"Experiencing God: The Chink In God's Armor"
Hosea 11:1-9
Has anybody been watching the movie series, "The Hobbit"? It's based on J.R.R. Tolkein's book by the same name, so maybe some of you have read it. It's a fantasy story about a little dwarf like man--a Hobbit--named Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo, against his better judgement, agrees to go on a perilous journey by the wizard, Gandalf. At one point in the story, Bilbo helped a village get rid of the dragon, Smaug. Smaug lived inside a dark mountain and slept on a pile of jewels and gold that it had stolen from surrounding villages over a period of many years. And dragons live a long time.
Because Bilbo had found a magic ring that made him invisible when he wore it, he was chosen to sneak into Smaug's cave and see if the dragon had a weakness. Bilbo discovered one of the dragon's thick scales had broken off. The gap in the scales was in the middle of its chest, directly over its heart. The next time the dragon attacked the village, the archers were ready. They aimed for the thin spot in the dragon's chest, that one small spot of vulnerability.
Or, there's the Greek myth from Homer's Illiad, about the hero, Achilles. As a child, Achilles had been dipped in the magical river. Since that point, Achilles was protected against all foes. He was dipped all the way in the river, except where he was being held by his heals. So his heals were not protected from the river's enchantment.
Achilles became a great warrior and the leader in the Trojan Wars. But he was killed by Paris when Paris shot an arrow that struck Achilles in the heel. It was his only vulnerable spot. So the term "Achilles heel" has come to mean those parts of us that are susceptible to attack. They are our weak spots. They are the chinks in our armor. No matter how well we try to protect ourselves, there are those vulnerable spots where our defenses are weakest. Where there are no dragon scales to protect us.
We believe God is omnipotent. That is, God is all powerful. We believe that there is no power or force that is greater than God. God can do anything. God can resist all attacks. God has no unprotected spot. God has no chink in the armor. God has no achilles heal. God has no weaknesses. We have believed that is true.
I'm not sure I believe that anymore. I believe I have discovered a weakness in God. I think I have found a place where God has chosen to be left unprotected. It is an achilles heal on God. It is a place where God has chosen to remain vulnerable. The verses read earlier from Hosea is one of the more poignant places in scripture where God's soft spot is described.
This is how God's chink in the armor came to be. God fell in love with people. The way that happened, as described here in Hosea, is through an adoptive process. God's love is an adoptive love. It is a love that comes out of choosing rather than obligation. God adopted--that is, God fell in love in a lovingly, parental way--with people. It is a conscious choice. Apparently, if I'm reading these verses correctly, God didn't have to make that choice. But God did. God chose us, adopted us, out of a tender love.
God didn't leave it at that. God could have merely said, "OK, I adopt you; I name you my children." And then left it at that. Instead, God took time to be the kind of adoptive parent who takes his choices seriously. God spent great amounts of time and energy pursuing and adopting us as children. God uses tender, parental imagery here: "I was the one who taught Israel how to walk..." God's love for us has been, and continues to be a pursuing, hands on love. God is not absentee parent.
Some children were asked what the difference was between plain old love and true love. One little girl answered, "Love is when my mommy reads me a bedtime story. True love is when she doesn't skip any pages."
God's pursuing love for us is that kind of not-skipping-any-pages kind of love. God wants to make sure we know that He is involved with us every step of the way. And that God will not skip anything along the way to get to us.
God's pursuing love is full of touch and affection. As it says in these verses in Hosea: "I took my people up in my arms...I picked them up and held them to my cheek...I drew them to me with affection and love." God's loving arms are ready for us.
The problem is that we often don't see that. We don't realize how often or how much God tenderly cares for us. Touches our spirits in affectionate ways. "I took my people up in my arms," says God. But then God follows that statement up with, "...but they did not acknowledge that I took care of them." God said, "...I called to them, but the more I called, the more they turned away from me."
In the middle of this love poem from God to God's people is an interlude of frustrated love. Of love spurned. God's love pursues us; we run away. We turn to others who promise us much less than what God has offered, and we run toward that, and leave God behind.
Remember I said that God's pursuing love is like an adoptive love. There are adoptees who search for their biological parents. I have walked with some parishioners over the years who went through that process, and wish they wouldn't have. Sometimes it breaks the adoptive parents hearts when a child wants to look for his "real" parents. I try to explain what it means to be a "real" parent. That it doesn't take much effort to get pregnant and have a child. Just giving birth doesn't make you a parent. It's what you do after the birth that makes you a parent. That's what real parenting is all about. To adoptive parents, the adoptee isn't just an adopted child. He or she is their son or daughter. Period.
I have a feeling that that is what this interlude of frustrated love in Hosea's love poem is all about. People said to God, "I'm going to find my 'real' God. You aren't my real God. You say you are, but you really aren't." But even then, God's love doesn't give up the pursuit.
John Henry Jowett once said, "Love doesn't come from doing something; it comes from being with Somebody."
Maybe you've read the book, The Little Prince. It's just a small book, but packed with insight about love. It is a fable or parable about the Little Prince who has a special rose. At one point in the story, the Little Prince is frustrated because of all the time he thinks he has wasted caring for his rose. The rose, in turn, doesn't seem to appreciate the Little Prince. The Little Prince tells his woes to the fox. The fox thinks for a minute and then said, "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes it so important."
That's what God is saying, I think. "I've been with you since you were a tiny child. I have never faltered from being with you. I have never strayed from pursuing you, or been absent from you. I have dried your tears when you cried. I have cheered you on. I have swelled with pride, just to be with you. I have wasted time on you, never thinking it a waste. It was just something I wanted to do. You can turn away from me all you want. But I will always be with you, pursuing you with my love, no matter what."
And there lies God's vulnerable spot. There is God's achilles heal. There is the chink in God's armor. God may have to say with Forest Gump, "I may not be a very smart man, but I know what love is." That's the way God chooses to appear: maybe not very smart in continuing the pursuit (just like Forest Gump did with Jenny in the movie), but God is very loving. Very forgiving. Very accepting. Very unvengeful. Very faithful and loyal. No matter what.
Sir Thomas More was an Irish poet. He got married early in life to a beautiful Irish lass with flaming red hair and green eyes. Her beauty surpassed them all.
Sir Thomas was called away to teach for a time at a distant university. During his absence, his beautiful wife contracted smallpox. The dreaded disease left pock marks and scars all over her body, especially her face. She couldn't even look at herself, and forbade others to look at her as well. She was so fearful that Sir Thomas would reject her that she resolved her face would never agains see the light of day. She kept herself in her room, and had heavy drapes fitted to block out all sunlight.
When Sir Thomas returned, he was informed about his once lovely wife. He went immediately up to their bedroom. She recognized his footsteps in the darkness and said, "No, Thomas, come no nearer. I have resolved that you will never see me again by the light of day." Sir Thomas quietly, without saying a word, turned and left the room.
He went downstairs and went into the music room where he sat at the piano working on the words of a poem. The next morning he returned to the upstairs bedroom. He came to the door of the bedroom, pushed it open, and there in the half light of the hallway, he took the poem and read it to her:
Believe me,
if all those endearing young charms,
which I look on so fondly today,
were to pass in a moment,
and flee from my arms
like fairy dreams fading away,
thou would'st still be adored,
as this moment thou art.
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
and around that dear visage
each throb of my heart
would entwine itself
verdantly still.
Sir Thomas placed the paper in his vest pocket, moved to one of the large windows, and threw open the heavy drapes. As the first rays of the early morning's dawn flooded into the room, he turned just in time to receive his wife into his arms.
God's love poem here in Hosea carries the same message:
How can I give you up?
How can I abandon you?
My heart will not let me do it!
My love for you is too strong.
In those words lay the soft spot that leads to God's own heart. It is a spot that God has chosen not to protect. It is the place God leaves open, hoping we will see it and take advantage of it, not to wound God, but to embrace God and allow ourselves to be embraced by God--right next to God's exposed and ever pursuing heart.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Experiencing God: Crisis of Belief
"Experiencing God: Crisis of Belief"
Acts 14:1-7
As a large part of the message this morning, I want to share the story of how Rosaria Butterfield heard God's invitation, and how she became a person of faith. I don't know Rosaria. I found her story on a website of people whose lives were transformed when they became a Christian.
I'll read a piece of Rosaria's story, then stop and make some comments based on one of the "seven realities" Henry Blackaby writes about in chapter 5 of Experiencing God. Here's how Rosaria starts out her story:
The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end conversation rather than deepen it.
Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.
As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the world-views of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right...
After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full...
I began researching Religious groups and their politics of hatred. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.
(Inside, though) I was a broken mess. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.
The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn't argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn't know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.
One of the "Seven Realities" that Blackaby brings up in chapter 5 of Experiencing God is that God's invitation to join him always leads to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action. In other words, God is going to make you think.
But it's not a kind of thinking where you're sitting in your barcalounger ruminating and cogitating about some philosophical religious falderal. Instead it's the kind of thinking that forces you to ask some basic questions about two fronts of your life. First, belief in God. Do you believe in God and do you believe God? Notice that question doesn't have to do with God. It has to do with you.
So, if you are serious about asking yourself that question, and answering it, that will bring you to the crisis of belief that Blackaby mentions in this chapter. Do you believe or not? And notice the two different shades of questions that I asked: Do you believe IN God? And, Do you BELIEVE God. You ask yourself those two questions, and you will very much find yourself in a crisis of belief. If you say, "Yes" to both of those questions, then what does that mean for your life, how you're going to live, the choices you make? If you answer "No," then what does that mean? They are two very basic questions that you can't avoid.
They were questions that a perceptive pastor asked Rosaria, not to get into an argument with Rosaria, but for her to understand she's not going to get away with little self-reflection about where she was at with God. So, let's hear some more about this crisis of faith that came upon Rosaria.
Later that night, I fished the (pastor's) letter out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken's letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.
With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses. That Christians who mocked me...were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.
Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics and faith. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.
I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours food. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. "This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria," she warned.
With tremors, I whispered, "J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?
J exhaled deeply. "Rosaria," she said, "I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn't. If you want, I will pray for you."
The "what if?" questions that Rosaria was voicing to her friend is the crisis of faith that Blackaby says we will experience if we are seriously entertaining God's invitation to join Him. All the years of Rosaria's dealing with Jesus by not dealing with him are now up for question. The crisis of faith is now fully engaged. What if she was wrong all those years? What if she was wrong about Jesus? What if what she read about Jesus in the Bible is true? All of us have to answer that crisis-creating question. God will not allow us to do otherwise. We all have to go through the crisis of faith in order to experience God.
Here's more of Rosaria's story:
I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from my bed...and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church...
I fought with everything I had.
I did not want this.
I did not ask for this.
I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.
But God's promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord's Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: "If anyone wills to do [God's] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine..." (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why I was a sinner. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.
But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand (my sin) from God's point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a sinner, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?
Remember, I said earlier that the crisis of belief comes at us from two directions. The second direction, the second crisis of faith has to do with belief in yourself. The heart of this part of the crisis of faith has to do with the question, Are you doubting that you can do what God is asking you to do? Do you know who you are, and what you're here for, and if you don't, how are you going to find out?
And here is another question that fits in here: Do you believe in yourself as much as God believes in you? We talk a lot about how important it is to believe in God. But we don't talk enough about how God believes in us. If God didn't believe in you, He wouldn't ask you to join Him in His work.
Believing in someone is to love them. I found this version of 1 Corinthians 13--the love chapter--that I really like. 1 Corinthians 13:7, in the "Easy To Read Version" says: "Love never gives up on people. It never stops believing in them, loses hope, and never quits."
Believing in someone doesn't mean you believe they can do anything they set their mind to. Believing in someone doesn't mean they look up to you, although that may be a part of it. To say you believe in God is saying more than you know God exists. To believe in God is to have confidence in God, to esteem God, to trust God. Aren't we saying the same thing to someone when we say we believe in them? In other words, we love them. And that's what God means when God believes in us. Even if we don't believe in God, God always believes in us. And there's the crisis: do we believe that?
Here's the last little piece of Rosaria's story:
Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of world-views, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me "wife" and many call me "mother." (Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.)
That's what it all comes down to--working through the crisis of faith God's invitation to join him ultimately brings, with all the questions I've brought up. That crisis demands at one point, faith, and then action. Because, how you respond to God and God's invitation reveals what you truly believe about God. What has your response told God what you think of Him? As you think about that question, watch out. You might be headed towards a crisis of belief.
Acts 14:1-7
As a large part of the message this morning, I want to share the story of how Rosaria Butterfield heard God's invitation, and how she became a person of faith. I don't know Rosaria. I found her story on a website of people whose lives were transformed when they became a Christian.
I'll read a piece of Rosaria's story, then stop and make some comments based on one of the "seven realities" Henry Blackaby writes about in chapter 5 of Experiencing God. Here's how Rosaria starts out her story:
The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end conversation rather than deepen it.
Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.
As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the world-views of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right...
After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full...
I began researching Religious groups and their politics of hatred. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.
(Inside, though) I was a broken mess. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.
The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn't argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn't know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.
One of the "Seven Realities" that Blackaby brings up in chapter 5 of Experiencing God is that God's invitation to join him always leads to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action. In other words, God is going to make you think.
But it's not a kind of thinking where you're sitting in your barcalounger ruminating and cogitating about some philosophical religious falderal. Instead it's the kind of thinking that forces you to ask some basic questions about two fronts of your life. First, belief in God. Do you believe in God and do you believe God? Notice that question doesn't have to do with God. It has to do with you.
So, if you are serious about asking yourself that question, and answering it, that will bring you to the crisis of belief that Blackaby mentions in this chapter. Do you believe or not? And notice the two different shades of questions that I asked: Do you believe IN God? And, Do you BELIEVE God. You ask yourself those two questions, and you will very much find yourself in a crisis of belief. If you say, "Yes" to both of those questions, then what does that mean for your life, how you're going to live, the choices you make? If you answer "No," then what does that mean? They are two very basic questions that you can't avoid.
They were questions that a perceptive pastor asked Rosaria, not to get into an argument with Rosaria, but for her to understand she's not going to get away with little self-reflection about where she was at with God. So, let's hear some more about this crisis of faith that came upon Rosaria.
Later that night, I fished the (pastor's) letter out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken's letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.
With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses. That Christians who mocked me...were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.
Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics and faith. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.
I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours food. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. "This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria," she warned.
With tremors, I whispered, "J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?
J exhaled deeply. "Rosaria," she said, "I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn't. If you want, I will pray for you."
The "what if?" questions that Rosaria was voicing to her friend is the crisis of faith that Blackaby says we will experience if we are seriously entertaining God's invitation to join Him. All the years of Rosaria's dealing with Jesus by not dealing with him are now up for question. The crisis of faith is now fully engaged. What if she was wrong all those years? What if she was wrong about Jesus? What if what she read about Jesus in the Bible is true? All of us have to answer that crisis-creating question. God will not allow us to do otherwise. We all have to go through the crisis of faith in order to experience God.
Here's more of Rosaria's story:
I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from my bed...and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church...
I fought with everything I had.
I did not want this.
I did not ask for this.
I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.
But God's promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord's Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: "If anyone wills to do [God's] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine..." (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why I was a sinner. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.
But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand (my sin) from God's point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a sinner, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?
Remember, I said earlier that the crisis of belief comes at us from two directions. The second direction, the second crisis of faith has to do with belief in yourself. The heart of this part of the crisis of faith has to do with the question, Are you doubting that you can do what God is asking you to do? Do you know who you are, and what you're here for, and if you don't, how are you going to find out?
And here is another question that fits in here: Do you believe in yourself as much as God believes in you? We talk a lot about how important it is to believe in God. But we don't talk enough about how God believes in us. If God didn't believe in you, He wouldn't ask you to join Him in His work.
Believing in someone is to love them. I found this version of 1 Corinthians 13--the love chapter--that I really like. 1 Corinthians 13:7, in the "Easy To Read Version" says: "Love never gives up on people. It never stops believing in them, loses hope, and never quits."
Believing in someone doesn't mean you believe they can do anything they set their mind to. Believing in someone doesn't mean they look up to you, although that may be a part of it. To say you believe in God is saying more than you know God exists. To believe in God is to have confidence in God, to esteem God, to trust God. Aren't we saying the same thing to someone when we say we believe in them? In other words, we love them. And that's what God means when God believes in us. Even if we don't believe in God, God always believes in us. And there's the crisis: do we believe that?
Here's the last little piece of Rosaria's story:
Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of world-views, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me "wife" and many call me "mother." (Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.)
That's what it all comes down to--working through the crisis of faith God's invitation to join him ultimately brings, with all the questions I've brought up. That crisis demands at one point, faith, and then action. Because, how you respond to God and God's invitation reveals what you truly believe about God. What has your response told God what you think of Him? As you think about that question, watch out. You might be headed towards a crisis of belief.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Experiencing God: Being God's Servant
"Experiencing God: Being God's Servant"
John 13:1-17
In this chapter of Experiencing God, Blackaby gives an illustration from the life of the evangelist, Dwight L. Moody. The illustration has to do with Moody first being confronted with the question, "Imagine what God can do through the life of one dedicated man." Moody took that question seriously, and being only a shoe salesman at that time, dedicated his life to Christ and began serving him.
Moody had some great qualities as a Christian human being. One of those was being a servant. Not many great leaders get how important this is, nor live a life of servanthood. One of my favorite Dwight Moody stories had to do with shoes.
A large group of European pastors came to one of D. L. Moody’s Northfield Bible Conferences in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Following the European custom of the time, each guest put his shoes outside his room to be cleaned and polished by the hall servants overnight. But of course this was America and there were no hall servants. No one was there to shine those shoes. Walking the dormitory halls that night, Moody saw the shoes and determined not to embarrass those overseas Christian leaders who attended his conference. He mentioned what needed to be done to some ministerial students who were there. But Moody was met only with silence or pious excuses. Moody returned to the dorm, gathered up the shoes, and, alone in his room, the world’s most famous evangelist began to clean and polish the shoes. Only the unexpected arrival of a friend in the midst of the work revealed the secret. When the foreign visitors opened their doors the next morning, their shoes were shined. They never knew by whom. Moody told no one, but his friend told a few people, and during the rest of the conference, different men volunteered to shine the shoes in secret.
Perhaps the episode is a vital insight into why God used D. L. Moody as He did. He was a man with a servant’s heart and that was the basis of his true greatness.
As I said, servanthood is not a quality of character that many people, especially our leaders, get. Our culture is much like the Greek and Roman cultures of Jesus’ day. Greek culture valued freedom above most everything else. To have personal dignity meant that you were free. Those who were most esteemed were those who had no one above them making demands, or exercising power over them.
Thus, in Greek and Roman culture, there was a violent aversion to bondage, to being a slave or a servant. This even was a part of the Greek pagan religions—there was no kneeling in any of the rites of Greek worship, because kneeling before someone, even a god, meant that you were a servant or a slave. A true Greek worshipper would have nothing of that.
Taylor University is a Christian college in Indiana. Years ago, Taylor admitted one of the first African students, a young man who went by the name of Sam, as a foreign exchange student. This was before it was commonplace for international students to come to the U.S. to study. He was a bright young man with great promise.
When he arrived on campus, the President of the University took him on a tour, showing him the classrooms and the dorms. When the tour was over, the President asked Sam where he would like to live. The young man replied, "If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me." The President was overwhelmed. Over the years he had welcomed thousands of Christian men and women to the campus, and none had ever made such a request: “If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me.” That's the kind of servanthood meekness Jesus talked about.
Imagine other servanthood kinds of statements that would be similar, but that you probably wouldn’t hear very often in our power oriented culture:
If there is a job that no one wants to do, I'll do that job.
If there's a kid that no one wants to eat lunch with, I'll eat with that kid.
If there's a hardship that has to be endured, I'll share that hardship.
If there's a sacrifice that needs to be made, I'll make that sacrifice.
Paul opened up all his letters by identifying who he was. In his letters he used one word most often: doulos. Most translations use the English word, servant. But doulos literally means slave. Paul described himself as a slave of Christ. When Paul described Christians, he uses the same term. We are the douloi of Christ—the slaves of Christ.
What’s interesting in Paul’s theology is that he wrote about the conversion from being one form of slave to another. That is, we were once slaves of sin. But we need to be converted from that to being the slave to Christ. Paul wrote about how we are set free from sin by Christ. But that freedom isn’t some kind of autonomy in which we get to be and do whatever we want. Instead that freedom is so that we can make the choice to be in relationship with Christ. We move from doing what we want to do—which is a kind of awful slavery—to doing what Christ wants us to do within our loving relationship with Christ. It’s the movement from being self-serving to Christ-serving, which includes serving others.
Here’s an example of that. Maybe you’ll remember the movie, “Patch Adams.” It’s based on the true story of a man who wanted to be a doctor in an unorthodox way—not the way medical school was training him.
At one point, before he had become a licensed medical doctor, Patch bought a house at which he and others were giving basic care to anyone who walked in the door. The medical school staff caught wind of it and brought charges against Patch. There was a hearing, open to the public, and this movie clip is part of that scene at which Patch makes his defense.
Patch Adams movie clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXWDSeVeaAE
This is a great movie, if you haven’t seen it. As you can see from this small clip, one of the main themes is, in the medical profession, in any profession, or just humanity in general, is it all about authoritarian domination, or is it about servanthood? In the opening part of his defense, Patch says, “If you treat disease, you win some and you lose some. But if you treat people, you win every time.”
Servanthood is about touching other’s lives. Primarily, first and foremost, it is about being in touch, through a loving relationship with God. Once that relationship is started, then you see the value of serving others, and the servanthood life. The children who came in at the end of this clip and put on the clown noses, were all children from the cancer ward at the hospital where Patch volunteered and became a resident. It’s caring about the “least of these” that makes the servanthood so winsome and amazing. The rewards are indefinable.
In an earlier century, there lay a large boulder in the middle of the roadway. Traveler after traveler walked past the boulder, veering off the side of the road to get around it. All the while, they were shaking their head and muttering, "Can you believe that? Someone should get that big thing out of the way. What an inconvenience!" Finally, a man came along and, seeing the boulder, took a branch from a tree and pried the boulder enough to get it rolling and rolled it off to the side of the road. Lying underneath the rock, he found a small bag with a note. The man picked up the note and read it. It read as follows: "Thank you for being a true servant of the kingdom. Many have passed this way and complained because of the state of the problem and spoken of what ought to be done. But you have taken the responsibility upon yourself to serve the kingdom instead. You are the type of citizen we need more of in this kingdom. Please accept this bag of gold that traveler after traveler have walked by simply because they didn’t care enough about the kingdom to serve." I wonder what "bags of gold" we’re missing each day, simply because we don’t bother to get involved in serving our heavenly kingdom. Are we the type of heavenly citizens our Father needs more of?
That’s the point Jesus is trying to get across to the disciples when he washes their feet. The kinds of disciples Jesus needs aren’t the ones who are demanding, who make others wash their feet, who want to get their way in the world. Instead the loving Father God needs those who aren’t afraid to kneel, and serve others in some real, foot washing way. And John makes it clear that Jesus even washes Judas’ feet—the one who would betray him. As servants of the loving God, we wash any and all feet that come our way.
Jesus said that he came not to be served but to serve. Washing the disciples feet encapsulates the mission of all who will follow after him. The method (kneeling, washing, serving) is the message (we are here to serve not to be served; lower yourself rather than promote yourself; the best way to love and show love is to serve.)
Ruth Bell Graham, in one of her books, told of a scene that moved her. The date was February 11, 1973. Captain Jeremiah Denton stood at the door of a plane, saluted smartly, then made his way carefully and painfully down the steep steps to the tarmac. Stopping in front of the microphone, he said, “We are honored to have served our country under difficult circumstances…” Ruth Graham remembered watching, with the rest of America, as this man just released from years of being a POW in North Vietnam, as he expressed his gratitude. Gratitude about serving his country!
Ruth Graham then wrote, “Is this how the believer will feel when he, or she, stands one day before God? Liberated from this earth and its struggles, will we say, ‘We are honored to have served…under difficult circumstances’”?
John 13:1-17
In this chapter of Experiencing God, Blackaby gives an illustration from the life of the evangelist, Dwight L. Moody. The illustration has to do with Moody first being confronted with the question, "Imagine what God can do through the life of one dedicated man." Moody took that question seriously, and being only a shoe salesman at that time, dedicated his life to Christ and began serving him.
Moody had some great qualities as a Christian human being. One of those was being a servant. Not many great leaders get how important this is, nor live a life of servanthood. One of my favorite Dwight Moody stories had to do with shoes.
A large group of European pastors came to one of D. L. Moody’s Northfield Bible Conferences in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Following the European custom of the time, each guest put his shoes outside his room to be cleaned and polished by the hall servants overnight. But of course this was America and there were no hall servants. No one was there to shine those shoes. Walking the dormitory halls that night, Moody saw the shoes and determined not to embarrass those overseas Christian leaders who attended his conference. He mentioned what needed to be done to some ministerial students who were there. But Moody was met only with silence or pious excuses. Moody returned to the dorm, gathered up the shoes, and, alone in his room, the world’s most famous evangelist began to clean and polish the shoes. Only the unexpected arrival of a friend in the midst of the work revealed the secret. When the foreign visitors opened their doors the next morning, their shoes were shined. They never knew by whom. Moody told no one, but his friend told a few people, and during the rest of the conference, different men volunteered to shine the shoes in secret.
Perhaps the episode is a vital insight into why God used D. L. Moody as He did. He was a man with a servant’s heart and that was the basis of his true greatness.
As I said, servanthood is not a quality of character that many people, especially our leaders, get. Our culture is much like the Greek and Roman cultures of Jesus’ day. Greek culture valued freedom above most everything else. To have personal dignity meant that you were free. Those who were most esteemed were those who had no one above them making demands, or exercising power over them.
Thus, in Greek and Roman culture, there was a violent aversion to bondage, to being a slave or a servant. This even was a part of the Greek pagan religions—there was no kneeling in any of the rites of Greek worship, because kneeling before someone, even a god, meant that you were a servant or a slave. A true Greek worshipper would have nothing of that.
Taylor University is a Christian college in Indiana. Years ago, Taylor admitted one of the first African students, a young man who went by the name of Sam, as a foreign exchange student. This was before it was commonplace for international students to come to the U.S. to study. He was a bright young man with great promise.
When he arrived on campus, the President of the University took him on a tour, showing him the classrooms and the dorms. When the tour was over, the President asked Sam where he would like to live. The young man replied, "If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me." The President was overwhelmed. Over the years he had welcomed thousands of Christian men and women to the campus, and none had ever made such a request: “If there is a room that no one wants, give that room to me.” That's the kind of servanthood meekness Jesus talked about.
Imagine other servanthood kinds of statements that would be similar, but that you probably wouldn’t hear very often in our power oriented culture:
If there is a job that no one wants to do, I'll do that job.
If there's a kid that no one wants to eat lunch with, I'll eat with that kid.
If there's a hardship that has to be endured, I'll share that hardship.
If there's a sacrifice that needs to be made, I'll make that sacrifice.
Paul opened up all his letters by identifying who he was. In his letters he used one word most often: doulos. Most translations use the English word, servant. But doulos literally means slave. Paul described himself as a slave of Christ. When Paul described Christians, he uses the same term. We are the douloi of Christ—the slaves of Christ.
What’s interesting in Paul’s theology is that he wrote about the conversion from being one form of slave to another. That is, we were once slaves of sin. But we need to be converted from that to being the slave to Christ. Paul wrote about how we are set free from sin by Christ. But that freedom isn’t some kind of autonomy in which we get to be and do whatever we want. Instead that freedom is so that we can make the choice to be in relationship with Christ. We move from doing what we want to do—which is a kind of awful slavery—to doing what Christ wants us to do within our loving relationship with Christ. It’s the movement from being self-serving to Christ-serving, which includes serving others.
Here’s an example of that. Maybe you’ll remember the movie, “Patch Adams.” It’s based on the true story of a man who wanted to be a doctor in an unorthodox way—not the way medical school was training him.
At one point, before he had become a licensed medical doctor, Patch bought a house at which he and others were giving basic care to anyone who walked in the door. The medical school staff caught wind of it and brought charges against Patch. There was a hearing, open to the public, and this movie clip is part of that scene at which Patch makes his defense.
Patch Adams movie clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXWDSeVeaAE
This is a great movie, if you haven’t seen it. As you can see from this small clip, one of the main themes is, in the medical profession, in any profession, or just humanity in general, is it all about authoritarian domination, or is it about servanthood? In the opening part of his defense, Patch says, “If you treat disease, you win some and you lose some. But if you treat people, you win every time.”
Servanthood is about touching other’s lives. Primarily, first and foremost, it is about being in touch, through a loving relationship with God. Once that relationship is started, then you see the value of serving others, and the servanthood life. The children who came in at the end of this clip and put on the clown noses, were all children from the cancer ward at the hospital where Patch volunteered and became a resident. It’s caring about the “least of these” that makes the servanthood so winsome and amazing. The rewards are indefinable.
In an earlier century, there lay a large boulder in the middle of the roadway. Traveler after traveler walked past the boulder, veering off the side of the road to get around it. All the while, they were shaking their head and muttering, "Can you believe that? Someone should get that big thing out of the way. What an inconvenience!" Finally, a man came along and, seeing the boulder, took a branch from a tree and pried the boulder enough to get it rolling and rolled it off to the side of the road. Lying underneath the rock, he found a small bag with a note. The man picked up the note and read it. It read as follows: "Thank you for being a true servant of the kingdom. Many have passed this way and complained because of the state of the problem and spoken of what ought to be done. But you have taken the responsibility upon yourself to serve the kingdom instead. You are the type of citizen we need more of in this kingdom. Please accept this bag of gold that traveler after traveler have walked by simply because they didn’t care enough about the kingdom to serve." I wonder what "bags of gold" we’re missing each day, simply because we don’t bother to get involved in serving our heavenly kingdom. Are we the type of heavenly citizens our Father needs more of?
That’s the point Jesus is trying to get across to the disciples when he washes their feet. The kinds of disciples Jesus needs aren’t the ones who are demanding, who make others wash their feet, who want to get their way in the world. Instead the loving Father God needs those who aren’t afraid to kneel, and serve others in some real, foot washing way. And John makes it clear that Jesus even washes Judas’ feet—the one who would betray him. As servants of the loving God, we wash any and all feet that come our way.
Jesus said that he came not to be served but to serve. Washing the disciples feet encapsulates the mission of all who will follow after him. The method (kneeling, washing, serving) is the message (we are here to serve not to be served; lower yourself rather than promote yourself; the best way to love and show love is to serve.)
Ruth Bell Graham, in one of her books, told of a scene that moved her. The date was February 11, 1973. Captain Jeremiah Denton stood at the door of a plane, saluted smartly, then made his way carefully and painfully down the steep steps to the tarmac. Stopping in front of the microphone, he said, “We are honored to have served our country under difficult circumstances…” Ruth Graham remembered watching, with the rest of America, as this man just released from years of being a POW in North Vietnam, as he expressed his gratitude. Gratitude about serving his country!
Ruth Graham then wrote, “Is this how the believer will feel when he, or she, stands one day before God? Liberated from this earth and its struggles, will we say, ‘We are honored to have served…under difficult circumstances’”?
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