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April 23, 2006
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2 Peter
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"You have been Undragoned"
2 Peter 1: 1-11; 2 Corinthians 5:16-17
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis begins: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
This boy refers to his parents as Harold and Alberta being from a very progressive family, likes animals, especially beetles, if they are dead and pinned on a card, and loves all kinds of facts but nothing of fiction. This boy Eustace gets swept into a journey with his cousins Edmond and Lucy unlike any he could dare imagine. Indeed, for him this journey is more like a nightmare, surrounded by talking beasts on a magnificent sailing vessel named the Dawn Treader. They are sailing to the Lone Islands and beyond in search of the seven noble lords who had been sent on a suicide mission years before by Narnia's previous wicked king.
Those on board including his cousins have learned maturity, not unlike what we have been learning through Peter. The wisdom of maturity has taught them to love others for selfishness is not a joyful thing. Eustace however, knows no other way than selfishness, so their good humor, joy and unselfish behaviors put and keep him in a sour mood.
One day having limped ashore an island after a terrible storm needing to repair their ship, something dreadful happens to Eustace.
To avoid having to help with the work, with an "I'll show them" attitude, Eustace sneaks off, hikes up to a high ridge and then slides and skids down into the valley in the center of the island.
There in a dense fog he is startled by a rustling and bustling near him, panics, hides by a tree and to his horror sees this huge, scaly dragon lumber out of its cave, close by him, to a lake and after drinking a bit there, collapses and dies.
Eustace is unnerved for a moment, then feels as if he himself has triumphed over the dead beast, and kicks it in an act of victory. It begins to rain so he runs back into a cave, finding it is the dragon's lair, filled with treasure. Eustace is enchanted, slipping a bracelet above his elbow, and stuffing his pockets with diamonds, he plans to spend his wealth well, perhaps in another land.
But exhausted after his long hike and fright, he instead falls asleep on the dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart and (here is the dreadful news) he becomes a dragon himself.
At first he just imagines that some other dragon has come into the cave while he slept as he sees a dragon foot on one side of him and then on another, and wisps of smoke appearing before his eyes. However in a mad dash to escape from this beast realizes he is running on all fours, and upon looking at himself in the lake sees to his horror, he has become the beast.
- Not too far off this description, for Eustace acted like a beast and now looks the part, but a shock none the less.
Eustace's first thought is to get even with the others, when he finds he is this enormous winged animal, but then realizes he does not really want to, but instead, wants to be friends. With dismay he realizes that as this monster he is cut off from the whole human race and an appalling loneliness comes over him. He begins to see that the others had not been fiends at all and begins to wonder if he himself had been as a nice person as he had always supposed. He longs for their voices and begins to cry huge, hot, dragonish tears.
After the others find out what has happened to Eustace, and begin to pity his plight, and after he has been able to help them gather wood to rebuild the ship, Eustace has a most amazing experience.
One evening Aslan, the Son of the Great Emperor across the sea, who is the Christ-figure in the story, invites Eustace the dragon to follow him. He leads Eustace to a great pool and Eustace knows he is to get into it to be healed. But the Lion says, "You must undress first".
Eustace remembers that snakes can shed their skin and thinks perhaps that is what the lion means. He sheds several skins, tearing as deeply as he dares, it hurts, but still he cannot go into the pool.
Then the Lion says, "You will have to let me undress you." So Eustace lies on his back. The lion's first tear was so deep that Eustace thinks it had gone right into his heart. And when the lion began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything he'd ever felt. The lion peeled the beastly stuff off of him and there Eustace was, smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than he had been. Then Aslan caught hold of Eustace and threw him into the water and after the initial pain suddenly it felt perfectly delicious and then suddenly Eustace realized he had turned into a boy again. And before sending him back to his company of now friends, Aslan dresses him.
- Lewis in this story put into words just how beastly we are apart from Christ, how the sin is ugly, deforming our humanity, making us more beast than human. And how it is only the work of Christ that can redeem us, we cannot find transformation any other way, until Christ comes and undresses us from our old nature and reclothes us in His garments, in His righteousness.
It is in the 130th Psalm that it is written, "The Lord Himself will redeem Israel from all their sins" (130:8). That statement is a prophetic word of the work on the cross where God did redeem all of Israel along with all who will believe from their sins.
That redemption is when we are cleansed from our past sins. It is the action of putting off all that made us more dragon than human, the dying to the old nature, to begin living in the new. This action is always remembered. We never forget from what God has delivered us.
Another boy, Edmund, after hearing how Aslan had delivered Eustace tells him: "Between ourselves you haven't been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor" (p. 91).
They both could testify that they had been changed by Aslan as we can testify that we have been changed by the Lord Jesus Christ. They had both put their trust in Aslan's ability to set them free from sin, not in their own ability to free themselves. They both went with Aslan and were set free by Aslan's action, as we are freed through the cross of Jesus Christ.
The story parallels reality.
Once we are set free we follow Jesus in growing up into maturity in the faith. Through these steps we reorient our thinking and then our behaviors - we put on Jesus Christ in our lives so that He will be expressed through our lives. We choose to serve brothers and sisters in the body within the body, expressing God's love through our lives, and then serve and care for those outside the body.
God through Peter has given us this great way of growth, these means of God's grace in our lives to escape the corruption in the world and participate in God's nature.
And now in verse 8 tells us why we out to apply ourselves diligently to this. He tells us the reason for this hot pursuit of maturity, and it is found in the fact that with these qualities as our life, they will keep us from being idle in our faith, a "do nothing," barren and as the NIV says, from being ineffective.
You and I are meant to bear fruit for God in this life. We have been undragoned by God in order that we can live life in the "undragoned" state of becoming more like Jesus.
Remember last week I quoted an American theologian who put the point of our faith in these words, not to get us out of the world and into heaven, but "to get the world (the dragon) out of us by putting heaven (God himself) into our hearts, and then to send us back into the world to live holy lives of love for God and love for our neighbors…"(Elmer M. Colyer, "The Trinity in the Ordo Salutis," 14, a paper presented at the PNWAC Evangelical Convocation in Richland, Washington, April 24-26, 2005. Dr. Colyer is a Professor of Historical Theology at University of Debuque Theological Seminary. (parenthesis added by me)
The fruit which comes from our lives will be fruit that touches other lives with the love and reality of Jesus. It does not need to look like much to us nor to the world to count in God's sight. Rather, "a cup of cold water" given in Jesus' name, for the sake and in the character of Jesus, will be remembered by heaven.
- But notice that anyone who does not have these qualities, who does not add to their faith, who is not diligently adding goodness and so forth to their basic faith, these people have three things true of them:
First, they are blind -- they walk without Jesus' guiding light
Second, they are nearsighted or short-sighted - such people cannot see anything but what is right in front of them. To fix our sights only upon the earth and see nothing of what is beyond!
It is easy to become shortsighted in life, to only see things as they appear to be in the moment and unable to take a long view of things. But this word can also mean to "shut the eyes" - and it is easy for us to shut our eyes to things that make us uncomfortable instead of facing and walking with God into what He has placed before us.
Finally, they have forgotten that they have been cleansed from past sins, which means instead of growing up beyond their baptism, which washed their sins from their lives, they have gone back to the old sins they had turned from, they have slipped from following God.
If we don't want to be blind, nearsighted and backslidden in the faith, then we must remember we have been undragoned, we have been changed, so we pursue God, apply the faith to our lives, grow in Christ, day by day.
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