Matthew 2:13-23
If the “business of America is business,” the apex of the year has to be Christmas. I was in retail for some 25 years. It was very common to lose money for 10 months of the year in the hope that the last two would pull you out into the black. The entire retail industry runs that way. That’s why there is so much anxiety over Christmas sales. Christmas is the season for correcting the bottom line. And then comes January, one of the worst 2 months of the year, the other being April.
You know early on whether or not you are going to make it through the holiday season. The problem is that you order for the holiday season usually way back in July and August. If you calculate wrongly, you wake up on December 26 with too much inventory and owing too much to your suppliers.
A couple of times during my retail days, I got caught with a recession that flattened sales in the last quarter of the year, while we were planning for increases. One year in particular I recall as taking me several years to pull out. I learned the hard way to anticipate downturns before they happened.
As Christians, we attempt to minimize the retail aspect of Christmas. No matter how hard we try, however, it cannot be done to our satisfaction unless we give it up entirely, which creates a whole other set of problems with family and friends.
We’re stuck with Christmas. I found a poem this past week that pokes fun at the post-Christmas blues – the time when we have to clean up physically and financially from our binges:
‘Twas the day after Christmas, and all through the room
Strewn wrappings were crying for want of a broom.
The children were scattered; the friends’ gifts exploring,
Since now most of theirs were broken or boring.
All tummies were stuffed from the fabulous feast;
Leftovers would serve for one month at least.
And mama and papa were countryside ranging.
Those unwanted gifts returned or exchanging.
Yes, Christmas is past with its bustle and noise –
Sales and carols, Santas and toys.
Decorations are packed, the Yuletide discarded,
The holiday’s over, just as we got started.
We even romanticize the birth of Jesus by placing Him in a sanitized setting with a good supply of Pampers and formula, forgetting that the cave was a shelter for animals and that Mary had just given birth there. I have been downwind of Bedouins in the Wadi Kilt that stretches from Jerusalem to Jericho, and it is not a pleasant experience. While the shepherds lived in the fields nearby, they did not have showers. They brought the smell of sheep and body odor into the cave with them.
Those three kings from the Orient had been traveling probably for most of a year or more, sleeping out on the desert floor with their filthy camels.
No amount of frankincense and myrrh could cover that scent, let me assure you.
Yet, in the middle of all that was a picture that never leaves us – a guiding star hovering over the place where Jesus lay; bright lights in the heavens; angels singing and praising God; hope and excitement in the air. On the eighth day of His life, His parents, excited as they were by the circumstances surrounding His birth, brought Him to the temple to be circumcised, and there was that great meeting with Simeon and Anna who had been told by the Lord that they would see the Consolation of Israel.
We forget that it was nearly 12 miles along a dusty road from Bethlehem to the Temple, and 12 miles back. Yet, Mary, we are told, “…treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” While we may sanitize the story, as Christians we follow suit with Mary, treasuring up all these things and pondering them in our hearts.
While Mary is treasuring and pondering, however, Joseph is responsible for their actions after the excitement is over. God deals with Joseph directly, post-Christmas, and most of what He says to Joseph is, “Get up!”
Luke’s narrative of the next 3-4 years is purely historical and objective, while Matthew’s is drenched in tears and fears, pain and problems, blood and lament. Those are the realities that are left off the covers of our Christmas cards, but they lead us to believe that even Mary and Joseph must have experienced the post-Christmas blues.
How they dealt with them may help us deal with our post-Christmas blues.
There are very few times in the Bible where Joseph is referred to as Jesus’ father. One time was when Mary scolds Jesus for scaring her and His father to death for staying in the Temple while they were returning to Nazareth, thinking Jesus was in the crowd. Jesus rebukes her by saying to her, “Didn’t you know that I have to be in my Father’s house?”
Joseph is the quintessential Step-Dad. He has the responsibility without the ownership. While Mary treasures and ponders, Joseph gets dreams that direct him here and there. When Jesus was around the age of two, and, we can assume, Mary and Joseph had settled in Bethlehem, the three kings came to worship with their gifts. Herod has been tipped off about their search for “…the one born king of the Jews.” He was threatened by anyone who might have a legitimate claim by birth to the throne.
Herod consulted the Scriptures and found the oracle from Isaiah 60 that proclaimed a ruler coming out of Bethlehem who would be the shepherd of God’s people, Israel.
“When you come back,” he told the kings, “let me know where the child is so that I may go and worship him.” Warned in a dream, the Magi went back home another way. Herod was, to say the least, furious.
It is a year or so later, and Joseph now has a house and a toddler. An angel appears to him in a dream and says, “Get up, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
Do you hear any mention of Joseph as the father here? The angel doesn’t say, “Take your son;” he says, “Take the child and his mother…” Had it been you or me, we might have been inclined to say, “Hey’ it’s your kid! I’m just getting settled here. You take care of him!” Instead, Joseph leaves everything behind and heads for Egypt.
The glow of Christmas surely has ended for the Step-Dad, Joseph. The king is furious; the infant is helpless; all boys under the age of two are slaughtered, and they are going backwards to that country where their forefathers had been slaves. The trip was about 80 miles to the Egyptian border, and they likely traveled another 100 miles to the Jewish community in Alexandria, a trip of about two weeks.
Joseph is escaping from the long reach of King Herod. Here is what Joseph knows about this Herod who spoils the glow of Christmas for his family:
Herod was born into a politically well-connected family and was accustomed to being a power-broker. At 25, he was named governor of Galilee. In 40 BC, the Roman senate named him “King of the Jews.” The Jews hated this title because they looked forward to the Messiah’s claim as king.
Soon after becoming King, Herod wiped out several bands of guerillas who were terrorizing the countryside. He brutally silenced anyone who got in the way of his power, including his brother-in-law, his mother-inn-law, two of his sons and his wife. The historian, Josephus, referred to Herod as “Barbaric.” Caesar Augustus is reported to have said, “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son, because pigs are protected by the law.”
Herod was a dominating figure. He built 7 palaces and 7 theaters, one of which seated 9,500 people. He constructed stadiums, the largest of which seated 300,000 fans. He was the architect and builder of the new temple for the Jews. By his cold-blooded murder of the males below the age of two in Bethlehem, you might call Herod the “Butcher of Bethlehem.”
A voice is heard in Ramah,
Weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
And refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.
At the age of somewhere around 4, the Lord appeared again to Joseph in a dream. Same words – “Get up, take the child and his mother…” This time, he was told that those who were intending to kill Jesus had themselves died. No mention of Joseph as the father, Step-Dad or otherwise; just “Get up and go.”
It appears that Joseph planned to go back and pick up his life in Bethlehem. Along the way, he finds out that Herod’s son, Archaeleus, is on the throne and becomes afraid. Archaeleus is even more sinister than his father. So he changed course to the district of Galilee and the Town of Nazareth in which he and Mary had been living before the birth of Jesus but from which they had been away for some 4 years now.
It looks like the party is well over by this time. Reality has really set in. Those in Nazareth who knew them probably had their own ideas as to how Mary got pregnant. Nazareth was not exactly the garden spot of the universe. In fact, Nathaniel, a prospective disciple, asked about Jesus in John 1:46, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nobody lived in Nazareth except those who could not afford to live anywhere else. Even in His death, Pilate put the mocking inscription over the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
If anyone had a right to be bummed, it was Joseph. Here he was back in his home town, amidst all the gossip and finger-pointing, later to become father to several other boys but alone knowing that he was not the father of Jesus. He was merely the protector, a task that would be bound to take the bloom off any rose. And there was Mary, ever treasuring and pondering.
You wonder how Joseph kept from getting the blahs and how that relates to us today!
The first thing you notice about Joseph is that he seems to take his God with him wherever he may be. To put it another way, he is content with his circumstances. The Apostle Paul refers to this characteristic as a maturity test – “I have learned, in whatever state I may be, to thereby be content.” Joseph takes his God with him wherever he goes, settles in and assumes that this is where he is supposed to be unless told otherwise.
Most of us tend to live in the future. That is, we have dreams about what we could be doing or how we could be living if we were somewhere else. That is especially true in Maine in the winter, isn’t it? If you are like me, you tend once in awhile to get tired of keeping these furnaces going and struggling with the weather and say, “Why am I putting myself through this, when there are lots of other more comfortable places to live?”
The problem with that kind of thinking is that it strips us of our obedience. We are where we are, and where we are, that is where God wants us to shine at the moment. Joseph was obedient. The truth is that there could well have been limits on how much of this virgin birth stuff he was going to have to take. He could very well have been thinking about moving down to Jerusalem to give Jesus a head start at the best of rabbinical schools.
Joseph is content, however, in every place God puts him. He lives in the now – not in the future. His obedience is not postponed until he is a bit older, or the kids are grown, or the weather is better, or they have a place on the Sea of Galilee. Joseph is obedient:
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (v. 14).
So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarine” (vs. 21-23).
I am sure, like every other young lad, all Joseph wanted was a life and respectability. Yet, first on his list was obedience. He didn’t move until God said, “Get up!” He had learned at an early age that the remedy for the post-Christmas blahs was contentment and obedience. He doesn’t gripe like Moses; he gets up and obeys, like Abraham. He somehow understands that blessings flow not from who we are or what we do or even where we are; blessings flow from obedience.
Is God pressing something on your heart this morning – a decision you have been postponing; a relationship you need to heal or sever; a card you need to send; a phone call you need to make? Is God convicting you about a person you need to forgive or about griping about your circumstances? “Get up!” Obey!
The second thing that chases away the blahs is to lower your expectations. The King of the Jews and His family spent the first few years in exile, as refugees. When God says, “Get up,” we cannot assume that where we are going is a better place under better circumstances. Every Christian hope carries with it a testing time of hard times that follow. We want ease and comfort, but the Christmas that we know is about difficulty. Like with Joseph, the post-Christmas world in which we live our daily lives is neither our hope nor our home. God did not remove the difficulties from Joseph. He led him through them.
Good news always has its enemies. Somebody once said, “In order to see the Babe in Bethlehem, you must pass through Jerusalem and awaken King Herod.” Joseph had learned the hard way that when the angel told him to “Get up and take the child and his mother,” he was probably headed for hardship. Yet, he obeyed, even though the glow of Christmas morning was now a distant memory. He kept it alive with low expectations as to his comforts but with high expectations as to God’s ability to bring him through and high expectations of His abiding presence.
A good rule of thumb when we want to know the will of God in our lives is, “If you want to know God’s will, then do the will of God that you already know.” God did not tell Joseph to go to Nazareth until he first obeyed and went to Judea. If you want God to guide you, then start moving on those things you already know He wants you to do.
Finally, the path to chasing away the post-Christmas blahs is also to live at all times in the shadow of the Almighty. That was Abraham’s way, and that was Joseph’s way. The OT patriarchs have an entire chapter in Hebrews devoted to their faith. You will be loathe to find anywhere in the Scriptures a reference to the faith of Joseph, the Step-Dad of Jesus. Yet, his response was extraordinary under the circumstances in which he might well have wished he were somewhere else with someone else.
Joseph lived in the shadow of the Almighty. He somehow knew that the key to the things he desired was to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. He somehow knew that “…his delight was in the law of the Lord.” He somehow knew that he presenting himself as a living sacrifice to God was the way to open the floodgates of heaven. He somehow knew that his task was to encourage his family to obedience. He somehow knew that that little kid over whom he had been given temporary charge needed a strong and obedient Dad.
Lucy walks up to Charlie Brown just before Christmas and says to him, Charlie Brown, since it is Christmas, I suggest that we lay aside all our differences and be friends for this season of the year. Charlie Brown says, That’s a great idea, Lucy, but why does it have to be just at this time of year? Why can’t we be friends all year long? Lucy looks at Charlie Brown with disgust and asks, What are you, a fanatic or something?
With that, I’ll finish the poem for you:
To celebrate peace and the meaning of giving,
To discover real love and the purpose for living,
Dear Jesus, please help us to stop and remember
That you came to earth not just for December.
But from birth in a manger to death on a cross,
You gave up your glory and counted it loss.
So now as we trust You – God’s only Son –
The real celebration has only begun.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Waiting for the Cloud to Lift
By:
Stan Moody
December 7, 2008
Numbers 9:15-23
John 14:15-21
Do you ever experience the feeling that God is on vacation? My thoughts lately have not been very positive concerning the Christian life and the presence of God with His people. I have felt like the Prophet Isaiah who, when he heard the voice of the Lord, cried out, “Woe is me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5).
In the midst of these thoughts come two messages of hope. The first message of hope is that of the Shekihah, the cloud of the glory of God that was introduced to the children of Israel in the desert. The second message of hope is in the words, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”
This passage of Scripture in Numbers is very instructive for us as the groundwork for how God works with His people. When the cloud covered the tabernacle by day and as a pillar of fire by night, the people of God were to encamp. When it lifted, they were to set out in the desert. The people of God, then, were to be in one of two states – staying put or moving out.
While they were encamped, they worshipped God, conducted their lives in some normal fashion and learned from Moses and Aaron about the beauty and holiness of God. Perhaps it was during those times that they practiced living by the Law of Moses.
The times of encampment, however, were indefinite. God had placed His people in a position of not being able to plan from day to day. V. 22 tells us that the cloud was apt to be over the tabernacle for two days or for a month or for a year; they had no idea for how long. It was a lesson in patient living in the presence of the Lord – a lesson that they flunked time after time. What grated with them was that they could not plan their lives. They were trapped into total dependence on God.
God’s presence, however, was key to their existence. Likewise, whether staying put or moving forward, God is sovereign over our lives. The problem comes with our difficulty in staying put.
The American way is that if you are not going forward, you are going behind. That is why the Church of Jesus Christ in America puts so much emphasis on growth, progress, success and numbers.
If you read the 10th chapter of Numbers, however, you will notice that the times of staying put were the times when the Lord was especially present with His people. There were whole ceremonies of blowing trumpets, preaching, preparing hearts to love God and building strength for the next journey whenever that might happen and wherever that might lead. There is even a bit about Moses pleading with his father-in-law to stay with them instead of going back to his native Midian. He had decided to leave the assembly and go back to his people. Moses said to him, “Please stay with us. If you come with us, we will share with you the good things that the Lord gives us.”
The desert through which they wandered is symbolic of a wasteland, inhabited by enemies and dangers of all kinds. Here, in chapter 110, vs. 3, 36, is how Moses viewed their predicament:
Whenever the ark set out, Moses said,
“Rise up, O Lord!
May your enemies be scattered; may your foes flee before you.
Whenever it came to rest, he said,
“Return, O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel.”
God’s presence is critical to our ability to stay put – to stay at rest. I believe that the believing church in America is straining at trying to move forward at a time when God wants us to come to rest. Times of rest are times marshall the resources necessary to move forward in God’s time and with His guidance – not in our time and in our own strength.
As difficult as it is for us Americans to accept, we are where we are and therefore, as Christians, are where God wants us to be. Instead of praying the usual prayer of, “Lord, what do you want me to do next?” maybe our prayer ought to be, “Lord, what do you want me to do while I am right here?” Direction from God is not just for the next big move into the unknown of the desert. It is, perhaps, merely to stay in the oasis of His presence now.
There is a phrase that intrigues me that I found had been originally employed by Dr. Altizer, the author of the “God is dead” movement in the 1960’s. His conclusion was that God had outlived His usefulness and had died with the crucifixion of Christ. My take is not that God had willed Himself to die but that the church kills Him off from time to time by refusing to stay at rest. But inviting the presence of God at times when nothing seems to be happening is a true test of faith, is it not?
I am thinking that we are living in a time when God has either been killed off by the church or been made so irrelevant as to be dead. We march on, taking the banner of Christ without the presence of the Father.
John 14 has much to say about such a way of living.
First, there is a lesson that we can draw from the OT Scripture this morning. That is, that people are insecure when God is not present. We as believers cannot cope outside the presence of our Father, the Living God. We become orphans and scared out of our minds. Jesus was well aware of this problem when He was saying goodbye to His disciples.
The discourse by Jesus in the 14th chapter of John begins with the words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.” Peter was so attached to Jesus that he wanted to go with Him into death, if need be – anything but being left behind and abandoned. Jesus ties trust of God together with trust of Him, even though He was about to leave His disciples. There can be no Jesus without God, nor can there be any God without Jesus. Believing in Jesus but not trusting God is not an option for the Christian.
The discourse in John 14 ends with two thoughts in v. 18, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” and “I will not leave you as orphans.” Jesus then destroys in v. 20 any thought of separating Himself from God the Father: “In that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” There is a pecking order here – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or Comforter. The Son reveals the Father, and the Holy Spirit reveals the Son. And yet, all three are One, as we are one with Jesus.
We must, however, study this for its real meaning. We have the Comforter promised to the disciples, and there is talk about things that will happen in “that day.” Can we separate the Comforter from the Christ, and has “that day” already appeared? If so, where do we stand?
This is about the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. You will see that the presence of God remains as constant in the New as in the Old. It takes a new form, however, from the nation-state to the individual; from the temple to the heart.
This discourse was delivered by Jesus just after Judas had left the Last Supper to betray Him. He turned to the others and addressed them with the words, “Little children, I will be with you only a little longer.” He then predicts Peter’s denial. The whole conversation hinges on the phrase, “little children.” These are His brothers to whom He is speaking. What Jesus is acknowledging here is that without His physical presence, they stand together in a comfortless and helpless condition. They are like fatherless and motherless children out in the cold – a fate that to Peter was worse than death.
Only one thing will change that condition, and it is found in the 18th verse: “I wil not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” This is a confirmation by Jesus that the constant and abiding presence of God will somehow remain with them but in a different form. This coming of which Jesus speaks is not some final coming at judgment. What He is referring to here is that He will shortly depart from them in bodily form for a season so that they may receive Him in a better form forever. He must go in order for them to receive Him in a better form that the one with which they had become accustomed.
The consolation of God’s people absolutely depends upon His presence with them. And yet, today, we talk about the “absent Christ” in the sense that He is somehow in our hearts, like some fond memory. We confuse bodily presence with real presence. Our consolation, the confirmation of our faith, depends on the real presence of the Living Lord. He has the audacity to say, “I come” during the very moment of leaving.
The average Christian today finds it convenient to live in the myth of the absent Christ, trying to do a rain dance to bring Him back. Instead, we are cautioned to live in the calm assurance that we are never alone but that we have Him with us more closely than did those who were nearest Him during His days here on earth.
“The world will see me no longer, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live” (v.19). This “Other Comforter” He will send – the Holy Spirit – is no substitute God wafted in from outer space while the spiritual Father and a physical Jesus sit by in the heavens until the final day. The coming of the Spirit is the coming of Jesus. Where the Spirit is, there is Christ; where Christ is, there is the Spirit. How else could these common men have pressed forward with the Gospel with quiet confidence? How else could the great ministers of the faith down through history have pressed forward unless basking in the assuring presence of Jesus?
If you take away Jesus Christ, our elder Brother, who alone reveals men to the Father, we are all orphans – fatherless children who gaze up into an empty heaven seeking an epiphany. The epiphany has come and is dwelling with His people. It is His part to come; it is our part to see, or to be conscious of Him who has come.
The nature of the world is that it fails to see Him. But the eye of the soul of the believer in Jesus Christ sees Him because it has turned away from dependence on the senses of eye, ear and touch. Because He lives, He has come. Because He has come, we who love Him and have accepted Him see Him and are comforted.
I began this sermon with the thought that I am sometimes overwhelmed with the sense that “…I am a man of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the Lord.” We fail to see Him because we have become guided not by His promises but by our senses. For most Christians today, it goes something like this: “God will not put up with this much longer; we are coming down to the end when Jesus will come again.” That is living by your senses outside the promises of God.
That is what it is like to be orphans in a fatherless world. Without His presence now, our worried eyes see only trials and temptation. Without His presence now, we are among the walking dead. Without His presence now, we cannot have the Father.
The Shekinah cloud of God’s presence stands over this little church that patiently waits for that cloud to be lifted. We have gone forward; we will go forward. But we must be careful that when we move, the cloud goes before us and that we do not leave the cloud of God’s presence behind.
In this Christmas season, we do not celebrate what once was but what now is and will be because of what once was. We ought not to pray for the lifting of the cloud. We ought, instead, to pray that when the cloud lifts, as it forever does, we will be ready to follow into the desert.
Because this is the Advent season, I looked up the meaning of the word “advent” in the dictionary. The best meaning I could find was “a coming or arrival.” Some say we are living between the Advents. I say that we are living in the Advent. The Christ who has come comes to His people, one by one, and remains present. We must learn to live and practice in His presence and stop living as though in His absence.
I ask that you pray for us as a church in this sacred season that we will find peace in resting in the presence of God through Jesus Christ, His Son.
May the season of Christmas remind us of God’s abiding presence. May the season of Easter remind us of the cost of that abiding presence and point us to a God who will, indeed, never leave us nor forsake us.
Stan Moody
December 7, 2008
Numbers 9:15-23
John 14:15-21
Do you ever experience the feeling that God is on vacation? My thoughts lately have not been very positive concerning the Christian life and the presence of God with His people. I have felt like the Prophet Isaiah who, when he heard the voice of the Lord, cried out, “Woe is me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5).
In the midst of these thoughts come two messages of hope. The first message of hope is that of the Shekihah, the cloud of the glory of God that was introduced to the children of Israel in the desert. The second message of hope is in the words, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”
This passage of Scripture in Numbers is very instructive for us as the groundwork for how God works with His people. When the cloud covered the tabernacle by day and as a pillar of fire by night, the people of God were to encamp. When it lifted, they were to set out in the desert. The people of God, then, were to be in one of two states – staying put or moving out.
While they were encamped, they worshipped God, conducted their lives in some normal fashion and learned from Moses and Aaron about the beauty and holiness of God. Perhaps it was during those times that they practiced living by the Law of Moses.
The times of encampment, however, were indefinite. God had placed His people in a position of not being able to plan from day to day. V. 22 tells us that the cloud was apt to be over the tabernacle for two days or for a month or for a year; they had no idea for how long. It was a lesson in patient living in the presence of the Lord – a lesson that they flunked time after time. What grated with them was that they could not plan their lives. They were trapped into total dependence on God.
God’s presence, however, was key to their existence. Likewise, whether staying put or moving forward, God is sovereign over our lives. The problem comes with our difficulty in staying put.
The American way is that if you are not going forward, you are going behind. That is why the Church of Jesus Christ in America puts so much emphasis on growth, progress, success and numbers.
If you read the 10th chapter of Numbers, however, you will notice that the times of staying put were the times when the Lord was especially present with His people. There were whole ceremonies of blowing trumpets, preaching, preparing hearts to love God and building strength for the next journey whenever that might happen and wherever that might lead. There is even a bit about Moses pleading with his father-in-law to stay with them instead of going back to his native Midian. He had decided to leave the assembly and go back to his people. Moses said to him, “Please stay with us. If you come with us, we will share with you the good things that the Lord gives us.”
The desert through which they wandered is symbolic of a wasteland, inhabited by enemies and dangers of all kinds. Here, in chapter 110, vs. 3, 36, is how Moses viewed their predicament:
Whenever the ark set out, Moses said,
“Rise up, O Lord!
May your enemies be scattered; may your foes flee before you.
Whenever it came to rest, he said,
“Return, O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel.”
God’s presence is critical to our ability to stay put – to stay at rest. I believe that the believing church in America is straining at trying to move forward at a time when God wants us to come to rest. Times of rest are times marshall the resources necessary to move forward in God’s time and with His guidance – not in our time and in our own strength.
As difficult as it is for us Americans to accept, we are where we are and therefore, as Christians, are where God wants us to be. Instead of praying the usual prayer of, “Lord, what do you want me to do next?” maybe our prayer ought to be, “Lord, what do you want me to do while I am right here?” Direction from God is not just for the next big move into the unknown of the desert. It is, perhaps, merely to stay in the oasis of His presence now.
There is a phrase that intrigues me that I found had been originally employed by Dr. Altizer, the author of the “God is dead” movement in the 1960’s. His conclusion was that God had outlived His usefulness and had died with the crucifixion of Christ. My take is not that God had willed Himself to die but that the church kills Him off from time to time by refusing to stay at rest. But inviting the presence of God at times when nothing seems to be happening is a true test of faith, is it not?
I am thinking that we are living in a time when God has either been killed off by the church or been made so irrelevant as to be dead. We march on, taking the banner of Christ without the presence of the Father.
John 14 has much to say about such a way of living.
First, there is a lesson that we can draw from the OT Scripture this morning. That is, that people are insecure when God is not present. We as believers cannot cope outside the presence of our Father, the Living God. We become orphans and scared out of our minds. Jesus was well aware of this problem when He was saying goodbye to His disciples.
The discourse by Jesus in the 14th chapter of John begins with the words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.” Peter was so attached to Jesus that he wanted to go with Him into death, if need be – anything but being left behind and abandoned. Jesus ties trust of God together with trust of Him, even though He was about to leave His disciples. There can be no Jesus without God, nor can there be any God without Jesus. Believing in Jesus but not trusting God is not an option for the Christian.
The discourse in John 14 ends with two thoughts in v. 18, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” and “I will not leave you as orphans.” Jesus then destroys in v. 20 any thought of separating Himself from God the Father: “In that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” There is a pecking order here – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or Comforter. The Son reveals the Father, and the Holy Spirit reveals the Son. And yet, all three are One, as we are one with Jesus.
We must, however, study this for its real meaning. We have the Comforter promised to the disciples, and there is talk about things that will happen in “that day.” Can we separate the Comforter from the Christ, and has “that day” already appeared? If so, where do we stand?
This is about the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. You will see that the presence of God remains as constant in the New as in the Old. It takes a new form, however, from the nation-state to the individual; from the temple to the heart.
This discourse was delivered by Jesus just after Judas had left the Last Supper to betray Him. He turned to the others and addressed them with the words, “Little children, I will be with you only a little longer.” He then predicts Peter’s denial. The whole conversation hinges on the phrase, “little children.” These are His brothers to whom He is speaking. What Jesus is acknowledging here is that without His physical presence, they stand together in a comfortless and helpless condition. They are like fatherless and motherless children out in the cold – a fate that to Peter was worse than death.
Only one thing will change that condition, and it is found in the 18th verse: “I wil not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” This is a confirmation by Jesus that the constant and abiding presence of God will somehow remain with them but in a different form. This coming of which Jesus speaks is not some final coming at judgment. What He is referring to here is that He will shortly depart from them in bodily form for a season so that they may receive Him in a better form forever. He must go in order for them to receive Him in a better form that the one with which they had become accustomed.
The consolation of God’s people absolutely depends upon His presence with them. And yet, today, we talk about the “absent Christ” in the sense that He is somehow in our hearts, like some fond memory. We confuse bodily presence with real presence. Our consolation, the confirmation of our faith, depends on the real presence of the Living Lord. He has the audacity to say, “I come” during the very moment of leaving.
The average Christian today finds it convenient to live in the myth of the absent Christ, trying to do a rain dance to bring Him back. Instead, we are cautioned to live in the calm assurance that we are never alone but that we have Him with us more closely than did those who were nearest Him during His days here on earth.
“The world will see me no longer, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live” (v.19). This “Other Comforter” He will send – the Holy Spirit – is no substitute God wafted in from outer space while the spiritual Father and a physical Jesus sit by in the heavens until the final day. The coming of the Spirit is the coming of Jesus. Where the Spirit is, there is Christ; where Christ is, there is the Spirit. How else could these common men have pressed forward with the Gospel with quiet confidence? How else could the great ministers of the faith down through history have pressed forward unless basking in the assuring presence of Jesus?
If you take away Jesus Christ, our elder Brother, who alone reveals men to the Father, we are all orphans – fatherless children who gaze up into an empty heaven seeking an epiphany. The epiphany has come and is dwelling with His people. It is His part to come; it is our part to see, or to be conscious of Him who has come.
The nature of the world is that it fails to see Him. But the eye of the soul of the believer in Jesus Christ sees Him because it has turned away from dependence on the senses of eye, ear and touch. Because He lives, He has come. Because He has come, we who love Him and have accepted Him see Him and are comforted.
I began this sermon with the thought that I am sometimes overwhelmed with the sense that “…I am a man of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the Lord.” We fail to see Him because we have become guided not by His promises but by our senses. For most Christians today, it goes something like this: “God will not put up with this much longer; we are coming down to the end when Jesus will come again.” That is living by your senses outside the promises of God.
That is what it is like to be orphans in a fatherless world. Without His presence now, our worried eyes see only trials and temptation. Without His presence now, we are among the walking dead. Without His presence now, we cannot have the Father.
The Shekinah cloud of God’s presence stands over this little church that patiently waits for that cloud to be lifted. We have gone forward; we will go forward. But we must be careful that when we move, the cloud goes before us and that we do not leave the cloud of God’s presence behind.
In this Christmas season, we do not celebrate what once was but what now is and will be because of what once was. We ought not to pray for the lifting of the cloud. We ought, instead, to pray that when the cloud lifts, as it forever does, we will be ready to follow into the desert.
Because this is the Advent season, I looked up the meaning of the word “advent” in the dictionary. The best meaning I could find was “a coming or arrival.” Some say we are living between the Advents. I say that we are living in the Advent. The Christ who has come comes to His people, one by one, and remains present. We must learn to live and practice in His presence and stop living as though in His absence.
I ask that you pray for us as a church in this sacred season that we will find peace in resting in the presence of God through Jesus Christ, His Son.
May the season of Christmas remind us of God’s abiding presence. May the season of Easter remind us of the cost of that abiding presence and point us to a God who will, indeed, never leave us nor forsake us.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
"Show Me Your Faith!"
James 2:14-26
Stan Moody
This matter of faith vs. works has been debated for centuries. There has been an ongoing conflict between those who claim faith alone as being enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and those who depend on human works to earn their way into Heaven. It is either/or kind of thinking, and neither is right.
It is the same kind of thinking that divides Republicans from Democrats, Evangelicals from Mainline Christians – conservatives from liberals. Neither is right, and when neither is right, you can expect that both are wrong. How’s that for either/or thinking?
The Apostle James, thought to be the brother of Jesus, says, “You foolish man, do you want evidence (italics added) that faith without deeds is useless? …A person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.”
Faith in the free enterprise system without a willingness to share the wealth with those who are beneath the wheel is not faith at all. On the other hand, faith in the ideals of human rights and social justice without putting your own wealth at risk is not faith in anything. We are too busy telling other people what they ought to be doing and not busy enough taking inventory of our own lives – what we ought to be doing.
The idea that the answer to somebody else’s problem is to tell them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps is a scourge on the landscape of what some claim is a Christian nation. “Is it not the rich who are exploiting you?” James asks. “Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?”
There is a great irony here to which James is pointing us. And that is that in a nation where winning is everything, we are honoring winners who have gained their impressive lifestyles at the expense of others, whether in business or in politics. The rich and powerful find it nearly impossible to identify with the Lord Jesus Christ who came as a humble servant and avoided all semblances of wealth and fame. It is not the system that is the problem; it is the people gaming the system who are the problem. Both free marketers and social justice advocates base their politics on the inherent goodness of mankind, a fatally-flawed premise.
“Show me your faith.” James tells us. NMMH Church, “Show me your faith!” America, “Show me your faith!” “I have heard your words; show me your faith!”
We have reached a breaking point in evangelical life here in America. Last week, my daughter called me from Tucson all upset. She teaches Chemistry and Physics at a large Christian high school there. The mother of one of her students had just called her and asked, “How can you as a Christian justify voting for Obama?” She then dove into the abortion/pro-life debate.
Show me your faith! If you are pro-life, what are you doing about teenage girls who are living in terror because they are pregnant and have been abandoned? If you are pro-life, why are you not reacting to those pregnant women who were killed by our bombs on the streets of Baghdad when we invaded Iraq? If you are pro-life, what are you doing about loving those whose character turns your stomach – the throw-away people in our culture?
I’ll share with you a couple of touching stories that have been brought home to me by my children.
Jonathan, as do all teenage kids who have been brought up in the church, was pressing for the chance to stay at home on Sunday mornings. This went on for some time. I let Barbara deal with it, but I finally had to become involved. What I told him was, “I really need the support of my family there.” We have not heard another protest since. Show me your faith!
Because Little Barbara seems to have no interest in the things of the Lord these days, it is easy to assume that she has no faith. One evening, I came home and saw her playing with a baby on the living room floor. “What is this?” I asked. It was the baby of a young, unmarried mother who does not believe in abortion and has been abandoned by the father. Now, you can say, “She should have given the baby up for adoption.” Quite frankly, that is not your call or mine. We are called to deal with matters where they are and as they are – not where we should like them to be or as we should like them to be.
Barbara was taking care of this baby because its Mom needed to work to pay the bills. Show me your faith! A week or so ago, Barbara gave up her shift to this Mom because she was not getting enough hours. Show me your faith! I have to tell you that with all my confession of faith in all of my life, I can never remember doing something like that, especially in my 20’s.
I believe that we all have stories like this. I have heard a number of those stories in my years here at the NMMH Church – stories of faith giving rise to good works of the kind for which there is no payback. As this economic crisis deepens, however, the church of Jesus Christ in America may be pushed to get involved where it would rather not become involved – in places where there are people suffering with no foreseeable way out.
We as Evangelicals are used to picking the low-hanging fruit – the easy works of charity, like distributing Thanksgiving baskets. Where the rubber meets the road in the Kingdom, however, is when the works of charity have to be carried out despite the fact that you know you can’t help.
I was working with an inmate for several months. He was in segregation for the last of his term and was released without probation about a month ago. I always joked with him that I didn’t want to see his ugly face again once he left, and I warned him to go straight home to Brockton, MA, where he had family who loved him. His Dad is a pastor, and his grandmother is a pastor. He grew up in an evangelical church. He had a girlfriend in Lewiston, however.
A week or so ago, he was found dead of an overdose – in Lewiston. I could not help but think about the words of James in the 15th verse: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go; I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”
That falls into the category of, “God bless you; I’ll be praying for you.” He was 32 years old.
There is another man of 33 who was raised in a local Baptist church that was flourishing at one time. He is scheduled to be released at age 104 as the result of convictions as a serial rapist. He showed me a campaign button a couple of weeks ago that said, “Jesus for President.” Another said, “Vote the Bible.”
I suspect it is a lot easier to vote for Jesus for President than it is to plumb the depths of what it means to be a Christian – what kind of works you must do to prove your faith.
James renders the distinction between the words of faith and the action of faith even more troubling when he says, “Big deal! Even the demons believe there is one God. They believe so wholeheartedly that they shudder under the burden of that belief!” (v. 19). I suppose the appropriate question to ask, then, would be what distinguishes you and me from the believing demons for whom the things that they know in their heads make such an impression in their hearts that they shudder.
In fact, no matter how much you study the Bible, you cannot know anywhere near as much about God and His plan for redemption as do the demons. They have first hand experience in the divine government of God – His sovereign power over this world and His plan for salvation through Jesus Christ. No matter how much you may know about God, your faith in the existence of God and His plan for salvation pales into insignificance compared with that of the demons.
If you are relying on your faith, then, to get you through the pearly gates, remember that demons, with more faith in God than we, have another kind of date with destiny.
Demons believe that God is a holy God, a sin-hating God, a God of truth and a God of judgment. Demons know firsthand about Heaven and about Hell. When Jesus cast out demons on one occasion, they shouted, “What do you want with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” (Matt 8:29). What I see in this encounter between Jesus and those demons is a public acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God and that there is an appointed time for judgment.
James says, “Show me your faith…Faith without works is dead!”
We know what kind of works demons do, don’t we? They are works that draw applause, wreck lives and fight against God. They are works that are designed to attract us to this world rather than to the Kingdom of God. They are works that build up the human ego for the accumulation of awards rather than works that call on us to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves.
Our standing with God, therefore, is not measured by faith alone. Instead, it is in the nature of our works that our faith is distinguished from that of the demons. Works that demonstrate our faith are measured in our attitudes toward others – especially those who are incapable of doing us any good.
Demons will love their neighbor, provided their neighbor loves them. We, however, are called to love our neighbor, especially when our neighbor is considered to be our enemy. Demons will promote a winning strategy. We, however, must be willing to lose so that God may win. Demons will glorify strength and power. We, however, must be willing to be weak in order that God may display His strength through our weakness. Demons will pack people into the churches so long as what is being preached there glorifies the American Dream of prosperity and success. We, however, are called to be faithful to the Gospel, regardless of how poorly accepted it may be.
There is something about this chapter on works springing out of faith that draws our attention. It is that there are 3 kinds of faith outlined in this short passage of Scripture. James wants us to understand that, while there are many different kinds of faith, there is only one saving faith.
1. Dead Faith: “…faith, by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (v. 17).
People with this kind of faith understand the correct vocabulary for Christian belief. They can quote verses from the Bible. They know the common language of faith and often find comradeship with others who share that language of faith. They are quick to promise to pray for people in need and then move on to the next adventure. Like the demons, they know the doctrine of salvation – they have read the Four Spiritual Laws. They may even have repeated the Sinner’s Prayer. Yet, while the world waits for signs of a faith that spills out of their lives and into the world, they have gone through the motions and have never known the passion that comes from loving Christ enough to sacrifice our lives for Him as He has done for us.
A declaration of faith that has not resulted in a changed life committed to good works is a false declaration – a dead faith. A dead faith is a counterfeit faith that lulls many a church into a false confidence of its standing with God. This is the kind of faith that protests against abortion but is unwilling to put itself on the line for unwed mothers.
2. Demonic Faith: We have talked about the faith of demons. While those with dead faith are touched only in their intellect, demons are touched in their emotions. They shudder or tremble! That is one step above dead faith, is it not? Where is the changed life? Without receiving the life of Christ, our works will be no different from the local service club.
I can imagine a person having this kind of faith who believes the right things and feels the right things. I can imagine such a person intellectually adhering to the right kind of doctrines and the right kind of living and even having an emotional experience while listening to the Gospel.
But an intellectual faith and an emotional reaction to the words of faith can never save. Show me your faith!
3. Dynamic Faith: Dead faith touches only the intellect. Demonic faith touches both the intellect and the emotions. Dynamic faith, however, involves the intellect, the emotions and the will. The mind understands the truth; the heart desires and rejoices over the truth; the will, however, acts upon that truth.
Saving faith leads to action of a particular type. It is not intellectualism; it is not emotionalism. Instead, it is that which leads to good works.
We have spent considerable time in this church contrasting works that build up our egos and works that build up the Kingdom of God. One helps people and gives us a good feeling. The other loves people out of love of God for His love of us.
James gives Abraham as an example of Dynamic faith. Over and over again, Abraham demonstrated his faith by his works – self-sacrifice and obedience, even when the way violated every human instinct. James offers Rahab the harlot as another example of Dynamic faith. Rahab was a Gentile who risked her own life in answer to the call of God to hide the spies of Israel in Jericho. She was a prostitute who became the great, great, great grandmother of King David. She demonstrated her faith through her works.
I wonder what kind of faith we have this morning. Is it a faith that is content to just know about the things of God? Is it a faith that revs up our emotions when we hear those old hymns or those old Gospel sermons? Or does it go beyond knowing and feeling so that it motivates our actions?
We might ask how we at the NMMH Church can possibly make a difference in the Kingdom. We don’t have much money. We don’t have many young people. We can go through a long list of what we don’t have.
The Psalmist cries out to God that He reveal to him the motivators of the kind of faith that leads to works:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
See if there is any offensive way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
Make that the prayer of your heart this morning as you consider what kind of faith you have and what kind of works will show that faith to others.
God’s grace is a limitless fountain of possibility tapped into by a faith that knows no limitations. Everything we do here must be motivated by a faith that harbors no limits.
Paul writes in 1 Cor 13 , “…and now abides faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Love, or charity, is the greatest of the three because it gives rise to the words that prove our faith.
Stan Moody
This matter of faith vs. works has been debated for centuries. There has been an ongoing conflict between those who claim faith alone as being enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and those who depend on human works to earn their way into Heaven. It is either/or kind of thinking, and neither is right.
It is the same kind of thinking that divides Republicans from Democrats, Evangelicals from Mainline Christians – conservatives from liberals. Neither is right, and when neither is right, you can expect that both are wrong. How’s that for either/or thinking?
The Apostle James, thought to be the brother of Jesus, says, “You foolish man, do you want evidence (italics added) that faith without deeds is useless? …A person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.”
Faith in the free enterprise system without a willingness to share the wealth with those who are beneath the wheel is not faith at all. On the other hand, faith in the ideals of human rights and social justice without putting your own wealth at risk is not faith in anything. We are too busy telling other people what they ought to be doing and not busy enough taking inventory of our own lives – what we ought to be doing.
The idea that the answer to somebody else’s problem is to tell them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps is a scourge on the landscape of what some claim is a Christian nation. “Is it not the rich who are exploiting you?” James asks. “Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?”
There is a great irony here to which James is pointing us. And that is that in a nation where winning is everything, we are honoring winners who have gained their impressive lifestyles at the expense of others, whether in business or in politics. The rich and powerful find it nearly impossible to identify with the Lord Jesus Christ who came as a humble servant and avoided all semblances of wealth and fame. It is not the system that is the problem; it is the people gaming the system who are the problem. Both free marketers and social justice advocates base their politics on the inherent goodness of mankind, a fatally-flawed premise.
“Show me your faith.” James tells us. NMMH Church, “Show me your faith!” America, “Show me your faith!” “I have heard your words; show me your faith!”
We have reached a breaking point in evangelical life here in America. Last week, my daughter called me from Tucson all upset. She teaches Chemistry and Physics at a large Christian high school there. The mother of one of her students had just called her and asked, “How can you as a Christian justify voting for Obama?” She then dove into the abortion/pro-life debate.
Show me your faith! If you are pro-life, what are you doing about teenage girls who are living in terror because they are pregnant and have been abandoned? If you are pro-life, why are you not reacting to those pregnant women who were killed by our bombs on the streets of Baghdad when we invaded Iraq? If you are pro-life, what are you doing about loving those whose character turns your stomach – the throw-away people in our culture?
I’ll share with you a couple of touching stories that have been brought home to me by my children.
Jonathan, as do all teenage kids who have been brought up in the church, was pressing for the chance to stay at home on Sunday mornings. This went on for some time. I let Barbara deal with it, but I finally had to become involved. What I told him was, “I really need the support of my family there.” We have not heard another protest since. Show me your faith!
Because Little Barbara seems to have no interest in the things of the Lord these days, it is easy to assume that she has no faith. One evening, I came home and saw her playing with a baby on the living room floor. “What is this?” I asked. It was the baby of a young, unmarried mother who does not believe in abortion and has been abandoned by the father. Now, you can say, “She should have given the baby up for adoption.” Quite frankly, that is not your call or mine. We are called to deal with matters where they are and as they are – not where we should like them to be or as we should like them to be.
Barbara was taking care of this baby because its Mom needed to work to pay the bills. Show me your faith! A week or so ago, Barbara gave up her shift to this Mom because she was not getting enough hours. Show me your faith! I have to tell you that with all my confession of faith in all of my life, I can never remember doing something like that, especially in my 20’s.
I believe that we all have stories like this. I have heard a number of those stories in my years here at the NMMH Church – stories of faith giving rise to good works of the kind for which there is no payback. As this economic crisis deepens, however, the church of Jesus Christ in America may be pushed to get involved where it would rather not become involved – in places where there are people suffering with no foreseeable way out.
We as Evangelicals are used to picking the low-hanging fruit – the easy works of charity, like distributing Thanksgiving baskets. Where the rubber meets the road in the Kingdom, however, is when the works of charity have to be carried out despite the fact that you know you can’t help.
I was working with an inmate for several months. He was in segregation for the last of his term and was released without probation about a month ago. I always joked with him that I didn’t want to see his ugly face again once he left, and I warned him to go straight home to Brockton, MA, where he had family who loved him. His Dad is a pastor, and his grandmother is a pastor. He grew up in an evangelical church. He had a girlfriend in Lewiston, however.
A week or so ago, he was found dead of an overdose – in Lewiston. I could not help but think about the words of James in the 15th verse: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go; I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”
That falls into the category of, “God bless you; I’ll be praying for you.” He was 32 years old.
There is another man of 33 who was raised in a local Baptist church that was flourishing at one time. He is scheduled to be released at age 104 as the result of convictions as a serial rapist. He showed me a campaign button a couple of weeks ago that said, “Jesus for President.” Another said, “Vote the Bible.”
I suspect it is a lot easier to vote for Jesus for President than it is to plumb the depths of what it means to be a Christian – what kind of works you must do to prove your faith.
James renders the distinction between the words of faith and the action of faith even more troubling when he says, “Big deal! Even the demons believe there is one God. They believe so wholeheartedly that they shudder under the burden of that belief!” (v. 19). I suppose the appropriate question to ask, then, would be what distinguishes you and me from the believing demons for whom the things that they know in their heads make such an impression in their hearts that they shudder.
In fact, no matter how much you study the Bible, you cannot know anywhere near as much about God and His plan for redemption as do the demons. They have first hand experience in the divine government of God – His sovereign power over this world and His plan for salvation through Jesus Christ. No matter how much you may know about God, your faith in the existence of God and His plan for salvation pales into insignificance compared with that of the demons.
If you are relying on your faith, then, to get you through the pearly gates, remember that demons, with more faith in God than we, have another kind of date with destiny.
Demons believe that God is a holy God, a sin-hating God, a God of truth and a God of judgment. Demons know firsthand about Heaven and about Hell. When Jesus cast out demons on one occasion, they shouted, “What do you want with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” (Matt 8:29). What I see in this encounter between Jesus and those demons is a public acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God and that there is an appointed time for judgment.
James says, “Show me your faith…Faith without works is dead!”
We know what kind of works demons do, don’t we? They are works that draw applause, wreck lives and fight against God. They are works that are designed to attract us to this world rather than to the Kingdom of God. They are works that build up the human ego for the accumulation of awards rather than works that call on us to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves.
Our standing with God, therefore, is not measured by faith alone. Instead, it is in the nature of our works that our faith is distinguished from that of the demons. Works that demonstrate our faith are measured in our attitudes toward others – especially those who are incapable of doing us any good.
Demons will love their neighbor, provided their neighbor loves them. We, however, are called to love our neighbor, especially when our neighbor is considered to be our enemy. Demons will promote a winning strategy. We, however, must be willing to lose so that God may win. Demons will glorify strength and power. We, however, must be willing to be weak in order that God may display His strength through our weakness. Demons will pack people into the churches so long as what is being preached there glorifies the American Dream of prosperity and success. We, however, are called to be faithful to the Gospel, regardless of how poorly accepted it may be.
There is something about this chapter on works springing out of faith that draws our attention. It is that there are 3 kinds of faith outlined in this short passage of Scripture. James wants us to understand that, while there are many different kinds of faith, there is only one saving faith.
1. Dead Faith: “…faith, by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (v. 17).
People with this kind of faith understand the correct vocabulary for Christian belief. They can quote verses from the Bible. They know the common language of faith and often find comradeship with others who share that language of faith. They are quick to promise to pray for people in need and then move on to the next adventure. Like the demons, they know the doctrine of salvation – they have read the Four Spiritual Laws. They may even have repeated the Sinner’s Prayer. Yet, while the world waits for signs of a faith that spills out of their lives and into the world, they have gone through the motions and have never known the passion that comes from loving Christ enough to sacrifice our lives for Him as He has done for us.
A declaration of faith that has not resulted in a changed life committed to good works is a false declaration – a dead faith. A dead faith is a counterfeit faith that lulls many a church into a false confidence of its standing with God. This is the kind of faith that protests against abortion but is unwilling to put itself on the line for unwed mothers.
2. Demonic Faith: We have talked about the faith of demons. While those with dead faith are touched only in their intellect, demons are touched in their emotions. They shudder or tremble! That is one step above dead faith, is it not? Where is the changed life? Without receiving the life of Christ, our works will be no different from the local service club.
I can imagine a person having this kind of faith who believes the right things and feels the right things. I can imagine such a person intellectually adhering to the right kind of doctrines and the right kind of living and even having an emotional experience while listening to the Gospel.
But an intellectual faith and an emotional reaction to the words of faith can never save. Show me your faith!
3. Dynamic Faith: Dead faith touches only the intellect. Demonic faith touches both the intellect and the emotions. Dynamic faith, however, involves the intellect, the emotions and the will. The mind understands the truth; the heart desires and rejoices over the truth; the will, however, acts upon that truth.
Saving faith leads to action of a particular type. It is not intellectualism; it is not emotionalism. Instead, it is that which leads to good works.
We have spent considerable time in this church contrasting works that build up our egos and works that build up the Kingdom of God. One helps people and gives us a good feeling. The other loves people out of love of God for His love of us.
James gives Abraham as an example of Dynamic faith. Over and over again, Abraham demonstrated his faith by his works – self-sacrifice and obedience, even when the way violated every human instinct. James offers Rahab the harlot as another example of Dynamic faith. Rahab was a Gentile who risked her own life in answer to the call of God to hide the spies of Israel in Jericho. She was a prostitute who became the great, great, great grandmother of King David. She demonstrated her faith through her works.
I wonder what kind of faith we have this morning. Is it a faith that is content to just know about the things of God? Is it a faith that revs up our emotions when we hear those old hymns or those old Gospel sermons? Or does it go beyond knowing and feeling so that it motivates our actions?
We might ask how we at the NMMH Church can possibly make a difference in the Kingdom. We don’t have much money. We don’t have many young people. We can go through a long list of what we don’t have.
The Psalmist cries out to God that He reveal to him the motivators of the kind of faith that leads to works:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
See if there is any offensive way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
Make that the prayer of your heart this morning as you consider what kind of faith you have and what kind of works will show that faith to others.
God’s grace is a limitless fountain of possibility tapped into by a faith that knows no limitations. Everything we do here must be motivated by a faith that harbors no limits.
Paul writes in 1 Cor 13 , “…and now abides faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Love, or charity, is the greatest of the three because it gives rise to the words that prove our faith.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Finding the Word Through the Words
November 2, 2008
John 5:31-45
In politics, the preferred ground on which to stand is something called, “Moderate.” Some of you may remember the fight in the Presidential election of 1964 over the word “extremism.” Politics is the art of compromise, and extremism is a threat to compromise.
Barry Goldwater came about as close as anyone has in my lifetime to declaring politics a legitimate search for truth. He was beaten in one of the worst routs in American history. This is his famous quote: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
We seek the middle ground out of fear of becoming the target of those who, like Rodney King, want to “just get along.” I remember one controversial political stand I took on behalf of the leadership of two of the towns I represented. After I went public with the legislation, I looked around, and they had scattered – there was nobody there to back me up. Not believing that this was a cause worth falling on my sword over, I pulled the legislation.
The point is that in every ideological frontier in human history, people back away because it is out of the mainstream. We make the decision that we don’t want to die on that battleground, so the battleground that we all seek to make our stand keeps moving away from us as we become skilled at moderation.
Now, moderation is not a bad thing. In fact, the Bible says that we as Christians are to live our lives in moderation with regard to our pleasures and our habits. The pursuit of truth, however, is another matter. In that regard, we are called to a radical discipleship – the kind that Jesus quietly demonstrated through good works and the pursuit of a Kingdom that stood 180 deg out-of-phase with the popular religion of His time.
In fact, the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ remains 180 deg out-of-phase with popular religion of our time – in every generation down through redemptive history.
Radical discipleship is something to which every one of us is called. Moderation, however, is our habit, a habit that is, I believe, stifling the cause of Christ. The only time we are willing to step outside the bounds of moderation is when we are reasonably certain that to do so will attract crowds. We don’t want to take the risk of being radical and standing alone.
Last week, I shared with you the rather radical speech I gave at a conference in Washington, DC. What was interesting about that speech is that in order to resonate with the very few, I had to violate the comfort zones of the many.
There were two reactions to my speech of last week. The first was in the form of an email that I received from a fellow Christian in CA. He was ready to stand up and proclaim the “Second Reformation.” I emailed him back saying something to the effect that the road to reformation was in repentance. The other reaction was that because there might be a remnant of true believers within the churches of the Christian Right, I ought to moderate or scrap my rhetoric. At that, I bristle.
I ask, this morning, what would have happened if Martin Luther had decided that because there was a remnant of believers in the Catholic Church, he ought to hold his tongue? You and I probably would not be worshipping here this morning. In fact, there might not even be an America.
What if Jesus had decided that He could have compromised with the Devil in the desert, or caved into the attempts of the Pharisees to compromise Him, or listened to Peter when he wanted to raise up an army to defend Him, or listened to Judas and used His power to take the throne in Jerusalem, or listened to the thief and come down from the cross? No Christianity/no hope!
The course of history has never been corrected through moderation. Galileo and the great scientists who succeeded him stood alone and were condemned by the church. The Old Testament is replete with stories of God condemning the entire nation of Israel at the expense of the faithful remnant in order that He might display His glory through that remnant.
The fact that there may be a few righteous people among the Christian Right is no justification for backing off judging the church. We are told in Revelation 3 that God would spew the entire Church of Laodicea out of His mouth for what reason? For the reason that they were neither hot nor cold – they were moderates, you might say. They were smug in their wealth and success. Jesus called them “…wretched, pitiful, blind, poor and naked.” “Those whom I love, I rebuke,” He said (v.19).
To those of the righteous who remain in the Church of Laodicea, I would suggest that they get out while the getting is good. The same is true of us here at the NMMH Church. If we are icons of moderation – going along in order to get along, we are in danger of being spit out of God’s mouth. The formula that Jesus offers to us and the Laodiceans is this: “Be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (v. 19, 20).
We are not called to fill these pews with worshippers. We are called simply to open the door for Jesus as He knocks and to hear His voice when He speaks and to fellowship with Him and provide for Him when He is hungry, thirsty and naked.
The 5th Chapter of John has a lot to say about the difference between moderate and radical Christianity. It is embodied in a distinction between the Word and the Scriptures. That is the very conflict that plagues the Church of Jesus Christ today – the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the Word and the Scriptures.
Jesus begins this lesson by saying that even His testimony about Himself is not valid – that there is someone else who testifies in His favor, verifying that His word is truth. The testimony of John the Baptist was insufficient to validate Jesus’ divine nature. The light that the Baptist gave out was only for a season – an entertainment for a short time. Jesus says that He has a testimony that is “…weightier than that of John.” Somehow, the work that He was sent by the Father to finish is what testifies of His role in the salvation of mankind.
We have never heard the Father’s voice, v. 37. We have never seen the Father in person. We diligently search the Scriptures, v. 39. Yet, in all this many professing Christians refuse to come to Jesus for life. Why is that?
It is because they have God in their heads but not in their hearts, v. 42. It is because they are ready to listen to and accept somebody else but not Him, v. 43. It is because they honor the praise of men over the praise that comes from God, v. 44. They live by the law. Therefore, Moses and the law will be their judge, v. 45.
They put their trust in what Moses wrote rather than in what Jesus says, v. 46. Moses and the law become their hope. Because the law of Moses points to Christ, at the end of the day they don’t believe in Jesus, either.
Let’s get into this in a bit more detail.
What Jesus is doing here is distinguishing between the Scriptures and the Word of God:
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but God’s Word does not dwell in you…
• You diligently study the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life if you study and believe the Bible…
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but you do not believe in the One to whom the Scriptures point…
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but you refuse to come to Me to have life…
What I get from this, then, is that a person can study the Scriptures – even memorize them – and yet not have the Word of God dwelling in him. A person can study the Scriptures and yet not know Jesus Christ, no matter how many times he repeats the Sinner’s Prayer. A person can study the Scriptures and not have eternal life. A person can be a regular church attendee and not know Jesus.
There is, then, the potential for a false assurance that we are saved through hearing Gospel sermons and agreeing with biblical doctrines about Christ. It is clear, however, that the way to salvation is not through what someone else is saying about Christ, nor through obedience to the moral and ethical precepts of the law. In fact, if this passage is correct, adherence to a doctrine or a biblical way of life may be evidence of denial of Christ.
It somehow is easier to obey a select law or laws than it is to believe in Jesus, the “Word made flesh.” Belief in the Scriptures gets in the way of belief in the Word. Show me a person who rants and raves about the sexual deviancy of the non-Christian world or about those evil abortionists out there, and I will show you a person who does not know Jesus and who may very well not be a Christian.
Very simply, the Scriptures are not the way to life. The Scriptures point us to the way of life by bearing witness to the truth of who Jesus is.
Take a look at Jesus’ teaching of His disciples. Do you see Him pushing for them to memorize the Scriptures to find formulas to make the world a better place to live? No! Do you see Him pushing books on prayer? No! It is not that these things are bad in themselves. It is that Spiritual truth is not a science to be learned through books. Spiritual truth is experienced through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit speaking through the Scriptures, pointing us to the “way, the truth and the light.”
We have been talking in the past few weeks about bearing fruit in our Christian lives. Bearing fruit will never happen through those who are spouting Scripture to build their own pride of life or tell others how to live. Fruit bearing comes from living in the power of the Word – not the words. It comes from picking up our crosses daily and following Jesus. It comes from learning to live by the Scriptures because that has been made possible through the Word.
Some believe that you can have Jesus as your Savior if your belief goes no further than Jesus as a fireman who rescues you from burning in Hell. In light of this passage of Scripture, I would reject that thinking. Jesus as a fireman is Scriptural, but Jesus as a fireman is not the Joy and Delight of our hearts. We can know about Him – perhaps even have accepted what the Scriptures say about Him, but if we have no life in our walk, we do not know Him. Jesus the fireman is not Jesus our Savior.
In the 7th chapter of John, vs. 37-39, Jesus stood and said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
That’s the difference, isn’t it? Streams of living water will flow from those who make the transition from the Scriptures to the Word.
As Christians, we have a duty to search the Scriptures. In fact, it was the Scriptures that pointed our way to Christ. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were so bound up in the Scriptures that they could not get beyond such things as trying to figure out whose wife a woman would be in the next life if she had had several husbands. It’s irrelevant. The very foundation of the Scriptures is not a list of rules to make ourselves build favor with God. The Scriptures are a fountain of God’s revelation of Himself to fallen man, first through the holy law and then through new birth in Jesus Christ.
That is the sum and substance of the Scriptures. If you can’t get beyond the words, you will never get to the Word. If you can’t get to the Word, you will never “…have life and have it more abundantly,” the very purpose for which Christ came – “I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”
The Christian who is proud, angry and vengeful lives contrary to the purity, holiness and long-suffering of God. The Christian who believes that being amiable, courteous, good natured, easy going and “moderate” are the fruits of the abundant life needs a radical transformation of the spirit. Getting along with your neighbor is great, but it isn’t love. Love of neighbor is not satisfied until you can cry over your enemy – weep over “Jerusalem,” the locus of your heart, as Jesus did.
We search the Scriptures, not because we want to know how to behave better, but because the Scriptures are the grand charter of our salvation and a light to guide us into the way of peace. When study of the Scriptures creates new and more enticing prophets, such as we have in the Word of Faith movement in America today, it is creating infidels who look for new signs from Heaven. America is lurching from one new prophet to another. Overlooked is the Scriptural warning that one false prophecy invalidates the prophet.
We search the Scriptures because we want to find that treasure hidden in the field through prophesies, types, sacrifices and shadows. We want to find this Jesus who comes to us as Prophet, Priest and King. We search the Scriptures as our star in the east, guiding us to the promised Messiah. We search the Scriptures with a humble, childlike attitude because we know that the mysteries of the Kingdom are hidden from the wise, learned and proud of this world.
And we do indeed search the Scriptures to put into practice what we read so that we may live in the will of God. Those are the Scriptures that the woman at the well in Samaria heard from Jesus, recognizing Him as the promised Messiah. She recognized Him because she listened to the Scriptures with a desire to find Him there, to know Him and to worship Him. His words, “I that speak to you am he” changed her life that day so that she was empowered to go forward and “sin no more.”
Notice that Jesus said nothing about getting rid of the guy with whom she was presently living. He did not preach about adultery or homosexuality or abortion. He met her where she was with no conditions. Those things would take care of themselves as she began to walk by faith and, indeed, to desire to sin no more.
Transforming grace moves us from the Scriptures to the Word. The Psalmist said in Psalm 139, “Your word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” See the distinction? The words will not insulate us from our sin, not matter how many Scripture verses we memorize. It is the Word – Jesus – who insulates us from our sin and makes us want to “sin no more.”
God, being a spirit, can only communicate with our hearts by spirit. If we are strangers to His Holy Spirit, we will continue to be strangers to the Word, even though we may be walking encyclopedias of Scripture.
The evangelical church in America believes in the American Dream – that prosperity and good health can be named and claimed by Christians. Jesus’ warning, however, was that unless we are willing to follow Him into death and Resurrection, we will never even see the Kingdom of God. That is why, I suspect, that for most American Evangelicals, the Kingdom of God is not a present reality but is a future promise.
They can’t see it because the words of the Scriptures have not been transformed in their hearts to become the Word: “You diligently search the Scripture because you think that by them you have eternal life” (v. 39).
That great evangelist of the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, said it this way:
This is a radical way of life, is it not? While the world wants to put human behavior and belief into a formula or a political agenda, the church is apostate when it tries to accommodate or promote that formula or political agenda. The notion that we must accomplish politically what God cannot accomplish spiritually in His people indicates that many of our spiritual leaders do not know the Word.
There is no room here for moderation. Each of us who has come face-to-face with the Word through the Scriptures must prepare for the wedding feast, the Bride of Christ.
Extremism in the defense of Christian liberty is truly no vice.
John 5:31-45
In politics, the preferred ground on which to stand is something called, “Moderate.” Some of you may remember the fight in the Presidential election of 1964 over the word “extremism.” Politics is the art of compromise, and extremism is a threat to compromise.
Barry Goldwater came about as close as anyone has in my lifetime to declaring politics a legitimate search for truth. He was beaten in one of the worst routs in American history. This is his famous quote: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
We seek the middle ground out of fear of becoming the target of those who, like Rodney King, want to “just get along.” I remember one controversial political stand I took on behalf of the leadership of two of the towns I represented. After I went public with the legislation, I looked around, and they had scattered – there was nobody there to back me up. Not believing that this was a cause worth falling on my sword over, I pulled the legislation.
The point is that in every ideological frontier in human history, people back away because it is out of the mainstream. We make the decision that we don’t want to die on that battleground, so the battleground that we all seek to make our stand keeps moving away from us as we become skilled at moderation.
Now, moderation is not a bad thing. In fact, the Bible says that we as Christians are to live our lives in moderation with regard to our pleasures and our habits. The pursuit of truth, however, is another matter. In that regard, we are called to a radical discipleship – the kind that Jesus quietly demonstrated through good works and the pursuit of a Kingdom that stood 180 deg out-of-phase with the popular religion of His time.
In fact, the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ remains 180 deg out-of-phase with popular religion of our time – in every generation down through redemptive history.
Radical discipleship is something to which every one of us is called. Moderation, however, is our habit, a habit that is, I believe, stifling the cause of Christ. The only time we are willing to step outside the bounds of moderation is when we are reasonably certain that to do so will attract crowds. We don’t want to take the risk of being radical and standing alone.
Last week, I shared with you the rather radical speech I gave at a conference in Washington, DC. What was interesting about that speech is that in order to resonate with the very few, I had to violate the comfort zones of the many.
There were two reactions to my speech of last week. The first was in the form of an email that I received from a fellow Christian in CA. He was ready to stand up and proclaim the “Second Reformation.” I emailed him back saying something to the effect that the road to reformation was in repentance. The other reaction was that because there might be a remnant of true believers within the churches of the Christian Right, I ought to moderate or scrap my rhetoric. At that, I bristle.
I ask, this morning, what would have happened if Martin Luther had decided that because there was a remnant of believers in the Catholic Church, he ought to hold his tongue? You and I probably would not be worshipping here this morning. In fact, there might not even be an America.
What if Jesus had decided that He could have compromised with the Devil in the desert, or caved into the attempts of the Pharisees to compromise Him, or listened to Peter when he wanted to raise up an army to defend Him, or listened to Judas and used His power to take the throne in Jerusalem, or listened to the thief and come down from the cross? No Christianity/no hope!
The course of history has never been corrected through moderation. Galileo and the great scientists who succeeded him stood alone and were condemned by the church. The Old Testament is replete with stories of God condemning the entire nation of Israel at the expense of the faithful remnant in order that He might display His glory through that remnant.
The fact that there may be a few righteous people among the Christian Right is no justification for backing off judging the church. We are told in Revelation 3 that God would spew the entire Church of Laodicea out of His mouth for what reason? For the reason that they were neither hot nor cold – they were moderates, you might say. They were smug in their wealth and success. Jesus called them “…wretched, pitiful, blind, poor and naked.” “Those whom I love, I rebuke,” He said (v.19).
To those of the righteous who remain in the Church of Laodicea, I would suggest that they get out while the getting is good. The same is true of us here at the NMMH Church. If we are icons of moderation – going along in order to get along, we are in danger of being spit out of God’s mouth. The formula that Jesus offers to us and the Laodiceans is this: “Be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (v. 19, 20).
We are not called to fill these pews with worshippers. We are called simply to open the door for Jesus as He knocks and to hear His voice when He speaks and to fellowship with Him and provide for Him when He is hungry, thirsty and naked.
The 5th Chapter of John has a lot to say about the difference between moderate and radical Christianity. It is embodied in a distinction between the Word and the Scriptures. That is the very conflict that plagues the Church of Jesus Christ today – the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the Word and the Scriptures.
Jesus begins this lesson by saying that even His testimony about Himself is not valid – that there is someone else who testifies in His favor, verifying that His word is truth. The testimony of John the Baptist was insufficient to validate Jesus’ divine nature. The light that the Baptist gave out was only for a season – an entertainment for a short time. Jesus says that He has a testimony that is “…weightier than that of John.” Somehow, the work that He was sent by the Father to finish is what testifies of His role in the salvation of mankind.
We have never heard the Father’s voice, v. 37. We have never seen the Father in person. We diligently search the Scriptures, v. 39. Yet, in all this many professing Christians refuse to come to Jesus for life. Why is that?
It is because they have God in their heads but not in their hearts, v. 42. It is because they are ready to listen to and accept somebody else but not Him, v. 43. It is because they honor the praise of men over the praise that comes from God, v. 44. They live by the law. Therefore, Moses and the law will be their judge, v. 45.
They put their trust in what Moses wrote rather than in what Jesus says, v. 46. Moses and the law become their hope. Because the law of Moses points to Christ, at the end of the day they don’t believe in Jesus, either.
Let’s get into this in a bit more detail.
What Jesus is doing here is distinguishing between the Scriptures and the Word of God:
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but God’s Word does not dwell in you…
• You diligently study the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life if you study and believe the Bible…
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but you do not believe in the One to whom the Scriptures point…
• You diligently study the Scriptures, but you refuse to come to Me to have life…
What I get from this, then, is that a person can study the Scriptures – even memorize them – and yet not have the Word of God dwelling in him. A person can study the Scriptures and yet not know Jesus Christ, no matter how many times he repeats the Sinner’s Prayer. A person can study the Scriptures and not have eternal life. A person can be a regular church attendee and not know Jesus.
There is, then, the potential for a false assurance that we are saved through hearing Gospel sermons and agreeing with biblical doctrines about Christ. It is clear, however, that the way to salvation is not through what someone else is saying about Christ, nor through obedience to the moral and ethical precepts of the law. In fact, if this passage is correct, adherence to a doctrine or a biblical way of life may be evidence of denial of Christ.
It somehow is easier to obey a select law or laws than it is to believe in Jesus, the “Word made flesh.” Belief in the Scriptures gets in the way of belief in the Word. Show me a person who rants and raves about the sexual deviancy of the non-Christian world or about those evil abortionists out there, and I will show you a person who does not know Jesus and who may very well not be a Christian.
Very simply, the Scriptures are not the way to life. The Scriptures point us to the way of life by bearing witness to the truth of who Jesus is.
Take a look at Jesus’ teaching of His disciples. Do you see Him pushing for them to memorize the Scriptures to find formulas to make the world a better place to live? No! Do you see Him pushing books on prayer? No! It is not that these things are bad in themselves. It is that Spiritual truth is not a science to be learned through books. Spiritual truth is experienced through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit speaking through the Scriptures, pointing us to the “way, the truth and the light.”
We have been talking in the past few weeks about bearing fruit in our Christian lives. Bearing fruit will never happen through those who are spouting Scripture to build their own pride of life or tell others how to live. Fruit bearing comes from living in the power of the Word – not the words. It comes from picking up our crosses daily and following Jesus. It comes from learning to live by the Scriptures because that has been made possible through the Word.
Some believe that you can have Jesus as your Savior if your belief goes no further than Jesus as a fireman who rescues you from burning in Hell. In light of this passage of Scripture, I would reject that thinking. Jesus as a fireman is Scriptural, but Jesus as a fireman is not the Joy and Delight of our hearts. We can know about Him – perhaps even have accepted what the Scriptures say about Him, but if we have no life in our walk, we do not know Him. Jesus the fireman is not Jesus our Savior.
In the 7th chapter of John, vs. 37-39, Jesus stood and said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
That’s the difference, isn’t it? Streams of living water will flow from those who make the transition from the Scriptures to the Word.
As Christians, we have a duty to search the Scriptures. In fact, it was the Scriptures that pointed our way to Christ. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were so bound up in the Scriptures that they could not get beyond such things as trying to figure out whose wife a woman would be in the next life if she had had several husbands. It’s irrelevant. The very foundation of the Scriptures is not a list of rules to make ourselves build favor with God. The Scriptures are a fountain of God’s revelation of Himself to fallen man, first through the holy law and then through new birth in Jesus Christ.
That is the sum and substance of the Scriptures. If you can’t get beyond the words, you will never get to the Word. If you can’t get to the Word, you will never “…have life and have it more abundantly,” the very purpose for which Christ came – “I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”
The Christian who is proud, angry and vengeful lives contrary to the purity, holiness and long-suffering of God. The Christian who believes that being amiable, courteous, good natured, easy going and “moderate” are the fruits of the abundant life needs a radical transformation of the spirit. Getting along with your neighbor is great, but it isn’t love. Love of neighbor is not satisfied until you can cry over your enemy – weep over “Jerusalem,” the locus of your heart, as Jesus did.
We search the Scriptures, not because we want to know how to behave better, but because the Scriptures are the grand charter of our salvation and a light to guide us into the way of peace. When study of the Scriptures creates new and more enticing prophets, such as we have in the Word of Faith movement in America today, it is creating infidels who look for new signs from Heaven. America is lurching from one new prophet to another. Overlooked is the Scriptural warning that one false prophecy invalidates the prophet.
We search the Scriptures because we want to find that treasure hidden in the field through prophesies, types, sacrifices and shadows. We want to find this Jesus who comes to us as Prophet, Priest and King. We search the Scriptures as our star in the east, guiding us to the promised Messiah. We search the Scriptures with a humble, childlike attitude because we know that the mysteries of the Kingdom are hidden from the wise, learned and proud of this world.
And we do indeed search the Scriptures to put into practice what we read so that we may live in the will of God. Those are the Scriptures that the woman at the well in Samaria heard from Jesus, recognizing Him as the promised Messiah. She recognized Him because she listened to the Scriptures with a desire to find Him there, to know Him and to worship Him. His words, “I that speak to you am he” changed her life that day so that she was empowered to go forward and “sin no more.”
Notice that Jesus said nothing about getting rid of the guy with whom she was presently living. He did not preach about adultery or homosexuality or abortion. He met her where she was with no conditions. Those things would take care of themselves as she began to walk by faith and, indeed, to desire to sin no more.
Transforming grace moves us from the Scriptures to the Word. The Psalmist said in Psalm 139, “Your word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” See the distinction? The words will not insulate us from our sin, not matter how many Scripture verses we memorize. It is the Word – Jesus – who insulates us from our sin and makes us want to “sin no more.”
God, being a spirit, can only communicate with our hearts by spirit. If we are strangers to His Holy Spirit, we will continue to be strangers to the Word, even though we may be walking encyclopedias of Scripture.
The evangelical church in America believes in the American Dream – that prosperity and good health can be named and claimed by Christians. Jesus’ warning, however, was that unless we are willing to follow Him into death and Resurrection, we will never even see the Kingdom of God. That is why, I suspect, that for most American Evangelicals, the Kingdom of God is not a present reality but is a future promise.
They can’t see it because the words of the Scriptures have not been transformed in their hearts to become the Word: “You diligently search the Scripture because you think that by them you have eternal life” (v. 39).
That great evangelist of the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, said it this way:
Search the Scriptures, my dear brethren; taste and see how good the Word of God is, and then you will never leave that heavenly manna – that angel’s food – to feed on dry husks, those trifling, sinful compositions, in which men of false taste delight themselves…The Word of God will then be sweeter to you than honey and the honey-comb and dearer than gold and silver…Your souls by reading it will be filled with marrow and fatness, and your hearts molded into the spirit of its blessed Author. In short, you will be guided by God’s wisdom here, and conducted by the light of his divine word into glory hereafter.
This is a radical way of life, is it not? While the world wants to put human behavior and belief into a formula or a political agenda, the church is apostate when it tries to accommodate or promote that formula or political agenda. The notion that we must accomplish politically what God cannot accomplish spiritually in His people indicates that many of our spiritual leaders do not know the Word.
There is no room here for moderation. Each of us who has come face-to-face with the Word through the Scriptures must prepare for the wedding feast, the Bride of Christ.
Extremism in the defense of Christian liberty is truly no vice.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Inconsistency at Home
INCONSISTENT
October 15, 2008
Ezekiel 16:49-60
I have shared with you over the past several months the strange place in which I find myself as a chaplain in a maximum security prison. The way I have described it is that I could have gone my whole life without becoming exposed to such a desperate, irresolvable, negative environment. I think what washed over me was the thought that prison has disturbed my comfort zone. I should rather coast out in ignorance than come up against this seemingly impossible situation where my interpersonal skills simply don’t work very well, and I am forced to really trust God.
The way I have described it is to say, “I didn’t need to know about this.”
The Prophet Ezekiel is telling us in Ezekiel 16 how we use our blessings from God to insulate ourselves from the kind of reality we can’t change or don’t like. The fact is that we have a lot of things to think about in this Christian walk. There is the world out there that some Christians are trying to change with money, influence and politics. There is the church in here that some of the rest of us are trying to change. There are all those people in the middle who have become so numbed by God’s blessing on America that they are not interested in changing anything. Maybe they just want to be left alone.
As Christians, we can attack our culture and the sins of our culture and become oblivious to the rot that is destroying the Bride of Christ – the Church. In a sense, that is where Israel went wrong, and that is where the Christian Right is going wrong today. If we don’t face our own sins, we fail to stand for righteous and victorious living. Yet, if we focus too much on the sins within the church, we run the risk of destroying its life and vitality and turning it into a legalistic cult. No wonder the great mass of humanity prefers to zone out religious zeal from their lives. Religious zeal complicates comfortable living.
Let’s take a minute or so to examine Sodom and Gomorrah and Ezekiel’s condemnation of Israel as being worse than either. It is in the context of Israel’s somehow having done worse things than Sodom and Gomorrah and Samaria. Sodom and Gomorrah were burned for their sin, and Samaria, where the 10 tribes of Israel had relocated after Solomon’s reign, had been carried off to Assyria around 150 years before Jerusalem fell to Babylon.
Ezekiel is prophesying to his people in Babylon and telling them that they are going to be restored but that the daughters of Sodom, Gomorrah and Samaria are also going to be restored. In that way, he destroys the popular idea of a culture clash between those three cultures and states that Israel’s sin was twice as bad as was Samaria’s.
Faithful Jews would not understand such a statement, nor would the Church of Jesus Christ in America understand such a statement if that were to be said about us today.
Nobody knows much about Samaria, but everybody knows about Sodom. It has a sexual act named after it. Both the church and the world refer to Sodom as having been destroyed by fire for its homosexuality. When we think of Sodom, we think of promiscuity and judgment.
But when the Lord speaks of Sodom here, He describes their sin very differently. He doesn’t speak of homosexuality or licentiousness. He speaks, instead, of arrogance (or pride), gluttony and indifference. Those, apparently, were the sins of Sodom. Ezekiel speaks of Israelites and Sodomites as being sisters. That’s a touch of irony in a male-dominated homosexual environ!: “You would not even mention your sister Sodom in the day of your pride, before your (italics added) wickedness was uncovered” (v.56).
You will remember that when Lot and Abraham split up, Lot chose Sodom because it was fertile: “Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere” (Gen 13:10). Ezekiel refers to all those good things about Sodom as the source of their sin and destruction. They were arrogant, or proud. They became like gods. They put themselves on top of the ladder and would take instruction from no one. They had the attitude that they knew best what sort of behavior was acceptable and good.
Does that not sound like America – arrogant and proud? America acts as though it is superior to other cultures in the world and therefore has a right to set the standards for behavior. As with Sodom, sexual promiscuity has become a symptom of the disease of pride and arrogance. Divorce, homosexuality and all those uncomfortable sins out there are symptomatic of a society that makes its own laws and thinks it is free when it lives without restraint. And here comes the church of Jesus Christ, including most of us, condemning those sins, as did Israel, and at the same time falling victim to them, as did Israel. It reminds me of that old saying, “When you point your finger at someone else, you have three pointing at yourself.”
I met with my siblings last Saturday at a family wedding. My sister, Sue, who has played and sung here a number of times, was talking about her counseling practice to Christian women. It has been her experience that more than half the teenage girls in high school today are sexually active in a way that would shock you, as it did me. Being a Christian apparently is of little consequence. And yet, we point fingers at a promiscuous public of non-believers.
The same pride that has infected America has infected the church of Jesus Christ. Which came first is a matter of debate.
The Lord describes Sodom is being “overfed,’ or gluttonous. Gluttony describes our nation today, does it not? We have supermarkets full of food; we have homes abundant with luxuries; we have toys for our amusement in all kinds of weather and conditions; we trade our cars when the ashtrays get full, so to speak. God has given an abundance of material wealth to Americans. Yet, the Church of Jesus Christ, while condemning our culture for its gluttony, practices the sin of pride, a sin that is the prelude to sexual deviancy.
The Lord mentions the indifference of Sodom to its neighbors. In the King James Version, this is stated as “abundance of idleness.” That hits us where we live, does it not? We might refer to it as “prosperous ease.” There was nothing that gave the people of Sodom any anxiety. They had peace and prosperity, enjoyed an abundance of food with a good mix of work and leisure. Is that not like America, as well? The Church of Jesus Christ condemns such self-absorption but practices it itself without conviction.
The last thing that the Lord says about Sodom cuts to the core. She did not help the poor and the needy. The poor and the needy are uncomfortable realities for us comfortable suburbanites, are they not? God is not just talking about the down-and-outers of society. He is referring mostly to people who suffer from some kind of disability or distress, including those socially in need of protection from the arrogant and proud.
My passion, especially, is for those inmates who come out of prison with $50 and a bus ticket as far as Portland who can’t find housing or a job. We don’t want to know about those people, do we? It is better to talk about what they have done than what they could be doing now with our help. The two angels who came to Sodom that infamous night in Redemptive History found hospitality only in Lot’s home. When it became dark, the people of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house and demanded to have the two men for sex. Instead of supporting and assisting the two men and Lot’s family, their instinct was to abuse the vulnerable – the stranger.
That was a refusal to grant hospitality. That was the principal sin for which Sodom was condemned – refusal to extend hospitality to those in need of protection. If there had been 10 righteous people in Sodom, God would have spared the city. In the end, though, it was four – Lot, his wife and their two daughters, and Lot’s wife looked back because she could not bear to leave the pride, abundance and ease behind.
Why, we might ask, did the Lord not come right out and mention Sodom’s sin as we all understand it to be – the sin of sexual deviancy? Why mention first her pride, her gluttony and her indifference? The answer is that Sodom’s sin of sexual promiscuity was the ripe fruit of her pride, just as America’s sin of sexual deviancy is the ripe fruit of our pride.
Those things that Sodom had enjoyed – abundance of food, power and money – were blessings from God. Instead, they were abused to make themselves feel superior. The blessings were used for self instead of for God. While they relaxed the rules of their own living, they became desensitized to the actions of others. There is no record of anyone jumping in to help the two angels when they were under attack by that pack of human jackals. So God had to jump in and strike the men with blindness.
We have become gods unto ourselves in America. We have set our own rules of behavior. And many Christians, instead of rescuing those who suffer from their sin, are out there wagging their fingers at unwed mothers, sex offenders, murderers and sexual deviates. Self-love and self-congratulations will never lead to self-denial vital to showing compassion for those who are social rejects. If your world is only as big as yourself, and you use the prosperity that God has showered on you to satisfy only your own desires, why would you suddenly deny yourself for the sake of others?
Jerusalem’s sins were, somehow, even worse. In fact, they were guilty of the same sins because they tolerated the same attitudes. On the outside, Jerusalem was much like the church today. Its behaviors were nowhere near as repulsive as were those of the Sodomites. Despite the fact that their outward behavior was better than that of Sodom, they were worse because they had received the riches of the gospel and still succumbed to pride.
Do we as Christians – the New Jerusalem – view God’s abundant grace to us to be used for the benefit of others? Do we have an attitude of self-denial, seeking how we can best use our prosperity and peace and privileges for the benefit of others? Have we made it our business to help the poor and needy at home and abroad? Or do we consider the poor and needy a threat to our comforts?
The difference between the church and the world cannot be summed up in our sexuality or our positions on social issues. The difference between the church and the world lies in that first sin that God condemned through Ezekiel – pride.
That brings me to my concluding thoughts this morning – thoughts that were triggered by a sermon written and delivered by Charles Spurgeon in the mid 19th Century.
Those thoughts have to do, not with what the church sees when it looks at the world, but with what the world sees when it looks into the church.
What it sees when it looks into the church is either the person of Jesus Christ or justification for continuing in its own rebellion against God. If it sees the person of Jesus Christ, it does so despite the church’s flawed and imperfect life. If it sees only the justification for continuing in its sin, it does so because it sees there what it wants to see.
There is a classic example at the scene of the crucifixion of Christ. The thief on one side of Him saw what would justify his own rebellion against God: “If you be the Christ, save yourself and us!” The other said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” At the foot of the cross, people sneered and said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.” Then there was the Roman centurion at the moment of Jesus’ death, who praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous men.”
What we have is something very human here. When the church looks out into the world, some see corruption and are burdened by the world’s sin; others see the same corruption and are pleased with their own righteousness: “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men – like that sinner over there!” When the world looks into the church, some see hope and redemption; others see human failing and are pleased with their own righteousness. Spurgeon says that a man who is willing to find an excuse for being God’s enemy will never be at a loss when he looks into the church.
The issue before us as believers, however, is what God sees when He looks into the church. Does He see arrogance? Does He see gluttony? Does He see indifference? Or does He see concern for the poor and the needy – the socially abused and vulnerable? Does He see comfort, or does He see passion, not only for souls, but for the desperate plight of sinners wallowing in the pit of self? Does He see a church that condemns the behavior of others, or does He see a church that weeps over Zion?
These are convicting thoughts this morning, aren’t they? When we look at our mission in that light, we have to wonder what we could possibly offer a world dying in sin and loving it so. When pride becomes the sin, sex and self become the symptoms. We all get measured by the same standard – both within the church and outside the church.
The people of God give comfort to others by their murmurings and complaints. We talk about faith, but our faith does not often blossom into service. We grumble about the economy, the prices, low wages, political incompetency, as though God were treating us very badly. We show indifference and even cold-heartedness to others around us. Our churches are lukewarm and lifeless. We spend more time on worship than in prayer for others.
The Gospel is watered down to appeal to the enemies of God in order to look successful. We like everything to go smoothly and not be too unorthodox or too revved up. That also is the kind of church that the world likes – a church that operates beneath the radar and makes no waves. We focus on missions in far away places, while those around us are dying without Christ. In short, we help to keep sinners comfortable in their sin because we fail to exhibit our righteous standing before God and others, and we fail to stir the waters so that others may be healed.
The great sin of the church is that while we may be successful, rich, popular and entertaining, we are not witnesses of God in such a way that will stir men’s hearts to want what we have. We have not lived the righteous and sacrificial life that rebukes. It is a masterpiece of genius by the devil that he can use Christ’s own soldiers against Christ.
There is, however, a ray of hope. While the world looks at the church and finds it hypocritical and inconsistent, there are also those who are holy as examples to those who seek holiness. There are also those who are good as examples to those who seek goodness. There are also those who are true as examples to those who seek truth. While we all have been guilty, the question that writes itself in the midst of this sanctuary is, “Are we prepared to respond when others find holiness, goodness and truth within us, and how shall we respond?”
I began this sermon with the thought that I have discovered accountability for my life as a Christian that demands to be answered. It is the same accountability that I have preached Sunday after Sunday for all these years. I will readily admit that I have not been anywhere near faithful to my calling. Yet, it is true that “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.”
My heart breaks when an inmate comes into my office, is about to be released, and I have nothing to offer him but trifles and platitudes. He comes seeking bread, but I can offer him nothing but a stone.
I am hoping over the next few months to put together a support group for released felons - a Second Chance ministry, if you will. How that will happen, I have no idea. I am almost too weary to take it on at this point in my life. It is, however, a crying shame that the bulk of our churches are not willing or able to open their arms to these discards of society. I ask myself, and I ask you, “Who better is there to whom to minister than those whom the world has rejected?”
I ask you to pray for wisdom as we begin plotting and planning for a ministry here that will reach people where they live instead of in their comfort zones. The church protects its comfort zones by preaching against abortion but overlooking unwed mothers. It preaches against homosexuality but overlooks pride. It endorses the free enterprise system but ignores greed both within and without the church.
I hope that when God looks at us, He sees a church here in North Manchester that seeks first His Kingdom, that deals honestly and vigorously with carrying its cross daily, that weeps over those kinds of injustices that are resistant to any kind of a human intervention and that lives the message that outside the grace of God through Jesus Christ, we are nothing and can do nothing.
October 15, 2008
Ezekiel 16:49-60
I have shared with you over the past several months the strange place in which I find myself as a chaplain in a maximum security prison. The way I have described it is that I could have gone my whole life without becoming exposed to such a desperate, irresolvable, negative environment. I think what washed over me was the thought that prison has disturbed my comfort zone. I should rather coast out in ignorance than come up against this seemingly impossible situation where my interpersonal skills simply don’t work very well, and I am forced to really trust God.
The way I have described it is to say, “I didn’t need to know about this.”
The Prophet Ezekiel is telling us in Ezekiel 16 how we use our blessings from God to insulate ourselves from the kind of reality we can’t change or don’t like. The fact is that we have a lot of things to think about in this Christian walk. There is the world out there that some Christians are trying to change with money, influence and politics. There is the church in here that some of the rest of us are trying to change. There are all those people in the middle who have become so numbed by God’s blessing on America that they are not interested in changing anything. Maybe they just want to be left alone.
As Christians, we can attack our culture and the sins of our culture and become oblivious to the rot that is destroying the Bride of Christ – the Church. In a sense, that is where Israel went wrong, and that is where the Christian Right is going wrong today. If we don’t face our own sins, we fail to stand for righteous and victorious living. Yet, if we focus too much on the sins within the church, we run the risk of destroying its life and vitality and turning it into a legalistic cult. No wonder the great mass of humanity prefers to zone out religious zeal from their lives. Religious zeal complicates comfortable living.
Let’s take a minute or so to examine Sodom and Gomorrah and Ezekiel’s condemnation of Israel as being worse than either. It is in the context of Israel’s somehow having done worse things than Sodom and Gomorrah and Samaria. Sodom and Gomorrah were burned for their sin, and Samaria, where the 10 tribes of Israel had relocated after Solomon’s reign, had been carried off to Assyria around 150 years before Jerusalem fell to Babylon.
Ezekiel is prophesying to his people in Babylon and telling them that they are going to be restored but that the daughters of Sodom, Gomorrah and Samaria are also going to be restored. In that way, he destroys the popular idea of a culture clash between those three cultures and states that Israel’s sin was twice as bad as was Samaria’s.
Faithful Jews would not understand such a statement, nor would the Church of Jesus Christ in America understand such a statement if that were to be said about us today.
Nobody knows much about Samaria, but everybody knows about Sodom. It has a sexual act named after it. Both the church and the world refer to Sodom as having been destroyed by fire for its homosexuality. When we think of Sodom, we think of promiscuity and judgment.
But when the Lord speaks of Sodom here, He describes their sin very differently. He doesn’t speak of homosexuality or licentiousness. He speaks, instead, of arrogance (or pride), gluttony and indifference. Those, apparently, were the sins of Sodom. Ezekiel speaks of Israelites and Sodomites as being sisters. That’s a touch of irony in a male-dominated homosexual environ!: “You would not even mention your sister Sodom in the day of your pride, before your (italics added) wickedness was uncovered” (v.56).
You will remember that when Lot and Abraham split up, Lot chose Sodom because it was fertile: “Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere” (Gen 13:10). Ezekiel refers to all those good things about Sodom as the source of their sin and destruction. They were arrogant, or proud. They became like gods. They put themselves on top of the ladder and would take instruction from no one. They had the attitude that they knew best what sort of behavior was acceptable and good.
Does that not sound like America – arrogant and proud? America acts as though it is superior to other cultures in the world and therefore has a right to set the standards for behavior. As with Sodom, sexual promiscuity has become a symptom of the disease of pride and arrogance. Divorce, homosexuality and all those uncomfortable sins out there are symptomatic of a society that makes its own laws and thinks it is free when it lives without restraint. And here comes the church of Jesus Christ, including most of us, condemning those sins, as did Israel, and at the same time falling victim to them, as did Israel. It reminds me of that old saying, “When you point your finger at someone else, you have three pointing at yourself.”
I met with my siblings last Saturday at a family wedding. My sister, Sue, who has played and sung here a number of times, was talking about her counseling practice to Christian women. It has been her experience that more than half the teenage girls in high school today are sexually active in a way that would shock you, as it did me. Being a Christian apparently is of little consequence. And yet, we point fingers at a promiscuous public of non-believers.
The same pride that has infected America has infected the church of Jesus Christ. Which came first is a matter of debate.
The Lord describes Sodom is being “overfed,’ or gluttonous. Gluttony describes our nation today, does it not? We have supermarkets full of food; we have homes abundant with luxuries; we have toys for our amusement in all kinds of weather and conditions; we trade our cars when the ashtrays get full, so to speak. God has given an abundance of material wealth to Americans. Yet, the Church of Jesus Christ, while condemning our culture for its gluttony, practices the sin of pride, a sin that is the prelude to sexual deviancy.
The Lord mentions the indifference of Sodom to its neighbors. In the King James Version, this is stated as “abundance of idleness.” That hits us where we live, does it not? We might refer to it as “prosperous ease.” There was nothing that gave the people of Sodom any anxiety. They had peace and prosperity, enjoyed an abundance of food with a good mix of work and leisure. Is that not like America, as well? The Church of Jesus Christ condemns such self-absorption but practices it itself without conviction.
The last thing that the Lord says about Sodom cuts to the core. She did not help the poor and the needy. The poor and the needy are uncomfortable realities for us comfortable suburbanites, are they not? God is not just talking about the down-and-outers of society. He is referring mostly to people who suffer from some kind of disability or distress, including those socially in need of protection from the arrogant and proud.
My passion, especially, is for those inmates who come out of prison with $50 and a bus ticket as far as Portland who can’t find housing or a job. We don’t want to know about those people, do we? It is better to talk about what they have done than what they could be doing now with our help. The two angels who came to Sodom that infamous night in Redemptive History found hospitality only in Lot’s home. When it became dark, the people of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house and demanded to have the two men for sex. Instead of supporting and assisting the two men and Lot’s family, their instinct was to abuse the vulnerable – the stranger.
That was a refusal to grant hospitality. That was the principal sin for which Sodom was condemned – refusal to extend hospitality to those in need of protection. If there had been 10 righteous people in Sodom, God would have spared the city. In the end, though, it was four – Lot, his wife and their two daughters, and Lot’s wife looked back because she could not bear to leave the pride, abundance and ease behind.
Why, we might ask, did the Lord not come right out and mention Sodom’s sin as we all understand it to be – the sin of sexual deviancy? Why mention first her pride, her gluttony and her indifference? The answer is that Sodom’s sin of sexual promiscuity was the ripe fruit of her pride, just as America’s sin of sexual deviancy is the ripe fruit of our pride.
Those things that Sodom had enjoyed – abundance of food, power and money – were blessings from God. Instead, they were abused to make themselves feel superior. The blessings were used for self instead of for God. While they relaxed the rules of their own living, they became desensitized to the actions of others. There is no record of anyone jumping in to help the two angels when they were under attack by that pack of human jackals. So God had to jump in and strike the men with blindness.
We have become gods unto ourselves in America. We have set our own rules of behavior. And many Christians, instead of rescuing those who suffer from their sin, are out there wagging their fingers at unwed mothers, sex offenders, murderers and sexual deviates. Self-love and self-congratulations will never lead to self-denial vital to showing compassion for those who are social rejects. If your world is only as big as yourself, and you use the prosperity that God has showered on you to satisfy only your own desires, why would you suddenly deny yourself for the sake of others?
Jerusalem’s sins were, somehow, even worse. In fact, they were guilty of the same sins because they tolerated the same attitudes. On the outside, Jerusalem was much like the church today. Its behaviors were nowhere near as repulsive as were those of the Sodomites. Despite the fact that their outward behavior was better than that of Sodom, they were worse because they had received the riches of the gospel and still succumbed to pride.
Do we as Christians – the New Jerusalem – view God’s abundant grace to us to be used for the benefit of others? Do we have an attitude of self-denial, seeking how we can best use our prosperity and peace and privileges for the benefit of others? Have we made it our business to help the poor and needy at home and abroad? Or do we consider the poor and needy a threat to our comforts?
The difference between the church and the world cannot be summed up in our sexuality or our positions on social issues. The difference between the church and the world lies in that first sin that God condemned through Ezekiel – pride.
That brings me to my concluding thoughts this morning – thoughts that were triggered by a sermon written and delivered by Charles Spurgeon in the mid 19th Century.
Those thoughts have to do, not with what the church sees when it looks at the world, but with what the world sees when it looks into the church.
What it sees when it looks into the church is either the person of Jesus Christ or justification for continuing in its own rebellion against God. If it sees the person of Jesus Christ, it does so despite the church’s flawed and imperfect life. If it sees only the justification for continuing in its sin, it does so because it sees there what it wants to see.
There is a classic example at the scene of the crucifixion of Christ. The thief on one side of Him saw what would justify his own rebellion against God: “If you be the Christ, save yourself and us!” The other said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” At the foot of the cross, people sneered and said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.” Then there was the Roman centurion at the moment of Jesus’ death, who praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous men.”
What we have is something very human here. When the church looks out into the world, some see corruption and are burdened by the world’s sin; others see the same corruption and are pleased with their own righteousness: “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men – like that sinner over there!” When the world looks into the church, some see hope and redemption; others see human failing and are pleased with their own righteousness. Spurgeon says that a man who is willing to find an excuse for being God’s enemy will never be at a loss when he looks into the church.
The issue before us as believers, however, is what God sees when He looks into the church. Does He see arrogance? Does He see gluttony? Does He see indifference? Or does He see concern for the poor and the needy – the socially abused and vulnerable? Does He see comfort, or does He see passion, not only for souls, but for the desperate plight of sinners wallowing in the pit of self? Does He see a church that condemns the behavior of others, or does He see a church that weeps over Zion?
These are convicting thoughts this morning, aren’t they? When we look at our mission in that light, we have to wonder what we could possibly offer a world dying in sin and loving it so. When pride becomes the sin, sex and self become the symptoms. We all get measured by the same standard – both within the church and outside the church.
The people of God give comfort to others by their murmurings and complaints. We talk about faith, but our faith does not often blossom into service. We grumble about the economy, the prices, low wages, political incompetency, as though God were treating us very badly. We show indifference and even cold-heartedness to others around us. Our churches are lukewarm and lifeless. We spend more time on worship than in prayer for others.
The Gospel is watered down to appeal to the enemies of God in order to look successful. We like everything to go smoothly and not be too unorthodox or too revved up. That also is the kind of church that the world likes – a church that operates beneath the radar and makes no waves. We focus on missions in far away places, while those around us are dying without Christ. In short, we help to keep sinners comfortable in their sin because we fail to exhibit our righteous standing before God and others, and we fail to stir the waters so that others may be healed.
The great sin of the church is that while we may be successful, rich, popular and entertaining, we are not witnesses of God in such a way that will stir men’s hearts to want what we have. We have not lived the righteous and sacrificial life that rebukes. It is a masterpiece of genius by the devil that he can use Christ’s own soldiers against Christ.
There is, however, a ray of hope. While the world looks at the church and finds it hypocritical and inconsistent, there are also those who are holy as examples to those who seek holiness. There are also those who are good as examples to those who seek goodness. There are also those who are true as examples to those who seek truth. While we all have been guilty, the question that writes itself in the midst of this sanctuary is, “Are we prepared to respond when others find holiness, goodness and truth within us, and how shall we respond?”
I began this sermon with the thought that I have discovered accountability for my life as a Christian that demands to be answered. It is the same accountability that I have preached Sunday after Sunday for all these years. I will readily admit that I have not been anywhere near faithful to my calling. Yet, it is true that “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.”
My heart breaks when an inmate comes into my office, is about to be released, and I have nothing to offer him but trifles and platitudes. He comes seeking bread, but I can offer him nothing but a stone.
I am hoping over the next few months to put together a support group for released felons - a Second Chance ministry, if you will. How that will happen, I have no idea. I am almost too weary to take it on at this point in my life. It is, however, a crying shame that the bulk of our churches are not willing or able to open their arms to these discards of society. I ask myself, and I ask you, “Who better is there to whom to minister than those whom the world has rejected?”
I ask you to pray for wisdom as we begin plotting and planning for a ministry here that will reach people where they live instead of in their comfort zones. The church protects its comfort zones by preaching against abortion but overlooking unwed mothers. It preaches against homosexuality but overlooks pride. It endorses the free enterprise system but ignores greed both within and without the church.
I hope that when God looks at us, He sees a church here in North Manchester that seeks first His Kingdom, that deals honestly and vigorously with carrying its cross daily, that weeps over those kinds of injustices that are resistant to any kind of a human intervention and that lives the message that outside the grace of God through Jesus Christ, we are nothing and can do nothing.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Fight the Good Fight!
By:
Stan Moody
September 18, 2008
1Timothy 6:3-21
In the 6th chapter of 1st Timothy, the Apostle Paul picks up on the dangers that the fledgling 1st Century Christian community faces in attempting to avoid persecution from Rome. Timothy is a disciple of Paul’s and a leader in the church that Paul had established in Ephesus, Turkey.
Ephesus was a center of sea trade and one of the most influential cites in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Paul had ministered there for 3 years and was warning Timothy to guard against the tendency for the church to conform to their surroundings and fall victim to false teachers.
The church at Ephesus was credited by God in Revelation 2 for its good deeds, its hard work and its perseverance. It had successfully built into its culture an intolerance for “wicked men.” Somehow, unlike the church in America today, the church at Ephesus has successfully resisted false teachers:
Over a long period of time, the church at Ephesus had refused to tolerate sin among its members. They had resisted the widespread sexual practices of those who worshipped the goddess Artemis. In a world of tolerance such as that of the Roman Empire and the American Empire, it is popular to be open-minded toward sins, calling them personal choices or alternative lifestyles. That is all well and good. The church, however, must police itself.
When the church begins to tolerate an unrepentant spirit in its own congregations, it lowers its standards and compromises its witness. It is one thing to favor civil rights for everyone. It is another thing to favor civil rights within the church to the extent we become overly concerned with not offending anyone. The church is designed to police itself. Ephesus apparently had done a good job at policing itself morally and ethically, but it had fallen way short of the mission and goal of the Church of Jesus Christ.
I have often reminded you that “judgment begins,” not in the world in which we live and make our livings, but in the House of God. Repentance begins, not in evangelistic rallies but in the church among God’s people. We come here not to impress ourselves and each other with our righteousness but to live out our brokenness before God so that He may demonstrate His strength through our weaknesses.
Where the Ephesians were failing was that they had resisted sin out of their pride for their own righteous living. They had lost their zeal for God. They had become a busy church, doing much to benefit themselves and their community. Their work, however, was no longer motivated by their love for God.
We are going to explore this morning how fighting the fight against sin is apostasy if we are not fighting the “good fight of faith.”
Fighting seems to be a popular pastime in human history. We spend our lives fighting to gain a foothold in society. Not only do we lurch from war to war; we fight our parents while growing up; we fight our government; we fight against authority of any kind, and we fight to make a living and to ensure our comfort.
Young and old; high and low; rich and poor; educated and uneducated; we all have a very deep interest in fighting. You have only to take a look at the passion for sports in this country, and you can see the passion for fighting. The bloodier the sport, the more interest we have.
Our divorce courts are filled with fighting couples. People are suing each other over nothing. Sexual preferences are a cause for fighting among ourselves. This disgusting political season is just one more example of people fighting each other in order to become our Messiah-for-a-day. In the meantime, the Church of Jesus Christ is fighting for a piece of the power pie so that it might outlaw a short list of sins. It is fighting the fight of the damned rather than the good fight of faith.
I stand before you this morning as one who has been engaged in many fights over my lifetime. When I awaken in the middle of the night, I cringe over where some of those fights have taken me. Rather than the fight of faith, it often has been about fighting for a position at the top of the hill. I am reminded of that old saying, “too soon old and too late smart.” But then, I am energized by another saying, “It’s never too late!”
My time at the prison has made me aware that I had never taken Satan vey seriously. I have met him very up close and personal at the prison. I am inclined to lay all my past fighting at the feet of failing to take Satan seriously.
We as Christians and Americans have a hard time adhering to the words of Jesus, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” We have a hard time wrapping our minds and lives around this because, let’s face it, there is much about America to be loved. We tend too easily to engage not the good fight of faith but the bad fight of worldly passion and success, thinking that success is the mark of God’s blessing on a faithful people.
The news the Christians do not want to hear is that the good fight of faith is quietly carried out within human hearts in little groups of seekers of the Kingdom of God such as in the NMMH Church. It is then reflected through those hearts to a world that seeks contentment that only true godliness brings to the broken. You can pass all the laws you want. You can crusade for justice. You can give yourself to missions and good works. But the bottom line is that for most of us our final parting shot is a quarter of a column in the local newspaper, a loving epitaph by folks who will now spend our money and finally the eternal Judgment over whether we fought the good fight of faith.
We are told in the Scriptures to “Put on the whole armor of God.” That is the good fight of faith that has nothing to do with fighting against the laws that our pagan nation has put into place. By failing to take Satan seriously, we are failing to take up arms and therefore become complacent Christians with sloppy discipleship.
We may be good church members; we may be married in a Christian service; we may be buried as Christians when we die. But, have we fought the good fight of faith?
In 1 Timothy 6, Paul lays out the characteristics of waging a fight of faith within the church. Those who are under authority – employees and prisoners, for example – are to consider their masters worthy of full respect, whether Christians or not, so that God’s name will not be slandered (v. 1). Paul condemns false teachers who are conceited while understanding nothing (v. 2), those who quarrel over words and cause friction, who rob the truth and think that godliness is a path to financial success. That’s where we get all this frenetic business about the Second Coming and Armageddon and the health and wealth gospel. False teachers!
Paul reminds us that “godliness with contentment is great gain” (v. 6). How easy it is for any of us to worry about what is going to happen tomorrow. We spend our lives fighting and worrying, don’t we? The American financial system seems to be falling apart. We may be on the verge of another Great Depression. If not, we may be facing runaway inflation with all this debt we are accumulating - $5Trillion worth of national debt. With the bailout of AIG, we citizens of the US have assumed their $10 Trillion worth of debt. What if it all collapses? Where will we be then?
In all this chaos and confusion, we somehow are supposed to be content with food and clothing, for “we brought nothing into this world, and cannot take anything out of it” (v. 7). “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction” (v. 8). “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (v. 10).
As I was growing up, I came to the conclusion that the simple people with whom I worshipped were putting too much emphasis on faith and not enough on their own preparation. They had not fought to be in a position of power so that through their lifestyles they could be more effective witnesses. I was dead wrong! That was putting the cart before the horse. You don’t begin to fight the good fight of faith after you have gotten the credentials. The credentials may be helpful but are secondary to fighting the good fight of faith. The fight is not for credentials; the fight is for your own soul and the very soul of Christ’s church.
“Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share” (vs. 17, 18).
The so-called American Dream makes it easy not to trust God, particularly when we assume as I did as a young person that the evidence of God’s blessing on a life was success. “If these people are so righteous,” I thought, “how come they are not successful?” That’s the health and wealth gospel that robs us of the truth and makes us believe that godliness is the path to financial success (v. 5).
John Piper ties all this wasted energy to the warning of the Scriptures against covetousness. When you think about it, every message in the Bible points to the danger of covetousness. The entire Ten Commandments are about covetousness – desiring something so much that you lose your contentment in God and your deep and abiding compassion for your neighbor. You fail to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength because you want something else or someone else. You fail to love your neighbor because you are too busy grasping something for yourself. You take other people’s property, other people’s spouses and other people’s possessions because you want them for yourself. Paul counters with, “Godliness with contentment is great gain.”
Covetousness is the breeding ground for a thousand other sins. The Church of Jesus Christ has turned away from its first love because it wants to be like other people – doesn’t want to be considered as a peculiar people and does not want to be unsuccessful or appear weak.
To fight the good fight of faith, then, is to run away from the trap of covetousness. When you see it coming in the guise of an opportunity for “making a difference,” evaluate it and run away from it with faith that God will help. When you see it coming in the form of a new experience from a brochure or a catalogue, run away from it with faith that God will help.
Biblical history tells us that even though Israel pursued the law in the same way the Christian Right is pursuing the law today, she did not attain it because she pursued it by works rather than by faith. “Works” attained by the law is the kind of warfare that is not by faith. It robs us of the contentment that is ours by true godliness. It is condemned in the Scriptures, and yet America is deeply engaged in that very kind of warfare. Christian worship, if it is not entertaining and condemning of what those evil non-Christians are doing out there, is not worship today.
How can we possibly fight if, at the same time, we are content? That’s a good question. What it suggests is that the fight is against our natures. Somehow, we cannot fight unless we are content. Caving into our natures may make us fighters in one sense, but it robs us of our contentment. In order for the church to be triumphant over sin in the world, every one of us must fight the good fight of faith within ourselves and within our communities of worship. Taking the fight to the legislature is the fight of works, not faith. The fight belongs within every one of us daily.
We are called to be soldiers and must arise in the morning ready to fight the trend within ourselves to make the world and its temporary benefits our true home. The fight within the daily life of every Christian is three-fold – the world, the flesh and the devil. Those are the enemies against whom we must put on the whole armor of God.
To fight the world is to resist daily the love of the world’s good things, to overcome fear of the world’s laughter or condemnation of belief, to squelch our desire to be accepted by the world, to stifle our secret wish not to be different and to empty us of our fear of being extreme in our views.
Christianity is an extreme religion. It is the religion of a peculiar people. It is a radical religion that flies in the face of every popular instinct. It is a religion that you should not accept unless and until you are ready to fight.
The flesh is the second fight we must engage. That requires that we face squarely our own weaknesses by struggling daily in prayer. Do you know your weaknesses, or are you assuming that you are disciplined enough to keep them hidden? They are not hidden from God. Paul cries out in Romans 7, “I see a law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin in my nature. Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Paul, with all his education, training and 3-yrs of fellowship in the desert with the Spirit is decrying his own weaknesses and acknowledging his total dependence on Jesus Christ for deliverance. Are we merely putting a cover on our weaknesses, or are we bringing them to God in prayer daily?
The devil is the third fight we must engage daily. He is not dead. Ever since the fall of Adam and Eve, he has been restlessly walking to and fro on the earth working toward your ruin and mine. He never slumbers nor sleeps. While you and I work hard for our piece of the American Dream, Satan uses the American Dream to offer us a false contentment and to divert us from God. He is a murderer and a liar, sometimes suggesting superstition or luck; sometimes suggesting infidelity; always waging a campaign against our souls.
We make a mistake when we underestimate or underrate Satan. We make a mistake when we minimize Hell. We make a mistake when we view Heaven as a boring future. I know because I have made all those mistakes and continue to do so at one level or another. We are here to help each other engage in the good fight of faith.
We make a mistake when we fall into a comfortable religiosity. The overriding issue of whether or not we want to be Christians has nothing to do with making a personal choice among a myriad of religious choices open to us. It has to do with whether or not we are prepared to fight for our own souls and trust God in faith to be victorious.
We eat, we drink, we dress well, we work, we amuse ourselves, we get money, we spend money and we go through a round of formal religious services once a week. But the great spiritual warfare involves vigilance, agonies, anxieties, battles and contests within. The worst chains of slavery to the world and the things of the world are those lurid attractions of the world embellished by Satan and not felt by us as prisoners because we have been desensitized to their presence.
The Christian good fight of faith is totally unlike the conflicts with which we are accustomed in our daily living in the world. It does not depend on a strong arm, a quick eye or a swift foot. It is not waged with weapons of human goodness but with spiritual weapons unseen by the unfaithful. Success in the Kingdom of God is not reflected in our bank accounts or our resumes but, instead, depends entirely on believing, especially when there is no physical evidence of that success.
In the way of encouragement, I should hasten to say to you this morning that while this is a private fight, it also is a community fight. We are here to help each other arm ourselves for war. Do you find yourself falling short of the Kingdom of God? Do you find your flesh warring against your spirit and your spirit against your flesh? Are you conscience of two enemies at war contending for your allegiance? If so, that is a good thing. That says that you are no friend of Satan. That says that Satan, who does not assault his own people, has keyed on you because he wants to discourage you in your walk with his enemy, God.
Anything better than apathy, stagnation, deadness of spirit and indifference puts you in a better state than most Christians today, many of whom have no feeling at all except to fight against what their unbelieving neighbor is doing.
Do not be discouraged that you feel that you do not have enough faith or have less than that of others. Faith is a matter of degree in everyone. All people do not believe alike. Every Christian has ebbs and flows of faith and believes more at one time than at another. But fight according to the faith you have been given and pray for faith to wage the good fight. Those who have the most faith will always be the happiest, most content soldiers.
Worldly wars that are sometimes necessary are always evil. They usher into eternity those who are totally unprepared for Judgment. They bring out the worst passions of mankind. They destroy and waste property and bring out racism and bigotry even among Christians. They fill the peaceful hours of life with the mourning of widows and orphans. They spread poverty, taxation and national distress. They derange the order of society and interrupt the witness of the Gospel. They direct our energies toward killing and physical results rather than toward good deeds and spiritual results. Every Christian ought to be crying out, “Lord, give us peace in our time!”
The “good fight,” however is quite another thing. We have the best of generals – the Lord Jesus Christ. He cares for the weakest and the poorest among us. He guides and directs us daily. His eye is on His people. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He never rejects those who come to Him in faith. No soldiers of Christ are ever lost, missing in action or left dead on the battlefield.
It is a good fight because it does an enormous amount of good to the soul. It calls forth the best things of life. It promotes humility and charity. It lessens selfishness and worldliness. It encourages people to put their affection on things above. It does good in the world. Wherever true Christian’s live, they are a blessing. They raise the standard of religion and morality by their lives and their contentment while the world is falling apart around them.
Fighting the good fight of faith means to engage the struggle without seeing the end - taking on the campaign without seeing the reward; reaching for the cross without the crown. This is hard, thankless piece of work that leaves us not looking very righteous to others but being content.
The time is always short. The Kingdom is at hand. The Lord who has come will appear again. There is urgency about this fight of faith.
I need your help to engage this fight with courage not seen in the traditional church today. You need my help to fight and overcome complacency. We need each other’s help to be prepared to live as a peculiar people, aliens and strangers in this land but adopted children of the Most High God.
We need each other’s help to fight the good fight of faith and to lay hold of eternal life to which each of us has been called. We have been called; it is time to answer the call.
Stan Moody
September 18, 2008
1Timothy 6:3-21
In the 6th chapter of 1st Timothy, the Apostle Paul picks up on the dangers that the fledgling 1st Century Christian community faces in attempting to avoid persecution from Rome. Timothy is a disciple of Paul’s and a leader in the church that Paul had established in Ephesus, Turkey.
Ephesus was a center of sea trade and one of the most influential cites in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Paul had ministered there for 3 years and was warning Timothy to guard against the tendency for the church to conform to their surroundings and fall victim to false teachers.
The church at Ephesus was credited by God in Revelation 2 for its good deeds, its hard work and its perseverance. It had successfully built into its culture an intolerance for “wicked men.” Somehow, unlike the church in America today, the church at Ephesus has successfully resisted false teachers:
I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.
Yet, I hold this against you. You have forsaken your first love. Remember the heights from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place.
Over a long period of time, the church at Ephesus had refused to tolerate sin among its members. They had resisted the widespread sexual practices of those who worshipped the goddess Artemis. In a world of tolerance such as that of the Roman Empire and the American Empire, it is popular to be open-minded toward sins, calling them personal choices or alternative lifestyles. That is all well and good. The church, however, must police itself.
When the church begins to tolerate an unrepentant spirit in its own congregations, it lowers its standards and compromises its witness. It is one thing to favor civil rights for everyone. It is another thing to favor civil rights within the church to the extent we become overly concerned with not offending anyone. The church is designed to police itself. Ephesus apparently had done a good job at policing itself morally and ethically, but it had fallen way short of the mission and goal of the Church of Jesus Christ.
I have often reminded you that “judgment begins,” not in the world in which we live and make our livings, but in the House of God. Repentance begins, not in evangelistic rallies but in the church among God’s people. We come here not to impress ourselves and each other with our righteousness but to live out our brokenness before God so that He may demonstrate His strength through our weaknesses.
Where the Ephesians were failing was that they had resisted sin out of their pride for their own righteous living. They had lost their zeal for God. They had become a busy church, doing much to benefit themselves and their community. Their work, however, was no longer motivated by their love for God.
We are going to explore this morning how fighting the fight against sin is apostasy if we are not fighting the “good fight of faith.”
Fighting seems to be a popular pastime in human history. We spend our lives fighting to gain a foothold in society. Not only do we lurch from war to war; we fight our parents while growing up; we fight our government; we fight against authority of any kind, and we fight to make a living and to ensure our comfort.
Young and old; high and low; rich and poor; educated and uneducated; we all have a very deep interest in fighting. You have only to take a look at the passion for sports in this country, and you can see the passion for fighting. The bloodier the sport, the more interest we have.
Our divorce courts are filled with fighting couples. People are suing each other over nothing. Sexual preferences are a cause for fighting among ourselves. This disgusting political season is just one more example of people fighting each other in order to become our Messiah-for-a-day. In the meantime, the Church of Jesus Christ is fighting for a piece of the power pie so that it might outlaw a short list of sins. It is fighting the fight of the damned rather than the good fight of faith.
I stand before you this morning as one who has been engaged in many fights over my lifetime. When I awaken in the middle of the night, I cringe over where some of those fights have taken me. Rather than the fight of faith, it often has been about fighting for a position at the top of the hill. I am reminded of that old saying, “too soon old and too late smart.” But then, I am energized by another saying, “It’s never too late!”
My time at the prison has made me aware that I had never taken Satan vey seriously. I have met him very up close and personal at the prison. I am inclined to lay all my past fighting at the feet of failing to take Satan seriously.
We as Christians and Americans have a hard time adhering to the words of Jesus, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” We have a hard time wrapping our minds and lives around this because, let’s face it, there is much about America to be loved. We tend too easily to engage not the good fight of faith but the bad fight of worldly passion and success, thinking that success is the mark of God’s blessing on a faithful people.
The news the Christians do not want to hear is that the good fight of faith is quietly carried out within human hearts in little groups of seekers of the Kingdom of God such as in the NMMH Church. It is then reflected through those hearts to a world that seeks contentment that only true godliness brings to the broken. You can pass all the laws you want. You can crusade for justice. You can give yourself to missions and good works. But the bottom line is that for most of us our final parting shot is a quarter of a column in the local newspaper, a loving epitaph by folks who will now spend our money and finally the eternal Judgment over whether we fought the good fight of faith.
We are told in the Scriptures to “Put on the whole armor of God.” That is the good fight of faith that has nothing to do with fighting against the laws that our pagan nation has put into place. By failing to take Satan seriously, we are failing to take up arms and therefore become complacent Christians with sloppy discipleship.
We may be good church members; we may be married in a Christian service; we may be buried as Christians when we die. But, have we fought the good fight of faith?
In 1 Timothy 6, Paul lays out the characteristics of waging a fight of faith within the church. Those who are under authority – employees and prisoners, for example – are to consider their masters worthy of full respect, whether Christians or not, so that God’s name will not be slandered (v. 1). Paul condemns false teachers who are conceited while understanding nothing (v. 2), those who quarrel over words and cause friction, who rob the truth and think that godliness is a path to financial success. That’s where we get all this frenetic business about the Second Coming and Armageddon and the health and wealth gospel. False teachers!
Paul reminds us that “godliness with contentment is great gain” (v. 6). How easy it is for any of us to worry about what is going to happen tomorrow. We spend our lives fighting and worrying, don’t we? The American financial system seems to be falling apart. We may be on the verge of another Great Depression. If not, we may be facing runaway inflation with all this debt we are accumulating - $5Trillion worth of national debt. With the bailout of AIG, we citizens of the US have assumed their $10 Trillion worth of debt. What if it all collapses? Where will we be then?
In all this chaos and confusion, we somehow are supposed to be content with food and clothing, for “we brought nothing into this world, and cannot take anything out of it” (v. 7). “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction” (v. 8). “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (v. 10).
As I was growing up, I came to the conclusion that the simple people with whom I worshipped were putting too much emphasis on faith and not enough on their own preparation. They had not fought to be in a position of power so that through their lifestyles they could be more effective witnesses. I was dead wrong! That was putting the cart before the horse. You don’t begin to fight the good fight of faith after you have gotten the credentials. The credentials may be helpful but are secondary to fighting the good fight of faith. The fight is not for credentials; the fight is for your own soul and the very soul of Christ’s church.
“Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share” (vs. 17, 18).
The so-called American Dream makes it easy not to trust God, particularly when we assume as I did as a young person that the evidence of God’s blessing on a life was success. “If these people are so righteous,” I thought, “how come they are not successful?” That’s the health and wealth gospel that robs us of the truth and makes us believe that godliness is the path to financial success (v. 5).
John Piper ties all this wasted energy to the warning of the Scriptures against covetousness. When you think about it, every message in the Bible points to the danger of covetousness. The entire Ten Commandments are about covetousness – desiring something so much that you lose your contentment in God and your deep and abiding compassion for your neighbor. You fail to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength because you want something else or someone else. You fail to love your neighbor because you are too busy grasping something for yourself. You take other people’s property, other people’s spouses and other people’s possessions because you want them for yourself. Paul counters with, “Godliness with contentment is great gain.”
Covetousness is the breeding ground for a thousand other sins. The Church of Jesus Christ has turned away from its first love because it wants to be like other people – doesn’t want to be considered as a peculiar people and does not want to be unsuccessful or appear weak.
To fight the good fight of faith, then, is to run away from the trap of covetousness. When you see it coming in the guise of an opportunity for “making a difference,” evaluate it and run away from it with faith that God will help. When you see it coming in the form of a new experience from a brochure or a catalogue, run away from it with faith that God will help.
Biblical history tells us that even though Israel pursued the law in the same way the Christian Right is pursuing the law today, she did not attain it because she pursued it by works rather than by faith. “Works” attained by the law is the kind of warfare that is not by faith. It robs us of the contentment that is ours by true godliness. It is condemned in the Scriptures, and yet America is deeply engaged in that very kind of warfare. Christian worship, if it is not entertaining and condemning of what those evil non-Christians are doing out there, is not worship today.
How can we possibly fight if, at the same time, we are content? That’s a good question. What it suggests is that the fight is against our natures. Somehow, we cannot fight unless we are content. Caving into our natures may make us fighters in one sense, but it robs us of our contentment. In order for the church to be triumphant over sin in the world, every one of us must fight the good fight of faith within ourselves and within our communities of worship. Taking the fight to the legislature is the fight of works, not faith. The fight belongs within every one of us daily.
We are called to be soldiers and must arise in the morning ready to fight the trend within ourselves to make the world and its temporary benefits our true home. The fight within the daily life of every Christian is three-fold – the world, the flesh and the devil. Those are the enemies against whom we must put on the whole armor of God.
To fight the world is to resist daily the love of the world’s good things, to overcome fear of the world’s laughter or condemnation of belief, to squelch our desire to be accepted by the world, to stifle our secret wish not to be different and to empty us of our fear of being extreme in our views.
Christianity is an extreme religion. It is the religion of a peculiar people. It is a radical religion that flies in the face of every popular instinct. It is a religion that you should not accept unless and until you are ready to fight.
The flesh is the second fight we must engage. That requires that we face squarely our own weaknesses by struggling daily in prayer. Do you know your weaknesses, or are you assuming that you are disciplined enough to keep them hidden? They are not hidden from God. Paul cries out in Romans 7, “I see a law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin in my nature. Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Paul, with all his education, training and 3-yrs of fellowship in the desert with the Spirit is decrying his own weaknesses and acknowledging his total dependence on Jesus Christ for deliverance. Are we merely putting a cover on our weaknesses, or are we bringing them to God in prayer daily?
The devil is the third fight we must engage daily. He is not dead. Ever since the fall of Adam and Eve, he has been restlessly walking to and fro on the earth working toward your ruin and mine. He never slumbers nor sleeps. While you and I work hard for our piece of the American Dream, Satan uses the American Dream to offer us a false contentment and to divert us from God. He is a murderer and a liar, sometimes suggesting superstition or luck; sometimes suggesting infidelity; always waging a campaign against our souls.
We make a mistake when we underestimate or underrate Satan. We make a mistake when we minimize Hell. We make a mistake when we view Heaven as a boring future. I know because I have made all those mistakes and continue to do so at one level or another. We are here to help each other engage in the good fight of faith.
We make a mistake when we fall into a comfortable religiosity. The overriding issue of whether or not we want to be Christians has nothing to do with making a personal choice among a myriad of religious choices open to us. It has to do with whether or not we are prepared to fight for our own souls and trust God in faith to be victorious.
We eat, we drink, we dress well, we work, we amuse ourselves, we get money, we spend money and we go through a round of formal religious services once a week. But the great spiritual warfare involves vigilance, agonies, anxieties, battles and contests within. The worst chains of slavery to the world and the things of the world are those lurid attractions of the world embellished by Satan and not felt by us as prisoners because we have been desensitized to their presence.
The Christian good fight of faith is totally unlike the conflicts with which we are accustomed in our daily living in the world. It does not depend on a strong arm, a quick eye or a swift foot. It is not waged with weapons of human goodness but with spiritual weapons unseen by the unfaithful. Success in the Kingdom of God is not reflected in our bank accounts or our resumes but, instead, depends entirely on believing, especially when there is no physical evidence of that success.
In the way of encouragement, I should hasten to say to you this morning that while this is a private fight, it also is a community fight. We are here to help each other arm ourselves for war. Do you find yourself falling short of the Kingdom of God? Do you find your flesh warring against your spirit and your spirit against your flesh? Are you conscience of two enemies at war contending for your allegiance? If so, that is a good thing. That says that you are no friend of Satan. That says that Satan, who does not assault his own people, has keyed on you because he wants to discourage you in your walk with his enemy, God.
Anything better than apathy, stagnation, deadness of spirit and indifference puts you in a better state than most Christians today, many of whom have no feeling at all except to fight against what their unbelieving neighbor is doing.
Do not be discouraged that you feel that you do not have enough faith or have less than that of others. Faith is a matter of degree in everyone. All people do not believe alike. Every Christian has ebbs and flows of faith and believes more at one time than at another. But fight according to the faith you have been given and pray for faith to wage the good fight. Those who have the most faith will always be the happiest, most content soldiers.
Worldly wars that are sometimes necessary are always evil. They usher into eternity those who are totally unprepared for Judgment. They bring out the worst passions of mankind. They destroy and waste property and bring out racism and bigotry even among Christians. They fill the peaceful hours of life with the mourning of widows and orphans. They spread poverty, taxation and national distress. They derange the order of society and interrupt the witness of the Gospel. They direct our energies toward killing and physical results rather than toward good deeds and spiritual results. Every Christian ought to be crying out, “Lord, give us peace in our time!”
The “good fight,” however is quite another thing. We have the best of generals – the Lord Jesus Christ. He cares for the weakest and the poorest among us. He guides and directs us daily. His eye is on His people. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He never rejects those who come to Him in faith. No soldiers of Christ are ever lost, missing in action or left dead on the battlefield.
It is a good fight because it does an enormous amount of good to the soul. It calls forth the best things of life. It promotes humility and charity. It lessens selfishness and worldliness. It encourages people to put their affection on things above. It does good in the world. Wherever true Christian’s live, they are a blessing. They raise the standard of religion and morality by their lives and their contentment while the world is falling apart around them.
Fighting the good fight of faith means to engage the struggle without seeing the end - taking on the campaign without seeing the reward; reaching for the cross without the crown. This is hard, thankless piece of work that leaves us not looking very righteous to others but being content.
The time is always short. The Kingdom is at hand. The Lord who has come will appear again. There is urgency about this fight of faith.
I need your help to engage this fight with courage not seen in the traditional church today. You need my help to fight and overcome complacency. We need each other’s help to be prepared to live as a peculiar people, aliens and strangers in this land but adopted children of the Most High God.
We need each other’s help to fight the good fight of faith and to lay hold of eternal life to which each of us has been called. We have been called; it is time to answer the call.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Regression Progression!
By:
Stan Moody
September 11, 2008
Matthew 18:1-11
Two things there are that seem certain in this life besides death and taxes. The first is that when we are children, we can’t wait to grow up so that we can take over our own lives. The age of 21 seems to a kid to be the point at which all our hopes and dreams are realized and we are now positioned to the long trip down hill. We get to age 21, and we begin to realize that the toughest challenges yet lie ahead. Every decade, even when you are 80, becomes a challenge. We humans forever chafe at being under the thumb of authority, and to us progress means moving into the next decade as quickly as possible.
That is, perhaps, the point at which Jesus speaks to us in this 18th chapter of Matthew, v. 3: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The only answer is the one we give to Peggy Lee, “No; Peggy, that is not all there is. There is the business of becoming somebody – my career and raising a family that will be a credit to me.” As we approach 30, though, our goals and our dreams become empty as we attain them, and Jesus begins to speak more loudly: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven! What part of “never” don’t we understand?
The great irony in all this is that at the very time we are in progression, we begin to realize that we also are in regression – back to the earth, another certainty. We are racing toward our own demise, and we put on a full press to fulfill ourselves. Jesus begins to speak more loudly: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!
The peace that God promises to those who seek first the kingdom of God and the righteousness of Christ is that the only progression worth having is the that of the road less traveled – the narrow way of the Kingdom of God. Some wise person once said, “All sin goes back to ‘I want to be somebody.’” The Bible teaches that the first requirement of getting the things we need is to first seek after the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells us, however, that in order even to enter the Kingdom of God, we have to go back to the starting point – become as little children.
We will be thinking this morning about what Jesus was intending for us to hear in that message.
Last Sunday, we had a visitor from a local fundamentalist church that is growing by leaps and bounds. During the prayer-request time, he asked to speak and, essentially, invited you to become saved. This was in reaction to the perception locally that you have never heard the Gospel here at the NMMH Church. I thought it was one of the rudest, most judgmental things I had ever seen happen in a church. However, it encouraged within me some soul searching of my own, giving rise to the sermon this morning.
A couple of other things happened recently. On Friday afternoons, there is a woman who comes into the prison to visit her husband. I am told that she corresponds with some 900 inmates across the country. She does not know who I am, but I have figured out who she is by association.
One Friday, I walked into the lobby deep in thought, and her voice rang out through a room full of people, “Sir, you need to smile more!” Is that it? The joy of the Lord is reflected in a smile? Is that what we have come to in this country – that happiness is wrapped up in how we appear to other people? Or was this just another rude, boundary-crashing member of the Christian Right?
Finally, the last object lesson – Brandon Drewry. I have been working with Brandon Drewry for months now. He was homeless, living in Portland’s little Bowery – the Bayside region. He had been in town for 3 days and was arrested and tried 27 months later for gross sexual assault on a street woman. There was not a scrid of physical evidence. He was defended by the public defender system, convicted and sentenced to 30 years solely on the testimony of two crack/cocaine addicts.
I thought Brandon’s story needed to be told – the failure of the public defender system and the public outcry to get the homeless out of our sight. Whether he did it or not, I don’t know and don’t really care. The point is that at age 47, unless he gets a sentence reduction or clemency, he will be going out feet first because not only is he mentally ill; he has been diagnosed with PTSD and Hepatitis A.
His previous life was as a cab driver and a petty drug dealer in Daytona Beach, FL. I have tried to make him understand that the Kingdom of God precedes anything he does to gain a legal remedy. His answer is that he is a good person because he has never done anything to hurt anyone. In other words, he may have been guilty of misfeasance, but he is not guilty of malfeasance. He wants a chance to prove that he is inherently good but sees the Kingdom of God as a diversion from the goal of his life – getting out of prison. He sees no harm to anyone in selling dope.
I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God!
When we think about the qualities of a child, what comes immediately to mind are “vulnerable, dependent, teachable and focused.” Those are the easy ones.
The context of this message by Jesus to His disciples is important for us. First, this is not a generic message like the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has just been asked a question by his disciples, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” As they often did, they had been arguing among themselves as to which one of them would be top dog when Jesus established His kingdom in Jerusalem, an event that was never going to happen.
That seems very adult, doesn’t it? “Who is in charge? Who is going to be President?” Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven on earth?”
Bear in mind that these people to whom Jesus is talking are not neophytes who have never heard the Gospel. They have been with Him now for some time – nearly 3 years. Under those conditions, we would think that they were already citizens of the Kingdom of God. They had given up everything to follow Him. They had heard all the best sermons on the love of God ever preached in the history of mankind. They knew that Jesus was the way to salvation. Yet, there was this one thing.
They were arguing about which one of them would be the greatest in a Kingdom they would not even enter unless they changed, regressed and became as little children. They were jockeying for position, like a bunch of egocentric politicians: “Who is the greatest?” To merely enter the Kingdom required that they give up jockeying for position.
With respect to our day, you might say that the disciples to whom Jesus was speaking were professing Christians – those, perhaps, who had repeated the Sinner’s Prayer. To our visitor last week who thought that the way into the kingdom of heaven was by locking in the precise date you were saved – to mark it on the calendar – perhaps he has forgotten that while the kingdom of God is about accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, there is a little-mentioned other piece of business: “He who perseveres (endures) to the end will be saved” (Matt. 24:13). Just as the Kingdom of God is present already but not yet fulfilled, so our salvation is present already but not yet fulfilled.
The path to fulfillment is to change, to humble ourselves and to become as little children, making certain that we do not “look down on one of these little ones” along the way. That is the message of Matthew 18.
OK; what does it mean to someone already schooled in the way of grace to become as a little child? I had the advantage of the classic sermons of George Whitfield to help us get through this “regression progression.” George Whitfield was the preacher who, along with Jonathan Edwards and the Wesley’s, kicked off the First Great Awakening of the early 18th Century.
I would be quick to point out here that, while it has taken each of us decades to become adults, it will perhaps take us decades to reverse the direction. I tell you that because “regression progression,” like the victorious Kingdom of God, is a process, not an instant reversal. That is why perseverance to the end is a critical component of salvation.
At the same time we are grasping for some degree of personal power and glory – those things that elude most kids – we are haunted by the reality that we are hurtling toward our own demise and then the Judgment. We want to be certain how to stand up at the Judgment and hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joys of your Lord.”
Brandon Drewry’s formula is too risky – “Do no harm.” Our visitor’s formula is equally risky – memorize the date you were saved. Since only some 4% of those who go down to the altar at evangelistic rallies actually stick with the long-range program, celebrating your salvation date is pretty risky for something that will not be declared as finished until the “end” of our lives.
To put a smile on your face, showing the world how happy you are since you accepted Jesus, is also very risky. There are a lot of mental patients who wear smiles on their faces. Sometimes a smile can be a barrier against real communication. It can be a put-down to someone wrestling with real problems. It can be a defense mechanism to keep other people at bay. Chances are, it has nothing to do with entering the Kingdom of God.
These are the things that people do who have a Christ in their heads but no Christ in their hearts. Yet, Jesus says, I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
The words of Jesus imply that before you or I can have any well-grounded hope of being happy in a future state, there must be some great, notable and amazing change that passes over our souls and dramatically alters our allegiances. While we watch our bodies change, why is it that we pay so little attention to changing our souls so that our temper, our conduct and our habits become progressively centered on God and His Kingdom?
Jesus is not telling us to go back to being a blank piece of paper. Anyone who has raised children knows that they are not sinless by any stretch. Kids are conceived and born into sin. Any parent who is paying attention will be able to tell you that if you do not understand that, and if you do not discover the overwhelming urge of self-will in a child, your child is headed for big trouble, and you are headed for big grief.
Jesus is not telling us, therefore, that in order to enter the Kingdom of God we must become innocent, naïve and sinless – far from it.
On the other hand, while kids are certainly innocent compared with grownups, they have hearts that are sensual and minds that are carnal, and they lie with impunity much of the time. How many of us as parents have spent hours trying to unravel one of their lies. Does Jesus want us to become like that? I think He assumes that we have already taken lying to an art form. No; there is something more to this matter of becoming as little children.
Let’s not forget that the context to this statement by Jesus was a dispute over which of the disciples was going to be the greatest in the kingdom – a very adult exercise. The child-object lesson, then, is not only Jesus’ antidote to power and ambition but is the key to turning the corner from “me” and my legacy to God and His glory. In this time when our nation is preoccupied with change, Jesus offers change that is eternal and rejects the lust after power and ambition.
On the other hand, this has nothing to do with closing our businesses, resigning our positions on the school board and retiring to the woods, turning into hermits. The problem with that remedy is that our sinful hearts follow there with us. Christianity is a social religion. We have to stay engaged in whatever it is we are doing.
What Jesus is telling us here, I think, is that while we are not to go out of this world, if we are truly converted, or changed, we will be loose from this world. Though we are engaged in it through our careers, our families and our relationships, yet if we are real Christians we will be loosely tied to the world wherein we raise our families and earn our livings. Ask a child about presidents and senators and representatives and bishops, and he will have no idea what you are talking about because he is loose to the world – loosey-goosey, so to speak. Children live in the world but are restricted to their own authority structures. That is where God wants us to be – to live in the world but to owe our allegiance to the authority structure that He has appointed for us.
Be loose from the world but aware of our Eternal Father, God.
Another way in which Jesus says we must change and become as little children is that we must be aware of our weaknesses. It is the characteristic of adulthood that we long to get to the position where we don’t need anyone. We call that freedom. Jesus is telling us to go back to the kind of dependency that seeks God’s guidance in every aspect of our lives. We step off the worldly treadmill when we confess Jesus Christ as Lord. We step off into the great unknown, guided by the Holy Spirit. Never have we been more vulnerable since we were children.
Are children aware of their weaknesses? Yes! Must they be led by the hand? Yes! The way to the Kingdom of God is to let go of our exalted opinions of ourselves. If we are rich and lack nothing and are proud of it, we are inwardly poor. Like little children who will gladly give up their hand to be guided by a parent, so must real Christians give up their hearts, their understanding, their will and their affections to be guided by the Word of God, the Providence of God and the Spirit of God.
As little children look on themselves as ignorant, so must we look upon ourselves as ignorant because we have taken on the eternal mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The Apostle Paul, who was a rising star in ecclesiastical circles, said this about himself: “Unto me, who am the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). Paul’s conversion required of him that he consider all his previous accomplishments and credentials as dung.
Little children are guileless. That is to say, they are vulnerable in the sense that they lack cunning in dealing with others. We who profess Jesus Christ as Lord must also become guileless. That does not mean that we ought not to be watchful and careful or that we ought to expose ourselves to every assault. What it means is that we ought to pray for the wisdom of a serpent and yet be as harmless as a dove. We ought to take the knowledge that we have gained from being an adult and apply it harmlessly to every circumstance of our lives.
Are you one of God’s children? Then deal with God as your little children have dealt with you. As soon as they want anything, or if their body hurts, have they not run to you as a parent? Does the evil of this world trouble you? Run to God! Does the world trouble you? Go tell your Father about it. “As a father pities his children, so will the Lord pity them that fear him.”
What you should be seeing from this little object lesson that Jesus gave to His disciples is that there is for us a sea change in attitude in this business of joining the Kingdom of God. Perhaps our visiting friend from last week was inclined to think that your date of conversion was the most important thing in your life. Unless it is accompanied by a “regression progression,” however, it is a fake conversion. Repeating a Sinner’s Prayer or being baptized into a church is easy to do. Regressing back to a little child is a conscious and painful rejection of all that we have spent our lives trying to overcome. It is much easier to go through the motions of religion than it is to be broken from the limitations and dependencies of childhood.
Life in the Kingdom of God is tough and lonely at times, and there are very few who are willing to take that journey. There is, however, one more warning about becoming as a little child.
God is not a willy-nilly parent. He is a jealous God who loves his children too much to spare the rod. God chastens those He loves. He teaches us to pray for the qualities of childhood – humility, faith, love and grace in time of need.
I thank God that I fellowship with a people who seek God’s grace and have a childlike faith. I thank God that Jesus has shown us by example and declared to us by word the characteristics of the Kingdom life from the average run-of-the-mill religious experience.
I thank God that the NMMH Church is a place where I can come to grips with the ordinary in the process of professing the extraordinary.
Stan Moody
September 11, 2008
Matthew 18:1-11
Two things there are that seem certain in this life besides death and taxes. The first is that when we are children, we can’t wait to grow up so that we can take over our own lives. The age of 21 seems to a kid to be the point at which all our hopes and dreams are realized and we are now positioned to the long trip down hill. We get to age 21, and we begin to realize that the toughest challenges yet lie ahead. Every decade, even when you are 80, becomes a challenge. We humans forever chafe at being under the thumb of authority, and to us progress means moving into the next decade as quickly as possible.
That is, perhaps, the point at which Jesus speaks to us in this 18th chapter of Matthew, v. 3: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The only answer is the one we give to Peggy Lee, “No; Peggy, that is not all there is. There is the business of becoming somebody – my career and raising a family that will be a credit to me.” As we approach 30, though, our goals and our dreams become empty as we attain them, and Jesus begins to speak more loudly: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven! What part of “never” don’t we understand?
The great irony in all this is that at the very time we are in progression, we begin to realize that we also are in regression – back to the earth, another certainty. We are racing toward our own demise, and we put on a full press to fulfill ourselves. Jesus begins to speak more loudly: I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!
The peace that God promises to those who seek first the kingdom of God and the righteousness of Christ is that the only progression worth having is the that of the road less traveled – the narrow way of the Kingdom of God. Some wise person once said, “All sin goes back to ‘I want to be somebody.’” The Bible teaches that the first requirement of getting the things we need is to first seek after the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells us, however, that in order even to enter the Kingdom of God, we have to go back to the starting point – become as little children.
We will be thinking this morning about what Jesus was intending for us to hear in that message.
Last Sunday, we had a visitor from a local fundamentalist church that is growing by leaps and bounds. During the prayer-request time, he asked to speak and, essentially, invited you to become saved. This was in reaction to the perception locally that you have never heard the Gospel here at the NMMH Church. I thought it was one of the rudest, most judgmental things I had ever seen happen in a church. However, it encouraged within me some soul searching of my own, giving rise to the sermon this morning.
A couple of other things happened recently. On Friday afternoons, there is a woman who comes into the prison to visit her husband. I am told that she corresponds with some 900 inmates across the country. She does not know who I am, but I have figured out who she is by association.
One Friday, I walked into the lobby deep in thought, and her voice rang out through a room full of people, “Sir, you need to smile more!” Is that it? The joy of the Lord is reflected in a smile? Is that what we have come to in this country – that happiness is wrapped up in how we appear to other people? Or was this just another rude, boundary-crashing member of the Christian Right?
Finally, the last object lesson – Brandon Drewry. I have been working with Brandon Drewry for months now. He was homeless, living in Portland’s little Bowery – the Bayside region. He had been in town for 3 days and was arrested and tried 27 months later for gross sexual assault on a street woman. There was not a scrid of physical evidence. He was defended by the public defender system, convicted and sentenced to 30 years solely on the testimony of two crack/cocaine addicts.
I thought Brandon’s story needed to be told – the failure of the public defender system and the public outcry to get the homeless out of our sight. Whether he did it or not, I don’t know and don’t really care. The point is that at age 47, unless he gets a sentence reduction or clemency, he will be going out feet first because not only is he mentally ill; he has been diagnosed with PTSD and Hepatitis A.
His previous life was as a cab driver and a petty drug dealer in Daytona Beach, FL. I have tried to make him understand that the Kingdom of God precedes anything he does to gain a legal remedy. His answer is that he is a good person because he has never done anything to hurt anyone. In other words, he may have been guilty of misfeasance, but he is not guilty of malfeasance. He wants a chance to prove that he is inherently good but sees the Kingdom of God as a diversion from the goal of his life – getting out of prison. He sees no harm to anyone in selling dope.
I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become as little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God!
When we think about the qualities of a child, what comes immediately to mind are “vulnerable, dependent, teachable and focused.” Those are the easy ones.
The context of this message by Jesus to His disciples is important for us. First, this is not a generic message like the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has just been asked a question by his disciples, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” As they often did, they had been arguing among themselves as to which one of them would be top dog when Jesus established His kingdom in Jerusalem, an event that was never going to happen.
That seems very adult, doesn’t it? “Who is in charge? Who is going to be President?” Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven on earth?”
Bear in mind that these people to whom Jesus is talking are not neophytes who have never heard the Gospel. They have been with Him now for some time – nearly 3 years. Under those conditions, we would think that they were already citizens of the Kingdom of God. They had given up everything to follow Him. They had heard all the best sermons on the love of God ever preached in the history of mankind. They knew that Jesus was the way to salvation. Yet, there was this one thing.
They were arguing about which one of them would be the greatest in a Kingdom they would not even enter unless they changed, regressed and became as little children. They were jockeying for position, like a bunch of egocentric politicians: “Who is the greatest?” To merely enter the Kingdom required that they give up jockeying for position.
With respect to our day, you might say that the disciples to whom Jesus was speaking were professing Christians – those, perhaps, who had repeated the Sinner’s Prayer. To our visitor last week who thought that the way into the kingdom of heaven was by locking in the precise date you were saved – to mark it on the calendar – perhaps he has forgotten that while the kingdom of God is about accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, there is a little-mentioned other piece of business: “He who perseveres (endures) to the end will be saved” (Matt. 24:13). Just as the Kingdom of God is present already but not yet fulfilled, so our salvation is present already but not yet fulfilled.
The path to fulfillment is to change, to humble ourselves and to become as little children, making certain that we do not “look down on one of these little ones” along the way. That is the message of Matthew 18.
OK; what does it mean to someone already schooled in the way of grace to become as a little child? I had the advantage of the classic sermons of George Whitfield to help us get through this “regression progression.” George Whitfield was the preacher who, along with Jonathan Edwards and the Wesley’s, kicked off the First Great Awakening of the early 18th Century.
I would be quick to point out here that, while it has taken each of us decades to become adults, it will perhaps take us decades to reverse the direction. I tell you that because “regression progression,” like the victorious Kingdom of God, is a process, not an instant reversal. That is why perseverance to the end is a critical component of salvation.
At the same time we are grasping for some degree of personal power and glory – those things that elude most kids – we are haunted by the reality that we are hurtling toward our own demise and then the Judgment. We want to be certain how to stand up at the Judgment and hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joys of your Lord.”
Brandon Drewry’s formula is too risky – “Do no harm.” Our visitor’s formula is equally risky – memorize the date you were saved. Since only some 4% of those who go down to the altar at evangelistic rallies actually stick with the long-range program, celebrating your salvation date is pretty risky for something that will not be declared as finished until the “end” of our lives.
To put a smile on your face, showing the world how happy you are since you accepted Jesus, is also very risky. There are a lot of mental patients who wear smiles on their faces. Sometimes a smile can be a barrier against real communication. It can be a put-down to someone wrestling with real problems. It can be a defense mechanism to keep other people at bay. Chances are, it has nothing to do with entering the Kingdom of God.
These are the things that people do who have a Christ in their heads but no Christ in their hearts. Yet, Jesus says, I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
The words of Jesus imply that before you or I can have any well-grounded hope of being happy in a future state, there must be some great, notable and amazing change that passes over our souls and dramatically alters our allegiances. While we watch our bodies change, why is it that we pay so little attention to changing our souls so that our temper, our conduct and our habits become progressively centered on God and His Kingdom?
Jesus is not telling us to go back to being a blank piece of paper. Anyone who has raised children knows that they are not sinless by any stretch. Kids are conceived and born into sin. Any parent who is paying attention will be able to tell you that if you do not understand that, and if you do not discover the overwhelming urge of self-will in a child, your child is headed for big trouble, and you are headed for big grief.
Jesus is not telling us, therefore, that in order to enter the Kingdom of God we must become innocent, naïve and sinless – far from it.
On the other hand, while kids are certainly innocent compared with grownups, they have hearts that are sensual and minds that are carnal, and they lie with impunity much of the time. How many of us as parents have spent hours trying to unravel one of their lies. Does Jesus want us to become like that? I think He assumes that we have already taken lying to an art form. No; there is something more to this matter of becoming as little children.
Let’s not forget that the context to this statement by Jesus was a dispute over which of the disciples was going to be the greatest in the kingdom – a very adult exercise. The child-object lesson, then, is not only Jesus’ antidote to power and ambition but is the key to turning the corner from “me” and my legacy to God and His glory. In this time when our nation is preoccupied with change, Jesus offers change that is eternal and rejects the lust after power and ambition.
On the other hand, this has nothing to do with closing our businesses, resigning our positions on the school board and retiring to the woods, turning into hermits. The problem with that remedy is that our sinful hearts follow there with us. Christianity is a social religion. We have to stay engaged in whatever it is we are doing.
What Jesus is telling us here, I think, is that while we are not to go out of this world, if we are truly converted, or changed, we will be loose from this world. Though we are engaged in it through our careers, our families and our relationships, yet if we are real Christians we will be loosely tied to the world wherein we raise our families and earn our livings. Ask a child about presidents and senators and representatives and bishops, and he will have no idea what you are talking about because he is loose to the world – loosey-goosey, so to speak. Children live in the world but are restricted to their own authority structures. That is where God wants us to be – to live in the world but to owe our allegiance to the authority structure that He has appointed for us.
Be loose from the world but aware of our Eternal Father, God.
Another way in which Jesus says we must change and become as little children is that we must be aware of our weaknesses. It is the characteristic of adulthood that we long to get to the position where we don’t need anyone. We call that freedom. Jesus is telling us to go back to the kind of dependency that seeks God’s guidance in every aspect of our lives. We step off the worldly treadmill when we confess Jesus Christ as Lord. We step off into the great unknown, guided by the Holy Spirit. Never have we been more vulnerable since we were children.
Are children aware of their weaknesses? Yes! Must they be led by the hand? Yes! The way to the Kingdom of God is to let go of our exalted opinions of ourselves. If we are rich and lack nothing and are proud of it, we are inwardly poor. Like little children who will gladly give up their hand to be guided by a parent, so must real Christians give up their hearts, their understanding, their will and their affections to be guided by the Word of God, the Providence of God and the Spirit of God.
As little children look on themselves as ignorant, so must we look upon ourselves as ignorant because we have taken on the eternal mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The Apostle Paul, who was a rising star in ecclesiastical circles, said this about himself: “Unto me, who am the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). Paul’s conversion required of him that he consider all his previous accomplishments and credentials as dung.
Little children are guileless. That is to say, they are vulnerable in the sense that they lack cunning in dealing with others. We who profess Jesus Christ as Lord must also become guileless. That does not mean that we ought not to be watchful and careful or that we ought to expose ourselves to every assault. What it means is that we ought to pray for the wisdom of a serpent and yet be as harmless as a dove. We ought to take the knowledge that we have gained from being an adult and apply it harmlessly to every circumstance of our lives.
Are you one of God’s children? Then deal with God as your little children have dealt with you. As soon as they want anything, or if their body hurts, have they not run to you as a parent? Does the evil of this world trouble you? Run to God! Does the world trouble you? Go tell your Father about it. “As a father pities his children, so will the Lord pity them that fear him.”
What you should be seeing from this little object lesson that Jesus gave to His disciples is that there is for us a sea change in attitude in this business of joining the Kingdom of God. Perhaps our visiting friend from last week was inclined to think that your date of conversion was the most important thing in your life. Unless it is accompanied by a “regression progression,” however, it is a fake conversion. Repeating a Sinner’s Prayer or being baptized into a church is easy to do. Regressing back to a little child is a conscious and painful rejection of all that we have spent our lives trying to overcome. It is much easier to go through the motions of religion than it is to be broken from the limitations and dependencies of childhood.
Life in the Kingdom of God is tough and lonely at times, and there are very few who are willing to take that journey. There is, however, one more warning about becoming as a little child.
God is not a willy-nilly parent. He is a jealous God who loves his children too much to spare the rod. God chastens those He loves. He teaches us to pray for the qualities of childhood – humility, faith, love and grace in time of need.
I thank God that I fellowship with a people who seek God’s grace and have a childlike faith. I thank God that Jesus has shown us by example and declared to us by word the characteristics of the Kingdom life from the average run-of-the-mill religious experience.
I thank God that the NMMH Church is a place where I can come to grips with the ordinary in the process of professing the extraordinary.
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