"Sparta!"...eh, not really.

Right around Thanksgiving, I started noticing a lot of reTweets that mentioned praying for @MattChandler74...so all these people I knew all knew Matt Chandler, and I had no idea who he was. I looked him up and quickly learned his story of a Thanksgiving Day seizure which was the manifestation of a malignant brain tumor. I then became acquainted and immersed in Matt's story, his brilliant commentary on scripture, and his unquenchable passion for Jesus. If you skim through my Facebook updates for the past few weeks you'll notice brilliant quotes...straight from his sermons. If you got a sec read the excerpt below (I know it's long...it could have been longer):

Look at where he goes next. Verse 12, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God. . .” Okay, let’s chat. In almost every one of our membership classes that I’ve been a part of, a twenty year old guy in the room has raised his hand and said, “If you had one thing to say to young men, what would it be?” And I think the thing I always aggressively go after young men for is passivity. It’s this weak willed passivity where you don’t take your sin seriously, you don’t want to put anything to war and you just sit around and go, “Oh God, I wish I wasn’t that way.” There just seems to be no zeal for war, no desire to put anything to death. There’s just this, “Oh, I hope this works out, but I’d rather not have to work at it or anything. Is there something You can do to just make this go away?” It’s just this haphazard and lame attempt at putting sin to death. And the text is going, “No, that’s not how we’re doing this.” “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God. . .” Now I need to make a real clear distinction here, because one is about action and one is about a person. So he says here, “Don’t present the members of your body, your hands, your eyes, your ears, your mind, don’t present the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness.” This is what your mama said, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Be careful what you’re digesting, but instead he says, “Present yourselves to God.” So it’s not just, “Don’t do bad things; do good things instead.” That’s not what he said. He said, “Don’t use your hands, mind and faculties to absorb sinful things, but rather press into God. Know the Person and work of God.” One of the reasons I’m constantly trying to get you to read better books than read and to think more deeply than you think is because the Bible says it’s by beholding God that we’re transformed from one degree of glory to the next. That doesn’t occur simply by modifying our behavior. It’s in seeing and understanding the nature of God, the character of God, the beauty of God. And that’s why he says here, “Present yourselves to God. Press into Him. Know Him. That’s the goal.” (emphasis mine)

What is evidence of a man that is had? He has the righteousness of his Lord. I love the movie 300 about the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. It is a instant classic movie that strokes the male ego. To embed and fight to the death gets our adrenaline pumping as men. (And the leotard is permissible cause of the stack of abs above it...side note...one of my life-goals is to pump out the 300 work-out in a descent time...guess you got be able to actually complete it to count the time!) There is something valiant and valuable in this epic story...but not when it comes to battling sin. Jesus was a Spartan...pierced like King Leonidas...difference is boys, Jesus rose and death has no dominion over us. Men think that they can phalanx themselves in and simply hold off sin, but scripture teaches us that our demise has already infiltrated before we isolate and numb ourselves. The only way to war with sin is to relentlessly run from it...shun it...snuff it...expose it. A man that is had by Jesus wars against his sin...just not like a Spartan. God likes paradoxes.