"100 Years From Now"
Romans 12:1-2
(Note to readers: This was a round table discussion. The three questions were given to groups of people at worship. They discussed each one and wrote notes about the questions. Then they reported back and answers were compiled during the discussion. Following the discussion, I presented my thoughts that are written beneath the three questions. If you have any thoughts about the questions that you'd like to share, please email me at wingspan19@gmail.com).
Imagine it's 100 years from now. The people in Pratt Presbyterian Church are gathering to celebrate the history of the church. As they look back, what would you hope they would say about this present time (2014 and beyond) in the church's history?
Pretend our church is an 100 year old person. This person is being interviewed. One of the questions is, "Of what are you most proud, as you look back over your 100 years?" What would you answer be if you were this person-church? Another question you are asked is, "To what do you attribute your health and longevity?" What is your answer?
Pretend you can time travel. One of the places you decide to time travel to is Pratt Presbyterian Church 100 years from now. Realistically, what do you think you will find? The reason I used the 100 year time frame is because we just celebrated the 100th anniversary of our church building. I'm not sure if the people back then wondered what we'd be like in 100 years, and how things would change.
100 years from now is a long time. Especially with as fast as things are changing now. Change didn’t happen as fast over the last 100 years as it will the next hundred years. 100 years ago, what changes were coming could be anticipated. Now, we have no idea how much change will be taking place—we assume A LOT! Back 100 years ago, it was assumed not much will change, and if it does there would be plenty of time to adapt.
I think we're still infected with that way of thinking--that if things change, they will change slowly, and we will have plenty of time to adapt. Things don't change very fast in churches anyway--right? Our congregation in particular, has a 130 history. We could call it a DNA, so-to-speak, that has determined a lot of who we are. Changing that congregational DNA is hard--maybe as hard as changing our human DNA. (Although that's not getting very hard either.)
There are two words I want you to pay attention to in these first couple of verses of Romans 12: "...be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." Transformed. Renewing. Other more modern versions have something like, "...change the way you think."
To be transformed literally comes from the word metamorphosis. To go through a metamorphosis means to change from one thing into something else. Maybe as a kid, or even as an adult, you watched a caterpillar create a chrysalis and emerge as a butterfly--two distinct biological entities. That's the kind of transformation Paul is talking about here that needs to happen.
Metamorphosis is not a transformation that happens once and is over, but in Paul's way of thinking, it is a process that happens now and continues into the future.
And we do that by the "renewing of your mind." This word, renewal, means to be new in nature, with the implication of becoming better.
My sense is that we are at a Y intersection. Over the past 100 years we have come so far. But what we have been doing over the past 30 or so years stopped working. The two roads at this Y intersection are very different roads. If we choose one of the roads at the Y, it will mean staying on the road we've been on. Which will, in my estimation, get us closed down in the next 25 years.
The other road at this Y we are at would mean, metamorphosis and renewal. It will mean becoming something very different than what we are now. What we are doing now is not working. What we need to do, if we are going to survive the next 25 years--and beyond--will be to take the road that will cause us to go through a process of complete and utter metamorphosis--to become something else, to start that now so that we can continue into the future. Maybe for the next 100 years. We are going to have to change the way we think about church, and what church is. We are going to have to be willing to go through a painful process, but which pain will set this congregation up for long-term health.
When I was in Bakersfield at the church there, a 1200 member church, the senior pastor and the Session caught a vision for what needed to be done to turn that downtown church around. The vision involved buying up a whole city block, and putting a gym and new administration building in. It also meant buying an existing office building on the property and turn it into the home of a Hispanic and Chinese congregations.
The way they sold the plan to the congregation was to go to the members and say, "We have a vision. But some of you older members will never get to see the fruits of it. It is a bold plan for the health and well being of the congregation into the next 50-75 years. Are you willing to invest in something you will not see the ultimate fruits of?"
They ultimately said yes. The whole project took $5 million dollars as well as supporting the churches annual $1.5 million dollar budget. They paid everything off in 3 years.
Now I'm not saying we need to buy this whole block and build a gym. We don't need another gym, thanks to the foresight of Porter and his bank. But I think the choice of taking the other road in the Y intersection we are at will be just as costly in some ways, and painful, but amazing and exciting. I think God is setting us up, through the Experiencing God study and some other ministries that are emerging, to begin to think BIGGER. Think DIFFERENTLY. Metamorphisically different.
But wouldn't it be just as painful, tragically so, rather than creatively so, to close this church down in 25 years because there's no one left?
We need to think differently, NOW, so that we can begin the process of metamorphosis change that will help this church not just survive, but grow, in the next 100 years.
Monday, August 25, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
Whatever
"Whatever"
Romans 11:30-32
Men’s Bible Study recently finished up a study of the life of Paul. At one point, during Paul’s journeys, he had been arrested. One of the qualities we quickly discovered about Paul was that he never missed an opportunity to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No matter who he was talking to, Paul always worked the Gospel message into the conversation.
On this one particular instance, as I said, Paul had been arrested. He was brought before King Agrippa. Paul told Agrippa about Christ. Agrippa’s response was tragically telling:
Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. (Acts 26:28)
Almost. Not quite, but almost. You almost got me, Paul.
Maybe Paul had that experience in mind when he wrote these lines to the church in Rome. Paul uses the word, “disobedient.” I’ll give you a quick little Greek lesson about this word. In the Greek language that Paul wrote in, the word is “apeitheia.” It’s where we get our word “apathy” from. The root word in the Greek means, convince or persuade. The “a” prefix on the word means “not” or “against.” So a-peithea means not convinced, or not persuaded. Which is what Agrippa was, when Paul shared the gospel.
Our English translations, then decided to use the word disobedient in these lines of Paul to the Roman Christians. So, to be disobedient, in this instance, literally means to be unconvinced and unpersuaded. To be unpersuaded means that you are not certain that something is true. You’re not sure that what you are seeing or hearing can be relied on or trusted.
If you remain unconvinced, you never really give yourself over. You never really get emotionally involved. If someone told you they loved you, but you held on to a handful of skepticism about what they are telling you, you will end up withholding yourself, unpersuaded by their love. That may have nothing to do with them, and everything to do with you, and the spirit within you. If you keep to your stance of being unpersuaded, you never commit yourself fully.
Did you hear about the company that makes blank bumper stickers? They're for people who don't want to get involved. To come at life and people and God with the posture of not allowing yourself to be won over, is like driving around with a blank bumper sticker. You are for nothing, you are allied with nothing, you are passionate about nothing.
In the book of Acts there is the story of Annanias and Saphira. In the early church, people were selling property and giving the proceeds to the apostles. The apostles would then use that money for feeding and taking care of the poor who were coming to Christ by the thousands. But Annanias and Saphira held back a good portion of the sale of their property, just in case. They were not as thoroughly convinced that this Christianity thing was real. They were almost persuaded. But just in case what was happening through the gospel didn’t last, they would have an insurance policy of funds to fall back on.
That’s not being totally persuaded. Gordon Stull used a great example of this in our Sunday School class one time. We were talking about this whole-hearted kind of commitment. Gordon said it’s like the poker player, who at some point pushes all her chips into the middle of the pot and says, “I’m all in.” She lays everything she’s got on the line. She’s all in. Annanias and Saphira were not all in. Their lack of being totally convinced about Christ ended up costing them dearly.
There’s a further step in this slippery slope of remaining adamantly unpersuaded. After a while, you just don’t care. Refusing to be convinced slowly becomes apathy. Remaining unconvinced keeps you from being emotionally involved. No emotional involvement becomes a “who cares” attitude.
Someone asked me the other day, “What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?” I said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I was going to call the Apathy Hotline one day, but then I thought, “What’s the point?”
And the nice thing about apathy is you don't have to exert yourself to show you're sincere about it.
Remember the early part of the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Revelation is a vision of the future, written by John the Divine. There are letters to seven churches at the start of the book. The seven letters are messages to those churches from the Risen Christ. In the letter to the church at Laodicea, Christ says,
I know…that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. (Revelation 3:15-16)
Here, the Risen Christ is equating being lukewarm to being apathetic. Those believers were never passionately all in. They would never allow themselves to be fully convinced. They weren’t emotionally hooked by Christ. Just, “Meh.” “Whatever.”
In the book I mentioned in last weeks message, The Inferno, by Dante, he wrote, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” I think Dante picked up this notion from Christ’s letter to Laodicea in the book of Revelation. Because people who are attempting to remain neutral are people who are not allowing themselves to be convinced. And people who are not persuaded about Christ won’t allow themselves to get passionately involved.
But there are times, as Dante has made the point, times of moral crisis, times of spiritual degradation, times when the flag of warning has been raised when we individually, or as a church, need to take a stand. Need to make our voice heard. Need to throw ourselves into some situation and make a difference. But we won’t do that if we aren't convinced about Christ.
British historian, Arnold Toynbee once said, “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm; and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”
When you meet someone who is enthusiastic about something, isn’t it because they are thoroughly persuaded? You can’t get excited about something you are still unconvinced about. You aren’t going to throw yourself into your relationship with Christ, if you really aren’t sure about him. You aren’t going to be part of some kind of ministry, or make plans for your own ministry, if you are not convinced about the one whom you are serving.
The longer you hold out, the more you hold back, the less enthusiastic you will become, the less chance you will allow yourself to be convinced otherwise. To be like Agrippa in his conversation with Paul, and to be “almost persuaded,” really means you are really unpersuaded. Almost persuaded doesn’t cut it with Christ. That was the warning of Christ to the church at Laodicea, the lukewarm, those who just sit by and remain sort of convinced about Christ get spewed out of his mouth. To be almost persuaded means you are lukewarm. What Christ wants is that you be “all in” as Gordon Stull described, or “all out.” At least Christ knows where you stand that way. It’s the apathetic fence sitters who end up doing nothing, or being nothing that makes Christ gag.
In the cartoon "Mother Goose and Grim," the cat is sleeping. Someone asks, "What are you doing?”
The cat says "Nothing. I's a cat. Cats always do nothing."
"When are you going to get up?" the questioner asked.
"I don't know" says the cat. "The hardest part of doing nothing is knowing when you're finished.”
Christ knows. Christ knows when you’re finished. It’s when you show that half-hearted enthusiasm. It’s when you are passionate, sort of, about your relationship with him. It’s when you say you have a plan about some kind of ministry in the name of Christ, and then that plan just stays on paper. It’s when you’re persuaded, almost, but not fully. You may try and get by with that in the church. But Christ knows. Christ knows if you’re fully convinced. Or not.
Romans 11:30-32
Men’s Bible Study recently finished up a study of the life of Paul. At one point, during Paul’s journeys, he had been arrested. One of the qualities we quickly discovered about Paul was that he never missed an opportunity to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No matter who he was talking to, Paul always worked the Gospel message into the conversation.
On this one particular instance, as I said, Paul had been arrested. He was brought before King Agrippa. Paul told Agrippa about Christ. Agrippa’s response was tragically telling:
Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. (Acts 26:28)
Almost. Not quite, but almost. You almost got me, Paul.
Maybe Paul had that experience in mind when he wrote these lines to the church in Rome. Paul uses the word, “disobedient.” I’ll give you a quick little Greek lesson about this word. In the Greek language that Paul wrote in, the word is “apeitheia.” It’s where we get our word “apathy” from. The root word in the Greek means, convince or persuade. The “a” prefix on the word means “not” or “against.” So a-peithea means not convinced, or not persuaded. Which is what Agrippa was, when Paul shared the gospel.
Our English translations, then decided to use the word disobedient in these lines of Paul to the Roman Christians. So, to be disobedient, in this instance, literally means to be unconvinced and unpersuaded. To be unpersuaded means that you are not certain that something is true. You’re not sure that what you are seeing or hearing can be relied on or trusted.
If you remain unconvinced, you never really give yourself over. You never really get emotionally involved. If someone told you they loved you, but you held on to a handful of skepticism about what they are telling you, you will end up withholding yourself, unpersuaded by their love. That may have nothing to do with them, and everything to do with you, and the spirit within you. If you keep to your stance of being unpersuaded, you never commit yourself fully.
Did you hear about the company that makes blank bumper stickers? They're for people who don't want to get involved. To come at life and people and God with the posture of not allowing yourself to be won over, is like driving around with a blank bumper sticker. You are for nothing, you are allied with nothing, you are passionate about nothing.
In the book of Acts there is the story of Annanias and Saphira. In the early church, people were selling property and giving the proceeds to the apostles. The apostles would then use that money for feeding and taking care of the poor who were coming to Christ by the thousands. But Annanias and Saphira held back a good portion of the sale of their property, just in case. They were not as thoroughly convinced that this Christianity thing was real. They were almost persuaded. But just in case what was happening through the gospel didn’t last, they would have an insurance policy of funds to fall back on.
That’s not being totally persuaded. Gordon Stull used a great example of this in our Sunday School class one time. We were talking about this whole-hearted kind of commitment. Gordon said it’s like the poker player, who at some point pushes all her chips into the middle of the pot and says, “I’m all in.” She lays everything she’s got on the line. She’s all in. Annanias and Saphira were not all in. Their lack of being totally convinced about Christ ended up costing them dearly.
There’s a further step in this slippery slope of remaining adamantly unpersuaded. After a while, you just don’t care. Refusing to be convinced slowly becomes apathy. Remaining unconvinced keeps you from being emotionally involved. No emotional involvement becomes a “who cares” attitude.
Someone asked me the other day, “What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?” I said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I was going to call the Apathy Hotline one day, but then I thought, “What’s the point?”
And the nice thing about apathy is you don't have to exert yourself to show you're sincere about it.
Remember the early part of the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Revelation is a vision of the future, written by John the Divine. There are letters to seven churches at the start of the book. The seven letters are messages to those churches from the Risen Christ. In the letter to the church at Laodicea, Christ says,
I know…that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. (Revelation 3:15-16)
Here, the Risen Christ is equating being lukewarm to being apathetic. Those believers were never passionately all in. They would never allow themselves to be fully convinced. They weren’t emotionally hooked by Christ. Just, “Meh.” “Whatever.”
In the book I mentioned in last weeks message, The Inferno, by Dante, he wrote, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” I think Dante picked up this notion from Christ’s letter to Laodicea in the book of Revelation. Because people who are attempting to remain neutral are people who are not allowing themselves to be convinced. And people who are not persuaded about Christ won’t allow themselves to get passionately involved.
But there are times, as Dante has made the point, times of moral crisis, times of spiritual degradation, times when the flag of warning has been raised when we individually, or as a church, need to take a stand. Need to make our voice heard. Need to throw ourselves into some situation and make a difference. But we won’t do that if we aren't convinced about Christ.
British historian, Arnold Toynbee once said, “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm; and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”
When you meet someone who is enthusiastic about something, isn’t it because they are thoroughly persuaded? You can’t get excited about something you are still unconvinced about. You aren’t going to throw yourself into your relationship with Christ, if you really aren’t sure about him. You aren’t going to be part of some kind of ministry, or make plans for your own ministry, if you are not convinced about the one whom you are serving.
The longer you hold out, the more you hold back, the less enthusiastic you will become, the less chance you will allow yourself to be convinced otherwise. To be like Agrippa in his conversation with Paul, and to be “almost persuaded,” really means you are really unpersuaded. Almost persuaded doesn’t cut it with Christ. That was the warning of Christ to the church at Laodicea, the lukewarm, those who just sit by and remain sort of convinced about Christ get spewed out of his mouth. To be almost persuaded means you are lukewarm. What Christ wants is that you be “all in” as Gordon Stull described, or “all out.” At least Christ knows where you stand that way. It’s the apathetic fence sitters who end up doing nothing, or being nothing that makes Christ gag.
In the cartoon "Mother Goose and Grim," the cat is sleeping. Someone asks, "What are you doing?”
The cat says "Nothing. I's a cat. Cats always do nothing."
"When are you going to get up?" the questioner asked.
"I don't know" says the cat. "The hardest part of doing nothing is knowing when you're finished.”
Christ knows. Christ knows when you’re finished. It’s when you show that half-hearted enthusiasm. It’s when you are passionate, sort of, about your relationship with him. It’s when you say you have a plan about some kind of ministry in the name of Christ, and then that plan just stays on paper. It’s when you’re persuaded, almost, but not fully. You may try and get by with that in the church. But Christ knows. Christ knows if you’re fully convinced. Or not.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Are You Saved?
Are You Saved?
Romans 10:8-13
Are you saved? It’s a simple question. It’s definitely a religious question. We associate the question with evangelistic types who feel no discomfort in walking up to a total stranger and asking the question, “Are you saved?” I haven't seen any street preachers in the past few years who are buttonholing people on city street corners trying to save their eternal souls. Or people walking up and down the sidewalks with a sandwich board that says, “The end is near.”
I don’t know why. It’s still a relevant question. It’s a question all of us have to ask ourselves, or be asked by someone in the church. There are lots of variations on the little question, Are you saved? What is the state of your eternal soul? If you died today do you know where your soul would be? When someone joins the church, the first question they are asked is, “Who is your Lord and Savior?” There is only one acceptable answer.
If you are a thinking person, hopefully you ponder the question, Are you saved? On one level, when you hear that question, you may be thinking the question really is, Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior? That’s part of it. But there’s more to ponder here.
If you hear the question, Are you saved?, you may ask, and rightly so, “Saved from what?” It’s like the bumper stickers back in the ’70’s that said, “Jesus is the answer.” Then the backlash bumper stickers started coming out that said, “What’s the question?” Or there were the bumper stickers that said, “I found it!” And the backlash bumper stickers that read, “I didn’t know you lost it.” If I answer “yes” to that question, “Are you saved?”, you also have to be ready for the backlash question: From what are you saved? The word implies that you are saved from something.
The word “save” in the Greek language of the Bible means:
1) saved from serious peril
2) to be kept alive
3) preserve your inner being
So, think of those meanings when you think about being saved. From what serious peril were you actually saved? How were you literally kept alive when you were saved? How was your inner being being preserved when you were saved?
When Paul Tillich retired as professor at Harvard Divinity School, on the occasion of his last class, he preached a sermon to his students on Matthew 10:8, “Heal the sick, raise the dead…” Tillich then said to the ministry students, “You will go out to carry the gospel of healing, but your biggest problem will be persuading people they need to be healed.” His sermon made the point that the biggest challenge Christian ministry faces is that of getting people to realize how sick we are without healing faith in God.
I think he’s right. Most people don’t think they are that bad of a person. They become “saved”—that is, as I mentioned before, they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, but won’t allow themselves to think any further about the depth of what they have just been saved from.
Being saved from what? Hell? Eternal damnation? Eternal torment? The fiery flames? Pitch forks and torture? Most of our understanding of what hell is all about comes more from Dante’s book, The Inferno, than it does from the Bible.
A man died and was taken to his place of eternal torment by the devil. As he passed sulphurous pits and shrieking sinners, he saw a man he recognized as a corrupt television evangelist snuggling up to a beautiful woman.
"That's unfair!" he cried. "I have to roast for all eternity, and that TV evangelist gets to spend it with a beautiful woman."
"Shut up", barked the devil, jabbing the man with his pitchfork. "Who are you to question that woman's punishment?”
I want to give you an alternate understanding of what hell is all about based on a couple of things Jesus said, rather than Dante’s seven circles of hell.
First, one of the most quoted and memorized verses in the Bible: John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” The word, perish, in the language Jesus spoke, means total annihilation. It doesn’t have anything to do with eternal damnation, fires, and torturous torment. It means that your soul is fully destroyed.
What Jesus is contrasting here in this most favorite of verses, is between having your soul completely erased, or having everlasting life with God.
And secondly, add to that the statement Jesus made recorded in Matthew 10, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Again, this word destroy has to do with having all traces of your soul expunged from existence. From these two statements Jesus makes, we are forced to rethink what hell is all about.
What if hell is not a place of eternal torment, but is a place where your soul is totally obliterated? What if what you are saved from is not eternal punishment, but the irreversible eradicating of all that you are body and soul? If you had the choice to live eternally with God and with the souls of all who love God, or having even your soul absolutely and forever eliminated, which would you choose?
Francis Schaeffer, in his book, No Little People, described the judgement of God as a great prairie fire. He wrote:
A Christian has only one foundation: Jesus Christ the Savior. And on that foundation he builds—with either combustible or non-combustible material. One day there will be a great judgment and the fire will come. It will be like the great prairie fire which sweeps along burning everything in its path. Suddenly it comes to a great rock outcropping in the midst of the prairie. Everything around the rock will be consumed. Only that which is atop the rock will escape the fire.
That’s what you have been saved from. Not eternal punishment. But total and final incineration of your very soul. Why does that happen? How do people come to that end?
In the opening scene of the movie, La Doce Vita, there is a panoramic view of Rome’s skyline. The focus is on the grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the center. Then there is the sound of a helicopter, heard off in a distance, until we catch a glimpse of it, far off, dragging some obscure object through the air by wires.
As the helicopter flies closer, you can clearly make out the cargo. It is a huge statue of Christ being dragged across the skyline of Rome. In the middle of the helicopter's flight, the film cuts to a beach below. Young beach goers, annoyed by the intrusion of the helicopter noise, laugh mockingly, pointing, as the statue flies overhead. The helicopter comes to a stop, hovers in place, then releases the statue into a trash dump-site below, breaking into pieces as it hits.
The message is loud and clear: Modern people have relegated Christ to the trash heap. People act as if Christ really doesn’t matter. In the early days of Christianity, the believers were hunted down and killed in all kinds of heinous ways. The threat of the world was a clear and present danger. But today, we as believers have no such external threat. The world doesn’t see us as a danger anymore. The world only sees Christians and our Christian beliefs as something that can be ignored, or laughed at as antiquated and irrelevant. It is against this grim scenery that the drama of God’s salvation is played out.
That is how a person reaches the point of having their soul erased by God. If you want to live as if Christ doesn’t matter, or as if Christ is some antiquated figure who has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, or if you want to live as if Christ has nothing to say to you about how you will live your life, to all that God says, “Fine, have it your way.”
Remember when Jesus said, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26) Notice Jesus doesn’t say if you want to gain the world and ignore Jesus in the process, your soul isn’t eternally tortured. It is forfeited. It is given up. It is erased.
People say, “How can a loving God condemn someone’s soul to eternal punishment?” Well, God doesn’t. God just grants people their wishes. If you want to live as if God doesn’t exist, and not believe in the Savior Jesus, then fine. You won’t be subject to the evil whims of a devil. You will simply reap what you have sown in this life—the total eradication of your soul.
That’s what you’ve been saved from. Let me say again what the meaning of the word “save” is in the Greek: saved from serious peril, to be kept alive, to have your inner being preserved. It isn’t hard to make the connection about what you have been saved from. Is it not serious peril to face having your very soul erased? Doesn’t being kept alive mean more than just your body, but that your soul also has a life and it can be wiped away? And what is your inner being but your soul, and to preserve your soul for eternity, rather than it being quashed at the end of life, is something you should desire? And the only way to do that, as Paul has said here, “…if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
There is one more piece to this statement by Paul that he goes on to explain in detail. It’s a part of being saved, that is just as important as what we are saved from. It is what we are saved for. It’s not enough for God that we be saved from the peril of losing our soul. God wants to benefit us, if we accept his salvation from annihilation, so that our life now may be full.
Here’s what we’re saved for: to be put right with God (vs. 10); so that we won’t be disappointed (vs. 11)—interesting that the word literally means that we won’t be put to shame—that God saves us for a release from shame and a way to live into a sense of self-esteem and inner strength; that we will be richly blessed (vs. 12); and, that so we will be attended to by God whenever we call out to him (v. 13).
Whenever I talk to people who are going through some grief experience I try to help give them a sense of their resources to deal with that grief. Is not this list of what we are saved for a great trove of resources that God has given us? That no matter what, when we are saved, we are right with God; that we will not suffer ultimate shame and disappointment no matter how tough the situation; that we will be richly blessed no matter what we feel has been taken from us; and that God promises to always be there when we call out to him.
What we are saved from and what we are saved for is truly a cause for exultant worship and praise of God.
The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836. But the decree was not to be valid until the next year. On July 1, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica. At 11:00 at night, all of them dressed in white robes, they knelt down, faces turned upward at the clock tower, awaiting midnight. As the clock struck twelve, the twenty thousand slaves rose together and shouted joyously, “We are free! We are free!” They knew exactly what they were freed from. And they were just gaining a sense of what they were freed for.
Can we not also, at the moment we have confessed with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believed in our heart that God raised him from the dead, can we not also raise our hands in joy and shout, “We are saved! We are saved!”
Romans 10:8-13
Are you saved? It’s a simple question. It’s definitely a religious question. We associate the question with evangelistic types who feel no discomfort in walking up to a total stranger and asking the question, “Are you saved?” I haven't seen any street preachers in the past few years who are buttonholing people on city street corners trying to save their eternal souls. Or people walking up and down the sidewalks with a sandwich board that says, “The end is near.”
I don’t know why. It’s still a relevant question. It’s a question all of us have to ask ourselves, or be asked by someone in the church. There are lots of variations on the little question, Are you saved? What is the state of your eternal soul? If you died today do you know where your soul would be? When someone joins the church, the first question they are asked is, “Who is your Lord and Savior?” There is only one acceptable answer.
If you are a thinking person, hopefully you ponder the question, Are you saved? On one level, when you hear that question, you may be thinking the question really is, Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior? That’s part of it. But there’s more to ponder here.
If you hear the question, Are you saved?, you may ask, and rightly so, “Saved from what?” It’s like the bumper stickers back in the ’70’s that said, “Jesus is the answer.” Then the backlash bumper stickers started coming out that said, “What’s the question?” Or there were the bumper stickers that said, “I found it!” And the backlash bumper stickers that read, “I didn’t know you lost it.” If I answer “yes” to that question, “Are you saved?”, you also have to be ready for the backlash question: From what are you saved? The word implies that you are saved from something.
The word “save” in the Greek language of the Bible means:
1) saved from serious peril
2) to be kept alive
3) preserve your inner being
So, think of those meanings when you think about being saved. From what serious peril were you actually saved? How were you literally kept alive when you were saved? How was your inner being being preserved when you were saved?
When Paul Tillich retired as professor at Harvard Divinity School, on the occasion of his last class, he preached a sermon to his students on Matthew 10:8, “Heal the sick, raise the dead…” Tillich then said to the ministry students, “You will go out to carry the gospel of healing, but your biggest problem will be persuading people they need to be healed.” His sermon made the point that the biggest challenge Christian ministry faces is that of getting people to realize how sick we are without healing faith in God.
I think he’s right. Most people don’t think they are that bad of a person. They become “saved”—that is, as I mentioned before, they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, but won’t allow themselves to think any further about the depth of what they have just been saved from.
Being saved from what? Hell? Eternal damnation? Eternal torment? The fiery flames? Pitch forks and torture? Most of our understanding of what hell is all about comes more from Dante’s book, The Inferno, than it does from the Bible.
A man died and was taken to his place of eternal torment by the devil. As he passed sulphurous pits and shrieking sinners, he saw a man he recognized as a corrupt television evangelist snuggling up to a beautiful woman.
"That's unfair!" he cried. "I have to roast for all eternity, and that TV evangelist gets to spend it with a beautiful woman."
"Shut up", barked the devil, jabbing the man with his pitchfork. "Who are you to question that woman's punishment?”
I want to give you an alternate understanding of what hell is all about based on a couple of things Jesus said, rather than Dante’s seven circles of hell.
First, one of the most quoted and memorized verses in the Bible: John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” The word, perish, in the language Jesus spoke, means total annihilation. It doesn’t have anything to do with eternal damnation, fires, and torturous torment. It means that your soul is fully destroyed.
What Jesus is contrasting here in this most favorite of verses, is between having your soul completely erased, or having everlasting life with God.
And secondly, add to that the statement Jesus made recorded in Matthew 10, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Again, this word destroy has to do with having all traces of your soul expunged from existence. From these two statements Jesus makes, we are forced to rethink what hell is all about.
What if hell is not a place of eternal torment, but is a place where your soul is totally obliterated? What if what you are saved from is not eternal punishment, but the irreversible eradicating of all that you are body and soul? If you had the choice to live eternally with God and with the souls of all who love God, or having even your soul absolutely and forever eliminated, which would you choose?
Francis Schaeffer, in his book, No Little People, described the judgement of God as a great prairie fire. He wrote:
A Christian has only one foundation: Jesus Christ the Savior. And on that foundation he builds—with either combustible or non-combustible material. One day there will be a great judgment and the fire will come. It will be like the great prairie fire which sweeps along burning everything in its path. Suddenly it comes to a great rock outcropping in the midst of the prairie. Everything around the rock will be consumed. Only that which is atop the rock will escape the fire.
That’s what you have been saved from. Not eternal punishment. But total and final incineration of your very soul. Why does that happen? How do people come to that end?
In the opening scene of the movie, La Doce Vita, there is a panoramic view of Rome’s skyline. The focus is on the grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the center. Then there is the sound of a helicopter, heard off in a distance, until we catch a glimpse of it, far off, dragging some obscure object through the air by wires.
As the helicopter flies closer, you can clearly make out the cargo. It is a huge statue of Christ being dragged across the skyline of Rome. In the middle of the helicopter's flight, the film cuts to a beach below. Young beach goers, annoyed by the intrusion of the helicopter noise, laugh mockingly, pointing, as the statue flies overhead. The helicopter comes to a stop, hovers in place, then releases the statue into a trash dump-site below, breaking into pieces as it hits.
The message is loud and clear: Modern people have relegated Christ to the trash heap. People act as if Christ really doesn’t matter. In the early days of Christianity, the believers were hunted down and killed in all kinds of heinous ways. The threat of the world was a clear and present danger. But today, we as believers have no such external threat. The world doesn’t see us as a danger anymore. The world only sees Christians and our Christian beliefs as something that can be ignored, or laughed at as antiquated and irrelevant. It is against this grim scenery that the drama of God’s salvation is played out.
That is how a person reaches the point of having their soul erased by God. If you want to live as if Christ doesn’t matter, or as if Christ is some antiquated figure who has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, or if you want to live as if Christ has nothing to say to you about how you will live your life, to all that God says, “Fine, have it your way.”
Remember when Jesus said, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26) Notice Jesus doesn’t say if you want to gain the world and ignore Jesus in the process, your soul isn’t eternally tortured. It is forfeited. It is given up. It is erased.
People say, “How can a loving God condemn someone’s soul to eternal punishment?” Well, God doesn’t. God just grants people their wishes. If you want to live as if God doesn’t exist, and not believe in the Savior Jesus, then fine. You won’t be subject to the evil whims of a devil. You will simply reap what you have sown in this life—the total eradication of your soul.
That’s what you’ve been saved from. Let me say again what the meaning of the word “save” is in the Greek: saved from serious peril, to be kept alive, to have your inner being preserved. It isn’t hard to make the connection about what you have been saved from. Is it not serious peril to face having your very soul erased? Doesn’t being kept alive mean more than just your body, but that your soul also has a life and it can be wiped away? And what is your inner being but your soul, and to preserve your soul for eternity, rather than it being quashed at the end of life, is something you should desire? And the only way to do that, as Paul has said here, “…if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
There is one more piece to this statement by Paul that he goes on to explain in detail. It’s a part of being saved, that is just as important as what we are saved from. It is what we are saved for. It’s not enough for God that we be saved from the peril of losing our soul. God wants to benefit us, if we accept his salvation from annihilation, so that our life now may be full.
Here’s what we’re saved for: to be put right with God (vs. 10); so that we won’t be disappointed (vs. 11)—interesting that the word literally means that we won’t be put to shame—that God saves us for a release from shame and a way to live into a sense of self-esteem and inner strength; that we will be richly blessed (vs. 12); and, that so we will be attended to by God whenever we call out to him (v. 13).
Whenever I talk to people who are going through some grief experience I try to help give them a sense of their resources to deal with that grief. Is not this list of what we are saved for a great trove of resources that God has given us? That no matter what, when we are saved, we are right with God; that we will not suffer ultimate shame and disappointment no matter how tough the situation; that we will be richly blessed no matter what we feel has been taken from us; and that God promises to always be there when we call out to him.
What we are saved from and what we are saved for is truly a cause for exultant worship and praise of God.
The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836. But the decree was not to be valid until the next year. On July 1, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica. At 11:00 at night, all of them dressed in white robes, they knelt down, faces turned upward at the clock tower, awaiting midnight. As the clock struck twelve, the twenty thousand slaves rose together and shouted joyously, “We are free! We are free!” They knew exactly what they were freed from. And they were just gaining a sense of what they were freed for.
Can we not also, at the moment we have confessed with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believed in our heart that God raised him from the dead, can we not also raise our hands in joy and shout, “We are saved! We are saved!”
Monday, July 21, 2014
Working Up An Appetite
"Working Up An Appetite"
Romans 8:18-28
"Working Up An Appetite"
Romans 8:18-28
Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and author, once wrote about the time he was visiting Rome during Christmas. He went to St. Peter's Cathedral on Christmas Eve to see Pope Pius XII celebrate mass. Buechner described the huge crowd of pilgrims who were there, and the great anticipation that charged the air with holy electricity. Then the Pope was carried in on his golden throne.
This is how Buechner describes his experience:
Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into all the faces around me and behind me with a look so keen and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular. He was not a potentate nodding and smiling to acknowledge the enthusiasm of the multitudes. He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting, whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching, for someone, some one, who he thought might be there that night or any night, anywhere, but whom he had never found, and yet he kept looking. Face after face he searched for the face that he knew he would know--was it this one? was it this one? or this one?--and then he passed on out of my sight. It was a powerful moment for me..and I felt that I knew whom he was looking for...that in the teeming mystery of that place he was looking not just for the Christ in our faces but for the Christ himself... (The Hungering Dark, page 115, 118)
I have known people whose gaze was equally intense, whose eyes were also large and worn with their looking. There was a guy in my college dorm like that. John something-or-other; I can't remember his last name. He was a Jesus Freak of the first order. It was the early 1970's. John had been strung out so far on drugs, probably not too many people would have been surprised or concerned when the last thread broke.
But then John saw The Lord. A meeting so powerful, so real, that it almost instantly, and miraculously, regenerated John's brain and his life. He yearned to see The Lord again. Everyday he yearned with deep moans. One day he came up to me and with a mournful ache in his voice, said, "Steve, when's Jesus coming back; I want to see him so badly."
I said, "I don't know, John. I just don't know." He clapped me on the shoulder, nodding his head, and went on, looking--searching--like the Pope was searching for Jesus, for some visible sign of the Lord's presence.
I sometimes wonder what happened to John, and the few people I know like him who have been so anxious to see The Lord. I wonder if they are still looking, if their eyes are still larger than life in their search for the holy.
There aren't too many people who I know, like John, who are so overt in their search. Most people I know live as if there is nothing really holy in life. Most are trying to avoid a face-to-face with Jesus. Most people don't look for Christ himself as they pass their days.
Dwight L. Moody was once asked, "Why are you always talking about your need to be filled with the Holy Spirit?"
Moody replied, "Because I leak."
Most people, I know, leak. They slowly--or quickly--lose their attentiveness to God and to the things of God. There is so much that pokes holes in our attentiveness to God, that obscures our vision to God and to what God is doing. Or there are those who try to redefine God's activity as something else: politics, fate, social reform, psychology.
But the key is our attention--our appetite--for God and for what God is doing in the world. It is in that driving urge to keep our eyes large in search of God and God's activity. God and God's work is all around us. It's happening in spite of us, whether we're paying attention or not.
There was a farmer who was visiting a friend in New York City. As they were walking down one of the avenues, the farmer suddenly turned to his friend and said, "I hear a cricket."
"Oh, you're crazy," his friend replied.
"No; I hear a cricket. I do! I'm sure of it."
"It's the noon hour," his friend replied. "There are wall-to-wall people, cars honking, taxi's squealing around corners, noises all over the place. How can you say you hear a cricket in the midst of all this noise?"
"I'm sure I do." He listened attentively and then walked to the corner, and listened a little more. Finally, near by, he saw a shrub planted in a concrete planter. He brushed at the leaves that had fallen, and there was a cricket.
His friend was astonished. But the farmer said, "My ears are no different than yours. It simply depends on what you are listening for. Here, let me show you what I mean." The farmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change--and dropped the coins on the sidewalk. Nearly every head turned within a block. "You see what I mean?" he said picking up his coins. "It all depends on what you're listening for."
How do we listen for God? How do we keep our attention for God from leaking out? How do we keep from being distracted by so many other things? How do we keep our eyes large with anticipation, looking for the face of Christ in the many people we see each day? How do we keep our eyesight clear so we know what we are seeing when we see it: the face of Christ at work in our lives and in our world? How do we keep looking and not give up?
The apostle Paul wrote to the Roman Christians that the answer to those kinds of questions was the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, according to Paul, arouses our appetite for God. The Holy Spirit makes our souls growl with deep hunger for the things of God. When that appetite becomes distracted, or we try to satisfy it with other things, the Holy Spirit keeps the hunger alive.
Have you ever been really thirsty, and it seems you are drinking every kind of liquid refreshment you can think of, but still your thirst persists? Or, when hungry, you stuff yourself with a lot of junk food, and then feel bloated, but you still feel hungry? In fact, if you kept eating the empty calories you'd literally starve to death.
Spiritually, we stuff or drown our God-appetite with that which is not God. We misread the source of our deep hunger. That's why the Holy Spirit is so important--the Holy Spirit keeps us in touch with where our hunger really lies, that it is a hunger for God. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to make us feel our hunger pains for God over and over, until that pain drives us to true satisfaction. The Holy Spirit makes us realize how starved we are, driving us back to the pantry of God's presence.
Hunger pains can hurt when you are really starving. We ache for deliverance from such pains. But we can't be delivered until we realize the folly of our predicament. We can't take care of the cause of the pains until we gain the knowledge of how we wittingly or unwittingly have been starving ourselves of God. The Holy Spirit not only creates the hunger pains, but then gives the knowledge of our folly and then the direction for how to satisfy our hunger for God.
There is one more role that the Holy Spirit takes on, as mentioned by Paul in this chapter of his letter to the Roman Christians. It is the flip side of what I have just been saying. This role of the Holy Spirit has to do with prayer. Paul says that the Holy Spirit interprets our prayers to God, and even when we don't exactly know what to say, the Holy Spirit prays for us.
Probably one of the most troubling disciplines of being a Christian is prayer. How am I supposed to pray? How long should I pray? What should I say? When should I pray? What is prayer, anyway? These kinds of questions seem to have arisen ever since people discovered communication with God was possible--even expected. Paul certainly must have heard such questions from converts in the churches he was establishing.
His response to those questions? "Don't worry about it." Paul saw that that was one of the great roles of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.
A grandfather was passing his granddaughter's room one night and overheard her repeating the alphabet in a very reverent way. "What on earth are you doing?" he asked her.
"I'm saying my prayers," explained the little girl. "But I can't think of exactly the right words tonight, so I'm just saying all the letters. God will put them together for me, because God knows what I'm trying to say."
That little girl, whether she knew it or not, was taking Paul's teaching to heart. "Don't worry about it; the Holy Spirit puts all the letters together and makes it come out just right before God."
Even our groans and sighs are turned into prayer by the Holy Spirit. Did you ever imagine how holy those noises are: **nasal sigh**; **deep breath**; **sigh**; **groan**. All those are prayers! Noises (or individual letters) transformed into prayers by the Holy Spirit.
In this way, the Holy Spirit is keeping us present to God. Our prayers, fashioned by the Holy Spirit to reflect our true selves and needs, are made known to God--brought into the very presence of God.
Now remember I said that this activity of the Holy Spirit is the flip side of the first role? In the first activity of the Holy Spirit, we are having out attention--our appetite--for God, heightened and directed to God. The Holy Spirit is keeping us looking for God and attentive to God.
In the second role, the Holy Spirit is keeping God attentive to us. God is being made to pay attention to us through our prayers that are being brought into God's presence by the Holy Spirit. It's a two way street, and the Holy Spirit is in charge of keeping the traffic of that communication going both ways.
Romans 8:18-28
"Working Up An Appetite"
Romans 8:18-28
Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and author, once wrote about the time he was visiting Rome during Christmas. He went to St. Peter's Cathedral on Christmas Eve to see Pope Pius XII celebrate mass. Buechner described the huge crowd of pilgrims who were there, and the great anticipation that charged the air with holy electricity. Then the Pope was carried in on his golden throne.
This is how Buechner describes his experience:
Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into all the faces around me and behind me with a look so keen and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular. He was not a potentate nodding and smiling to acknowledge the enthusiasm of the multitudes. He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting, whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching, for someone, some one, who he thought might be there that night or any night, anywhere, but whom he had never found, and yet he kept looking. Face after face he searched for the face that he knew he would know--was it this one? was it this one? or this one?--and then he passed on out of my sight. It was a powerful moment for me..and I felt that I knew whom he was looking for...that in the teeming mystery of that place he was looking not just for the Christ in our faces but for the Christ himself... (The Hungering Dark, page 115, 118)
I have known people whose gaze was equally intense, whose eyes were also large and worn with their looking. There was a guy in my college dorm like that. John something-or-other; I can't remember his last name. He was a Jesus Freak of the first order. It was the early 1970's. John had been strung out so far on drugs, probably not too many people would have been surprised or concerned when the last thread broke.
But then John saw The Lord. A meeting so powerful, so real, that it almost instantly, and miraculously, regenerated John's brain and his life. He yearned to see The Lord again. Everyday he yearned with deep moans. One day he came up to me and with a mournful ache in his voice, said, "Steve, when's Jesus coming back; I want to see him so badly."
I said, "I don't know, John. I just don't know." He clapped me on the shoulder, nodding his head, and went on, looking--searching--like the Pope was searching for Jesus, for some visible sign of the Lord's presence.
I sometimes wonder what happened to John, and the few people I know like him who have been so anxious to see The Lord. I wonder if they are still looking, if their eyes are still larger than life in their search for the holy.
There aren't too many people who I know, like John, who are so overt in their search. Most people I know live as if there is nothing really holy in life. Most are trying to avoid a face-to-face with Jesus. Most people don't look for Christ himself as they pass their days.
Dwight L. Moody was once asked, "Why are you always talking about your need to be filled with the Holy Spirit?"
Moody replied, "Because I leak."
Most people, I know, leak. They slowly--or quickly--lose their attentiveness to God and to the things of God. There is so much that pokes holes in our attentiveness to God, that obscures our vision to God and to what God is doing. Or there are those who try to redefine God's activity as something else: politics, fate, social reform, psychology.
But the key is our attention--our appetite--for God and for what God is doing in the world. It is in that driving urge to keep our eyes large in search of God and God's activity. God and God's work is all around us. It's happening in spite of us, whether we're paying attention or not.
There was a farmer who was visiting a friend in New York City. As they were walking down one of the avenues, the farmer suddenly turned to his friend and said, "I hear a cricket."
"Oh, you're crazy," his friend replied.
"No; I hear a cricket. I do! I'm sure of it."
"It's the noon hour," his friend replied. "There are wall-to-wall people, cars honking, taxi's squealing around corners, noises all over the place. How can you say you hear a cricket in the midst of all this noise?"
"I'm sure I do." He listened attentively and then walked to the corner, and listened a little more. Finally, near by, he saw a shrub planted in a concrete planter. He brushed at the leaves that had fallen, and there was a cricket.
His friend was astonished. But the farmer said, "My ears are no different than yours. It simply depends on what you are listening for. Here, let me show you what I mean." The farmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change--and dropped the coins on the sidewalk. Nearly every head turned within a block. "You see what I mean?" he said picking up his coins. "It all depends on what you're listening for."
How do we listen for God? How do we keep our attention for God from leaking out? How do we keep from being distracted by so many other things? How do we keep our eyes large with anticipation, looking for the face of Christ in the many people we see each day? How do we keep our eyesight clear so we know what we are seeing when we see it: the face of Christ at work in our lives and in our world? How do we keep looking and not give up?
The apostle Paul wrote to the Roman Christians that the answer to those kinds of questions was the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, according to Paul, arouses our appetite for God. The Holy Spirit makes our souls growl with deep hunger for the things of God. When that appetite becomes distracted, or we try to satisfy it with other things, the Holy Spirit keeps the hunger alive.
Have you ever been really thirsty, and it seems you are drinking every kind of liquid refreshment you can think of, but still your thirst persists? Or, when hungry, you stuff yourself with a lot of junk food, and then feel bloated, but you still feel hungry? In fact, if you kept eating the empty calories you'd literally starve to death.
Spiritually, we stuff or drown our God-appetite with that which is not God. We misread the source of our deep hunger. That's why the Holy Spirit is so important--the Holy Spirit keeps us in touch with where our hunger really lies, that it is a hunger for God. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to make us feel our hunger pains for God over and over, until that pain drives us to true satisfaction. The Holy Spirit makes us realize how starved we are, driving us back to the pantry of God's presence.
Hunger pains can hurt when you are really starving. We ache for deliverance from such pains. But we can't be delivered until we realize the folly of our predicament. We can't take care of the cause of the pains until we gain the knowledge of how we wittingly or unwittingly have been starving ourselves of God. The Holy Spirit not only creates the hunger pains, but then gives the knowledge of our folly and then the direction for how to satisfy our hunger for God.
There is one more role that the Holy Spirit takes on, as mentioned by Paul in this chapter of his letter to the Roman Christians. It is the flip side of what I have just been saying. This role of the Holy Spirit has to do with prayer. Paul says that the Holy Spirit interprets our prayers to God, and even when we don't exactly know what to say, the Holy Spirit prays for us.
Probably one of the most troubling disciplines of being a Christian is prayer. How am I supposed to pray? How long should I pray? What should I say? When should I pray? What is prayer, anyway? These kinds of questions seem to have arisen ever since people discovered communication with God was possible--even expected. Paul certainly must have heard such questions from converts in the churches he was establishing.
His response to those questions? "Don't worry about it." Paul saw that that was one of the great roles of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.
A grandfather was passing his granddaughter's room one night and overheard her repeating the alphabet in a very reverent way. "What on earth are you doing?" he asked her.
"I'm saying my prayers," explained the little girl. "But I can't think of exactly the right words tonight, so I'm just saying all the letters. God will put them together for me, because God knows what I'm trying to say."
That little girl, whether she knew it or not, was taking Paul's teaching to heart. "Don't worry about it; the Holy Spirit puts all the letters together and makes it come out just right before God."
Even our groans and sighs are turned into prayer by the Holy Spirit. Did you ever imagine how holy those noises are: **nasal sigh**; **deep breath**; **sigh**; **groan**. All those are prayers! Noises (or individual letters) transformed into prayers by the Holy Spirit.
In this way, the Holy Spirit is keeping us present to God. Our prayers, fashioned by the Holy Spirit to reflect our true selves and needs, are made known to God--brought into the very presence of God.
Now remember I said that this activity of the Holy Spirit is the flip side of the first role? In the first activity of the Holy Spirit, we are having out attention--our appetite--for God, heightened and directed to God. The Holy Spirit is keeping us looking for God and attentive to God.
In the second role, the Holy Spirit is keeping God attentive to us. God is being made to pay attention to us through our prayers that are being brought into God's presence by the Holy Spirit. It's a two way street, and the Holy Spirit is in charge of keeping the traffic of that communication going both ways.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up
"Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up!"
Romans 8:12-17
In the 17th century, children were regarded as little adults. Children were made to dress like their parents, were given heavy responsibilities, and were forbidden anything that resembled a plaything.
A historian who has studied 330 portraits of children between the years of 1670 and 1810 discovered that the pictures "contain no distinctive childish artifacts such as toys, children's furniture, or school books. The poses show no signs of play or playfulness. The faces of the children are as solemn as the faces of other adults."
Until the 1800's children weren't even given books at their own reading levels. Juvenile literature hadn't been invented.
Parents in the 17th and 18th centuries often kept their children at a long arms length, in order to keep from creating close relations with their children. Puritan ministers specifically urged parents not to become too close to their children. Many children were sent away to live with other families.
What is wrong with us? What has happened to us? What happens between childhood and adulthood that forces us to grow up too fast? Maybe we've bought into a lie. The lie says, This is an adult world for adults. If that's so, look around you at the world. Look around and see what the grown-ups have done with the world.
A little boy whispered to his father during church, "I have to go potty." So the father took him by the hand and quietly led his boy down the aisle. When they were almost to the back of the church, the little boy turned and shouted, "I'll be right back, God; I just have to go to the potty!"
Now we all laugh. Isn't that cute. How many of you adults would feel uninhibited enough to do that? Why isn't it just as cute for an adult to do such a thing? Well, an adult should know better. It's just not proper. Why is it proper, even cute, for a child to do such a thing? Well, they don't know any better. They haven't learned yet, so it's excusable.
Listen to those words: "...haven't learned yet..." Learned from who? And, learned what? Who gets to decide what's childish and what's adultish? Who gets to decide what's proper and improper for how a grown-up is supposed to act? Think about that. There is no rule book out there that says, This is childish, and, This is not childish. There is no person out there, whom we as society have given the power to decide what it is to act like a child and what it is to act like an adult.
Those messages are hammered into us by grown-ups when we were children. Those grown-ups got those messages from their grown-ups when they were children. And on and on down the line. Apparently at least as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries.
When I was a child, my father would say, repeatedly, "Act like an adult!" "Quit being so childish!" I didn't have the wherewithal to say back to him, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old; can't acting like an adult wait for a few years?"
And when I was being punished, spanked with his belt, he'd say, "Suck it up. Don't cry. Take it like a man." And if I cried I got more of it. (I hope if any of you fathers did that, said that, to your sons, that you--if you haven't already--will go to them and apologize for doing and saying such a thing.) Because I didn't, and your sons didn't have the wherewithal to say back, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old and this hurts like hell; why can't I cry?"
I was so busy trying to live up to my father's adultisms, I never really got to be a kid. So now you can stop wondering why I act like a kid so much. I'm making up for lost time.
When I was at the church up in Hickman, Nebraska, some kids were playing in the church. Their moms were getting things set up for Vacation Bible School. The kids were in and out of my office, grabbing root beer candies, drawing on my whiteboard, typing stuff on my computer while I was trying to write my sermon (I just left the stuff on there that they typed, so it would remind me of that day and what it means to be a kid).
They asked if I'd turn on the microphones in the sanctuary so they could sing. I said, "Sure." I didn't think twice. After a few minutes of their singing, the secretary came storming into my office, and said with a smile on her face, "Why are you letting them do that!? You know why? Because you're just a kid like they are!"
It was one of the best compliments I've ever received. I'm hoping she meant it as such. I am a big kid. I wanna be a big kid. I wanna play and have fun in life. Walt Disney said that he took it as a compliment that people said he had "not quite grown up." So I'm in good company.
A store clerk in a department store saw a young boy standing by the escalator. He seemed fascinated by it. The clerk asked the boy, "Is anything the matter?"
"No," said the boy. "I'm just waiting for my gum to come back."
That's the boy I want to be. I want to see the world as wondrous, where a hand hold on an escalator isn't a hand hold, but an amazing transportation device for my gum. Uninhibited. Unafraid to try something, or do something that others would say is childish.
Look up inhibited in the dictionary. Its definitions could double for the word, adult: restrain, forbid, hinder, suppress, arrest. I don't want to live an inhibited life where I've got to worry about restraining my wonder, forbidding myself from actions that supposedly don't match my age, suppressing myself from taking risks because I'm afraid like an adult, arresting my emotions that God designed into me because someone else says that's the way an adult behaves.
I wanna mess with that adult world. Like the two boys on an airline flight. The two boys were sitting next to each other. This was back in the days when they served meals on the flights, and the tickets were $200 cheaper. The boys got soup for their meal. One of them got an idea. He poured his soup in the airline barf bag. Then he started making noises like he was throwing up. When the stewardess got to him, he was sitting there happily eating the contents of the barf bag with a spoon.
I want to mess with the adult world, and remind others God designed us to play and enjoy the world God gave us. To remind others that we are children.
Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, who writes extensively about children, wrote in her book, Prisoners of Childhood:
As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over (the child), his vital growth will be violently interrupted. It is a child's legitimate need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center--the central actor--in his own activity.
I would go on to say that not only do children need to be treated as the central actor in their own story, I think they need to be shown how they can be the hero of their own story. But one of the things we do as adults is knock the heroic out of children, making them into the mediocre adults the rest of us have become. It's what most adults need to reclaim--how to become the hero's of their own stories.
I wonder how old Adam and Eve were in the Garden. Have you ever wondered that? All the artwork shows them as full grown adults. That God created a full grown man and woman. But what if they were kids? How does that change the story? The temptation of the serpent then becomes, "You can grow up faster; become adults; know stuff like adults; you will be adults." And in that moment, childhood was lost. Entrance was gained into the adult world, and we weren't children of God anymore. We were adults. We were our own man, our own woman, and look what's happened ever since.
That's not what God intended. I have scriptural proof. It's right there in Paul's letter to the Romans, that was read a few moments ago: "God's Spirit joins to our spirits to declare that we are God's children. Since we are his children, we will possess the blessings he keeps for his people..." Notice that word, children. Not adults. God wants us to be his children, not his adults. Our relationship with God is one of child to parent. That's part of the Holy Spirit's job--to keep us child-like, not adult-like. If you want to become a truly spiritual person, in tune with God through the Holy Spirit, then you better hang around with children. That's where the Holy Spirit is.
One time George Washington was invited to a special dinner at a home in a large northern city. The meal was prepared and ready to be served, but there was no Mr. Washington. The host had not seen him because he had been away from home and didn't arrive until the time when the guests were gathering.
One of the servants told their master that the general had arrived some time before and had been shown up to his room. The master and servant went to the room that had been assigned to the general but he wasn't there.
As they were about to return downstairs to inform the guests, they heard a man's voice singing, "Ride a horse to Bambury Cross." The sound was coming from the nursery. They opened the door and found the general, still in his dust-covered uniform, sitting and playing with the children. They were around him and over him and on him. When the host saw this he was very confused, but waited until the song was over.
General Washington laughed when he was told the guests were waiting, saying that it had probably done them good to wait for a change. He said that he would be down immediately, as soon as he had tucked the children into bed.
That's a man who knows what it means to be God's child in an adult world. Not ruled by inhibitions. Those kinds of people are peacefully and playfully free. In their freedom from inhibitions--all the restraints and hindrances, and prohibitions, and forbiddances--of grown-ups, they know what life is all about. What life is supposed to be like: enjoyment; wonder; simple trust; intuitive knowing; fearless play; disarming openness; unafraid to let your emotions be seen; to speak freely.
"I sure am glad to see you," the little girl said to her grandmother on her mother's side. "Now maybe Daddy will do the trick he's promising us."
The grandmother was curious. "What trick is that?" she asked.
"I heard him tell mommy," the little girl answered, "that if you came to visit he'd climb the walls."
As children, we get to say stuff like that. Be openly honest.
Why does God want us to be his children, and not his adults? Roy Wilbur once said, "The potential of a child is the most intriguing thing in all creation." That's what God sees in children--their amazing potential. By the time we're adults we've had a lot of the potential beaten out of us by the adult world. Somehow we buy into one of the other lies that it's all over for us. Too late. What potential we had as children has been dried up and disappeared once we became adults, with no second chances to get it back.
But then there's the story of the old teacher in Germany, long ago. He used to take his hat off and bow to his class every time he came into the classroom in the morning. When he was asked why, his answer was, "You never know what one of these children may become." And he was right. One little boy in the class was named Martin Luther.
That's the way God looks at all of us. At the start of every day, God takes his hat off and bows to us wondering what all of us will become, endowed with all the childlike potential he has given us.
Here's one of the saddest stories I've read. A man who was condemned to die in the electric chair was asked if he wished to make a final statement. He looked at all the reporters, photographers, officials and observers who stood outside the glass staring at him and then said bitterly, "If I had been shown this much attention when I was a boy, I would not be here today." So sad. But happens so often.
I was having a conversation with some other parents in a different church. We got to sharing stories about how children like to come into their parents room at night and cuddle and fall asleep.
One mother said her little daughter came into their bedroom in the middle of the night. She woke them up and said, "In my room there aren't any good dreams. May I sleep in bed with you and daddy?"
I've never forgotten that line. What a wonderfully simple and yet profound thing for a child to say. Somewhere along the line the man who was condemned to die in the electric chair had lost his place where he could dream some good dreams. To be a child. To be a child of God. To snuggle with God and continue, all life long, to dream the good dreams of a child. To dream about what we can become, no matter how old we are, because we are God's children.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Playing With Cards Face Up
"Playing With Cards Face Up"
Romans 7:15-25
When my son Ryan was a boy, I taught him how to play cribbage. How I did that was by first playing with all our cards laid out on the table, face up. We went through each of our hands, looking at the reasons why we should keep certain cards, and why we should put others into the crib.
For learning purposes, I’m not sure of a better way to teach a person, especially a young boy, how to play the game. (I must have taught Ryan pretty well; he beat me every game for the first year we played cribbage together. He was about 8 or 9.) It is odd, though, playing with cards face up on the table. There are no secrets. There is no mental juggling trying to figure out what he might have in his hand, or what card he might play next. I know what he’s got, and he knows the same about my hand.
At first, I had this feeling of vulnerability with all my cards out there. I wasn’t sure how Ryan felt about it, since he was just learning how to play. It’s so easy to be taken advantage of when all your cards are laying out there on the table for your “opponent” to see.
It occurred to me that that way of learning how to play a card game is a metaphor for the way we learn how to live. We start out, as soon as we are old enough to figure out what’s going on around us, with all of who we are laid out there for everyone to see. Everything is face up, so to speak. Emotions. Personality. Identity. While we’re learning how to play this game of life, we are open and vulnerable to attack by those who have played a lot longer than we.
As we discover more and more of the rules, and more and more of the pain that goes along with being taken advantage of, we start picking up a card here and a card there. We keep them hidden. We don’t trust others to know what we’ve got, who we are, what we are feeling. We start hiding all that from the other players in this game of life. We find out quickly that we have to protect what we are holding in our hands. Others know we have cards, we let people see the backs of them, but we don’t let anyone else know what they are, the value of them, what they mean to us.
There are at least a couple reasons why we hide our cards. One is, if they are all really good ones, we don’t want others to know exactly how good they are. And the other reason is that if we have a hand full of losers, again we don’t want others to know exactly how bad they are. We develop poker faces to mask any authentic emotions or personality. As we play, we decide how we will play out our hands; that is, reveal who we are, what we may be feeling, etc. Even, and maybe especially so, if we have a bunch of losers in our hand, if that’s what it seems like our lives have become, we want to play those cards to our best advantage.
I read, a while back, the novel, Gilead. (Has anyone read it?) It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a novel about an elderly Kansas Congregationalist Pastor named John Ames. Pastor Ames is writing a journal type memoir for his young son about his past, his everyday life, and things he is thinking about. He feels his life is fading away, and there’s some things he wants his son to know.
Pastor Ames best friend is a similarly elderly, retired Presbyterian minister named Boughton. Boughton has a son named Jack who is kind of a stereotypical preacher’s kid: a little wild, never amounted to much, has skeletons in his closet that no one knows about. In other words, Jack is holding a hand of loser cards in life.
Jack came back to town for a while to stay with his aging father, and sister. Jack is trying to decide if he wants to reveal a couple of the cards out of the hand of his lousy life to his father. It’s the reason he’s come home. So Jack first comes to Pastor Ames, his father’s best friend, to take a chance with him first--to tell him the part of his sad life that he wants to tell his own father. It takes all the trust and courage Jack can muster just to tell his father’s friend his story; to reveal just a couple of the awful cards in his hand, so to speak.
That’s the image I want to concentrate on. What happens when we have a hand full of losers? Not in cards, but in life. And let’s say the reason, as it was in Jack’s case, that we have ended up with a hand of losers is not because of the deal, but because of the way we have played the game so far. In the game of trying to live in this world, we have made some bad decisions. They have cost us dearly. So what do we do now?
One of our options is of course to keep playing life close to the chest. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t disclose yourself. Keep trying to work things out by yourself. The other option is to play by different rules with the cards you are holding. Rules laid out by the apostle Paul here in the seventh chapter of Romans.
Paul’s no different than us. We have this misconception that he’s some kind of super-Christian. But he’s been playing cards with life. What he’s found is that the more he plays the worse it gets. He gets a good card in the deal now and then, but for the most part, whenever he makes a decision about what to do with his life, it ends up being a bad decision. Life gets more bitter than sweet.
We’ve been following his life in Men’s Bible Study, and it’s been a great journey. But everywhere he goes he gets beat up by some angry mob. Or stoned. Or left for dead.
He wants to do the right thing, be a good man, make healthy decisions. It appears he has done that. But, by his own self-assessment here in this part of Romans, what he finds is that even though that’s what he wants, what he ends up doing is the wrong thing, not being the kind of man he wants to be, and making choices that end in some kind of disaster.
Paul is speaking as the archetype, the mold, the pattern that fits us all. His words are the experience of us all. We are all people of conflicting natures. We have good intentions but bad behaviors. We seem to be neither all bad, but neither are we all that good. We vacillate between the two natures of a greedy Donald Trump and the Good Samaritan; the snideness of a self-righteous politician to the humility of Mother Teresa. We run the gamut between the surface flipness of a Facebook caption to the depth of the novel I mentioned earlier, Gilead. Most of the time it feels like we are leaning a lot more to the negative sides of those characteristics than we do to the positive.
I think that’s a large part of what grace is. It’s cutting each other a lot of slack, because if we saw all of each other’s cards, if we all laid it all out on the table, we’d quickly find out we’re all holding empty, pointless hands, one way or another. Let’s be honest. That’s all Paul is asking us to do. That’s all he’s doing himself.
What we discover is that this battle going on within all of us is part of us. Yet at the same time, it’s bigger than us--bigger than what we are usually able to cope with. Finally we, like Paul, get frustrated and tired of it all, and the Lord shows us a different way to play the game.
The main new rule that Paul employs for playing cards with life is this: confess. Put your cards back on the table, face up. Disclose your hand. Reveal yourself.
But, and I want us to be clear here, but, it’s important to take a look at what Paul is confessing. He is not confessing particular, individual screw-ups in his life.
What Paul is doing is confessing to the basic inclinations, the motivational forces that are creating the negative behaviors he hates in himself. What he is confessing to is that there is this basic wrongness about himself. That basic wrongness is what’s keeping him holding on to a bunch of worthless cards in life, which leads to deceit, emptiness, loneliness, and self-hatred. And, the attempt to keep those cards close to his chest, all the effort he is expending to hide that from others, trying to dupe others into believing all is well in life, is killing him emotionally, spiritually, even physically.
So instead of going on and holding his hand pressed against his chest, he’s laying it down. “Look at it,” he cries out. “This is the way my life is really going.” He admits it.
I decide one way, but then I act another.
I do things I absolutely despise.
I can’t be trusted to figure out what’s best.
The power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions.
I obviously need help.
I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it.
I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway.
Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
These are not specifics. They are general, yet basic truths about ourselves and our human condition. It’s something along these lines: “Don’t trust me completely, because I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who will ultimately prove untrustworthy.” Or, “I want to be known as good, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t have the will power to always act on my good intentions.” Or, “I love you, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who won’t act loving all the time and will hurt you some times.”
The most important words in those statements are, I AM THE KIND OF PERSON WHO. What Paul is asking us to confess and get out on the table is a certain kind of honesty about ourselves. It’s a kind of honesty that we don’t always like to admit openly. (And that, in itself, is another example of our problem: “I’m willing to face up to things, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t like to admit that I have some basic flaws in my nature that hurt other people.”)
See how we slough off the kind of confession that Paul is asking us to make about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? We say things like, “Well, I know I’m not perfect; nobody’s perfect,” followed up with a little nervous laugh. What we are really saying, if we are honest with ourselves is that, though we’re not perfect, we still see ourselves right up there. Maybe an 8 on a scale of 1-10. At least a 7.
But Paul is saying, “Get real. Admit it to yourself. Lay your cards on the table and take a good look at them. All your cards. Not just the best ones. Let everyone see them. Let everyone see THE KIND OF PERSON you are. Now what happens to that self-rating?” That’s what Paul is saying is the new rule for playing cards with life.
There are at least a couple of things that happen when we follow Paul’s example of playing with our cards face up. First, like I said before, we certainly find out what grace really means. We feel a deep empathetic sadness in our hearts for ourselves and all the rest sitting at the table with us, as we come to the understanding of how we have all been playing hands with very few points. And we may even all start laughing at the realization of the silliness of trying to play such hands. We experience the laughter of grace and freedom in the company of others who now have laid down such hands, and we don’t have to work so hard anymore at holding on to them.
There's a line in the Simon and Garfunkle song, "Kathy's Song," that I've always liked. It's a rewording of the oft quoted phrase, "There but by the grace of God go I." In "Kathy's Song" it is, "There but for the grace of you go I." That line came to me while I was in the midst of a major screw up in my life. There were others who were making sure my face was constantly being rubbed in it all. But there were others whose grace and forgiveness literally saved me. It wasn't just God's grace--it was "the grace of others," the people who saw all my cards face up, and let me know in one way or another, that despite the cards I had played, I was still worthwhile.
And the other important realization is that we don’t have the wherewithal to change THE KIND OF PERSON we are. It doesn’t matter how many trips we make to the self-help bookshelf, and how many of those kinds of books we actually read even after we buy them or check them out. They can’t change our basic flaws that make us act the way we do.
As Paul says toward the end of his confessional agony, “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?” It’s quite a situation, isn’t it? We know what’s wrong with us. We can finally admit it. We can lay our cards on the table. We can proclaim, honestly, the duplicity of our basic natures. But even that does not change us. That is, nullify our duplicity. As I said earlier, that is where the sudden realization comes that this whole “problem” is a lot bigger than just us. The cure will have to come from somewhere, or someone, else.
Of course, the one who can set all this right is clear. In Paul’s words: “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind...” Then he goes on in the whole 8th chapter of Romans and talks about how Christ makes us whole, single-minded, God ordered people. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON WHO sold our soul, but Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is now entirely owned by God. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON who lived a life unable to really have any kind of control over our desires, but God through Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who has a new kind of desire--a desire to do what is God’s and our best. We may have been THE KIND OF PERSON who might be just any kind of person, but God through Christ who has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is His kind of person.
In the game of Cribbage, there is the up card, the draw card. The deck is cut and the dealer chooses at random, a card that gets to be added in with the other cards for extra points. So, even if you have little or no points in the cards you are holding on to, that one card, the up card, can make all the difference in what you are holding. It can be the one gut shot card that makes your hand into a run, or creates combinations that gives you an amazing hand. Jesus is that “up card” who makes our sorry hands, our sorry lives, into one with all kinds of value.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, in an act of honesty, knowing what kind of hand we are trying to play in life, to just go ahead and lay down the terrible cards we have collected, knowing they are of very little value, or may indeed add up to nothing with no hope of any points among them. But then, when we lay them down, in that simple act of confession for all to see, they are transformed into an amazing hand, a winner in God’s eyes.
“The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ...set things right in this life of contradictions” so we can serve God with all our heart and mind.
Romans 7:15-25
When my son Ryan was a boy, I taught him how to play cribbage. How I did that was by first playing with all our cards laid out on the table, face up. We went through each of our hands, looking at the reasons why we should keep certain cards, and why we should put others into the crib.
For learning purposes, I’m not sure of a better way to teach a person, especially a young boy, how to play the game. (I must have taught Ryan pretty well; he beat me every game for the first year we played cribbage together. He was about 8 or 9.) It is odd, though, playing with cards face up on the table. There are no secrets. There is no mental juggling trying to figure out what he might have in his hand, or what card he might play next. I know what he’s got, and he knows the same about my hand.
At first, I had this feeling of vulnerability with all my cards out there. I wasn’t sure how Ryan felt about it, since he was just learning how to play. It’s so easy to be taken advantage of when all your cards are laying out there on the table for your “opponent” to see.
It occurred to me that that way of learning how to play a card game is a metaphor for the way we learn how to live. We start out, as soon as we are old enough to figure out what’s going on around us, with all of who we are laid out there for everyone to see. Everything is face up, so to speak. Emotions. Personality. Identity. While we’re learning how to play this game of life, we are open and vulnerable to attack by those who have played a lot longer than we.
As we discover more and more of the rules, and more and more of the pain that goes along with being taken advantage of, we start picking up a card here and a card there. We keep them hidden. We don’t trust others to know what we’ve got, who we are, what we are feeling. We start hiding all that from the other players in this game of life. We find out quickly that we have to protect what we are holding in our hands. Others know we have cards, we let people see the backs of them, but we don’t let anyone else know what they are, the value of them, what they mean to us.
There are at least a couple reasons why we hide our cards. One is, if they are all really good ones, we don’t want others to know exactly how good they are. And the other reason is that if we have a hand full of losers, again we don’t want others to know exactly how bad they are. We develop poker faces to mask any authentic emotions or personality. As we play, we decide how we will play out our hands; that is, reveal who we are, what we may be feeling, etc. Even, and maybe especially so, if we have a bunch of losers in our hand, if that’s what it seems like our lives have become, we want to play those cards to our best advantage.
I read, a while back, the novel, Gilead. (Has anyone read it?) It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a novel about an elderly Kansas Congregationalist Pastor named John Ames. Pastor Ames is writing a journal type memoir for his young son about his past, his everyday life, and things he is thinking about. He feels his life is fading away, and there’s some things he wants his son to know.
Pastor Ames best friend is a similarly elderly, retired Presbyterian minister named Boughton. Boughton has a son named Jack who is kind of a stereotypical preacher’s kid: a little wild, never amounted to much, has skeletons in his closet that no one knows about. In other words, Jack is holding a hand of loser cards in life.
Jack came back to town for a while to stay with his aging father, and sister. Jack is trying to decide if he wants to reveal a couple of the cards out of the hand of his lousy life to his father. It’s the reason he’s come home. So Jack first comes to Pastor Ames, his father’s best friend, to take a chance with him first--to tell him the part of his sad life that he wants to tell his own father. It takes all the trust and courage Jack can muster just to tell his father’s friend his story; to reveal just a couple of the awful cards in his hand, so to speak.
That’s the image I want to concentrate on. What happens when we have a hand full of losers? Not in cards, but in life. And let’s say the reason, as it was in Jack’s case, that we have ended up with a hand of losers is not because of the deal, but because of the way we have played the game so far. In the game of trying to live in this world, we have made some bad decisions. They have cost us dearly. So what do we do now?
One of our options is of course to keep playing life close to the chest. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t disclose yourself. Keep trying to work things out by yourself. The other option is to play by different rules with the cards you are holding. Rules laid out by the apostle Paul here in the seventh chapter of Romans.
Paul’s no different than us. We have this misconception that he’s some kind of super-Christian. But he’s been playing cards with life. What he’s found is that the more he plays the worse it gets. He gets a good card in the deal now and then, but for the most part, whenever he makes a decision about what to do with his life, it ends up being a bad decision. Life gets more bitter than sweet.
We’ve been following his life in Men’s Bible Study, and it’s been a great journey. But everywhere he goes he gets beat up by some angry mob. Or stoned. Or left for dead.
He wants to do the right thing, be a good man, make healthy decisions. It appears he has done that. But, by his own self-assessment here in this part of Romans, what he finds is that even though that’s what he wants, what he ends up doing is the wrong thing, not being the kind of man he wants to be, and making choices that end in some kind of disaster.
Paul is speaking as the archetype, the mold, the pattern that fits us all. His words are the experience of us all. We are all people of conflicting natures. We have good intentions but bad behaviors. We seem to be neither all bad, but neither are we all that good. We vacillate between the two natures of a greedy Donald Trump and the Good Samaritan; the snideness of a self-righteous politician to the humility of Mother Teresa. We run the gamut between the surface flipness of a Facebook caption to the depth of the novel I mentioned earlier, Gilead. Most of the time it feels like we are leaning a lot more to the negative sides of those characteristics than we do to the positive.
I think that’s a large part of what grace is. It’s cutting each other a lot of slack, because if we saw all of each other’s cards, if we all laid it all out on the table, we’d quickly find out we’re all holding empty, pointless hands, one way or another. Let’s be honest. That’s all Paul is asking us to do. That’s all he’s doing himself.
What we discover is that this battle going on within all of us is part of us. Yet at the same time, it’s bigger than us--bigger than what we are usually able to cope with. Finally we, like Paul, get frustrated and tired of it all, and the Lord shows us a different way to play the game.
The main new rule that Paul employs for playing cards with life is this: confess. Put your cards back on the table, face up. Disclose your hand. Reveal yourself.
But, and I want us to be clear here, but, it’s important to take a look at what Paul is confessing. He is not confessing particular, individual screw-ups in his life.
What Paul is doing is confessing to the basic inclinations, the motivational forces that are creating the negative behaviors he hates in himself. What he is confessing to is that there is this basic wrongness about himself. That basic wrongness is what’s keeping him holding on to a bunch of worthless cards in life, which leads to deceit, emptiness, loneliness, and self-hatred. And, the attempt to keep those cards close to his chest, all the effort he is expending to hide that from others, trying to dupe others into believing all is well in life, is killing him emotionally, spiritually, even physically.
So instead of going on and holding his hand pressed against his chest, he’s laying it down. “Look at it,” he cries out. “This is the way my life is really going.” He admits it.
I decide one way, but then I act another.
I do things I absolutely despise.
I can’t be trusted to figure out what’s best.
The power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions.
I obviously need help.
I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it.
I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway.
Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
These are not specifics. They are general, yet basic truths about ourselves and our human condition. It’s something along these lines: “Don’t trust me completely, because I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who will ultimately prove untrustworthy.” Or, “I want to be known as good, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t have the will power to always act on my good intentions.” Or, “I love you, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who won’t act loving all the time and will hurt you some times.”
The most important words in those statements are, I AM THE KIND OF PERSON WHO. What Paul is asking us to confess and get out on the table is a certain kind of honesty about ourselves. It’s a kind of honesty that we don’t always like to admit openly. (And that, in itself, is another example of our problem: “I’m willing to face up to things, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t like to admit that I have some basic flaws in my nature that hurt other people.”)
See how we slough off the kind of confession that Paul is asking us to make about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? We say things like, “Well, I know I’m not perfect; nobody’s perfect,” followed up with a little nervous laugh. What we are really saying, if we are honest with ourselves is that, though we’re not perfect, we still see ourselves right up there. Maybe an 8 on a scale of 1-10. At least a 7.
But Paul is saying, “Get real. Admit it to yourself. Lay your cards on the table and take a good look at them. All your cards. Not just the best ones. Let everyone see them. Let everyone see THE KIND OF PERSON you are. Now what happens to that self-rating?” That’s what Paul is saying is the new rule for playing cards with life.
There are at least a couple of things that happen when we follow Paul’s example of playing with our cards face up. First, like I said before, we certainly find out what grace really means. We feel a deep empathetic sadness in our hearts for ourselves and all the rest sitting at the table with us, as we come to the understanding of how we have all been playing hands with very few points. And we may even all start laughing at the realization of the silliness of trying to play such hands. We experience the laughter of grace and freedom in the company of others who now have laid down such hands, and we don’t have to work so hard anymore at holding on to them.
There's a line in the Simon and Garfunkle song, "Kathy's Song," that I've always liked. It's a rewording of the oft quoted phrase, "There but by the grace of God go I." In "Kathy's Song" it is, "There but for the grace of you go I." That line came to me while I was in the midst of a major screw up in my life. There were others who were making sure my face was constantly being rubbed in it all. But there were others whose grace and forgiveness literally saved me. It wasn't just God's grace--it was "the grace of others," the people who saw all my cards face up, and let me know in one way or another, that despite the cards I had played, I was still worthwhile.
And the other important realization is that we don’t have the wherewithal to change THE KIND OF PERSON we are. It doesn’t matter how many trips we make to the self-help bookshelf, and how many of those kinds of books we actually read even after we buy them or check them out. They can’t change our basic flaws that make us act the way we do.
As Paul says toward the end of his confessional agony, “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?” It’s quite a situation, isn’t it? We know what’s wrong with us. We can finally admit it. We can lay our cards on the table. We can proclaim, honestly, the duplicity of our basic natures. But even that does not change us. That is, nullify our duplicity. As I said earlier, that is where the sudden realization comes that this whole “problem” is a lot bigger than just us. The cure will have to come from somewhere, or someone, else.
Of course, the one who can set all this right is clear. In Paul’s words: “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind...” Then he goes on in the whole 8th chapter of Romans and talks about how Christ makes us whole, single-minded, God ordered people. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON WHO sold our soul, but Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is now entirely owned by God. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON who lived a life unable to really have any kind of control over our desires, but God through Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who has a new kind of desire--a desire to do what is God’s and our best. We may have been THE KIND OF PERSON who might be just any kind of person, but God through Christ who has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is His kind of person.
In the game of Cribbage, there is the up card, the draw card. The deck is cut and the dealer chooses at random, a card that gets to be added in with the other cards for extra points. So, even if you have little or no points in the cards you are holding on to, that one card, the up card, can make all the difference in what you are holding. It can be the one gut shot card that makes your hand into a run, or creates combinations that gives you an amazing hand. Jesus is that “up card” who makes our sorry hands, our sorry lives, into one with all kinds of value.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, in an act of honesty, knowing what kind of hand we are trying to play in life, to just go ahead and lay down the terrible cards we have collected, knowing they are of very little value, or may indeed add up to nothing with no hope of any points among them. But then, when we lay them down, in that simple act of confession for all to see, they are transformed into an amazing hand, a winner in God’s eyes.
“The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ...set things right in this life of contradictions” so we can serve God with all our heart and mind.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Experiencing God In His Kingdom
"Experiencing God In His Kingdom"
Luke 9:10-17
This is the last sermon in the long “Experiencing God” series. I have appreciated how many of you have read the book, have been a part of one of the small groups, and how you stuck with this long, seven month study. Although we are done reading the book and you will have your final small group sessions this week, it doesn’t end here. As Alan said in the Minute for Mission, we have been listening to God and because of that we are starting to THINK BIGGER. With God, we are challenged to THINK BIGGER.
That’s what this last message is about, as we look at the story of the feeding of the 5000. We want to be a part of something that is way bigger than we ever thought was possible.
There's a certain progression, or factors, that make up this feeding of the 5000 incident. Let's go through them, in order, so we can pick out the differences between "thinking small" vs "thinking bigger".
First is the lateness of the day. Luke tells us that it was "late in the afternoon." Time is a resource. Sometimes it feels like time is going so slowly. While at others it feels like time is racing by. But the way we have divided up time, it goes by at the same rate, 24/7: one tick of the second hand at a time. Click, click, click, click. Every day it's the same.
As the day goes by, we have this sense in the back of our minds that time is a limited resource. Not for the history of all things. Time has been "marching on" for possibly millions of years. But for us, time is a limited resource. Each of us only has so much. How much that is, none of us knows. As we get older we begin to sense that there is less of it ahead of us, than there is behind us. Time, for us, is running out.
We can feel that same way with each day. We only have 24 hours in a day. The later into the day we get, the more we realize we just might not have enough hours in this day to get done what we wanted or needed to get done. When you're getting to the end of your day, do you look back and see how much you did or didn't get done? Or do you look ahead to the time you have left and what you can do with that amount of time, no matter how small it seems?
Time has slipped away from the disciples in their dealing with this large crowd of people. They didn't know how much time Jesus was going to spend with the people, or how long Jesus was going to teach them about how to deal with all their concerns. Jesus had been talking about God's Kingdom for most of the day. The resource of time was almost used up. The day had gotten away from them. Now it was nearing the end of the afternoon. Evening was upon them. What do they do now, thinking they had so little time left?
The next factor is the location. The disciples told Jesus, "There is nothing in this place. It is like a desert." The place itself, apparently had no resources. It wasn't that there were meager resources in which to take care of the crowd's needs. There were NO resources. "Nothing." They were all in a place where there was nothing available for the people, at a time in the day where the shadows on the sundial were getting long.
I've had people ask me why I'm living in a small town. "There's nothing to do there!" is the exclamation that I've heard a number of times. So I reply, "OK, I've lived in several big cities. You live in a big city. You have all these resources for entertainment and self-fulfillment. So what do you do with your free time? What, of all those resources the city has to offer, have you accessed? Have you gone to a play? A concert? A book signing? Listened to a lecture or speaker? Gone to a museum? A professional sporting event? What all have you done, of all the things you have available?" Their response: "Hardly anything. We just sit home and watch TV." Then I say, "There you have it."
The next factor in this story of the feeding of the 5000 is the need. This is what drives the tension in the story. The disciples recognize that people need to eat, and they are a long ways from nowhere. The place "like a desert" will provide no food, nor any kind of lodging.
At least the disciples recognize the people have needs. But evidently the people hadn't planned ahead. They didn't bring any resources for the things they needed. None brought a tent or some kind of make-shift shelter for the night. None had apparently planned ahead and brought some food with them. The attitude behind the disciples statement is that these people just weren't thinking and didn't come prepared. It's not the disciples fault--according to them--that the people came so ill-prepared. Nor is it the disciples responsibility to make up for the people's unpreparedness.
So send them back to some place where there were resources they could access. It's their own fault, the disciples were saying, for not having anything. Turn them over, Jesus, to the natural consequences of their meager supplies.
Next comes the retort to the disciples attitude expressed in what they were telling Jesus. Jesus' reply? "You give them something to eat." Evidently the disciples came prepared. They had food. They had something.
Rather than agreeing with the disciples and saying the problem was the people's because they didn't have anything to eat, Jesus was telling the disciples, the problem is yours because you have something but aren't willing to share. The disciples had food. The resource they were low on was compassion. Let someone else take care of it. Or, let them take care of themselves. They got themselves into this situation; let them get themselves out of it.
The fifth factor in this feeding of the 5000 story is the meager resources. Jesus quickly throws the responsibility for feeding all these people back on the disciples. "You give them something to eat." OK. Now they start scrounging in their bags. According to the story they only come up with five small flat loaves of bread and two salt dried fish.
The disciples tell Jesus what they came up with. Notice their wording to Jesus, "We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish." Notice the word, "only" in the disciples statement. They haven't just told Jesus what they have. They have made a judgement about how much they have: "only."
We were teasing Rod at breakfast a couple of weeks ago about his poor farmer talk. We asked him how the wheat was up north around his parents place. He gave us the characteristic poor farmer talk: "Oh, I don't know if we'll get much of anything out of this years crop. Probably just a few bushels here and there. It's going to be a bad year."
So we questioned further. "Not much rain up there, then?"
Rod says, "Oh they got a lot of rain. It's been good that way."
We say, "So even though they got a lot of rain, the crop's not looking good."
"You just don't know," Rod said. "All the heads could be empty; not much grain."
"'Could be,' you say," we ask. "So it could be good, too?"
"I suppose," Rod says. "You just never know. If it's like last year, we just may get nothing at all."
We shook our heads and teased him, saying even if he got 100 bushels an acre, it would still be a bad crop. I've sat in enough small town coffee shops, shooting the breeze with farmers to know they hold their truths pretty close to the chest, and won't admit to any abundance, or good fortune. I was told one time that farmers don't like bragging about an abundant crop, so they all just talk the "poor farmer" talk, so no one feels bad. I don't know if that's true or not. I do know the disciples were talking the poor farmer talk: All we have here are five small loaves, and two old dried fish.
The next factor in this story, after telling us about their meager resources, is the size of the need: 5000 men. 5000! And that's just the men. If there were women and children along, they weren't significant enough to add to the count. There could have been upwards of 10,000 people there. And the women may have not been counted, nor gotten anything to eat because of their low status. So there were probably more there than 5000. But at least the men were counted.
So the story's tension is set with those two opposing facts: five loaves and two fish vs. 5000 men to feed. Low resources. Big need. Little available. Huge possibility.
Between those two opposing facts are the disciples. The disciples who are feeling inadequate. It's not just that they don't think they have enough to meet the great need in terms of feeding all those people. The disciples were feeling another kind of inadequacy. An inadequacy of faith. Jesus was challenging them to exercise their faith. To have confidence in their faith. To think bigger than themselves and their assessment of their meager resources. The disciples were not only saying, "We just don't have enough stuff here to take care of all the people." They were also saying, "We don't have enough faith to make something amazing happen. We're just a bunch of guys trying to get by with what little we have."
My friend Alan Luttrell has asked me, and himself, the question, "If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do?" It's an intriguing question about confidence and assurances. I want to turn that question into a faith question: "If you had such a strong faith, what would you do?" What would you accomplish? Looking at the, possibly, meager resources you are holding in your hands--at least by your evaluation--in the hands of a faith-full person, what would you be able to do? What would be your limits?
You see, when Jesus gave the disciples his challenge (You give them something to eat.) he was, in my mind, going against a lot of what Blackaby has been saying in this book. Blackaby has been saying you sit back and wait for God to act, for God to do something and then you get on board with that. But Jesus is saying here, "You do something. Don't look at me. You've got food. Supposedly you've got faith. Take care of it. Feed these people. Take care of their need. Take the initiative. See what happens."
The disciples stood there stuttering and stammering, "But, but, but, but..." All those buts were a result of thinking too small. Or small thinking. Small faith. Low evaluation not only of God but of themselves. But, but, but... "But what?" Jesus is challenging. "Give me the dang bread and fish," he finally tells them. "Tell everyone to sit down; groups would work good," Jesus says. At least the disciples can do that. Jesus shakes his head in frustration at them--at us.
Jesus "looked up toward heaven..." That's the next factor in this story. God. Looking to God as the one who thinks big, and sees big opportunities for witness about our big God. God--the one who can multiply something meager into something massive. All God needs are people with the kind of resources of faith, so that our big God can do big things through people who have big faith.
How does that happen in this story? Jesus breaks the bread and fish and hands it to the disciples. That's what most of the translations say happens. That Jesus broke the bread and fish and handed it to the disciples. But what the Greek says is that Jesus "...broke the bread and fish and kept handing them to his disciples..." In other words, Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish, and kept breaking and kept breaking, and kept handing and kept handing the pieces off to the disciples. The more he broke off, the more he kept having to break off. The more he had to give.
And that's the final factor in this story--the surprising abundance of 5 small loaves of bread and 2 dried fish. So much so, that everyone was filled, and there was some left over--12 small baskets full of leftovers. These would have been small baskets, about the size of a large grapefruit. But still. And not just 5 loaves and two fish, but 5 loaves and 2 fish in the hands of Jesus. Who just told the disciples--you feed the people. Which means they could have done what he did: breaking bread and giving bread until all were filled with extra to spare.
So here's the point, I think, of this story. It's only two words, so it's easy to remember. Here they are. Ready? Think Bigger. Jesus was talking to the people most of the day about God's Kingdom. And by the sign of this miracle, the main motto of the Kingdom of God is, Think Bigger.
The disciples were victims of their own small thinking. Small resources. Limited possibilities. Too little for too much need. Too many rationalizations that avoid taking compassionate action and responsibility: it's too late in the day; we're out in the middle of no where. You can't expect so much of us. We've got faith, to a certain point.
But Jesus is demonstrating that there is so much more. If only we would Think Bigger, or maybe, Faith Bigger. Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "I tell you for certain that if you have faith in me, you will do the same things that I am doing. You will do even greater things..." (John 14:12). Whoa!! It's amazing that Jesus just says we will do the same things he does, if we have faith. That is mind blowing enough. But then to hear him say that we will do even greater things than he has done, is enough to knock us off our feet.
The only qualification is, "...if you have faith in me..." In other words, if we would only Faith Bigger. If only we wouldn't succumb so easily to small faith thinking, as the disciples did in this story. If only we wouldn't just look at what we think are meager resources, and think it's just too late, and think our situation is like being in a desert. If only we would take Jesus at his word, and Faith Bigger, and do unbelievably amazing things that Jesus says we can do.
That, I think, is the main point of this book, that we've been reading for seven months. If Experiencing God is about anything, it is about Faith Bigger. It's about giving ourselves over to God fully in faith, and Think Bigger. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:
What God has planned,
for people who love him
is more than eyes have seen
or ears have heard.
It has never even
entered our minds. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
In other words, we cannot even begin to comprehend what we are capable of if we Faith Bigger. God is ready to make it happen with us. God, as Jesus did with the disciples, is simply saying, "You do it. Take charge. DO your faith; just don't sit around and think about your faith. Find out what God and you can do, when you abandon yourself into Faith Bigger. Don't think small. Think Bigger. Make it happen. Faith Bigger.
Luke 9:10-17
This is the last sermon in the long “Experiencing God” series. I have appreciated how many of you have read the book, have been a part of one of the small groups, and how you stuck with this long, seven month study. Although we are done reading the book and you will have your final small group sessions this week, it doesn’t end here. As Alan said in the Minute for Mission, we have been listening to God and because of that we are starting to THINK BIGGER. With God, we are challenged to THINK BIGGER.
That’s what this last message is about, as we look at the story of the feeding of the 5000. We want to be a part of something that is way bigger than we ever thought was possible.
There's a certain progression, or factors, that make up this feeding of the 5000 incident. Let's go through them, in order, so we can pick out the differences between "thinking small" vs "thinking bigger".
First is the lateness of the day. Luke tells us that it was "late in the afternoon." Time is a resource. Sometimes it feels like time is going so slowly. While at others it feels like time is racing by. But the way we have divided up time, it goes by at the same rate, 24/7: one tick of the second hand at a time. Click, click, click, click. Every day it's the same.
As the day goes by, we have this sense in the back of our minds that time is a limited resource. Not for the history of all things. Time has been "marching on" for possibly millions of years. But for us, time is a limited resource. Each of us only has so much. How much that is, none of us knows. As we get older we begin to sense that there is less of it ahead of us, than there is behind us. Time, for us, is running out.
We can feel that same way with each day. We only have 24 hours in a day. The later into the day we get, the more we realize we just might not have enough hours in this day to get done what we wanted or needed to get done. When you're getting to the end of your day, do you look back and see how much you did or didn't get done? Or do you look ahead to the time you have left and what you can do with that amount of time, no matter how small it seems?
Time has slipped away from the disciples in their dealing with this large crowd of people. They didn't know how much time Jesus was going to spend with the people, or how long Jesus was going to teach them about how to deal with all their concerns. Jesus had been talking about God's Kingdom for most of the day. The resource of time was almost used up. The day had gotten away from them. Now it was nearing the end of the afternoon. Evening was upon them. What do they do now, thinking they had so little time left?
The next factor is the location. The disciples told Jesus, "There is nothing in this place. It is like a desert." The place itself, apparently had no resources. It wasn't that there were meager resources in which to take care of the crowd's needs. There were NO resources. "Nothing." They were all in a place where there was nothing available for the people, at a time in the day where the shadows on the sundial were getting long.
I've had people ask me why I'm living in a small town. "There's nothing to do there!" is the exclamation that I've heard a number of times. So I reply, "OK, I've lived in several big cities. You live in a big city. You have all these resources for entertainment and self-fulfillment. So what do you do with your free time? What, of all those resources the city has to offer, have you accessed? Have you gone to a play? A concert? A book signing? Listened to a lecture or speaker? Gone to a museum? A professional sporting event? What all have you done, of all the things you have available?" Their response: "Hardly anything. We just sit home and watch TV." Then I say, "There you have it."
The next factor in this story of the feeding of the 5000 is the need. This is what drives the tension in the story. The disciples recognize that people need to eat, and they are a long ways from nowhere. The place "like a desert" will provide no food, nor any kind of lodging.
At least the disciples recognize the people have needs. But evidently the people hadn't planned ahead. They didn't bring any resources for the things they needed. None brought a tent or some kind of make-shift shelter for the night. None had apparently planned ahead and brought some food with them. The attitude behind the disciples statement is that these people just weren't thinking and didn't come prepared. It's not the disciples fault--according to them--that the people came so ill-prepared. Nor is it the disciples responsibility to make up for the people's unpreparedness.
So send them back to some place where there were resources they could access. It's their own fault, the disciples were saying, for not having anything. Turn them over, Jesus, to the natural consequences of their meager supplies.
Next comes the retort to the disciples attitude expressed in what they were telling Jesus. Jesus' reply? "You give them something to eat." Evidently the disciples came prepared. They had food. They had something.
Rather than agreeing with the disciples and saying the problem was the people's because they didn't have anything to eat, Jesus was telling the disciples, the problem is yours because you have something but aren't willing to share. The disciples had food. The resource they were low on was compassion. Let someone else take care of it. Or, let them take care of themselves. They got themselves into this situation; let them get themselves out of it.
The fifth factor in this feeding of the 5000 story is the meager resources. Jesus quickly throws the responsibility for feeding all these people back on the disciples. "You give them something to eat." OK. Now they start scrounging in their bags. According to the story they only come up with five small flat loaves of bread and two salt dried fish.
The disciples tell Jesus what they came up with. Notice their wording to Jesus, "We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish." Notice the word, "only" in the disciples statement. They haven't just told Jesus what they have. They have made a judgement about how much they have: "only."
We were teasing Rod at breakfast a couple of weeks ago about his poor farmer talk. We asked him how the wheat was up north around his parents place. He gave us the characteristic poor farmer talk: "Oh, I don't know if we'll get much of anything out of this years crop. Probably just a few bushels here and there. It's going to be a bad year."
So we questioned further. "Not much rain up there, then?"
Rod says, "Oh they got a lot of rain. It's been good that way."
We say, "So even though they got a lot of rain, the crop's not looking good."
"You just don't know," Rod said. "All the heads could be empty; not much grain."
"'Could be,' you say," we ask. "So it could be good, too?"
"I suppose," Rod says. "You just never know. If it's like last year, we just may get nothing at all."
We shook our heads and teased him, saying even if he got 100 bushels an acre, it would still be a bad crop. I've sat in enough small town coffee shops, shooting the breeze with farmers to know they hold their truths pretty close to the chest, and won't admit to any abundance, or good fortune. I was told one time that farmers don't like bragging about an abundant crop, so they all just talk the "poor farmer" talk, so no one feels bad. I don't know if that's true or not. I do know the disciples were talking the poor farmer talk: All we have here are five small loaves, and two old dried fish.
The next factor in this story, after telling us about their meager resources, is the size of the need: 5000 men. 5000! And that's just the men. If there were women and children along, they weren't significant enough to add to the count. There could have been upwards of 10,000 people there. And the women may have not been counted, nor gotten anything to eat because of their low status. So there were probably more there than 5000. But at least the men were counted.
So the story's tension is set with those two opposing facts: five loaves and two fish vs. 5000 men to feed. Low resources. Big need. Little available. Huge possibility.
Between those two opposing facts are the disciples. The disciples who are feeling inadequate. It's not just that they don't think they have enough to meet the great need in terms of feeding all those people. The disciples were feeling another kind of inadequacy. An inadequacy of faith. Jesus was challenging them to exercise their faith. To have confidence in their faith. To think bigger than themselves and their assessment of their meager resources. The disciples were not only saying, "We just don't have enough stuff here to take care of all the people." They were also saying, "We don't have enough faith to make something amazing happen. We're just a bunch of guys trying to get by with what little we have."
My friend Alan Luttrell has asked me, and himself, the question, "If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do?" It's an intriguing question about confidence and assurances. I want to turn that question into a faith question: "If you had such a strong faith, what would you do?" What would you accomplish? Looking at the, possibly, meager resources you are holding in your hands--at least by your evaluation--in the hands of a faith-full person, what would you be able to do? What would be your limits?
You see, when Jesus gave the disciples his challenge (You give them something to eat.) he was, in my mind, going against a lot of what Blackaby has been saying in this book. Blackaby has been saying you sit back and wait for God to act, for God to do something and then you get on board with that. But Jesus is saying here, "You do something. Don't look at me. You've got food. Supposedly you've got faith. Take care of it. Feed these people. Take care of their need. Take the initiative. See what happens."
The disciples stood there stuttering and stammering, "But, but, but, but..." All those buts were a result of thinking too small. Or small thinking. Small faith. Low evaluation not only of God but of themselves. But, but, but... "But what?" Jesus is challenging. "Give me the dang bread and fish," he finally tells them. "Tell everyone to sit down; groups would work good," Jesus says. At least the disciples can do that. Jesus shakes his head in frustration at them--at us.
Jesus "looked up toward heaven..." That's the next factor in this story. God. Looking to God as the one who thinks big, and sees big opportunities for witness about our big God. God--the one who can multiply something meager into something massive. All God needs are people with the kind of resources of faith, so that our big God can do big things through people who have big faith.
How does that happen in this story? Jesus breaks the bread and fish and hands it to the disciples. That's what most of the translations say happens. That Jesus broke the bread and fish and handed it to the disciples. But what the Greek says is that Jesus "...broke the bread and fish and kept handing them to his disciples..." In other words, Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish, and kept breaking and kept breaking, and kept handing and kept handing the pieces off to the disciples. The more he broke off, the more he kept having to break off. The more he had to give.
And that's the final factor in this story--the surprising abundance of 5 small loaves of bread and 2 dried fish. So much so, that everyone was filled, and there was some left over--12 small baskets full of leftovers. These would have been small baskets, about the size of a large grapefruit. But still. And not just 5 loaves and two fish, but 5 loaves and 2 fish in the hands of Jesus. Who just told the disciples--you feed the people. Which means they could have done what he did: breaking bread and giving bread until all were filled with extra to spare.
So here's the point, I think, of this story. It's only two words, so it's easy to remember. Here they are. Ready? Think Bigger. Jesus was talking to the people most of the day about God's Kingdom. And by the sign of this miracle, the main motto of the Kingdom of God is, Think Bigger.
The disciples were victims of their own small thinking. Small resources. Limited possibilities. Too little for too much need. Too many rationalizations that avoid taking compassionate action and responsibility: it's too late in the day; we're out in the middle of no where. You can't expect so much of us. We've got faith, to a certain point.
But Jesus is demonstrating that there is so much more. If only we would Think Bigger, or maybe, Faith Bigger. Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "I tell you for certain that if you have faith in me, you will do the same things that I am doing. You will do even greater things..." (John 14:12). Whoa!! It's amazing that Jesus just says we will do the same things he does, if we have faith. That is mind blowing enough. But then to hear him say that we will do even greater things than he has done, is enough to knock us off our feet.
The only qualification is, "...if you have faith in me..." In other words, if we would only Faith Bigger. If only we wouldn't succumb so easily to small faith thinking, as the disciples did in this story. If only we wouldn't just look at what we think are meager resources, and think it's just too late, and think our situation is like being in a desert. If only we would take Jesus at his word, and Faith Bigger, and do unbelievably amazing things that Jesus says we can do.
That, I think, is the main point of this book, that we've been reading for seven months. If Experiencing God is about anything, it is about Faith Bigger. It's about giving ourselves over to God fully in faith, and Think Bigger. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:
What God has planned,
for people who love him
is more than eyes have seen
or ears have heard.
It has never even
entered our minds. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
In other words, we cannot even begin to comprehend what we are capable of if we Faith Bigger. God is ready to make it happen with us. God, as Jesus did with the disciples, is simply saying, "You do it. Take charge. DO your faith; just don't sit around and think about your faith. Find out what God and you can do, when you abandon yourself into Faith Bigger. Don't think small. Think Bigger. Make it happen. Faith Bigger.
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