Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Parables of the Treasure and the Pearl, Matthew 13:44-46

When one of our sons was three, we took him to the store so he could buy a toy he’d been saving for. He knew exactly what he wanted and had saved enough money. So we walked in, got the toy, and took it to the cash register. Everything seemed to be going well until the cashier took his carefully-saved money. Then he fell apart, because he didn’t want to give her his money. We had explained, in advance, how it was going to work and he had agreed, but when the moment arrived, it was a very difficult choice to make. He really did want the toy, and in the end he paid for it; but for awhile it wasn’t clear what was going to happen.

This is often a difficult lesson to learn: that in order to get something we want, we have to give up something else. Even accepting a free gift involves letting go of whatever is in our hands at the moment to make room for the gift. I’ve known many professing Christians who say they want to follow Jesus Christ, but when it comes to Sunday morning aren’t willing to give up the extra sleep they want, or the opportunity to spend the whole day in recreation. “I have to go back to work on Monday; I really need this time for myself.” As I talk to pastors, I get the impression that this is a growing problem in our culture; a significant number of people in our churches, who think of themselves as serious believers, only attend corporate worship an average of two or three Sundays a month. And, for the most part, these people never grow to spiritual maturity, because they’re not willing to give up very much for the sake of God’s kingdom. Others maybe attend worship regularly but aren’t willing to set aside any time to cultivate God’s presence. They wish, at times, that they had a stronger relationship with God, but when it comes down to it they’re not willing to give up any of their time to bring that about. This is a hard lesson, that in order to get something we want, we have to give up something else. It’s one thing to struggle with this problem when we’re three years old; at that point it’s a simple issue of development and maturity. But if we go on year after year holding tenaciously to the things we already have, unwilling to part with any of our treasures (things like time, recreation, or work), there’s something more serious going on.

These two parables point us in the right direction. They both make the same point: when we see the value of God’s kingdom, we will joyfully lay aside everything that stands in the way of possessing it. In the first parable, a man stumbles across a treasure buried in a field. It was common in the ancient world to hide money and other valuables in this way. There weren’t any banks, and with bandits as well as frequent enemy invasions, it wasn’t safe to hide anything of significant value in the house. Many treasures were lost in this way; maybe the people died or were taken into exile by invaders before they could dig it up. No doubt over time some just lost track of the exact spot and were unable to ever recover their treasure. Even today, some are being dug up in Palestine (Robert Mounce, Matthew, pp. 134-35).

So this man finds one of these lost buried treasures in a field, and because he doesn’t own the field, he immediately hides it again then goes out and sells all he has and buys the field (which, then, makes the treasure his). Some people get bogged down at this point by the question of whether what this man did was ethical or not, and they’re so bothered by that problem that they miss the whole point of the parable. A parable is a story that makes a particular point; it’s not saying, “go out and do this,” but rather “here is a picture that tells us something important about the kingdom of heaven.” If we get stuck on the ethical problem of whether this man should have done things differently or not, we’re likely to miss what the parable is saying. The point of the parable is that this man was so pleased with this treasure he had found that he joyfully parted with everything he had in order to possess it. The second parable says the same thing in a different way. A merchant is traveling from place to place, looking for fine pearls, and in his travels he discovers one of such value that he sells everything he has in order to buy it. These parables are saying that the kingdom of heaven is of such worth that when we see the truth about it we’ll gladly part with anything that stands in the way of possessing it.

The first thing to notice is that the motivation for this sacrifice is not guilt, or a sense of duty, but a realization of the exceeding value of the treasure. Notice the phrase, in verse 44, “in his joy.” This isn’t a picture of someone who says, “I don’t like this one bit, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.” I talked to a man several years ago who was just as concerned as I was about the current trend of sporadic church attendance. “My mother taught me to be in church every Sunday,” he said. That was a good thing, to learn the habit of dragging himself to church whether he felt like it or not. But there was something lacking. He wasn’t able to get beyond the idea of doing the right thing, doing his duty. There was no joy in it, and in the end he wasn’t any more spiritually mature than the people who only attended half the time.

Neither of these parables is about the benefits of sacrifice. The point is not, “it’s good for you to give up something; it’ll make you into a better person.” They’re not laying down a legal obligation, saying, “if you do this you’ll be saved.” Neither of the characters in these parables is being dragged kicking and screaming; they are joyfully parting with everything they have because they’re so taken with the wonder of this treasure they’ve discovered. They’re like the apostle Paul, when he tells the Philippians, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (3:7-8). Not, “I’ve come to see the worthlessness of everything I previously valued.” He’s making a comparison. Everything now seems insignificant compared to “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” We have a hymn chorus that says the same thing: “turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.” It’s not that the things of earth are worthless; it’s that the wonder of who Jesus is causes them to fade by comparison: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

The second thing is that not everyone discovers the value of God’s kingdom in the same way. We need to be careful about making too much of the details of a parable. Usually a parable makes one major point, and the surrounding details may or may not be applicable. It’s usually a mistake to look for a hidden meaning in every aspect of the story; but it’s also a mistake to go to the other extreme and say, “every parable is only saying one thing.” The New Oxford Annotated Bible has a good balance: “In general the teaching of a parable relates to a single point, and apart from this the details may, or may not, have a particular meaning” (note on Matthew 13:1-52).

Having said that, there’s an instructive difference in these two stories: the first man stumbles across a treasure he is not seeking, while the second man finds something he’s been diligently looking for. The important thing is not how we discover the treasure of God’s kingdom but how we respond to that discovery. The characters in these two parables make their discoveries in very different ways, but they both make exactly the same response. People come into God’s kingdom in a wonderful variety of ways, sometimes in ways that make no sense at all to us.

One of my favorite evangelism stories is about one of the leaders in Operation Mobilization, a man with an exceptional gift in evangelism. One day, when he was still a student in Bible College, he was out with a group of friends witnessing to people in Chicago. At the end of the day they were traveling in a van on their way back to their dormitory and he saw a man standing at a bus stop. Something about the man caught his attention and as the van went by he leaned out of the window, yelled “read this, it’s really important,” and threw him a tract. Six months later, he was visiting a church in Chicago and a man stood up to give his testimony about how he came to Christ. The man began, “well, it’s really a strange story; about six months ago I was standing at a bus stop, deeply depressed, when a guy threw me a tract from a van....” St. Augustine was converted by a voice coming over the wall saying, “take up and read.” He never knew where the voice came from, whether it was the voice of God or of an angel, or if it was someone speaking words intended for someone else. But God spoke to Augustine through those words; he knew beyond any doubt that God was calling to him and he picked up his Bible, read, and was converted to Christ. People come into God’s kingdom frequently in surprising ways; we need to allow them to follow a path that’s different from the one we’ve followed. The important thing is not how we come to the realization that God’s kingdom is a treasure that exceeds everything else we have; the important thing is how we respond to that realization.

The third thing is that receiving God’s kingdom means, of necessity, laying aside all the other things that are competing for first place in our affections. You may ask, “but isn’t salvation a free gift?” Yes, it is, but we can’t receive it if our hands are full. We can’t receive the gift if there’s no room for it in our lives. We need to be careful about taking those passages that stress that salvation is a free gift and separating them from their context in the New Testament. Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19, 21). Just a little later, He goes on: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (v. 24). God offers us, freely, an unspeakable treasure in the gospel; but in order to receive it, we need to lay aside our other treasures to make room for it. If we grasp for everything, like our popular culture encourages us to do, we’ll end up with nothing in the end. That’s the point of Jesus’ words: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Listen to this verse in The Message: “If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.”

St. Augustine spent his early life running from God. His mother was a Christian, and she prayed fervently for him. But he was over thirty by the time he turned to Christ. Looking back on his life, he didn’t say, “thank God I had all that time to myself before I became a Christian, before I had to give up so many things that I enjoyed.” He didn’t say, “well, you know, it’s not so bad; I was able to do all those things I wanted to do when I was young, so now I can lay that all aside and diligently follow the path of duty.” When he looked back, he saw that the loss was not in turning to Christ, but in persisting so long in resisting Him. He was grieved, not in what he had to give up, but that he had lived so many years in alienation from God, the source of all good.

Here’s what he says, looking back: “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty, ancient yet ever new. Too late have I loved you! And behold, You were within, but I was outside, searching for You there – plunging, deformed amid those fair forms which You had made. You were with me, but I was not with You. Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You did not exist at all. You called and shouted, and burst my deafness. You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for You. You touched me, and now I yearn for Your peace” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Hal M. Helms, Book X, 27). In Christ, he found a treasure that exceeded his wildest imaginations, and he looked back with sorrow on the years he’d wasted fleeing from Eternal Beauty. When he saw the truth, he gladly parted with all his treasures and spent the rest of his life making room to welcome Christ into every area of his life.

Why do we grasp so tenaciously for our treasures? Why are we so unwilling to part with them (and I’m not thinking here only of material possessions, but also of things like time, work and recreation)? St. Augustine gives us a good answer at the beginning of his Confessions: “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Book I, 1). God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless, filled with longing and a sense of incompleteness. So we try to fill our hearts with the things of this world; it feels threatening to think of letting go of them. But when we use created things in this way, they dull our hearts and keep us from seeing the beauty of Christ. And they never quite do what we’re hoping for.

The answer is to cultivate an awareness of the “unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). We’re not called to give up things just for the sake of doing without. The two men in these parables didn’t sell all their possessions because they wanted to be free from the constraints of earthly life or because they had decided to wander the world in search of the divine. They sold all they had because they had found a treasure that exceeded their wildest imaginations. They had found a treasure which led them to joyfully part with everything they had. The emphasis is not on what they gave up, but on what they found. Our need is not to empty our lives for the sake of being empty, but to make room for Christ. If we do that, we won’t look back years from now and say, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t parted with all my treasures.” We’ll find ourselves saying, with St. Augustine, “You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for You.” Or with the Apostle Paul: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Saturday, September 14, 2013

A Mission Born in Prayer, Nehemiah 2:1-10

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, four children are visiting their uncle during their holiday from school. It’s a large old house, full of great places to explore. At one point, visitors come to the house and the children hide in a wardrobe to avoid having to talk to them. But once they enter the wardrobe they find themselves in another world, the land of Narnia, where they experience many adventures and where the whole course of their lives is changed. They enter the wardrobe to hide, and the things that happen affect them for the rest of their lives. Surprising things happen to them, things they never could have anticipated.

Prayer is like that. When we come before God in prayer, we never know what is going to happen. When we pray, we come into the presence of the One who claims absolute lordship. We need to know that our prayers may set in motion things that will change the entire direction of our lives. This may not be our intention at all; it may be the last thing that enters our minds at the time. But because we’re dealing with God, our Creator and Redeemer, we never know what might happen when we begin to pray.

Prayer is not a safe, tame activity. When we begin praying, we’re not the ones in control. We’re not in charge. After the children enter the land of Narnia, they begin hearing about Aslan, the King, and learn that He is a lion. So Susan asks, “Is he–quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” And the conversation continues: “‘That you will, dearie, and no mistake,’ said Mrs. Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’ ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pp. 75-76). God is good, but He is not safe. He’s the King, and He claims absolute lordship over our lives. When we come into His presence, we never know what is going to happen.

And, when we begin crying out to God about a situation that concerns us, we never know when He is going to call us to become part of the answer. That’s what happened to Nehemiah. He began praying to God about the situation in Jerusalem, and then God called him to leave his home and become part of the solution. He had a very good position in the king’s court. Things were going well for him professionally. He had a stable, prestigious job. But when he started praying, God called him to leave all that behind and travel to Jerusalem, a place that was in ruin and disarray. Let’s look at how this all happened in Nehemiah’s life.

The first thing to notice is that it did not happen immediately. He had heard about the problems in Jerusalem late in the fall, and chapter two begins “Early the following spring” (NLT). The events Nehemiah is describing in chapter two came after several months of prayer and waiting on God. Nehemiah didn’t make a hasty decision. He didn’t rush off in foolish zeal. When we were working on the ship Logos, an American pastor and his wife visited for about two weeks, teaching, preaching and ministering to the people on the ship, then they returned home. Several weeks later, they showed up at the bottom of the gangway with their suitcases. They had resigned from their church, sold their home, and traveled to the ship without consulting anyone. No one knew they were coming, and the leaders weren’t quite sure what to do with them. They had been stirred spiritually on their first visit, and when they got home they made a hasty decision to leave everything behind and join permanently. Nehemiah’s decision was not made in haste. He waited for the right moment.

We need to know that God is not in a hurry. He’s not in a hurry in answering our prayers, and He’s not in a hurry about showing us what our part is going to be in the answer. He calls us to continue going about our duties right where we are, to cry out to Him and submit to His lordship. And as we do that, He makes His will clear in His own time. In the late fall, when Nehemiah started praying and fasting, he had a strong concern but it’s unlikely that he had any sense of direction about what he would be doing about the problem. But as he prayed and waited on God, an idea started forming in his mind. As he continued praying, that idea became so clear and unshakable that he just couldn’t get away from it. When the time came to take a definite step, God had prepared him. Those months of waiting and prayer were an important part of the process.

The second thing is that when the right moment did come, Nehemiah needed a great deal of courage to act on his plan. In verse 2, Nehemiah says, “I was very much afraid.” He’s been confronted by the king about his sadness: “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” Why does this frighten him? First of all, because his personal sadness doesn’t belong in the king’s court. He’s supposed to be cheerful in the king’s presence; he’s not supposed to be there dragging everyone else down with his personal struggles. In those days when kings exercised absolute power, Nehemiah could have been put to death for allowing himself to show sadness while he was serving the king.

But that’s not the only thing. The king’s question opens the door for Nehemiah to make his request, the thing that’s been weighing on his mind. He’s been waiting for the right moment, and now it’s arrived. It’s not just a private idea anymore; Nehemiah is at a point where he needs to step out and act on the things God’s been showing him. There are two opposite dangers when we’re confronted with a situation like this. The first danger is to rush ahead without seeking God’s direction. Nehemiah hasn’t fallen into that danger. But the opposite danger is that we endlessly form ideas that we never act on. We wait on the Lord, like we’re called to do, but then when the time comes to act we lose our nerve and back down. We get used to waiting and never get out of that mode.

T.S. Eliot has a poem that describes a person like that, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At the beginning of the poem, Prufrock sounds very bold. In the first section of the poem he’s calling for action: “Let us go then, you and I.” He repeats that line a few times early on, then the key phrase in the next section is “and indeed there will be time.” He’s hesitating now; he can’t seem to get over his sense of inertia. In Nehemiah’s place, he would have let the moment pass: “I’ll bring this up another time, not right now.” Later in the poem, he’s looking back, saying “And would it have been worth it, after all” (T.S. Eliot: The Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 3-7). The longer he waited, the more paralyzed he became, and finally he just gave up. He lost his courage.

Nehemiah doesn’t do that. When the moment comes, he speaks tactfully but honestly to the king: “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” He doesn’t make his request yet. He answers the king’s question tactfully and wisely. The burial place of one’s ancestors was an important thing to people during this time, so the king would likely feel sympathy. And Nehemiah doesn’t immediately name Jerusalem; sometime earlier, the king had ruled against the rebuilding of the city (you can read about that in Ezra 4), so what Nehemiah is hoping for is a reversal of the king’s earlier decision. On the whole, this is a very touchy situation, but Nehemiah doesn’t back down, like J. Alfred Prufrock does. He moves ahead cautiously, but he does move ahead.

His initial response opens the way for a further question from the king: “What is it you want?” Then notice what he does next: “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.” Before he responds to the king’s question, he turns his heart to God looking for help. But this isn’t the first time he’s prayed about the situation. He’s spent the past four months or so crying out to God on behalf of Jerusalem, so this brief prayer when he’s in the presence of the king is rooted in months of unhurried time in God’s presence. He prays briefly, then he goes ahead: “and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.” It took great courage for Nehemiah to bring this to the king. Those months that he spent praying brought him finally to this point where he had to step out of his comfort zone. It wasn’t easy for him. He was very much afraid, as he tells us. But he did it, looking to God for help.

The third thing is this: while he was waiting all those months in prayer, Nehemiah made good use of his time. He’s been thinking through the details of a plan. He’s been waiting, but he hasn’t been idle. He’s made good use of his time during this waiting period, so when the time comes he is ready. The king says yes to the initial request, and then notice what Nehemiah does next: “I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters... so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?”

We make a serious mistake when we set spirituality and practicality at odds with each other. There was no conflict between Nehemiah’s intense prayer and his practical planning. His awareness of these practical needs is part of the way God has equipped him for the work. The time Nehemiah has spent planning out these details is not less pleasing to God than the time he’s spent in prayer and fasting. He’s doing it all in obedience to God’s lordship; it’s all part of the same work.

God calls us to pray, but He doesn’t call us only to pray. He calls us to bring every area of our lives under His lordship, to offer everything we do as an act of worship. For Nehemiah, this meant long hours planning out the details of what he was going to do. I’ve known many people who assume that the leading of the Spirit always happens spontaneously, when we act on the spur of the moment. In this view, Nehemiah would have been better off not planning, simply trusting God to put the right ideas into his mind when he needed them.

Several years ago, I was in a church service and when the pastor stood up to give the sermon he said, “I don’t have a sermon for you this morning; I have a word from the Lord.” We were supposed to be impressed that he was subject to the immediate inspiration of the Spirit in this way; he wasn’t giving us a sermon, he was giving us something better. But it wasn’t better. His “word from the Lord” sounded like the unfocused rambling of someone who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say. If he had a “word from the Lord” he’d lost track of it sometime before he got into the pulpit. He was relying on God to give him a word right then, while he was standing in the pulpit, but God had given him a whole week to pray and seek a message from Scripture. He was deceived by a false view of spirituality. There’s nothing unspiritual about preparation. It’s part of what God calls us to do. God had given that preacher the gift of a whole week to come up with a message for the church, but he squandered that gift and was hoping to be bailed out by the immediate inspiration of the Spirit.

As Nehemiah has been crying out to God all these months, God has been preparing him for this moment. He responds well. He acts with courage; when he gains the king’s favor he presses further to get the things he needs to carry out the job. He’s not jumping out into the dark. He knows what he’s doing and what it will take to carry out the task. And he also knows why everything is going so well. Listen to what he says: “And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests.” He attributes it all to God. God has been preparing Nehemiah for this moment.

Prayer is not a safe activity. We never know what God is going to do when we come into His presence. As Nehemiah prays, God leads him out of his secure position into the insecurity of trying to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem. Everything falls into place when Nehemiah is with the king, but as soon as he arrives in Trans-Jordan, he encounters the beginnings of the opposition which will plague him throughout this book. The life God calls him to in Jerusalem is filled with hardship, sacrifice, difficulty and opposition. His life, in many ways, was easier as cupbearer to the king. But as he prayed, God called him to leave that behind.

Prayer is not a safe activity, because we follow One who modeled the sort of thing we see in Nehemiah: “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death–and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever” (Philippians 2, The Message). Knowing all that He’s done for us, let’s come before Him in prayer acknowledging His right to do whatever He wants with our lives. And then, having prayed, let’s seek to order every area of our lives in obedience to Him, no matter what He calls us to do, no matter what He calls us to give up, no matter where He calls us to go in His name. God is not safe, but He is good and He has good things planned for His people in the future. In the meantime, let’s offer ourselves in gratitude to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and follow Him wherever He leads.