ability to choose to live differently – to embrace another reality – to take the red pill and learn the truth about God, about reality, about who – and whose – we really are. And we cannot underestimate the importance of this choice.
If we are paying any attention to what is happening inside of us, to the spiritual hunger eating away at us, there will come a time of spiritual crisis in our lives. Now usually when we think of the word “crisis” we think of something bad, but that’s not necessarily the case. The word “crisis” literally means decision, and Webster defines “crisis” simply as “a decisive moment.”
There will come a time of spiritual crisis in many of our lives – a time when we have pursued our spiritual hunger to the place where we have begun to suspect we have been deluded – that things are not as they appear to be. Perhaps we have even heard that spiritually we have been in a kind of slavery – quite happily just motoring through life, continuing to live in ways that further and further alienate God from the picture of our lives. And a moment of spiritual crisis will often come where we have to make a decision. Will we, or will we not, listen to what we have heard? Will we pursue it, or forget it? Will we take the red pill, or the blue pill, so to speak. Will we enter onto a new kind of journey, where we allow God to open our eyes to things we had never seen before, and never even been capable of seeing, because before God came into our lives, the greatest light we had was darkness. We will need to make a choice of whether to see or not to see; to be awakened to truth or to remain blind. And we’re at different places, and at different distances, away from that crisis moment. In The Matrix, Neo is asking the question, “What is the Matrix?” He is actively looking for answers. In our video clip he finally comes to that crisis point. Many others in the film are just breezing through life inside the Matrix – ignoring the questions, living their lives, never thinking an inch below “sea level.” Not only are many of them not yet searching for answers, many of them don’t even realize the question!
That’s you and me this morning. We are all at different places, different points along our respective journeys. Some of you have been approaching that crisis point – that point of decision – for quite a while now. Others of you are just starting to consider the question, “What is my life all about? Is there something more to this than what I may have thought?”
In Christian spirituality, this crisis point is often incorrectly referred to as “the moment of salvation.” This is incorrect because “salvation” happens over a lifetime. God is continually renewing us, continually saving us, continually revealing to us deeper and deeper things about who we are, continually showing us more of Himself. There is no “moment of salvation.” There is only a moment where you choose to take the red pill or the blue pill. To allow Jesus to be your forgiver and leader and lead you along a new path that introduces you to a brand new reality; or to take the blue pill and just keep everything the same. Either way they are both journeys – destinations.
1 Corinthians 1:18 (NLT)
18 I know very well how foolish the message of the cross sounds to those who are on the road to destruction. But we who are being saved recognize this message as the very power of God.
Look at the language there. The road to destruction; those who are being saved. In both cases there is a process going on. We are either on the road to destruction, or we are being saved. No one has arrived. No one has reached the end yet. If you’ve been on the road to destruction – maybe the Highway to Hell as AC/DC called it – you’re not there yet. It’s not too late for you. And if you are being saved, you still have more to learn. God has new things to teach you and new challenges for you.
It would be foolish for me to let this opportunity to slip by. The question is which journey are you taking? Are you being saved? Have you allowed God to show you how blind you have been and to bring you into His light, so that your spiritual eyes can learn to see for the very first time? Or are you on the road to destruction, still in willing slavery to a way of life that will eventually consume you? You get to pick which journey you are on, to choose which pill you will take. Are you prepared to take the red pill today? I’m going to finish this message today, then at the end of this message I’m going to ask you if you want to take the red pill or the blue pill. Give it some thought. To take the red pill means that you have acknowledged the reality of your spiritual hunger; that you have come to realize it’s very well possible that spiritually you have been deluded and have been in slavery to thoughts and actions and ideas that keep you far from God, and it’s to ask God, through Jesus, to forgive your sins – to remove the barriers that separate you from God – and to be the leader of your life and teach you to learn to see clearly with your spiritual eyes and set you on a new path. That’s up to you. It is your choice and that choice is one of the greatest freedoms you have been given.
Spiritually to take the red pill is to be awakened.
It is to be given a chance to know the truth about reality – about God, about ourselves. It does not mean we will know everything or the answer to every question, but it does mean we will no longer have to live as slaves! Morpheus asks, “What if you had a dream from which you were unable to wake?” To take the red pill, so to speak, is to be awakened from that dream.
We spoke at the start about hardened skeptics and atheists. Many of these people want to believe, and want others to believe, that to embrace Jesus Christ is to take a crazy pill – that it requires that we abandon reason and become wackos and force our faith on everyone around us. That’s what they believe and there’s no way to convince them differently. The problem is that it’s not true at all. To be in the dream is to know only the dream. To be awakened from the dream is to know both the dream and the real world, to see things more fully, more completely. And this process continues all through our lives – this gradual unfolding of this incredible spiritual reality. Paul wrote:
1 Corinthians 13:9-12 (MSG)
9 We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete.
10 But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
I want to give you a quick caution about not reading too much into this film. There are some great things we can pull out of it to help us clarify some pretty difficult ideas, but there is a danger in just laying it directly over our faith and trying to apply it in every area. Examples where this film does not apply:
1. The film says all physical reality is bad. That actually springs from an ancient Gnostic idea. In the film the Matrix is a fake world generated by the machines to keep humans in slavery. In our world, the physical world was created by God to be a thing of beauty. Because of sin that came into it, it has become twisted and fraught with spiritual danger, but can still also be a place of beauty where God can be seen if we are looking.
2. Unlike what the film says, it is not true that all those not “awakened,” (in this case that would be roughly analogous to non-believers) are the “enemy.” It is, in fact, quite the opposite.
3. Probably many other things as well.
The key in using film as I have used it is not to watch a movie to “learn” new things about our faith, but to use what we know about our faith to bring new dimension to art; and to allow art to give us a vocabulary to speak about things in our faith that are otherwise quite difficult to articulate.
Okay, we’re at that place I promised you we’d get back to. I want to offer you the opportunity this morning to get on a new course – to learn to see reality in a new way that will make a real, practical difference in your work, in your relationships, in your perception of the world, in every aspect of your life. The Bible says that God makes himself known to us through the world around us and that every person can know God. In other words, there’s a God-shaped hole in every person. As we follow those God-instincts we have, we realize that we have been deluded all of our lives and that our instinct that there must be more has been spot-on! We learn that we have been in a dream-world – where we have been in slavery and have been perfectly fine with that – perhaps until now. And we’re brought eventually to a place of spiritual crisis where we understand that we must choose to remain on the road we are on, or get off that road and allow God to place us on a new one. We can be spiritually awakened as we appeal to God through Christ to forgive our sins and be the new leader of our lives from now on. And we can receive a brand new kind of life at that moment – a life that for the very first time is fundamentally oriented toward God and not away from Him. And that’s a very real thing I see happen in the lives of people all the time.
Are you at that place today where you feel it’s time to take the red pill, to surrender your life as you have known it and take the risk of discovering what else is out there? Will you pray with me?
Heavenly Father, this seems huge to me. I don’t remotely claim to understand all of this, but I’m hungry. I have been hungering and thirsting after something for so long and I think that maybe I finally know what it is – that this emptiness inside of me bears your shape and only you can fill it.
I know I am a sinful person – that I have lived my life essentially for myself. I don’t want that life anymore. I want to learn to live in ways that please you, and I want you to make me more like you – to love the way you love, to be patient as you are patient, to forgive the way you have forgiven me. Please be the leader of my life from this day on and give me a new heart that wants to do all I need to do to follow you faithfully. In Jesus name, Amen.
