St Theodore's Sermon

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Sermon of the Week
Look up the passage

5/3/00

Attitudes that Determine Altitude Matt 5:1-12

I love flying. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because it's associated with going to far-off, exotic, places. Perhaps it's because of the seeming freedom you have when you're in the air. Perhaps it's something to do with how fast you can get from one place to another, compared with driving. Whatever it is, I love it. Mind you there's one moment in every flight that I'm not so keen about. That's when the plane is landing. As you feel the aircraft turn and you can look down on the ground straight outside the window. Or when you hear the landing gear being lowered. There's always just a slight quiver in my stomach. I guess it's a fairly common experience though. Have you noticed how as you come in to land, they play that soothing music over the PA to calm everyone down. And everyone sits up waiting for the thump as the wheels make contact with the tarmac, and then you can all relax. But I wonder have you ever been in the cockpit when an aircraft is landing. Pilots don't have much to do these days to fly an aircraft once it's in the air, but when it's taking off or landing they're working flat out. They have to check the instruments, watch their flight path, their altitude, their airspeed, their angle of descent, checking them over and over as the aircraft gets closer to the runway. They need to know what each instrument signifies and which are the critical ones to keep an eye on, because once the aircraft is committed to touchdown, it's too late to change anything. Of course the instrumentation on modern aircraft is incredibly sophisticated, and one of the most important of these instruments is the Attitude Direction Indicator. This is the instrument that tells the pilot the aircraft's attitude. That is, where it's pointing in each of 3 dimensions; whether the aircraft is skewed or whether it's horizontal or tilted, whether it's descending at the right angle or not. Without the Attitude Direction Indicator, the task of achieving the right approach path is made that much more difficult.

As I was thinking about this, I thought, wouldn't it be good if we could have an Attitude Direction Indicator for our lives. Wouldn't it be good if we could have something that would show us whether we were on track for a safe landing in whatever we happen to be doing. It'd be great for instance, if we could have a meter that measured whether we were going in the right direction in our marriages, or in our work relationships, or in our friendships. Wouldn't it be good if parents could have some indicator of the best way to raise their children, if we could have some sort of corrective that would set us right before our families crash landed.

I've been told the formula for flying an aircraft is something like this:

But of course the difficulty for you and me is facing the possibility that we might need to change our attitudes. Think for a moment about the sorts of people you know. Do you know any grumps? The sort of person who's never happy; who can always find something wrong with the world; who if they ever wish you a nice day will put it something like "I hope you have a nicer day than you probably will have." The moment they wake up they know it's going to be a miserable day! Maybe you're like that. Well if you are your problem is a problem of attitude.

On the other hand, think about those friends who are always cheerful, or pleasant, or interested. They're a joy to be around aren't they? Their warmth and happy nature carry you along with them. What makes them different? It's that they have healthy attitudes.

But where do healthy attitudes come from? We're not born with them. We learn them. We pick them up from family, friends, teachers, life's circumstances, influential people in our lives, etc. We're like a piece of sedimentary rock that has in it the imprint of a bird or a small animal, left behind when the rock was soft mud, but now hardened into solid rock. When we're young we're very impressionable, easily moulded, and just as easily marred and scarred for life by things that happen to us, or that are done to us. But as we get older the attitudes we learnt as children become fixed in a way that's often very hard to break out of. Now that can be a good thing if the attitudes we grew up with are healthy ones. If you're a parent or a teacher, make sure that you're teaching your children good attitudes. But what if they're not?

I'm reminded of the story one minister tells of the time he moved to a new parish and found that one particular 5-year old seemed to be incredibly shy whenever he came near. He was sure he hadn't done anything to frighten him, but whenever he saw him the child would hide. So eventually he asked the parents what was wrong with young Peter? "Well," his mother answered after some hesitation, "whenever Peter's naughty we tell him that if he doesn't behave we'll lock him in the cupboard and send for the minister." No wonder the child was scared of him! He'd been fed certain information through which he'd formed a set of beliefs, that in turn created an unhealthy attitude towards the minister.

So what can we do if the attitudes we've learnt were unhealthy? How can we reverse the process? Well, the good news of the Christian gospel is that we don't have to stay stuck in our old habits, our old ways of thinking. God promises to help us change. He asks us to give up our old way of life with all its bad habits and let him change our way of thinking and make us into a new person, someone who can please him in all we do. How do we do that? We begin by aligning our thinking to God's.

That story I just told about young Peter, gives us some clues to how to change unhealthy attitudes. The first thing we might need to do is to correct the beliefs we have about the world. e.g. to begin to look at the world as a place in which God is active and in control. It might mean reminding ourselves that God is in control, even when things look bad. One of the great stories of the Bible is that of Abraham and Sarah. They were nearly a hundred years old, with no children, when God promised them they'd have a son. If anyone had a right to a bad attitude, to be depressed, to feel a sense of utter hopelessness, or even to yell at God for being so insensitive as to promise them what they'd been longing for, for 80 years and which was obviously impossible, it was Abraham and Sarah. But you know, Abraham believed that God was in control of the world, so when he was told Sarah would have a child, he believed him. And of course within a year Isaac was born. So that's the place to begin if you want a healthy attitude. Believe that God is in control of the world and be prepared to take God at his word.

Secondly, look for the ways that God works in the world. Bring all your cares to him to see how he'll look after you. And as you see him at work in your life, thank him for it.

Thirdly, make sure that your actions agree with what you believe about the world and about God. Someone once said "Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react." The thing about attitudes is that they're so much shaped by how we live. They're like habits. We can change them by the way we live. So make sure your reactions reinforce healthy attitudes and not unhealthy ones.

Well, if we're going to live fruitful, godly lives in this new millennium what sorts of attitudes should we have? How do we work out what are healthy attitudes? You know, there's a real danger in our modern world of thinking that something has to be new to be relevant. What we're presented today in the media or on TV has to be fresh and new or it's ignored. But what I want to suggest here is that there are some things that are ageless. There are some old-fashioned qualities that are timeless, attitudes that have always been healthy and always will be, even if they may not always be popular. When Jesus Christ stood up on a mountainside in Palestine 2000 years ago to teach the crowds about life in God's kingdom, he began by outlining eight attitudes that will lead to us receiving God's blessing. Attitudes that will lead to new heights of godliness. I don't want to talk about these in detail today. I'll be doing that over the next 8 weeks, but let me just briefly outline what they are.

These new attitudes begin with an attitude of dependence on God. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." In other words, it's OK to acknowledge your dependence on God, your poverty of spirit, because if God is your King, he'll supply all your needs. Similarly if you're one of those who suffer in this broken world, he says this: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." Suffering doesn't have to mean being a victim. There's comfort for those who mourn, from the God who knows what suffering is, because he's suffered the death of his only Son.

The next attitude is meekness. Not weakness, but a willingness to follow God's lead with all your strength. The result for people with this attitude is that they will inherit the earth. Similarly, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, will be filled. Do you long for justice to be done on earth? The day will come when God will bring his judgement to bear throughout the earth, when those who long for righteousness will be filled. Just make sure that you're one whose life is filled with that desire, not one whose unrighteousness will be judged.

Related to that are the merciful. Those who are merciful will in turn receive mercy. Be careful that your desire for justice is tinged with mercy, that it's not just a desire for revenge, because you too will need mercy when God comes to judge the world.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. I wonder how many of us would claim to be pure in heart? It seems to me that's a bold claim. We might be fairly pure, but fairly pure isn't the standard. My son was trying to whip some egg whites the other day and they just wouldn't whip. Eventually he gave up because he realised he must have dropped a tiny bit of yolk into the whites when he was separating them, so they weren't pure enough to whip up. Why is it necessary for us to be that pure? Because only pure hearts are able to come face to face with God.

One of the prime attitudes that come when we see the world the way God wants it, is that of a peacemaker. In fact he tells us that those who are peacemakers will be called children of God. That's because God is a peacemaker. God sent his only Son to live among us so we could be reconciled to God. So we could have peace with God. Do you have that sense of peace with God? If not let me invite you to come and talk to me as soon as the service is over and I'll tell you how you can have peace with God. If you do know that peace, are you sharing it with those around you? Finally "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." There's a radical side to following Jesus Christ that leads us to be willing to suffer for the sake of what we believe. It's an attitude that says: "We're not scared of death, we're not going to be put off being obedient to God, just because others oppose us. We'll continue to lead godly lives even if it means suffering for it."

This list of kingdom attitudes could easily daunt us if we judged our current lives by them; but if we see them as the goal to which we're moving, and if we seek to take one step at a time, they can become the motivation that leads us on to better and better things.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent the last years of his life suffering from tuberculosis, but he never let his illness stifle his positive view of life. Once when his wife heard him coughing badly, she said to him: "I expect you still believe it's a wonderful day." Stevenson looked at the sunshine bouncing off the wall of his bedroom and replied: "I do. I will never permit a row of medicine bottles to block my horizon."

Let me encourage you to work at developing godly attitudes that will lead to an ever increasing altitude of life, that will lift your eyes above the medicine bottles of your life to the horizon of godliness.


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	Sermon of the Week	Look up the passage
	5/3/00
	Attitudes that Determine Altitude	Matt 5:1-12

	I love flying. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because it's associated with going to far-off, exotic, places. Perhaps it's because of the seeming freedom you have when you're in the air. Perhaps it's something to do with how fast you can get from one place to another, compared with driving. Whatever it is, I love it. Mind you there's one moment in every flight that I'm not so keen about. That's when the plane is landing. As you feel the aircraft turn and you can look down on the ground straight outside the window. Or when you hear the landing gear being lowered. There's always just a slight quiver in my stomach. I guess it's a fairly common experience though. Have you noticed how as you come in to land, they play that soothing music over the PA to calm everyone down. And everyone sits up waiting for the thump as the wheels make contact with the tarmac, and then you can all relax. But I wonder have you ever been in the cockpit when an aircraft is landing. Pilots don't have much to do these days to fly an aircraft once it's in the air, but when it's taking off or landing they're working flat out. They have to check the instruments, watch their flight path, their altitude, their airspeed, their angle of descent, checking them over and over as the aircraft gets closer to the runway. They need to know what each instrument signifies and which are the critical ones to keep an eye on, because once the aircraft is committed to touchdown, it's too late to change anything. Of course the instrumentation on modern aircraft is incredibly sophisticated, and one of the most important of these instruments is the Attitude Direction Indicator. This is the instrument that tells the pilot the aircraft's attitude. That is, where it's pointing in each of 3 dimensions; whether the aircraft is skewed or whether it's horizontal or tilted, whether it's descending at the right angle or not. Without the Attitude Direction Indicator, the task of achieving the right approach path is made that much more difficult.
	As I was thinking about this, I thought, wouldn't it be good if we could have an Attitude Direction Indicator for our lives. Wouldn't it be good if we could have something that would show us whether we were on track for a safe landing in whatever we happen to be doing. It'd be great for instance, if we could have a meter that measured whether we were going in the right direction in our marriages, or in our work relationships, or in our friendships. Wouldn't it be good if parents could have some indicator of the best way to raise their children, if we could have some sort of corrective that would set us right before our families crash landed.
	I've been told the formula for flying an aircraft is something like this:
	But of course the difficulty for you and me is facing the possibility that we might need to change our attitudes. Think for a moment about the sorts of people you know. Do you know any grumps? The sort of person who's never happy; who can always find something wrong with the world; who if they ever wish you a nice day will put it something like "I hope you have a nicer day than you probably will have." The moment they wake up they know it's going to be a miserable day! Maybe you're like that. Well if you are your problem is a problem of attitude.
	On the other hand, think about those friends who are always cheerful, or pleasant, or interested. They're a joy to be around aren't they? Their warmth and happy nature carry you along with them. What makes them different? It's that they have healthy attitudes.
	But where do healthy attitudes come from? We're not born with them. We learn them. We pick them up from family, friends, teachers, life's circumstances, influential people in our lives, etc. We're like a piece of sedimentary rock that has in it the imprint of a bird or a small animal, left behind when the rock was soft mud, but now hardened into solid rock. When we're young we're very impressionable, easily moulded, and just as easily marred and scarred for life by things that happen to us, or that are done to us. But as we get older the attitudes we learnt as children become fixed in a way that's often very hard to break out of. Now that can be a good thing if the attitudes we grew up with are healthy ones. If you're a parent or a teacher, make sure that you're teaching your children good attitudes. But what if they're not?
	I'm reminded of the story one minister tells of the time he moved to a new parish and found that one particular 5-year old seemed to be incredibly shy whenever he came near. He was sure he hadn't done anything to frighten him, but whenever he saw him the child would hide. So eventually he asked the parents what was wrong with young Peter? "Well," his mother answered after some hesitation, "whenever Peter's naughty we tell him that if he doesn't behave we'll lock him in the cupboard and send for the minister." No wonder the child was scared of him! He'd been fed certain information through which he'd formed a set of beliefs, that in turn created an unhealthy attitude towards the minister.
	So what can we do if the attitudes we've learnt were unhealthy? How can we reverse the process? Well, the good news of the Christian gospel is that we don't have to stay stuck in our old habits, our old ways of thinking. God promises to help us change. He asks us to give up our old way of life with all its bad habits and let him change our way of thinking and make us into a new person, someone who can please him in all we do. How do we do that? We begin by aligning our thinking to God's.
	That story I just told about young Peter, gives us some clues to how to change unhealthy attitudes. The first thing we might need to do is to correct the beliefs we have about the world. e.g. to begin to look at the world as a place in which God is active and in control. It might mean reminding ourselves that God is in control, even when things look bad. One of the great stories of the Bible is that of Abraham and Sarah. They were nearly a hundred years old, with no children, when God promised them they'd have a son. If anyone had a right to a bad attitude, to be depressed, to feel a sense of utter hopelessness, or even to yell at God for being so insensitive as to promise them what they'd been longing for, for 80 years and which was obviously impossible, it was Abraham and Sarah. But you know, Abraham believed that God was in control of the world, so when he was told Sarah would have a child, he believed him. And of course within a year Isaac was born. So that's the place to begin if you want a healthy attitude. Believe that God is in control of the world and be prepared to take God at his word.
	Secondly, look for the ways that God works in the world. Bring all your cares to him to see how he'll look after you. And as you see him at work in your life, thank him for it.
	Thirdly, make sure that your actions agree with what you believe about the world and about God. Someone once said "Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react." The thing about attitudes is that they're so much shaped by how we live. They're like habits. We can change them by the way we live. So make sure your reactions reinforce healthy attitudes and not unhealthy ones.
	Well, if we're going to live fruitful, godly lives in this new millennium what sorts of attitudes should we have? How do we work out what are healthy attitudes? You know, there's a real danger in our modern world of thinking that something has to be new to be relevant. What we're presented today in the media or on TV has to be fresh and new or it's ignored. But what I want to suggest here is that there are some things that are ageless. There are some old-fashioned qualities that are timeless, attitudes that have always been healthy and always will be, even if they may not always be popular. When Jesus Christ stood up on a mountainside in Palestine 2000 years ago to teach the crowds about life in God's kingdom, he began by outlining eight attitudes that will lead to us receiving God's blessing. Attitudes that will lead to new heights of godliness. I don't want to talk about these in detail today. I'll be doing that over the next 8 weeks, but let me just briefly outline what they are.
	These new attitudes begin with an attitude of dependence on God. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." In other words, it's OK to acknowledge your dependence on God, your poverty of spirit, because if God is your King, he'll supply all your needs. Similarly if you're one of those who suffer in this broken world, he says this: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." Suffering doesn't have to mean being a victim. There's comfort for those who mourn, from the God who knows what suffering is, because he's suffered the death of his only Son.
	The next attitude is meekness. Not weakness, but a willingness to follow God's lead with all your strength. The result for people with this attitude is that they will inherit the earth. Similarly, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, will be filled. Do you long for justice to be done on earth? The day will come when God will bring his judgement to bear throughout the earth, when those who long for righteousness will be filled. Just make sure that you're one whose life is filled with that desire, not one whose unrighteousness will be judged.
	Related to that are the merciful. Those who are merciful will in turn receive mercy. Be careful that your desire for justice is tinged with mercy, that it's not just a desire for revenge, because you too will need mercy when God comes to judge the world.
	Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. I wonder how many of us would claim to be pure in heart? It seems to me that's a bold claim. We might be fairly pure, but fairly pure isn't the standard. My son was trying to whip some egg whites the other day and they just wouldn't whip. Eventually he gave up because he realised he must have dropped a tiny bit of yolk into the whites when he was separating them, so they weren't pure enough to whip up. Why is it necessary for us to be that pure? Because only pure hearts are able to come face to face with God.
	One of the prime attitudes that come when we see the world the way God wants it, is that of a peacemaker. In fact he tells us that those who are peacemakers will be called children of God. That's because God is a peacemaker. God sent his only Son to live among us so we could be reconciled to God. So we could have peace with God. Do you have that sense of peace with God? If not let me invite you to come and talk to me as soon as the service is over and I'll tell you how you can have peace with God. If you do know that peace, are you sharing it with those around you? Finally "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." There's a radical side to following Jesus Christ that leads us to be willing to suffer for the sake of what we believe. It's an attitude that says: "We're not scared of death, we're not going to be put off being obedient to God, just because others oppose us. We'll continue to lead godly lives even if it means suffering for it."
	This list of kingdom attitudes could easily daunt us if we judged our current lives by them; but if we see them as the goal to which we're moving, and if we seek to take one step at a time, they can become the motivation that leads us on to better and better things.
	Robert Louis Stevenson spent the last years of his life suffering from tuberculosis, but he never let his illness stifle his positive view of life. Once when his wife heard him coughing badly, she said to him: "I expect you still believe it's a wonderful day." Stevenson looked at the sunshine bouncing off the wall of his bedroom and replied: "I do. I will never permit a row of medicine bottles to block my horizon."
	Let me encourage you to work at developing godly attitudes that will lead to an ever increasing altitude of life, that will lift your eyes above the medicine bottles of your life to the horizon of godliness.

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