Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
December 27, 2015
This past week, Abbie told me about a discussion on Facebook. People were posting about “keeping Christ in Christmas,” and someone responded that it’s far more important to keep Christ in Christians, that Christians live in ways that are consistent with the life of Christ. The primary concern of the Church is not with the emphases of secular advertisers and marketers. The primary concern of the Church is that Christians are modeling the life of Christ, are bearing witness to Christ the Redeemer, whose birth we are celebrating in this Christmas season. And this passage is a great one for considering the centrality of Christ in the life of the Church.
The first thing to consider in looking at this passage, is the context. One of the greatest dangers, when we’re reading Scripture, is taking things out of context. Much false teaching begins in this way: people read something in the Bible and decide what it means without considering how it fits into the author’s flow of thought, and without considering the passage in the light of other Scripture. We need to remember that the people who first received this letter didn’t read it in small portions, as we’re doing. They read it straight through, like we do when we receive a letter from someone. So, each time we return and read a section, either in corporate worship or in our personal devotions, it’s important to take note of what the author said in the previous verses.
Paul begins this chapter by reminding the Colossians of their citizenship in heaven. Because they belong to Jesus Christ, they are no longer citizens of this world. They’ve been crucified with Christ, they’ve died to this world, and they’ve become citizens of heaven. They continue to live in this world, but their relationship with the world can never be what it once was. This is not just theological material for them to discuss over coffee. God’s intention is that we live lives consistent with our citizenship, so in verses 5-14, Paul explains how this should affect their conduct.
The point, in these verses, is not just that individual Christians are to model the life of the kingdom. That’s part of it, but he’s saying more than that. All the pronouns throughout this passage are in the plural. Paul is addressing the Church. The Church, as a body of people called together in Jesus’ name, is to model the life of God’s kingdom, especially in the way we act toward one another: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (vv. 12-14).
This is what the Church is to look like, according to God’s Word. But, of course, the Church often doesn’t look like this. The author of the hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation,” recognized this: “Though with a scornful wonder, men see her sore oppressed. By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.” The Church is often plagued with disunity, backbiting, gossip, an unforgiving spirit. In many conservative churches that describe themselves as “Bible-believing, people live double lives, because they’re afraid to admit the truth. They pretend that all is well, and that the Lord is doing wonderful things among them, when in reality their lives are so filled with inconsistency that they wonder whether the whole thing is really true at all. There’s no visible evidence in their lives, or in the life of the church, of the reality of God’s grace.
The Church is a body of people brought together by God because of our common bond in Jesus Christ. But this common bond that we have in Christ doesn’t automatically lead us to act in loving ways toward one another. These verses we’re looking at today, verses 15-17, emphasize that the Church can only model the life of God’s kingdom when individual members are putting Christ at the center of their lives. Our individual spiritual lives and the spiritual health of the Church are closely tied together and have a profound effect on each other.
The first thing to notice here, in verse 15, is that when the peace of Christ is ruling in our hearts, we are enabled to live at peace with each other. What does it mean to “let the peace of Christ rule” in our hearts? Paul says, in Romans 5:1: “therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Before we were justified we were not at peace with God. We treated Him as our enemy, and we consistently refused to acknowledge His Lordship over our lives. Sin put a barrier between ourselves and God, and this also ended up separating us from one another, and even from ourselves. Sin isolates us.
C.S. Lewis has an interesting illustration of this in his book, The Great Divorce, which is about a busload of people who travel from Hell to Heaven (and then back again). He describes Hell as a sprawling, dingy town, where people are constantly squabbling. Here’s a conversation he has with one of the people on the bus: “‘It seems the deuce of a town,’ I volunteered, ‘and that’s what I can’t understand. The parts of it that I saw were so empty. Was there once a much larger population?’ ‘Not at all,’ said my neighbour. ‘The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarreled so badly that he decides to move....’ ‘And what about the earlier arrivals? I mean – there must be people who came from earth to your town even longer ago.’ ‘That’s right. There are. They’ve been moving on and on. Getting further apart. They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. Astronomical distances. There’s a bit of rising ground near where I live and a chap has a telescope. You can see the lights of the inhabited houses, where those olds ones live, millions of miles away. Millions of miles from us and from one another. Every now and then they move further still. That’s one of the disappointments. I thought you’d meet interesting historical characters. But you don’t: they’re too far away’” (pp. 18-20). Sin isolates us, it drives us apart from one another.
In Christ those barriers are broken down. We have peace with God; we’re no longer in a state of war with Him. This is the “peace of Christ.” This truth has both an objective and a subjective dimension. Because we’ve been justified freely by faith, because God has declared us “not guilty,” we are at peace with God. That’s an objective reality; it doesn’t depend on how we feel at the moment. But when we clearly grasp this reality it leads naturally to a sense of peace in our hearts. We’re at rest. We’re able, as Paul goes on to say in Romans 5, to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” We’re not anxiously trying to make ourselves acceptable in God’s sight. So, the “peace of Christ” is both an objective reality and the subjective feeling that results from it.
The word translated “rule” is an interesting one. Originally it described the work of an umpire in the games, then it later came to mean “to order,” or “to control.” The New Century Version translates this verse: “Let the peace that Christ gives control your thinking.” The peace that Christ gives is based on the objective reality that God has declared us “not guilty,” purely by grace and not because of any good in ourselves. Paul’s point here is that this is to control the way we act toward one another. Notice how he finishes out the verse: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.” Peterson, in The Message, brings this out well: “Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other.” We’re to act, with one another, as people who’ve been pardoned by grace, who are at peace with God, and who are living in the certainty of a glorious future which is the exact opposite of what we deserve. When we’re tempted to erect barriers between ourselves, we need to remember the truth. We’re citizens of God’s kingdom, and all the old barriers have been broken down in Christ. The peace of Christ is to control the way we interact with each other. Because God has been gracious to us, we show grace to one another.
The second thing here, in verse 16, is that when the word of Christ is dwelling in us richly, we’re enabled to minister to one another. The Biblical view of life in the church is that we are all called to minister to one another; the function of pastors and teachers is to equip God’s people for this work of ministry. But, in ourselves, we have nothing to give. One of my professors at Messiah College shared that when his wife died of a brain tumor, his pastor called that day and asked if he could come over. George said no, he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. But his pastor said he didn’t want to talk; he just wanted to come over and sit with him. And that’s what he did. He just came over and sat. He didn’t try to give any answers (George knew all of them anyway). He didn’t try to give any advice at that time. George was in the initial shock of grief, and he really didn’t need any advice right then. But he needed the support and presence of another person, and that’s what his pastor gave.
How can we learn to minister to one another? How do we know when to speak and when not to speak? And when it’s time to speak, how do we know what to say to one another? In our culture, which is so obsessed with technique, we tend to think the problem is a lack of expertise. So the natural solution is to make up for this lack by taking a few courses. Then we’ll know more about the Bible and we’ll have a clearer idea of how to minister to others. And this can be helpful. But it’s not the primary thing. The primary thing is to be filled with the word of Christ, to “let the word of Christ” dwell in us richly. It’s not that we fill our heads with God’s word so that we’ll have something to talk about when it’s time to minister. It’s that we need to have our hearts full of God’s transforming Word, so that we’ll be people who are fit to minister to one another.
We “teach and admonish one another” as people whose hearts are full of God’s Word, who are being transformed by the power of the Word. When I was in graduate school, in the Religion Department at Temple University, I often found comfort and encouragement from these words in Psalm 119: “Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes. I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey your precepts” (Psalm 119:97-100). God’s Word is powerful. The environment I was in at the time was hostile to faith, but I found God’s Word sustaining me and nourishing me and enabling me to stand firm. Paul is calling us, in verse 16, to be people who meditate on God’s Word. As we lovingly meditate on the Word, we’ll find ourselves ministering to one another naturally.
Singing is the other thing that results from having hearts filled with the word of Christ. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly... as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.” We don’t know the precise distinction between these three terms. It seems likely that “psalms” refers to the Old Testament book of Psalms. Right from the beginning, the early church followed the Jewish practice of praying and singing the Psalms. “Hymns” may refer to written compositions; Philippians 2:6-11 seems to be an example of a very early hymn. And “spiritual songs” could refer to more spontaneous outbursts of praise with music. In any case, God’s people, from the beginning, have been singing people, and they have drawn from a wide variety of styles in their worship. We may not be certain of the precise definitions here, but it is surely significant that Paul finds it necessary to use three terms to describe the singing of the church. We don’t need to argue about which are more appropriate or which are superior for worship. Looking around at creation, we can see clearly that God loves variety. So why shouldn’t our worship reflect something of this? “Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.” It takes all three to fully express our praise and thanksgiving to God. We impoverish the church when we divide up into factions, who only focus on one style of worship and exclude all others.
The third thing to notice, in verse 17, is that when we’re living in the light of Christ’s lordship, we’re aware that everything we do and say reflects our relationship with Him: “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” It’s easy to lose sight of this in our society, which has such a strong emphasis on personal autonomy, but in everything we do we are acting as members of Christ’s body. We have no idea how far-reaching our actions are. It’s not possible to act on our own without influencing and affecting others. The year I graduated from Messiah College I spent a year working nights as a janitor in one of the buildings there. For a while, there was a work-study student who worked with me for a few hours each night. He was a very serious Christian, and yet it seemed like he lived constantly under a cloud. He seemed weighted down and burdened. And the first time we had a serious conversation he told me that when he was only 18 months old his father had committed suicide. Nearly 20 years had passed, and he couldn’t even remember his father, but that man’s suicide had cast a shadow over his son’s life.
Our actions have consequences far beyond anything we can imagine. And this is true also in the spiritual realm. In everything we do, we are acting as members of the Church, and our actions are either strengthening or weakening the spiritual condition of the body. We need to meditate on this and allow this realization to influence our daily choices. William Barclay has some wise counsel on this point: “One of the best tests of any action is: ‘Can we do it, calling upon the name of Jesus? Can we do it, asking for his help?’ One of the best tests of any word is: ‘Can we speak it and in the same breath name the name of Jesus? Can we speak it, remembering that he will hear?’” (William Barclay, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, p. 160).
The Church can only model the life of God’s kingdom when individual members are putting Christ at the center of their lives. And individual members can only learn to live with Christ at the center of their lives by entering into the life of the Church. Our individual spiritual lives and the spiritual life of the Church are closely tied together, and they affect each other far more than we realize. We want the peace of Christ and the Word of Christ to fill our corporate life in the Church, and we also want these things to fill our hearts as we live out our lives in the world. And we want to invite Christ’s presence into every area of our lives.
But that’s not where we are, much of the time. And it doesn’t always help to know how far we are from where we should be. Often this just discourages us. So how can we get from where we are to where God calls us to be? First, notice Paul’s emphasis on thanksgiving in these verses. He refers to thanksgiving and gratitude three times in this passage, once in each verse. What would happen to the endless fights over worship style, or how things should be done in the church, if we were intentional in singing “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in [our] hearts to God?” How would it affect our daily lives in the world if we were diligent in giving thanks throughout the day? Verse 15 is translated, in the New American Bible: “Dedicate yourselves to thankfulness.” Or, here’s The Message: “And cultivate thankfulness.” A spirit of thankfulness won’t just happen. We need to cultivate it. We need to take ourselves in hand, remind ourselves of the truth about ourselves and about God. And we need to say, as the Psalmist says: “I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness, and will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High” (Psalm 7:17). We won’t always feel like it. But as we intentionally give thanks over a lifetime, we’ll find ourselves cultivating a spirit of gratitude.
The second thing we can do is be attentive to the condition of our hearts. When we act in an unkind way toward someone, it will affect us. Pay attention to the condition of your heart when you’re at odds with someone, when you’re disturbed that things aren’t going your way, when you feel outraged because your rights are being violated. When we’re in that condition, the peace of Christ is not ruling in our hearts, and we need to turn to the Lord in repentance. Maybe the other person is wrong, but that’s not the point. The point is this: is the condition of your heart right at that moment pleasing to Jesus, who laid aside His rights to redeem us? Lay aside for a moment the question of who is in the right, and attend to the condition of your heart before God. Then you’ll be in a better condition to confront any wrong the other person may have done.
The third thing is that we need to give time to God’s Word. We need to give enough attention to God’s Word to allow it to permeate our lives. A friend of ours spent some time at L’Abri in Switzerland when Francis Schaeffer was still living. She told once of being in a Friday night discussion when someone asked Dr. Schaeffer if he watched movies. He responded “yes, I do, but I wouldn’t if I didn’t read four chapters a day in the Bible.” What was his point? Was he being legalistic? No, he was conscious of how much we’re affected by the things that occupy our minds, and he wanted God’s Word to be the primary influence over his thinking. We need to be intentional in cultivating God’s Word.
And the last thing is that we need to remind ourselves daily that we are not part of this world. We live in this world as citizens of God’s kingdom; we interact with people in this world as ambassadors of the kingdom of heaven. We need to be creative in reminding ourselves of this. And over a lifetime, as we repeatedly draw ourselves back to this fact, we’ll find that more and more this awareness will fill our conscious minds.
May God enable us to live in such a way that when we come to the end we will be able to say, like Simeon in our gospel reading, “Lord now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” The Liturgy of the Hours ends Night Prayer every night with this canticle, which is a great way of preparing ourselves for the day when we, like Simeon, will lay aside our lives in this world.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Sunday, November 29, 2015
The Lord Our Righteousness, Jeremiah 33:14-16
Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College
First Sunday in Advent, 2015
This passage in Jeremiah grows out of one of the darkest times in Israel’s history. The nation has been in an extended period of spiritual decline. They’ve been guilty of the worst sorts of idolatry, even to the point of practicing ritual prostitution and human sacrifice. There was a brief time of reform under King Josiah, which Jeremiah experienced early in his ministry, but now things have gone back to where they were. The Babylonians are outside the gate, and the city is under siege. Soon the nation will be taken captive and deported to Babylon, 700 miles away.
Jeremiah himself has been thrown into prison for prophesying that Jerusalem is going to be overcome by the Babylonian army. Here’s how chapter 33 begins: “While Jeremiah was still locked up in jail, a second Message from God was given to him” (The Message). This is a dark time in the nation. An army they have no hope of defeating is attacking the city, those in leadership have been persistently turning their backs on God, even to the point of locking up those who preach the truth. In the past, God has miraculously delivered them from powerful enemies, but He’s not going to do that now.
Things are bad, and they’re only going to get worse: “For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the houses in this city and the royal palaces of Judah that have been torn down to be used against the siege ramps and the sword in the fight with the Babylonians: They will be filled with the dead bodies of the men I will slay in my anger and wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness” (vv. 4-5). But then, even at this bleak moment in the nation’s history, there’s a message of hope. It begins early in the chapter: “But now take another look. I’m going to give this city a thorough renovation, working a true healing inside and out” (The Message). The nation is under judgment, and things are going to get considerably worse than they are, but that’s not the end of the story.
Verses 14-16 look forward to the fulfillment of God’s promise to send a Messiah. The whole passage is oriented to the future: “The days are coming” (v. 14), “In those days” (v. 15), “In those days” (v. 16). Right at the point where everything looks hopeless, God gives them a message of hope. Listen to these words from Hebrews 11: “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see” (Hebrews 11:1, NLT). The life of faith is a life of looking forward to what God is going to do in the future. It’s a life of joyful anticipation and expectation based on the certainty that God will fulfill His promises, not because everything around us seems hopeful, but because God is trustworthy.
Advent is a time that is especially set aside to cultivate a renewed sense of anticipation. Our senses become dulled over time. The sheer routineness of life tends to kill our sense of anticipation and hope. The pressures and stresses of life in this world crowd out our thoughts of God and His promises. We become dull and depressed spiritually. Everything seems gray, and it’s hard to envision things getting any better. Or, maybe our lives are going well, and we’re distracted by good things. There is so much to do, we don’t have time to cultivate a relationship with God. Advent is a time to stop and remind ourselves of the truth. Benedict Groeschel, in a series of meditations on Advent, said this: “Advent calls us as Christians to ponder again the mystery of our salvation, our hope that there is an answer to the riddle of earthly life with its passing joys, disappointments, sorrows, and frustrations, and its apparently dark end in the oblivion of death…. Advent calls every one of us to stop in the struggle of life and to look up, to recall the answer to the questions of life. We are on a journey to our Father’s house. The door has been opened to us by the Son of God, and the way marked out” (Behold, He Comes, p. 11). During the worst moment in Israel’s history, God gave them a message of hope for the future. The life of faith is a life of joyful anticipation and expectation, because God is trustworthy. This season, with its emphasis on looking forward to the fulfillment of our hope, can help us cultivate a stronger sense of hope in our Christian lives.
These verses look forward, but their anticipation for the future is rooted in God’s promises given in the past: “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfil the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.” God had made these promises hundreds of years before. The nation was living in an in-between time. God had promised and done great things in the distant past, but as the years and centuries rolled by, they’d lost sight of Him. Their memory of the past had become dim, and because of that they’d also lost their sense of hope for the future. Their sense of the past and their hope for the future were tied together.
It’s the same for us. We’re on a journey to our Father’s house, but our understanding of this is rooted in the past, in the promises of God and in the things He’s done in answer to the prayers of His people throughout the centuries. We, like the people of Israel, are living in an in-between time. The promise of “a righteous Branch... from David’s line” began to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ 2000 years ago, but we’re looking forward to the day when He will begin His visible reign in the New Heavens and New Earth. The focus of our lives as Christians is oriented to the future. But, in order to have a strong sense of our future hope, we need to cultivate a strong awareness of what God has done in the past. Our sense of the past and our hope for the future are tied together.
In the short-term, we’re preparing ourselves to worship the Incarnate Lord, the Word who became flesh 2000 years ago. We’ve heard the story over and over again, but we don’t really grasp the magnitude of what it means. Advent is an opportunity to meditate on God’s Word, on the things God has done and promised in the past, to cry out to Him to awaken us through His Spirit. Set aside time, during this Advent season, to pray over the story of Jesus’ birth, and come to worship expecting Him to make Himself known to you. Read through one of the gospels; pray through, and meditate on, some Advent and Christmas hymns. We’re preparing ourselves to worship Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
But Advent is also a time of preparation for that day in the future when we will see Him face to face. Are you living in anticipation of that day? Are you walking with Him, or has your faith been overwhelmed by the pressures and pursuits of this world? If you’re called to face Him tomorrow, will you be ashamed of how you’ve spent your life? Or will you be filled with joy? Listen to these words from Peter’s second letter: “Since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives you should be living! You should look forward to that day and hurry it along–the day when God will set the heavens on fire and the elements will melt away in the flames. But we are looking forward to the new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world where everyone is right with God” (2 Peter 3:11-13, NLT). Or these words from John’s first letter: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). We need a renewed sense of perspective about the things of this world. This whole life is a time of preparation for the day when we will see Him face to face, and celebrating Advent can help us cultivate the habit of preparing ourselves for His coming. God graciously calls us, during this season, to stop and take ourselves in hand, to refocus our priorities.
But in ourselves we won’t ever be ready to face Him. The people of Israel, during the time of Jeremiah, were reaping the consequences of their disobedience. When they had entered the land under Joshua’s leadership, God had given them a series of both promises and warnings. If they obeyed, they would experience God’s blessing, and if they persistently disobeyed, they would experience His curse. The prophets had warned, over and over, that they were headed toward destruction, and they had continued in their rebellion. They had persistently rejected God’s lordship and had gone their own way. They were reaping the consequences of their own choices.
But, even so, God gives them this gracious promise: “In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord Our Righteousness.’” We’re not prepared to face Him, because we’re guilty of sin and rebellion, of going our own way and not loving Him with all our heart and soul and strength and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We’ve persisted in making choices that are contrary to His will. But the city we’re looking forward to, the New Jerusalem, isn’t based on our righteousness. That city is named “The Lord Our Righteousness.” It’s a city that we enter because of the grace and mercy of our God in sending His Son to be our righteousness when we were hopelessly lost. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The city we’re looking forward to is called “The Lord Our Righteousness,” because Jesus, our Savior, has opened the door for us and has taken away all our guilt. He is our righteousness.
As we begin this Advent season, let’s set aside time to “ponder again the mystery of our salvation, our hope that there is an answer to the riddle of earthly life with its passing joys, disappointments, sorrows, and frustrations, and its apparently dark end in the oblivion of death.” Let’s “stop in the struggle of life and... look up, [and] recall the answers to the questions of life. We are on a journey to our Father’s house. The door has been opened to us by the Son of God, and the way marked out.” Very soon we’ll be at the end of our journey and will see Him face to face. This season is a gift, an opportunity to refocus our priorities and and renew our relationship with God, to be attentive to Him and to be reminded of our future hope. Set aside time to spend in His presence, and cultivate an expectant attitude in worship. We have to do with the Living God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Be attentive to what He is doing and what He has done. We never know when He is going to come to us in an extraordinary way. When that happens, may He find us waiting expectantly.
PRAYER: We thank you, O Lord, that you have so put eternity in our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us completely. We thank you that, in your sovereign wisdom, every present joy is mixed with sadness and unrest, to remind us that we are not yet home. And above all, we thank you for the sure hope and promise of an endless life which you have given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord (adapted from A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie, p. 91). Stir and awaken our dull hearts and minds this Advent season. Give us the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation, so that we may know you better; enlighten our hearts, so that we might know the hope to which you have called us, the riches of your glorious inheritance, and your incomparably great power for us who believe. Purify our hearts and minds and lives, and enable us to live in anticipation of that great day when we will no longer see things dimly, as in a mirror, but will see you face to face. For we pray in the name of Jesus, your Son, our Incarnate Lord, who appeared in the flesh and is now seated at your right hand, and who has promised to come again to take us home. Amen.
First Sunday in Advent, 2015
This passage in Jeremiah grows out of one of the darkest times in Israel’s history. The nation has been in an extended period of spiritual decline. They’ve been guilty of the worst sorts of idolatry, even to the point of practicing ritual prostitution and human sacrifice. There was a brief time of reform under King Josiah, which Jeremiah experienced early in his ministry, but now things have gone back to where they were. The Babylonians are outside the gate, and the city is under siege. Soon the nation will be taken captive and deported to Babylon, 700 miles away.
Jeremiah himself has been thrown into prison for prophesying that Jerusalem is going to be overcome by the Babylonian army. Here’s how chapter 33 begins: “While Jeremiah was still locked up in jail, a second Message from God was given to him” (The Message). This is a dark time in the nation. An army they have no hope of defeating is attacking the city, those in leadership have been persistently turning their backs on God, even to the point of locking up those who preach the truth. In the past, God has miraculously delivered them from powerful enemies, but He’s not going to do that now.
Things are bad, and they’re only going to get worse: “For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the houses in this city and the royal palaces of Judah that have been torn down to be used against the siege ramps and the sword in the fight with the Babylonians: They will be filled with the dead bodies of the men I will slay in my anger and wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness” (vv. 4-5). But then, even at this bleak moment in the nation’s history, there’s a message of hope. It begins early in the chapter: “But now take another look. I’m going to give this city a thorough renovation, working a true healing inside and out” (The Message). The nation is under judgment, and things are going to get considerably worse than they are, but that’s not the end of the story.
Verses 14-16 look forward to the fulfillment of God’s promise to send a Messiah. The whole passage is oriented to the future: “The days are coming” (v. 14), “In those days” (v. 15), “In those days” (v. 16). Right at the point where everything looks hopeless, God gives them a message of hope. Listen to these words from Hebrews 11: “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see” (Hebrews 11:1, NLT). The life of faith is a life of looking forward to what God is going to do in the future. It’s a life of joyful anticipation and expectation based on the certainty that God will fulfill His promises, not because everything around us seems hopeful, but because God is trustworthy.
Advent is a time that is especially set aside to cultivate a renewed sense of anticipation. Our senses become dulled over time. The sheer routineness of life tends to kill our sense of anticipation and hope. The pressures and stresses of life in this world crowd out our thoughts of God and His promises. We become dull and depressed spiritually. Everything seems gray, and it’s hard to envision things getting any better. Or, maybe our lives are going well, and we’re distracted by good things. There is so much to do, we don’t have time to cultivate a relationship with God. Advent is a time to stop and remind ourselves of the truth. Benedict Groeschel, in a series of meditations on Advent, said this: “Advent calls us as Christians to ponder again the mystery of our salvation, our hope that there is an answer to the riddle of earthly life with its passing joys, disappointments, sorrows, and frustrations, and its apparently dark end in the oblivion of death…. Advent calls every one of us to stop in the struggle of life and to look up, to recall the answer to the questions of life. We are on a journey to our Father’s house. The door has been opened to us by the Son of God, and the way marked out” (Behold, He Comes, p. 11). During the worst moment in Israel’s history, God gave them a message of hope for the future. The life of faith is a life of joyful anticipation and expectation, because God is trustworthy. This season, with its emphasis on looking forward to the fulfillment of our hope, can help us cultivate a stronger sense of hope in our Christian lives.
These verses look forward, but their anticipation for the future is rooted in God’s promises given in the past: “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfil the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.” God had made these promises hundreds of years before. The nation was living in an in-between time. God had promised and done great things in the distant past, but as the years and centuries rolled by, they’d lost sight of Him. Their memory of the past had become dim, and because of that they’d also lost their sense of hope for the future. Their sense of the past and their hope for the future were tied together.
It’s the same for us. We’re on a journey to our Father’s house, but our understanding of this is rooted in the past, in the promises of God and in the things He’s done in answer to the prayers of His people throughout the centuries. We, like the people of Israel, are living in an in-between time. The promise of “a righteous Branch... from David’s line” began to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ 2000 years ago, but we’re looking forward to the day when He will begin His visible reign in the New Heavens and New Earth. The focus of our lives as Christians is oriented to the future. But, in order to have a strong sense of our future hope, we need to cultivate a strong awareness of what God has done in the past. Our sense of the past and our hope for the future are tied together.
In the short-term, we’re preparing ourselves to worship the Incarnate Lord, the Word who became flesh 2000 years ago. We’ve heard the story over and over again, but we don’t really grasp the magnitude of what it means. Advent is an opportunity to meditate on God’s Word, on the things God has done and promised in the past, to cry out to Him to awaken us through His Spirit. Set aside time, during this Advent season, to pray over the story of Jesus’ birth, and come to worship expecting Him to make Himself known to you. Read through one of the gospels; pray through, and meditate on, some Advent and Christmas hymns. We’re preparing ourselves to worship Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
But Advent is also a time of preparation for that day in the future when we will see Him face to face. Are you living in anticipation of that day? Are you walking with Him, or has your faith been overwhelmed by the pressures and pursuits of this world? If you’re called to face Him tomorrow, will you be ashamed of how you’ve spent your life? Or will you be filled with joy? Listen to these words from Peter’s second letter: “Since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives you should be living! You should look forward to that day and hurry it along–the day when God will set the heavens on fire and the elements will melt away in the flames. But we are looking forward to the new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world where everyone is right with God” (2 Peter 3:11-13, NLT). Or these words from John’s first letter: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). We need a renewed sense of perspective about the things of this world. This whole life is a time of preparation for the day when we will see Him face to face, and celebrating Advent can help us cultivate the habit of preparing ourselves for His coming. God graciously calls us, during this season, to stop and take ourselves in hand, to refocus our priorities.
But in ourselves we won’t ever be ready to face Him. The people of Israel, during the time of Jeremiah, were reaping the consequences of their disobedience. When they had entered the land under Joshua’s leadership, God had given them a series of both promises and warnings. If they obeyed, they would experience God’s blessing, and if they persistently disobeyed, they would experience His curse. The prophets had warned, over and over, that they were headed toward destruction, and they had continued in their rebellion. They had persistently rejected God’s lordship and had gone their own way. They were reaping the consequences of their own choices.
But, even so, God gives them this gracious promise: “In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord Our Righteousness.’” We’re not prepared to face Him, because we’re guilty of sin and rebellion, of going our own way and not loving Him with all our heart and soul and strength and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We’ve persisted in making choices that are contrary to His will. But the city we’re looking forward to, the New Jerusalem, isn’t based on our righteousness. That city is named “The Lord Our Righteousness.” It’s a city that we enter because of the grace and mercy of our God in sending His Son to be our righteousness when we were hopelessly lost. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The city we’re looking forward to is called “The Lord Our Righteousness,” because Jesus, our Savior, has opened the door for us and has taken away all our guilt. He is our righteousness.
As we begin this Advent season, let’s set aside time to “ponder again the mystery of our salvation, our hope that there is an answer to the riddle of earthly life with its passing joys, disappointments, sorrows, and frustrations, and its apparently dark end in the oblivion of death.” Let’s “stop in the struggle of life and... look up, [and] recall the answers to the questions of life. We are on a journey to our Father’s house. The door has been opened to us by the Son of God, and the way marked out.” Very soon we’ll be at the end of our journey and will see Him face to face. This season is a gift, an opportunity to refocus our priorities and and renew our relationship with God, to be attentive to Him and to be reminded of our future hope. Set aside time to spend in His presence, and cultivate an expectant attitude in worship. We have to do with the Living God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Be attentive to what He is doing and what He has done. We never know when He is going to come to us in an extraordinary way. When that happens, may He find us waiting expectantly.
PRAYER: We thank you, O Lord, that you have so put eternity in our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us completely. We thank you that, in your sovereign wisdom, every present joy is mixed with sadness and unrest, to remind us that we are not yet home. And above all, we thank you for the sure hope and promise of an endless life which you have given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord (adapted from A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie, p. 91). Stir and awaken our dull hearts and minds this Advent season. Give us the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation, so that we may know you better; enlighten our hearts, so that we might know the hope to which you have called us, the riches of your glorious inheritance, and your incomparably great power for us who believe. Purify our hearts and minds and lives, and enable us to live in anticipation of that great day when we will no longer see things dimly, as in a mirror, but will see you face to face. For we pray in the name of Jesus, your Son, our Incarnate Lord, who appeared in the flesh and is now seated at your right hand, and who has promised to come again to take us home. Amen.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
God Builds a Nation, Genesis 12:1-3
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Huntingdon Congregation
Sept. 20, 2015
Asher Lev was an immensely gifted painter who grew up in an ultra-conservative Jewish home. His artistic endeavors often brought him into conflict with his family, who really didn’t understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. He had a strong inner compulsion to keep painting, despite the problems it caused in his life, and as a result, he became increasingly alienated from his family. But he was especially concerned about his mother, who often intervened between him and his father, and he portrayed this by painting a crucifix, with his mother on the cross and Asher and his father nailing her there. This was the final straw, and his family ended up disowning him.
Asher Lev is a fictional character from a book by Chaim Potok (My Name is Asher Lev). I wasn’t even aware of the book, but it came up in one of my college classes. A local rabbi spoke in our class and someone asked about it. Up to this point, he had been very open-minded and liberal, but when the name of Chaim Potok came up he became angry and said Potok was a horrible, arrogant person and then went on to assert that no Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix. It was simply unthinkable. But, of course, this was exactly the point Potok was making. No Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix, but if one did, this is how the community would react. The rabbi, despite his liberal, open-minded posturing, found himself acting like one of the characters in Potok’s novel. He was so incensed by the whole idea that he missed the point of the story.
This often happens to us: we get so caught up in our own concerns, or stuck on particular details, that we end up missing what is really going on. And this is also true when we read Scripture. When we’re reading the early chapters of Genesis, if our perspective is limited by a particular theory of how God carried out His work of creation, we’re likely to miss the point. The purpose of the early chapters of Genesis is not to give us a detailed cosmology or satisfy our curiosity about how it all took place. There are lots of unanswered questions in these early chapters, and there is no attempt, on the part of the biblical authors, to clear everything up for us.
The point of Genesis 1-11 is to get us to where we are today, the call of Abraham. In chapters one and two, we learn that God created the world and placed humans there to bear His image. In chapter three we learn of the Fall, that these humans have rebelled against God’s command, and chapters 4-11 show something of the disastrous effects of this choice. And it’s in the context of this world that’s alienated from God and from one another that God calls Abraham. When we meet him here he’s called Abram, but God later renames him Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.”
The first thing to notice is that God calls Abraham to make a major change in his life. God calls him to leave his own country, the place where he grew up, the place where he is comfortable, to leave behind all the people he knows. This involves two things: he’s being called to separation from the alienated, divided world into which he was born. God is telling him to turn his back on everything that has been important to him up to this point in his life. Remember the context here. The world is in a state of rebellion against God, the Creator; Abraham is being called to separate himself from this world that is on the wrong track and to identify himself with God, the One against whom the world is rebelling.
God’s call also leads Abraham into a state of insecurity and uncertainty. He’s being called to leave behind everything that he knows, all his sources of comfort, and to make a journey “into the land that I will show you.” Responding to God’s call on his life meant saying good-bye to his family, his friends, and his country, everything that’s been a part of his life up to this point. Not only saying good-bye to all that, but setting out in an uncertain direction; the author of Hebrews says “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (11:8). He didn’t know where he was going, but he set out anyway, because he trusted God who had called him. So this work of God in building a nation begins with His call to a specific man in a specific place who was going about his life with other things in mind. There’s no reason to think that Abraham had life-goals that differed from those around him; the thing that made the difference was that God called him to leave all that behind and he obeyed. We too easily assume that the biblical characters were special people, different from the rest of us, but if you continue reading about Abraham you’ll see that he had very significant weaknesses. He was a man seeking to get through his life like others around him, but God called him to something different than what he had in mind for himself.
The second thing to notice is that God promises to bless Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” The central idea here is that God is going to bless him, which will result in Abraham himself becoming a blessing to others. What does it mean for God to bless him? Does it mean that God will give him good things? Well yes, it does mean that – it says that he is going to become a great nation and that his name will be great -- but it means much more; in fact, getting things from God is not the main thing at all. It means that God will be his God, that God will identify with him in a special way. What is happening here is the beginning of the undoing of the effects of the Fall. The world is in chaos because of sin; people are alienated from God and from each other, and God comes to Abraham and says “I will be your God.”
The primary, most-important content of God’s blessing is God Himself. God created people in His image, to walk with Him in the garden and to know His companionship, and all that was lost at the Fall. God is calling Abraham to become the person he was created to be, to begin the process of transformation that will lead, in the end, to full restoration. This will be a blessing not only to Abraham himself, but also to those around him: “so that you will be a blessing.”
This leads to the next thing, which is that God’s call points far beyond Abraham himself: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It’s not that God looked at Abraham and said, “he seems like a really good guy; I think I’ll do something nice for him.” It’s that God is at work fulfilling the promise He hinted at when He was cursing the serpent in the garden and said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (3:15). God is at work restoring the brokenness of His creation, and the call of Abraham is the point in history when the process begins. The whole remainder of the Bible can be seen as the outworking of this promise in the lives of God’s people over many centuries.
Through Abraham, God builds a nation called by His name, and over the centuries He demonstrates His faithfulness to His promise, despite their persistent unfaithfulness. But His purpose in building a nation, like His call to Abraham, is not an end in itself; He’s preparing this nation to be the people through whom He will bring a Redeemer into the world, One who will finally undo the effects of the Fall and restore God’s creation. As we read today in our gospel reading, Jesus said to a group of Jewish leaders who opposed His ministry: “Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). The call of Abraham points forward to the ministry of Jesus. The ministry of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise that through Abraham all families of the earth would be blessed.
The final outworking of this is described near the end of the book of Revelation in this description of the New Jerusalem: “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp of sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (22:3-5). This is the point we don’t want to lose sight of when we’re reading Scripture. Whatever else happens along the way, and whatever conclusions we come to about the details of biblical history, what is happening is that God is restoring the creation to Himself, and the final result will be what we see portrayed at the end of the book of Revelation.
What does this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First, we need to know that our faith is deeply rooted in history. There’s a tendency in our culture to despise the past and assume that we are wiser than all the people who have gone before us. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that whatever is most-recent must be better. We need to know that God’s work of redemption didn’t start with us. He has been at work over the centuries preparing the way for us to be restored. The idea that things started out badly and have been steadily improving over time is a very weak assumption. It’s not terribly difficult to find people in the past who are much wiser than we are. Our technological advances have increased our access to information but have not made us wiser. T.S. Eliot described this well:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from ‘The Rock’).
God has been at work over many centuries to bring healing to us from the results of the Fall. Our hope for the future is rooted in the past, and we owe a great debt to those who have responded to God and have preserved the message for us, often at great cost to themselves.
The other thing is that we need to keep in perspective what God is doing. He’s not terribly concerned about whether we are Lutherans or Presbyterians or Baptists or Roman Catholics; His concern is with preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence throughout all eternity. It’s easy to get so caught up in the concerns of our particular group that we lose sight of God’s ultimate purpose in His work of redemption. He has been at work preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence and has graciously included us. When we gather for worship, we are joining with all those who went before us and are now worshiping before God’s throne in heaven.
The rabbi I mentioned at the beginning got pulled into Asher Lev’s story in spite of himself, but in Jesus we are truly part of this story that we’re reading about. God’s promise to Abraham, “in you all nations of the earth will be blessed,” includes us. We are part of that great body gathered in heaven, which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the rest. May God enable us to remember this as we read His Word and go about our lives in the coming week.
Asher Lev was an immensely gifted painter who grew up in an ultra-conservative Jewish home. His artistic endeavors often brought him into conflict with his family, who really didn’t understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. He had a strong inner compulsion to keep painting, despite the problems it caused in his life, and as a result, he became increasingly alienated from his family. But he was especially concerned about his mother, who often intervened between him and his father, and he portrayed this by painting a crucifix, with his mother on the cross and Asher and his father nailing her there. This was the final straw, and his family ended up disowning him.
Asher Lev is a fictional character from a book by Chaim Potok (My Name is Asher Lev). I wasn’t even aware of the book, but it came up in one of my college classes. A local rabbi spoke in our class and someone asked about it. Up to this point, he had been very open-minded and liberal, but when the name of Chaim Potok came up he became angry and said Potok was a horrible, arrogant person and then went on to assert that no Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix. It was simply unthinkable. But, of course, this was exactly the point Potok was making. No Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix, but if one did, this is how the community would react. The rabbi, despite his liberal, open-minded posturing, found himself acting like one of the characters in Potok’s novel. He was so incensed by the whole idea that he missed the point of the story.
This often happens to us: we get so caught up in our own concerns, or stuck on particular details, that we end up missing what is really going on. And this is also true when we read Scripture. When we’re reading the early chapters of Genesis, if our perspective is limited by a particular theory of how God carried out His work of creation, we’re likely to miss the point. The purpose of the early chapters of Genesis is not to give us a detailed cosmology or satisfy our curiosity about how it all took place. There are lots of unanswered questions in these early chapters, and there is no attempt, on the part of the biblical authors, to clear everything up for us.
The point of Genesis 1-11 is to get us to where we are today, the call of Abraham. In chapters one and two, we learn that God created the world and placed humans there to bear His image. In chapter three we learn of the Fall, that these humans have rebelled against God’s command, and chapters 4-11 show something of the disastrous effects of this choice. And it’s in the context of this world that’s alienated from God and from one another that God calls Abraham. When we meet him here he’s called Abram, but God later renames him Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.”
The first thing to notice is that God calls Abraham to make a major change in his life. God calls him to leave his own country, the place where he grew up, the place where he is comfortable, to leave behind all the people he knows. This involves two things: he’s being called to separation from the alienated, divided world into which he was born. God is telling him to turn his back on everything that has been important to him up to this point in his life. Remember the context here. The world is in a state of rebellion against God, the Creator; Abraham is being called to separate himself from this world that is on the wrong track and to identify himself with God, the One against whom the world is rebelling.
God’s call also leads Abraham into a state of insecurity and uncertainty. He’s being called to leave behind everything that he knows, all his sources of comfort, and to make a journey “into the land that I will show you.” Responding to God’s call on his life meant saying good-bye to his family, his friends, and his country, everything that’s been a part of his life up to this point. Not only saying good-bye to all that, but setting out in an uncertain direction; the author of Hebrews says “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (11:8). He didn’t know where he was going, but he set out anyway, because he trusted God who had called him. So this work of God in building a nation begins with His call to a specific man in a specific place who was going about his life with other things in mind. There’s no reason to think that Abraham had life-goals that differed from those around him; the thing that made the difference was that God called him to leave all that behind and he obeyed. We too easily assume that the biblical characters were special people, different from the rest of us, but if you continue reading about Abraham you’ll see that he had very significant weaknesses. He was a man seeking to get through his life like others around him, but God called him to something different than what he had in mind for himself.
The second thing to notice is that God promises to bless Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” The central idea here is that God is going to bless him, which will result in Abraham himself becoming a blessing to others. What does it mean for God to bless him? Does it mean that God will give him good things? Well yes, it does mean that – it says that he is going to become a great nation and that his name will be great -- but it means much more; in fact, getting things from God is not the main thing at all. It means that God will be his God, that God will identify with him in a special way. What is happening here is the beginning of the undoing of the effects of the Fall. The world is in chaos because of sin; people are alienated from God and from each other, and God comes to Abraham and says “I will be your God.”
The primary, most-important content of God’s blessing is God Himself. God created people in His image, to walk with Him in the garden and to know His companionship, and all that was lost at the Fall. God is calling Abraham to become the person he was created to be, to begin the process of transformation that will lead, in the end, to full restoration. This will be a blessing not only to Abraham himself, but also to those around him: “so that you will be a blessing.”
This leads to the next thing, which is that God’s call points far beyond Abraham himself: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It’s not that God looked at Abraham and said, “he seems like a really good guy; I think I’ll do something nice for him.” It’s that God is at work fulfilling the promise He hinted at when He was cursing the serpent in the garden and said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (3:15). God is at work restoring the brokenness of His creation, and the call of Abraham is the point in history when the process begins. The whole remainder of the Bible can be seen as the outworking of this promise in the lives of God’s people over many centuries.
Through Abraham, God builds a nation called by His name, and over the centuries He demonstrates His faithfulness to His promise, despite their persistent unfaithfulness. But His purpose in building a nation, like His call to Abraham, is not an end in itself; He’s preparing this nation to be the people through whom He will bring a Redeemer into the world, One who will finally undo the effects of the Fall and restore God’s creation. As we read today in our gospel reading, Jesus said to a group of Jewish leaders who opposed His ministry: “Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). The call of Abraham points forward to the ministry of Jesus. The ministry of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise that through Abraham all families of the earth would be blessed.
The final outworking of this is described near the end of the book of Revelation in this description of the New Jerusalem: “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp of sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (22:3-5). This is the point we don’t want to lose sight of when we’re reading Scripture. Whatever else happens along the way, and whatever conclusions we come to about the details of biblical history, what is happening is that God is restoring the creation to Himself, and the final result will be what we see portrayed at the end of the book of Revelation.
What does this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First, we need to know that our faith is deeply rooted in history. There’s a tendency in our culture to despise the past and assume that we are wiser than all the people who have gone before us. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that whatever is most-recent must be better. We need to know that God’s work of redemption didn’t start with us. He has been at work over the centuries preparing the way for us to be restored. The idea that things started out badly and have been steadily improving over time is a very weak assumption. It’s not terribly difficult to find people in the past who are much wiser than we are. Our technological advances have increased our access to information but have not made us wiser. T.S. Eliot described this well:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from ‘The Rock’).
God has been at work over many centuries to bring healing to us from the results of the Fall. Our hope for the future is rooted in the past, and we owe a great debt to those who have responded to God and have preserved the message for us, often at great cost to themselves.
The other thing is that we need to keep in perspective what God is doing. He’s not terribly concerned about whether we are Lutherans or Presbyterians or Baptists or Roman Catholics; His concern is with preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence throughout all eternity. It’s easy to get so caught up in the concerns of our particular group that we lose sight of God’s ultimate purpose in His work of redemption. He has been at work preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence and has graciously included us. When we gather for worship, we are joining with all those who went before us and are now worshiping before God’s throne in heaven.
The rabbi I mentioned at the beginning got pulled into Asher Lev’s story in spite of himself, but in Jesus we are truly part of this story that we’re reading about. God’s promise to Abraham, “in you all nations of the earth will be blessed,” includes us. We are part of that great body gathered in heaven, which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the rest. May God enable us to remember this as we read His Word and go about our lives in the coming week.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Doers of the Word, James 1:22-27
Shiloh Lutheran Church
August 30, 2015
(Note: this is an edited version of a sermon that appears earlier in this blog in the James series.)
I used to work with a guy who spent lots of time playing basketball video games. He understood how the game worked and knew how to develop a good strategy. He could get his players to make the right moves to win the game, both for offense and defense. He knew what it took to win a basketball game. But he didn’t play the game himself. He was overweight and out of shape; his connection with basketball was purely imaginary. He didn’t even watch real games.
When I was a young Christian, I talked with a man I had known all my life, who had never shown even the slightest interest in spiritual things. As I was talking with him, he informed me that he believed the gospel. He believed Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the world, and he had read several books on the end times. I was so amazed by his response that I didn’t know what to say. I said, “so you believe it’s all true?” And he responded, “yes.” So I asked him whether he was ready to stand in God’s presence, and he said, “no.” But he didn’t seem to be terribly bothered by that fact. He believed in the truth of the gospel, but his belief had no impact at all on his life. This kinds of divisions in our lives are common, and we get used to the lack of connection between our internal and external worlds.
Satan’s goal is to destroy us spiritually, and if he can’t achieve that by preventing us from coming to faith, he’ll try to isolate our faith so that it’s purely inward. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon. When the man they’re trying to destroy comes to repentance, Screwtape advises his nephew: “The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance” (p. 60). As long as it’s a purely inward thing, not ever converted into action, it’s in the realm of imagination.
That’s the problem James is addressing in these verses. Faith in the gospel is not just a sense of inner conviction. It’s not the sort of thing that can be confined to one dimension of our lives. God calls us not only to hear His Word and believe it with our minds, but to respond to it in obedience. Those who don’t convert their faith into action are self-deceived, James says: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” They persuade themselves that because they like listening to the Word, because they enjoy learning about it, they must be OK spiritually. But Jesus gives a very stern warning about this in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). James wants us to know that genuine faith involves more than saying, “Yes, I believe the Bible is true.” Faith in the gospel brings us into fellowship with the living God, who then sets out to transform every area of our lives in preparation for that day when we will see Him face to face and live in His presence forever. Believing the gospel is the beginning of the process of purification and transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
The first thing James calls us to in this passage is attentiveness to God’s Word. There’s some discussion among commentators about the words James uses in verses 23-25. When he describes a person looking in a mirror he uses one word, and then he uses a different word to describe a person looking at the law of liberty. This contrast comes across in the NIV: “like a man who looks at his face in a mirror.... But the man who looks intently into the perfect law....” It’s even stronger in the NEB: “He glances at himself and goes away.... But the man who looks closely into the perfect law....” The first is a careless, superficial glance, and the second is a focused gaze. But other translations make no distinction at all. The NRSV, for example, uses the word “looks” in both places, and some commentators argue that there’s really no significance in the word change, that James used different words for the sake of variety but that they both mean the same thing.
The difficulty with a discussion like this is that all the commentators and translators are more familiar with the original languages than any of us, and our temptation is to simply choose the position we like best, the one that fits with our assumptions. I like the first idea better, that James is drawing a contrast between two different ways of listening. That fits more neatly into my sermon. But as I’ve read the various commentaries, the second position seems to have a slightly stronger case.
But that’s not terribly important anyway. Maybe there isn’t an intentional contrast between these two words, but the point is that James is talking about two different ways of listening. Some hear in a way that doesn’t lead to obedience. Their hearing remains on the surface of their minds. If we want to avoid falling into the same trap, the place to begin is with attentive listening to God’s Word. We need to know the truth before we can obey it. We can also say that obedience is rooted in attentiveness to God’s Word, and that mere hearing is often (though not always) rooted in superficial attention. The words pass through our minds, and we say, “oh yes, I believe that,” and then we go on with our lives. But the words never get any deeper. They don’t lead us to genuine repentance, which is a change of direction, a new way of living. They don’t connect with our lives in the world. It may or may not be that James used two different words to underscore this point, but the difference is there in any case, so translations like the NIV are on the right track in emphasizing two different ways of paying attention to God’s Word.
So whether or not James is contrasting two different words about hearing, if we want to become doers of the Word, rather than mere hearers, we need to listen to God’s Word attentively. Psalm 1 describes people who are doing this: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.” They take delight in God’s Word and meditate on it day and night. They’re attentive to it. Their listening is not superficial.
The second thing James emphasizes here is the importance of remembering. Those who are mere hearers look and then immediately forget what they’ve seen; “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget... they will be blessed in their doing.” This is a frequent emphasis in the Old Testament. When Moses was reminding Israel of the law, he said: “So be careful not to forget the covenant that the Lord your God made with you....” (Deuteronomy 4:23). Later in the same book, Moses is confronting Israel with their stubbornness and he says: “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deut. 32:18). The prophets make the same complaint. Here’s one example from Jeremiah: “[The false prophets] plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal” (Jeremiah 23:27). Israel got into trouble again and again because they forgot the truth.
This kind of forgetfulness is a spiritual problem, not a mental one. We can be regular church attenders, we can even be consistent in our personal devotions, and be forgetful hearers at the same time. We go to church on Sunday, and even if we don’t say it this way our attitude is “well, now that’s out of the way and I can get on with the things I want to do.” Then we approach our personal devotions in the same way. Everything is compartmentalized; spiritual exercises may make us feel better, but they don’t connect with our lives. We spend time in Bible reading and prayer, then when we go to something else we leave it all behind. There’s no connection between the spiritual compartment of our lives and the other things we do.
If we want to become doers of the Word, we need to find ways to break down the walls of these compartments. One way we can begin to do this is by allowing God’s Word to confront the way we’re living our daily lives in the world, asking God for wisdom and direction by considering questions like: “what kinds of changes might God be calling me to make in response to this passage?” Or “what does this truth that I’ve just encountered have to say to some of the other compartments in my life?” “How can I put this into practice?” These kinds of questions can help us remember who we are and who we belong to as we leave our spiritual exercises and go out into the world.
This leads to the third thing James emphasizes, which is obedience. James is calling us to respond to God’s Word with concrete, specific acts of obedience. Mere hearers think it’s enough just to hear. Paul is confronting people like this in Romans 2 when he says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law will be justified” (Romans 2:13). God calls us, not only to listen attentively and to carefully remember what we’ve heard, but to follow up on this with obedience.
That’s the point of verses 26-27, where James contrasts true religion and false religion. He’s not saying “religion is a bad thing; all you really need is a relationship with Jesus.” He’s not contrasting religion and relationship. He’s contrasting true and false religion. Religion has to do with the outward implications of a relationship with God (see Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, pp. 210-11). Christian discipleship is not only an inward relationship, it’s a relationship with God that shows itself in outward actions. The word “religion” has to do with these outward actions. One commentator explains it this way: “Religion is... a comprehensive word for the specific ways in which a heart-relationship to God is expressed in our lives” (J.A. Motyer, The Message of James, p. 75).
The question is not whether or not we’re religious. The question is whether our religion is true or false. In describing the difference, James focuses on three areas: bridling the tongue, showing compassion for those who are vulnerable and in need, and avoiding the pollution of the world. False religion is confined to the spiritual compartment; it doesn’t lead to transformation in the way we use the gift of speech, in the way we respond to people who are in need, or in our attitude toward the world. We may be very diligent in our religious duties, but otherwise we look no different than those around us who make no profession of faith at all. James is saying that when this happens we’ve accepted a counterfeit religion. We’ve been self-deceived and our religion is worthless.
He wants us to know that Christian salvation is about more than going to church and having devotions. God calls us, not only to hear His Word and believe it with our minds, but to respond to it with obedience. He calls us to grow in obedience in each area of our lives: in our relationships, in learning to bridle our tongues; in the ways we use our resources, sharing with those who are vulnerable and in need; and in the way we relate to the world, being in this world but not being polluted by it. When we cultivate a life of obedience, James says we are blessed: “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.”
Notice how he describes God’s Word. He calls it the “law of liberty.” It sets us free to live the kind of life we were created to live. God’s Word isn’t like a straightjacket which keeps us from doing what we want to do. It’s the Word of the God who created us and who knows what is best for us. “True freedom is the opportunity and the ability to give expression to what we truly are. We are truly free when we live the life appropriate to those who are created in the image of God.... The law of God is the law of liberty because it safeguards, expresses and enables the life of true freedom into which Christ has brought us. This is the blessing of which James speaks (25), the blessing of a full life, a true humanity. Obedience is the key factor in our enjoyment of it” (Motyer, p. 71). Being doers of the Word is the best thing for us; it leads to the kind of life God created us for, a fully human life.
This passage is closely related to one earlier in the chapter which says “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” This Word that we’re being called to obey is the Word that saves us. James is saying that if we claim to believe this Word but aren’t growing in obedience we’ve deceived ourselves. Our faith is worthless and will not save us. This doesn’t contradict Paul’s teaching on justification by faith. James is saying that genuine faith can’t be confined to our inner lives; it will manifest itself in outward acts of obedience.
How we respond to this “word that has the power to save” our souls is of the greatest importance. We can’t afford to allow more “urgent” things to crowd this out. C.S. Lewis reminds us of the infinite dimension of our lives and the lives of those around us: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal” (The Business of Heaven, pp. 147-48). Each of us is headed in one direction or the other, and we are influencing the direction of others whether we’re aware of it or not. None of us are mere mortals. In the light of such overwhelming possibilities, how can we allow ourselves to be deceived? Since we live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, since we are all moving, and are influencing one another, in one direction or the other: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” Listen attentively to the Word, then remember what you’ve heard as you go about your duties, and order your life in obedience to His commands. Those who do this are blessed.
I used to work with a guy who spent lots of time playing basketball video games. He understood how the game worked and knew how to develop a good strategy. He could get his players to make the right moves to win the game, both for offense and defense. He knew what it took to win a basketball game. But he didn’t play the game himself. He was overweight and out of shape; his connection with basketball was purely imaginary. He didn’t even watch real games.
When I was a young Christian, I talked with a man I had known all my life, who had never shown even the slightest interest in spiritual things. As I was talking with him, he informed me that he believed the gospel. He believed Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the world, and he had read several books on the end times. I was so amazed by his response that I didn’t know what to say. I said, “so you believe it’s all true?” And he responded, “yes.” So I asked him whether he was ready to stand in God’s presence, and he said, “no.” But he didn’t seem to be terribly bothered by that fact. He believed in the truth of the gospel, but his belief had no impact at all on his life. This kinds of divisions in our lives are common, and we get used to the lack of connection between our internal and external worlds.
Satan’s goal is to destroy us spiritually, and if he can’t achieve that by preventing us from coming to faith, he’ll try to isolate our faith so that it’s purely inward. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon. When the man they’re trying to destroy comes to repentance, Screwtape advises his nephew: “The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance” (p. 60). As long as it’s a purely inward thing, not ever converted into action, it’s in the realm of imagination.
That’s the problem James is addressing in these verses. Faith in the gospel is not just a sense of inner conviction. It’s not the sort of thing that can be confined to one dimension of our lives. God calls us not only to hear His Word and believe it with our minds, but to respond to it in obedience. Those who don’t convert their faith into action are self-deceived, James says: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” They persuade themselves that because they like listening to the Word, because they enjoy learning about it, they must be OK spiritually. But Jesus gives a very stern warning about this in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). James wants us to know that genuine faith involves more than saying, “Yes, I believe the Bible is true.” Faith in the gospel brings us into fellowship with the living God, who then sets out to transform every area of our lives in preparation for that day when we will see Him face to face and live in His presence forever. Believing the gospel is the beginning of the process of purification and transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
The first thing James calls us to in this passage is attentiveness to God’s Word. There’s some discussion among commentators about the words James uses in verses 23-25. When he describes a person looking in a mirror he uses one word, and then he uses a different word to describe a person looking at the law of liberty. This contrast comes across in the NIV: “like a man who looks at his face in a mirror.... But the man who looks intently into the perfect law....” It’s even stronger in the NEB: “He glances at himself and goes away.... But the man who looks closely into the perfect law....” The first is a careless, superficial glance, and the second is a focused gaze. But other translations make no distinction at all. The NRSV, for example, uses the word “looks” in both places, and some commentators argue that there’s really no significance in the word change, that James used different words for the sake of variety but that they both mean the same thing.
The difficulty with a discussion like this is that all the commentators and translators are more familiar with the original languages than any of us, and our temptation is to simply choose the position we like best, the one that fits with our assumptions. I like the first idea better, that James is drawing a contrast between two different ways of listening. That fits more neatly into my sermon. But as I’ve read the various commentaries, the second position seems to have a slightly stronger case.
But that’s not terribly important anyway. Maybe there isn’t an intentional contrast between these two words, but the point is that James is talking about two different ways of listening. Some hear in a way that doesn’t lead to obedience. Their hearing remains on the surface of their minds. If we want to avoid falling into the same trap, the place to begin is with attentive listening to God’s Word. We need to know the truth before we can obey it. We can also say that obedience is rooted in attentiveness to God’s Word, and that mere hearing is often (though not always) rooted in superficial attention. The words pass through our minds, and we say, “oh yes, I believe that,” and then we go on with our lives. But the words never get any deeper. They don’t lead us to genuine repentance, which is a change of direction, a new way of living. They don’t connect with our lives in the world. It may or may not be that James used two different words to underscore this point, but the difference is there in any case, so translations like the NIV are on the right track in emphasizing two different ways of paying attention to God’s Word.
So whether or not James is contrasting two different words about hearing, if we want to become doers of the Word, rather than mere hearers, we need to listen to God’s Word attentively. Psalm 1 describes people who are doing this: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.” They take delight in God’s Word and meditate on it day and night. They’re attentive to it. Their listening is not superficial.
The second thing James emphasizes here is the importance of remembering. Those who are mere hearers look and then immediately forget what they’ve seen; “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget... they will be blessed in their doing.” This is a frequent emphasis in the Old Testament. When Moses was reminding Israel of the law, he said: “So be careful not to forget the covenant that the Lord your God made with you....” (Deuteronomy 4:23). Later in the same book, Moses is confronting Israel with their stubbornness and he says: “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deut. 32:18). The prophets make the same complaint. Here’s one example from Jeremiah: “[The false prophets] plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal” (Jeremiah 23:27). Israel got into trouble again and again because they forgot the truth.
This kind of forgetfulness is a spiritual problem, not a mental one. We can be regular church attenders, we can even be consistent in our personal devotions, and be forgetful hearers at the same time. We go to church on Sunday, and even if we don’t say it this way our attitude is “well, now that’s out of the way and I can get on with the things I want to do.” Then we approach our personal devotions in the same way. Everything is compartmentalized; spiritual exercises may make us feel better, but they don’t connect with our lives. We spend time in Bible reading and prayer, then when we go to something else we leave it all behind. There’s no connection between the spiritual compartment of our lives and the other things we do.
If we want to become doers of the Word, we need to find ways to break down the walls of these compartments. One way we can begin to do this is by allowing God’s Word to confront the way we’re living our daily lives in the world, asking God for wisdom and direction by considering questions like: “what kinds of changes might God be calling me to make in response to this passage?” Or “what does this truth that I’ve just encountered have to say to some of the other compartments in my life?” “How can I put this into practice?” These kinds of questions can help us remember who we are and who we belong to as we leave our spiritual exercises and go out into the world.
This leads to the third thing James emphasizes, which is obedience. James is calling us to respond to God’s Word with concrete, specific acts of obedience. Mere hearers think it’s enough just to hear. Paul is confronting people like this in Romans 2 when he says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law will be justified” (Romans 2:13). God calls us, not only to listen attentively and to carefully remember what we’ve heard, but to follow up on this with obedience.
That’s the point of verses 26-27, where James contrasts true religion and false religion. He’s not saying “religion is a bad thing; all you really need is a relationship with Jesus.” He’s not contrasting religion and relationship. He’s contrasting true and false religion. Religion has to do with the outward implications of a relationship with God (see Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, pp. 210-11). Christian discipleship is not only an inward relationship, it’s a relationship with God that shows itself in outward actions. The word “religion” has to do with these outward actions. One commentator explains it this way: “Religion is... a comprehensive word for the specific ways in which a heart-relationship to God is expressed in our lives” (J.A. Motyer, The Message of James, p. 75).
The question is not whether or not we’re religious. The question is whether our religion is true or false. In describing the difference, James focuses on three areas: bridling the tongue, showing compassion for those who are vulnerable and in need, and avoiding the pollution of the world. False religion is confined to the spiritual compartment; it doesn’t lead to transformation in the way we use the gift of speech, in the way we respond to people who are in need, or in our attitude toward the world. We may be very diligent in our religious duties, but otherwise we look no different than those around us who make no profession of faith at all. James is saying that when this happens we’ve accepted a counterfeit religion. We’ve been self-deceived and our religion is worthless.
He wants us to know that Christian salvation is about more than going to church and having devotions. God calls us, not only to hear His Word and believe it with our minds, but to respond to it with obedience. He calls us to grow in obedience in each area of our lives: in our relationships, in learning to bridle our tongues; in the ways we use our resources, sharing with those who are vulnerable and in need; and in the way we relate to the world, being in this world but not being polluted by it. When we cultivate a life of obedience, James says we are blessed: “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.”
Notice how he describes God’s Word. He calls it the “law of liberty.” It sets us free to live the kind of life we were created to live. God’s Word isn’t like a straightjacket which keeps us from doing what we want to do. It’s the Word of the God who created us and who knows what is best for us. “True freedom is the opportunity and the ability to give expression to what we truly are. We are truly free when we live the life appropriate to those who are created in the image of God.... The law of God is the law of liberty because it safeguards, expresses and enables the life of true freedom into which Christ has brought us. This is the blessing of which James speaks (25), the blessing of a full life, a true humanity. Obedience is the key factor in our enjoyment of it” (Motyer, p. 71). Being doers of the Word is the best thing for us; it leads to the kind of life God created us for, a fully human life.
This passage is closely related to one earlier in the chapter which says “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” This Word that we’re being called to obey is the Word that saves us. James is saying that if we claim to believe this Word but aren’t growing in obedience we’ve deceived ourselves. Our faith is worthless and will not save us. This doesn’t contradict Paul’s teaching on justification by faith. James is saying that genuine faith can’t be confined to our inner lives; it will manifest itself in outward acts of obedience.
How we respond to this “word that has the power to save” our souls is of the greatest importance. We can’t afford to allow more “urgent” things to crowd this out. C.S. Lewis reminds us of the infinite dimension of our lives and the lives of those around us: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal” (The Business of Heaven, pp. 147-48). Each of us is headed in one direction or the other, and we are influencing the direction of others whether we’re aware of it or not. None of us are mere mortals. In the light of such overwhelming possibilities, how can we allow ourselves to be deceived? Since we live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, since we are all moving, and are influencing one another, in one direction or the other: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” Listen attentively to the Word, then remember what you’ve heard as you go about your duties, and order your life in obedience to His commands. Those who do this are blessed.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
God is With Us, Psalm 23
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
State College, PA
7/19/15
The great English preacher Charles Spurgeon pointed out that in the first 22 psalms there are no green pastures or still waters. In Psalm 2 we find the nations raging against God, followed by lamentations of psalmists surrounded by enemies, leading up to the 22nd Psalm, which Jesus quoted on the cross. Spurgeon says “It is only after we have read, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ that we come to ‘The Lord is my Shepherd.’ We must by experience know the value of blood-shedding, and see the sword awakened against the Shepherd, before we shall be truly able to know the sweetness of the Good Shepherd’s care.” Psalm 23 follows Psalm 22 because we know God as our shepherd in a world that causes us to cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And the message of Psalm 23 is that God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives, through all different kinds of experiences.
This psalm describes God with two pictures. In the early part of the psalm, verses 1-4, God is described as a Shepherd. And, in verses 5-6, He is pictured as a gracious host. But the main idea, all through the psalm, is that He is present with His people. The words, “for you are with me,” are at the precise center of the psalm. Excluding the superscription, “A Psalm of David,” which was written hundreds of years after the psalmist wrote this prayer, there are 26 words in Hebrew both before and after these words. Hebrew poets liked to play with words in that way, and it seems likely that the author of this psalm puts these words intentionally at the center as the way of giving them special emphasis (see James Limburg, Psalms, p. 74).
God often comforts and reassures His people by reminding them that He is with them. Isaac, the son of Abraham, seems to have struggled with fearfulness. At one point, after an especially difficult time, God appears to him and says: “I am the God of your father, Abraham.... Do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you” (Genesis 26:23-24a, NLT). When everything was going wrong in Joseph’s life, the author of Genesis assures us: “The Lord was with Joseph and blessed him greatly as he served in the home of his Egyptian master” (Genesis 39:2, NLT). Later, after he’s been unjustly thrown into prison, the author says again: “But the Lord was with Joseph there, too, and he granted Joseph favor with the chief jailer” (v. 21). When Jeremiah was called to become a prophet, preaching a message which he knew would be unpopular, God reassured him with these words: “And don’t be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and take care of you” (Jeremiah 1:8). As he carried on his ministry, Jeremiah often didn’t feel like the Lord was with him. But he had this assurance from the beginning, and God was with him to the end, even during the dark times when he was ready to give up hope. Paul faced many difficulties during his ministry as an apostle; he was beaten with rods, flogged, shipwrecked; his ministry in Ephesus and Jerusalem led to riots. Most people would have given up in the face of such things. But while he was in Corinth, God reassured him: “Don’t be afraid! Speak out! Don’t be silent! For I am with you, and no one will harm you because many people in this city belong to me” (Acts 18:9-10, NLT). “I am with you.” That’s the thing this psalmist understands, and he puts it at the very center of the psalm to give it prominence and emphasize it. God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives.
He reinforces this idea, in verses 1-4, by picturing God as a shepherd. Shepherds were responsible for the physical survival and welfare of the flocks under their care. One Bible dictionary points out that, “In comparison with goats, which tended to fend for themselves, sheep depended on the shepherd to find pasture for them..., Shepherds also had to provide shelter, medication, aid in lambing time, and provision for lameness and weariness. Without the shepherd the sheep were helpless” (ISBE Revised, vol. 4, pp. 463-64). Sheep are dependent upon the shepherd. So the point, in verses 1-4, is that God is dependable. He is with us. He won’t desert us, because He is a good Shepherd, who cares for His sheep, knowing that they depend upon Him.
The psalmist lists some of the things that God, our Shepherd, does for us: 1) He leads us to refreshment and rest. Life in this world can be wearying. Sometimes we feel like we have been drained of all our resources, and that we have nothing left to give. When we’re in need of restoration and rest, our great Shepherd leads us beside quiet waters and restores our souls.
2) Our Shepherd also leads us in the right way, He “guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” When we depend on our own resources and wisdom we end up going the wrong way. Isaiah says “all we, like sheep, have gone astray.” We are in the habit of going astray, and we live in a world that tells us, over and over again, that this is the right way to go. So we need to turn continually to our great Shepherd for direction.
3) Our Shepherd also keeps us safe during times of darkness. In the English Standard Version, which is what we read in the service, the translators have a footnote with an alternate translation of the words, “valley of the shadow of death.” The alternate is “the valley of deep darkness.” Other versions offer similar suggestions, and all of these are a more common way of rendering the words in verse 4. For example, Psalm 44:19: “But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals and covered us over with deep darkness.” Or Isaiah 9:2: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light....” Why is this important? The psalmist isn’t only talking here about times when we’re facing death. This world is full of darkness, because it’s under the shadow of death. Our times of darkness are connected with the reality of death in this world. He’s saying that God is with Him during all the dark times of life, those times when we think we’ve lost our way, when we feel like God has deserted us. At all those darkest times of life, God our Shepherd is with us, even though we don’t feel His presence.
Abraham Kuyper was the prime minister of Holland, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and he was also a theologian and a preacher. The first serious theological book I ever read was his book, The Work of the Holy Spirit. I was a fairly young Christian, and I felt guilty reading it. Everything I’d heard about theologians was bad; I’d heard that they weren’t interested in living as true Christians but were only concerned with arguing and studying about insignificant details. I’d heard that Theology was irrelevant and divisive. But I forced myself to keep going, and I learned that the things I’d been told were false. Here’s something I read in that book, on the work of the Holy Spirit as Comforter: “Comfort is a deposited treasure from which I can borrow; it is like the sacrifice of Christ in whom is all my comfort, because on Calvary He opened to all the house of Israel a fountain for sin and uncleanness. But a comforter is a person, who, when I can not go to the fountain nor even see it, goes for me and fills his pitcher and puts the refreshing drops to my burning lips” (vol. 3, ch. 22). When we’re walking through the valley of deep darkness we can’t see where we’re going, and we lose sight of God’s precious promises. We don’t know where to turn for comfort. But we’re not on our own. The Comforter goes to the fountain for us, fills His pitcher, and brings us the refreshment we so desperately need.
There is a great example of this from the life of Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations, he is grieving over the fall of Jerusalem. The temple has been destroyed, and the people have been deported to Babylon. God's people have been subjected to terrible suffering and cruelty at the hands of the Babylonians. In chapter three we find him at the end of himself. "I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, `My splendor is gone, and all I had hoped from the Lord'" (vv.17‑18). He is overwhelmed with grief, and has given up hope even in God. Then, three verses later, he says this: "Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (vv.21‑23). What brought about this change? Why did he call these things to mind? Was Jeremiah capable of reviving himself at this point? No, he was experiencing the work of the Comforter. The Holy Spirit has reminded him of the truth and has renewed his hope. The psalmist, in verse 4, is saying the same thing. God, our great Shepherd, is with us when we go through times of darkness. We’re not on our own, and even when we lose sight of the truth, even when we lose hope, He comforts us with his rod and staff as our Shepherd. We are helpless without Him, like sheep without a shepherd. But He has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
In verses 5-6, the psalmist uses another image: he pictures God as a gracious Host, showing hospitality to His people. Despite the peacefulness and confidence of this psalm, it’s clear that the author is not experiencing easy times. He’s weary and in need of rest and refreshment; he’s going through a dark valley; and even in verse 5, when he’s experiencing God’s gracious hospitality, there are enemies present. God is with him and is committed to caring for him all through his life, but that doesn’t keep him from experiencing difficulties.
The psalmist says three things in verse 5, all of which revolve around the comfort he finds in worship: 1) “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” God is giving him good things in the midst of his difficulties. His enemies have evil intentions, but God is there, doing good things for him. That enables him to keep going. His enemies are speaking evil of him, telling lies about him, but God is blessing him in their presence, showing that He rejects what they’re saying about him. 2) “you anoint my head with oil.” In Scripture, oil is a symbol of God’s spirit, and the anointing oil was used to set a person apart as a priest. The psalmist is anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and he is part of a community of other people who have this same anointing. He’s connected, in the Spirit, with the congregation of God’s people. This leads to the next thing: 3) “my cup overflows.” Listen to this invitation that Jesus gave: “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:37-39). When we come to Jesus, as part of His body, He pours out His Spirit upon us, and we’re able to say, with the psalmist, “my cup overflows.” He prepares a rich feast for us, in the presence of our enemies, He anoints us with His Spirit and we’re filled to overflowing.
But it’s never enough merely to experience comfort in the present. We need assurance of God’s gracious care in the future, and we need to know that life will not always be what it is now. We won’t always be going through times of deep darkness which threaten to overwhelm us. We won’t always be living in the midst of enemies. The psalmist takes comfort in the gracious care he’s experienced from God, and it enables him to say this about his future: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Listen to how this verse reads in The Message: “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of God for the rest of my life.” Often the Psalmists complain of enemies pursuing them. But here the image is reversed. Goodness and mercy, beauty and love, are chasing after him, and they’ll continue to pursue him all through his life. God’s Word calls us to seek and to hunger after Him. But it doesn’t depend on our seeking. We get distracted and lose our way in the darkness. We go off on tangents. We get sick, and we don’t have the energy to order our lives the way we want to. But He is seeking us, as our Shepherd. He pursues us, to invite us to the great feast at His table.
God, our Shepherd, won’t keep us out of the valley of deep darkness, but He will walk through it with us and His rod and staff will comfort us, often without our awareness of what is going on. We’ll feel like we’re on our own, like He’s deserted us and is no longer blessing us as He has in the past. But somehow we’ll get to the other side of the valley and we’ll find that He was there all the time, and that we’ve gotten through only by His help. He is with us, watching out for us, carrying us when our faith is weak, seeking us when we lose our way, refreshing us with His presence at the times we least expect it.
In the light of all this, let’s make it our aim to walk with Him, whatever else is going on in our lives. Pray this Psalm regularly. Pray this psalm, along with the rest of the psalter, and immerse yourself in God’s Word, reminding yourself often of God’s promises to be with His people. And be regular in corporate worship; when we gather together as God’s people to worship, we’re anticipating the worship we’ll experience around God’s throne in heaven. Even more, we’re taking part in the worship that is happening right now before God’s throne. The refreshment that God gives us when we gather in His presence anticipates the Marriage Feast of the Lamb: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Revelation 21:1-5). This is what we have to look forward to, and our great Shepherd is caring for us, watching over us, until we arrive safely in His presence.
State College, PA
7/19/15
The great English preacher Charles Spurgeon pointed out that in the first 22 psalms there are no green pastures or still waters. In Psalm 2 we find the nations raging against God, followed by lamentations of psalmists surrounded by enemies, leading up to the 22nd Psalm, which Jesus quoted on the cross. Spurgeon says “It is only after we have read, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ that we come to ‘The Lord is my Shepherd.’ We must by experience know the value of blood-shedding, and see the sword awakened against the Shepherd, before we shall be truly able to know the sweetness of the Good Shepherd’s care.” Psalm 23 follows Psalm 22 because we know God as our shepherd in a world that causes us to cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And the message of Psalm 23 is that God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives, through all different kinds of experiences.
This psalm describes God with two pictures. In the early part of the psalm, verses 1-4, God is described as a Shepherd. And, in verses 5-6, He is pictured as a gracious host. But the main idea, all through the psalm, is that He is present with His people. The words, “for you are with me,” are at the precise center of the psalm. Excluding the superscription, “A Psalm of David,” which was written hundreds of years after the psalmist wrote this prayer, there are 26 words in Hebrew both before and after these words. Hebrew poets liked to play with words in that way, and it seems likely that the author of this psalm puts these words intentionally at the center as the way of giving them special emphasis (see James Limburg, Psalms, p. 74).
God often comforts and reassures His people by reminding them that He is with them. Isaac, the son of Abraham, seems to have struggled with fearfulness. At one point, after an especially difficult time, God appears to him and says: “I am the God of your father, Abraham.... Do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you” (Genesis 26:23-24a, NLT). When everything was going wrong in Joseph’s life, the author of Genesis assures us: “The Lord was with Joseph and blessed him greatly as he served in the home of his Egyptian master” (Genesis 39:2, NLT). Later, after he’s been unjustly thrown into prison, the author says again: “But the Lord was with Joseph there, too, and he granted Joseph favor with the chief jailer” (v. 21). When Jeremiah was called to become a prophet, preaching a message which he knew would be unpopular, God reassured him with these words: “And don’t be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and take care of you” (Jeremiah 1:8). As he carried on his ministry, Jeremiah often didn’t feel like the Lord was with him. But he had this assurance from the beginning, and God was with him to the end, even during the dark times when he was ready to give up hope. Paul faced many difficulties during his ministry as an apostle; he was beaten with rods, flogged, shipwrecked; his ministry in Ephesus and Jerusalem led to riots. Most people would have given up in the face of such things. But while he was in Corinth, God reassured him: “Don’t be afraid! Speak out! Don’t be silent! For I am with you, and no one will harm you because many people in this city belong to me” (Acts 18:9-10, NLT). “I am with you.” That’s the thing this psalmist understands, and he puts it at the very center of the psalm to give it prominence and emphasize it. God is with us and is committed to taking care of us all through our lives.
He reinforces this idea, in verses 1-4, by picturing God as a shepherd. Shepherds were responsible for the physical survival and welfare of the flocks under their care. One Bible dictionary points out that, “In comparison with goats, which tended to fend for themselves, sheep depended on the shepherd to find pasture for them..., Shepherds also had to provide shelter, medication, aid in lambing time, and provision for lameness and weariness. Without the shepherd the sheep were helpless” (ISBE Revised, vol. 4, pp. 463-64). Sheep are dependent upon the shepherd. So the point, in verses 1-4, is that God is dependable. He is with us. He won’t desert us, because He is a good Shepherd, who cares for His sheep, knowing that they depend upon Him.
The psalmist lists some of the things that God, our Shepherd, does for us: 1) He leads us to refreshment and rest. Life in this world can be wearying. Sometimes we feel like we have been drained of all our resources, and that we have nothing left to give. When we’re in need of restoration and rest, our great Shepherd leads us beside quiet waters and restores our souls.
2) Our Shepherd also leads us in the right way, He “guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” When we depend on our own resources and wisdom we end up going the wrong way. Isaiah says “all we, like sheep, have gone astray.” We are in the habit of going astray, and we live in a world that tells us, over and over again, that this is the right way to go. So we need to turn continually to our great Shepherd for direction.
3) Our Shepherd also keeps us safe during times of darkness. In the English Standard Version, which is what we read in the service, the translators have a footnote with an alternate translation of the words, “valley of the shadow of death.” The alternate is “the valley of deep darkness.” Other versions offer similar suggestions, and all of these are a more common way of rendering the words in verse 4. For example, Psalm 44:19: “But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals and covered us over with deep darkness.” Or Isaiah 9:2: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light....” Why is this important? The psalmist isn’t only talking here about times when we’re facing death. This world is full of darkness, because it’s under the shadow of death. Our times of darkness are connected with the reality of death in this world. He’s saying that God is with Him during all the dark times of life, those times when we think we’ve lost our way, when we feel like God has deserted us. At all those darkest times of life, God our Shepherd is with us, even though we don’t feel His presence.
Abraham Kuyper was the prime minister of Holland, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and he was also a theologian and a preacher. The first serious theological book I ever read was his book, The Work of the Holy Spirit. I was a fairly young Christian, and I felt guilty reading it. Everything I’d heard about theologians was bad; I’d heard that they weren’t interested in living as true Christians but were only concerned with arguing and studying about insignificant details. I’d heard that Theology was irrelevant and divisive. But I forced myself to keep going, and I learned that the things I’d been told were false. Here’s something I read in that book, on the work of the Holy Spirit as Comforter: “Comfort is a deposited treasure from which I can borrow; it is like the sacrifice of Christ in whom is all my comfort, because on Calvary He opened to all the house of Israel a fountain for sin and uncleanness. But a comforter is a person, who, when I can not go to the fountain nor even see it, goes for me and fills his pitcher and puts the refreshing drops to my burning lips” (vol. 3, ch. 22). When we’re walking through the valley of deep darkness we can’t see where we’re going, and we lose sight of God’s precious promises. We don’t know where to turn for comfort. But we’re not on our own. The Comforter goes to the fountain for us, fills His pitcher, and brings us the refreshment we so desperately need.
There is a great example of this from the life of Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations, he is grieving over the fall of Jerusalem. The temple has been destroyed, and the people have been deported to Babylon. God's people have been subjected to terrible suffering and cruelty at the hands of the Babylonians. In chapter three we find him at the end of himself. "I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, `My splendor is gone, and all I had hoped from the Lord'" (vv.17‑18). He is overwhelmed with grief, and has given up hope even in God. Then, three verses later, he says this: "Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (vv.21‑23). What brought about this change? Why did he call these things to mind? Was Jeremiah capable of reviving himself at this point? No, he was experiencing the work of the Comforter. The Holy Spirit has reminded him of the truth and has renewed his hope. The psalmist, in verse 4, is saying the same thing. God, our great Shepherd, is with us when we go through times of darkness. We’re not on our own, and even when we lose sight of the truth, even when we lose hope, He comforts us with his rod and staff as our Shepherd. We are helpless without Him, like sheep without a shepherd. But He has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
In verses 5-6, the psalmist uses another image: he pictures God as a gracious Host, showing hospitality to His people. Despite the peacefulness and confidence of this psalm, it’s clear that the author is not experiencing easy times. He’s weary and in need of rest and refreshment; he’s going through a dark valley; and even in verse 5, when he’s experiencing God’s gracious hospitality, there are enemies present. God is with him and is committed to caring for him all through his life, but that doesn’t keep him from experiencing difficulties.
The psalmist says three things in verse 5, all of which revolve around the comfort he finds in worship: 1) “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” God is giving him good things in the midst of his difficulties. His enemies have evil intentions, but God is there, doing good things for him. That enables him to keep going. His enemies are speaking evil of him, telling lies about him, but God is blessing him in their presence, showing that He rejects what they’re saying about him. 2) “you anoint my head with oil.” In Scripture, oil is a symbol of God’s spirit, and the anointing oil was used to set a person apart as a priest. The psalmist is anointed with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and he is part of a community of other people who have this same anointing. He’s connected, in the Spirit, with the congregation of God’s people. This leads to the next thing: 3) “my cup overflows.” Listen to this invitation that Jesus gave: “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:37-39). When we come to Jesus, as part of His body, He pours out His Spirit upon us, and we’re able to say, with the psalmist, “my cup overflows.” He prepares a rich feast for us, in the presence of our enemies, He anoints us with His Spirit and we’re filled to overflowing.
But it’s never enough merely to experience comfort in the present. We need assurance of God’s gracious care in the future, and we need to know that life will not always be what it is now. We won’t always be going through times of deep darkness which threaten to overwhelm us. We won’t always be living in the midst of enemies. The psalmist takes comfort in the gracious care he’s experienced from God, and it enables him to say this about his future: “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Listen to how this verse reads in The Message: “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of God for the rest of my life.” Often the Psalmists complain of enemies pursuing them. But here the image is reversed. Goodness and mercy, beauty and love, are chasing after him, and they’ll continue to pursue him all through his life. God’s Word calls us to seek and to hunger after Him. But it doesn’t depend on our seeking. We get distracted and lose our way in the darkness. We go off on tangents. We get sick, and we don’t have the energy to order our lives the way we want to. But He is seeking us, as our Shepherd. He pursues us, to invite us to the great feast at His table.
God, our Shepherd, won’t keep us out of the valley of deep darkness, but He will walk through it with us and His rod and staff will comfort us, often without our awareness of what is going on. We’ll feel like we’re on our own, like He’s deserted us and is no longer blessing us as He has in the past. But somehow we’ll get to the other side of the valley and we’ll find that He was there all the time, and that we’ve gotten through only by His help. He is with us, watching out for us, carrying us when our faith is weak, seeking us when we lose our way, refreshing us with His presence at the times we least expect it.
In the light of all this, let’s make it our aim to walk with Him, whatever else is going on in our lives. Pray this Psalm regularly. Pray this psalm, along with the rest of the psalter, and immerse yourself in God’s Word, reminding yourself often of God’s promises to be with His people. And be regular in corporate worship; when we gather together as God’s people to worship, we’re anticipating the worship we’ll experience around God’s throne in heaven. Even more, we’re taking part in the worship that is happening right now before God’s throne. The refreshment that God gives us when we gather in His presence anticipates the Marriage Feast of the Lamb: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Revelation 21:1-5). This is what we have to look forward to, and our great Shepherd is caring for us, watching over us, until we arrive safely in His presence.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
An Eyewitness to the Resurrection, John 20:1-31
Third Sunday of Easter, 2015
Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College, PA
In 1978, I spent two weeks with a missionary who made a lasting impact on my life. He, more than anyone I’ve ever met, convinced me that it’s worth it to keep going, that it’s a great thing to arrive at the end of our earthly lives knowing that we’ve finished the work God has called us to do. When I met him he was 92 years old and had been diligently following the Lord throughout his long life. It was a great thing to see him at that point, to see the fruit of a “long obedience in the same direction.” The presence of God was a tangible reality with that man, and every time I was around him I found myself stirred with a desire to know God and to walk with Him until the end.
He and his wife had served as missionaries in India, and then retired at 65. They had gone to live in America (he was from England, but his wife was American), and as far as they knew at that point, their ministry was over. They’d completed their work, and now they could sit back and do whatever they wanted. This was their time. But God had other plans. After two years, they were certain that God was calling them to return to India. So they went back, not to their old field, but to a completely new area, where there were no churches and no missionaries. They lived in a tent for the first two years, until they were able to build a mud hut. And when I met him, 25 years after their return to India, he said that God had been at work through them in ways that they’d never experienced before their retirement. The Hindus in the area had given their mission a name that meant “the dwelling place of peace,” because when they went there they recognized something different about the place. So, this man and his wife had come to what they thought was the end of their ministry. They had closed the door and returned to the West, planning to live out the rest of their lives in retirement. They had laid their ministry to rest, thinking maybe that they were too old to be of any use on the mission field. But then God had done something new, something that went beyond anything they’d experienced in their previous work.
Something similar is happening to the disciples in chapter 20 of John’s gospel. They’ve seen Jesus crucified and laid in a borrowed tomb. All their expectations centered around His ministry are over. These are not naive, gullible people. They know people don’t rise from the dead. They’re living in a time before modern medicine, when even something like a simple infection could easily be fatal, because of the lack of antibiotics. They’ve experienced death. They’ve experienced its permanence. They know that when a person dies, that’s the end of it. The 3 ½ years they spent with Him in ministry have come to nothing. It’s now time to put all that to rest and to find something to do with the rest of their lives. But then they find that this is different than all the other deaths they’ve experienced. They learn that He is risen from the dead. He even appears to them in the flesh. And, as a result, they come to know God in ways they couldn’t have during Jesus’ public ministry. Here are the steps: their faith is destroyed by the crucifixion; then, when Jesus rises from the dead their faith is restored, but it’s not only restored. It becomes something more than it had been before the crucifixion. Their whole relationship with God is transformed as a result.
First, notice that their faith is not an irrational leap into the dark. We too often, in our culture, assume that it is. We say, “well, this is my belief, but maybe you believe something else.” When I was in college, a visiting professor shared about how he lost his faith in graduate school and then came to a stronger faith by examining the evidence for the resurrection. Several students were talking to him after the lecture and one said, “faith has nothing to do with reason.” Faith belongs to a different realm altogether and has nothing to do with history and rational proof. Faith has to do with things that we “feel” are true, not things that can be demonstrated by historical and logical arguments.
This is completely different than John’s understanding of faith. The disciples aren’t interested, after the crucifixion, in persuading themselves that Jesus is really alive in some mystical sense. They know that He’s dead. They’ve seen Him die. The only thing that will persuade them of His resurrection is seeing physical evidence that something miraculous has happened. It doesn’t matter what they “feel” is true, as long as Jesus’ body is still laying there in the tomb.
The Resurrection is well-established by people who were eyewitnesses. John, who wrote this gospel, was there. This was the last of the gospels to be written, but the apostles had been preaching the truth of the Resurrection now for over half a century. They’d been preaching the Resurrection as a historical fact. Especially in the beginning, when they were preaching in Jerusalem, it would have been very easy for their enemies to discredit them by producing the body of Jesus. But they didn’t do it, because the tomb was empty. And those who preached as witnesses to the Resurrection paid a great price for the things they were saying. Many of them died as martyrs. They were willing to suffer great loss for preaching the Resurrection, because they were eyewitnesses and they knew it was true. They knew beyond any doubt that Jesus had risen from the dead.
The faith of the apostles was not an irrational leap in the dark. But, at the same time, their faith didn’t give them complete understanding. It didn’t do away with all their questions. It didn’t immediately clear everything up for them. John describes the graveclothes when they arrived at the tomb: “He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.” After the Resurrection, Jesus is still in a body, but His body is different. He appears to the disciples when they are hiding behind closed doors for fear of the Jews. He is no longer hindered by physical barriers. When Lazarus was raised from the dead he had to be freed from the graveclothes that were wrapped all around him. But Jesus had no need for this. He simply passed through them and left them laying there in the tomb. John got to the tomb first, but he didn’t go in. Then, after Peter was inside, John says this: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” John “took one look at the evidence and believed” (The Message). But he still didn’t understand Jesus’ teaching that the Resurrection was prophesied in Scripture.
As I listened to that visiting professor arguing with students who saw faith as a totally irrational thing, I thought he went too far. He made the Christian life sound like an intellectual exercise, as if the whole business of following Christ is primarily about ideas. I’m not sure that he really thought this way; he was trying to introduce some sanity to people who were at the opposite extreme. When I commented on some things he was saying, he agreed that the picture he was painting was unbalanced. Faith is rational; the Bible presents us with good, strong evidence for God’s intervention in real history. But faith is not limited to what we can explain and understand. Faith is rational, but it is not limited by our rationality.
We can come to genuine faith while we still have questions about many things. We can have genuine faith while our understanding is still cloudy. The evidence is sufficient so that believing the gospel is not intellectual suicide; but we don’t need to have all our doubts and questions fully answered before we can believe. Here’s something Jesus said earlier in His public ministry: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own” (John 7:17). If we have a genuine desire to be obedient to God our creator, we will know the truth. Often our doubts and struggles are a smokescreen. It’s not that we doubt the truth. It’s that we don’t want to obey God, and our intellectual questions become an excuse for disobedience. As finite human beings, we never have complete understanding about anything. So, in the life of faith, it’s no surprise that there are going to be things that we don’t understand. Many of our questions will be answered over time, but there will be others that we won’t fully answer in this life. Having genuine faith doesn’t mean that we fully understand everything.
The last thing to notice is this: their faith was not an end in itself. Faith brings us into a living relationship with God. It’s common, in our culture, to put all the emphasis on faith, to say things like, “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” “The important thing is to have faith in something.” Is this true, that faith has value in itself? Many people, in the history of the world, have believed in and practiced human sacrifice. They sincerely believed that God would be pleased if they sacrificed their children to Him. They were sincere, but they were sincere about the wrong thing. Or, what if I say “I believe I can fly.” I could spend a lot of time and energy concentrating all my faith on that one idea, to believe without doubting that I can fly. I may be perfectly sincere in this belief. But what will happen if I go to the top of a tall building and try to fly? I’ll have a very short vertical flight down to the pavement below. The important thing is not that we believe in something. The important thing is that we believe the truth. The truth is that I wasn’t created with the ability to fly. It’s important, for my continued well-being, that I believe the truth about this. Faith has no value in itself. It only has value in connection with the truth.
Thomas goes through a struggle to arrive at faith. At first, when the other disciples tell him they’ve seen the risen Lord, he says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He’s not gullible; he doesn’t want to be taken in. But then, a week later, the Lord appears to him and he immediately cries out, “My Lord and my God!” When he does come to faith, it leads him into a new relationship with Jesus; for the first time, he recognizes the truth about who Jesus is. He sees the truth of what we are told in the prologue to this gospel, that Jesus is the Incarnate Son of God, the Word made flesh. Genuine faith is not an end in itself. It leads us into a life-transforming relationship with God.
That’s the point John makes at the end of the chapter: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” Believing the truth about Jesus leads us to life. Believing the truth about Jesus brings us into a relationship with God. Listen to what John says at the beginning of his first letter: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us–we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 3:1-3). He’ speaking as an eyewitness, but his purpose in telling the things he’s seen is so that his readers can enter into fellowship with God. Faith is not an end in itself. It brings us into a life-transforming relationship with the living God.
John writes as an eyewitness. He’s not writing edifying religious stories to help us cope with the meaninglessness of life in this world. He’s telling us what he has seen and heard and experienced. But he also records these words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” We’re not eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, but we have the testimony of those who were. And Jesus says we are blessed, or happy, if we believe their testimony.
Peter writes to some people like this in his first letter. He’s writing to people who were suffering persecution for their faith, and he says this about their relationship with Jesus: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8-9). They haven’t seen Jesus, but they have believed the gospel and have come to love Him. And believing in Him, they’ve come into a life-transforming relationship and they are experiencing “indescribable and glorious joy” in His presence, despite the fact that they are suffering persecution. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus is indeed risen from the dead. He has paid in full the price for our sins and has risen to give us new life. This is what we are celebrating during this Easter season. May God grant us grace to live more in the light of this truth.
Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College, PA
In 1978, I spent two weeks with a missionary who made a lasting impact on my life. He, more than anyone I’ve ever met, convinced me that it’s worth it to keep going, that it’s a great thing to arrive at the end of our earthly lives knowing that we’ve finished the work God has called us to do. When I met him he was 92 years old and had been diligently following the Lord throughout his long life. It was a great thing to see him at that point, to see the fruit of a “long obedience in the same direction.” The presence of God was a tangible reality with that man, and every time I was around him I found myself stirred with a desire to know God and to walk with Him until the end.
He and his wife had served as missionaries in India, and then retired at 65. They had gone to live in America (he was from England, but his wife was American), and as far as they knew at that point, their ministry was over. They’d completed their work, and now they could sit back and do whatever they wanted. This was their time. But God had other plans. After two years, they were certain that God was calling them to return to India. So they went back, not to their old field, but to a completely new area, where there were no churches and no missionaries. They lived in a tent for the first two years, until they were able to build a mud hut. And when I met him, 25 years after their return to India, he said that God had been at work through them in ways that they’d never experienced before their retirement. The Hindus in the area had given their mission a name that meant “the dwelling place of peace,” because when they went there they recognized something different about the place. So, this man and his wife had come to what they thought was the end of their ministry. They had closed the door and returned to the West, planning to live out the rest of their lives in retirement. They had laid their ministry to rest, thinking maybe that they were too old to be of any use on the mission field. But then God had done something new, something that went beyond anything they’d experienced in their previous work.
Something similar is happening to the disciples in chapter 20 of John’s gospel. They’ve seen Jesus crucified and laid in a borrowed tomb. All their expectations centered around His ministry are over. These are not naive, gullible people. They know people don’t rise from the dead. They’re living in a time before modern medicine, when even something like a simple infection could easily be fatal, because of the lack of antibiotics. They’ve experienced death. They’ve experienced its permanence. They know that when a person dies, that’s the end of it. The 3 ½ years they spent with Him in ministry have come to nothing. It’s now time to put all that to rest and to find something to do with the rest of their lives. But then they find that this is different than all the other deaths they’ve experienced. They learn that He is risen from the dead. He even appears to them in the flesh. And, as a result, they come to know God in ways they couldn’t have during Jesus’ public ministry. Here are the steps: their faith is destroyed by the crucifixion; then, when Jesus rises from the dead their faith is restored, but it’s not only restored. It becomes something more than it had been before the crucifixion. Their whole relationship with God is transformed as a result.
First, notice that their faith is not an irrational leap into the dark. We too often, in our culture, assume that it is. We say, “well, this is my belief, but maybe you believe something else.” When I was in college, a visiting professor shared about how he lost his faith in graduate school and then came to a stronger faith by examining the evidence for the resurrection. Several students were talking to him after the lecture and one said, “faith has nothing to do with reason.” Faith belongs to a different realm altogether and has nothing to do with history and rational proof. Faith has to do with things that we “feel” are true, not things that can be demonstrated by historical and logical arguments.
This is completely different than John’s understanding of faith. The disciples aren’t interested, after the crucifixion, in persuading themselves that Jesus is really alive in some mystical sense. They know that He’s dead. They’ve seen Him die. The only thing that will persuade them of His resurrection is seeing physical evidence that something miraculous has happened. It doesn’t matter what they “feel” is true, as long as Jesus’ body is still laying there in the tomb.
The Resurrection is well-established by people who were eyewitnesses. John, who wrote this gospel, was there. This was the last of the gospels to be written, but the apostles had been preaching the truth of the Resurrection now for over half a century. They’d been preaching the Resurrection as a historical fact. Especially in the beginning, when they were preaching in Jerusalem, it would have been very easy for their enemies to discredit them by producing the body of Jesus. But they didn’t do it, because the tomb was empty. And those who preached as witnesses to the Resurrection paid a great price for the things they were saying. Many of them died as martyrs. They were willing to suffer great loss for preaching the Resurrection, because they were eyewitnesses and they knew it was true. They knew beyond any doubt that Jesus had risen from the dead.
The faith of the apostles was not an irrational leap in the dark. But, at the same time, their faith didn’t give them complete understanding. It didn’t do away with all their questions. It didn’t immediately clear everything up for them. John describes the graveclothes when they arrived at the tomb: “He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.” After the Resurrection, Jesus is still in a body, but His body is different. He appears to the disciples when they are hiding behind closed doors for fear of the Jews. He is no longer hindered by physical barriers. When Lazarus was raised from the dead he had to be freed from the graveclothes that were wrapped all around him. But Jesus had no need for this. He simply passed through them and left them laying there in the tomb. John got to the tomb first, but he didn’t go in. Then, after Peter was inside, John says this: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” John “took one look at the evidence and believed” (The Message). But he still didn’t understand Jesus’ teaching that the Resurrection was prophesied in Scripture.
As I listened to that visiting professor arguing with students who saw faith as a totally irrational thing, I thought he went too far. He made the Christian life sound like an intellectual exercise, as if the whole business of following Christ is primarily about ideas. I’m not sure that he really thought this way; he was trying to introduce some sanity to people who were at the opposite extreme. When I commented on some things he was saying, he agreed that the picture he was painting was unbalanced. Faith is rational; the Bible presents us with good, strong evidence for God’s intervention in real history. But faith is not limited to what we can explain and understand. Faith is rational, but it is not limited by our rationality.
We can come to genuine faith while we still have questions about many things. We can have genuine faith while our understanding is still cloudy. The evidence is sufficient so that believing the gospel is not intellectual suicide; but we don’t need to have all our doubts and questions fully answered before we can believe. Here’s something Jesus said earlier in His public ministry: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own” (John 7:17). If we have a genuine desire to be obedient to God our creator, we will know the truth. Often our doubts and struggles are a smokescreen. It’s not that we doubt the truth. It’s that we don’t want to obey God, and our intellectual questions become an excuse for disobedience. As finite human beings, we never have complete understanding about anything. So, in the life of faith, it’s no surprise that there are going to be things that we don’t understand. Many of our questions will be answered over time, but there will be others that we won’t fully answer in this life. Having genuine faith doesn’t mean that we fully understand everything.
The last thing to notice is this: their faith was not an end in itself. Faith brings us into a living relationship with God. It’s common, in our culture, to put all the emphasis on faith, to say things like, “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” “The important thing is to have faith in something.” Is this true, that faith has value in itself? Many people, in the history of the world, have believed in and practiced human sacrifice. They sincerely believed that God would be pleased if they sacrificed their children to Him. They were sincere, but they were sincere about the wrong thing. Or, what if I say “I believe I can fly.” I could spend a lot of time and energy concentrating all my faith on that one idea, to believe without doubting that I can fly. I may be perfectly sincere in this belief. But what will happen if I go to the top of a tall building and try to fly? I’ll have a very short vertical flight down to the pavement below. The important thing is not that we believe in something. The important thing is that we believe the truth. The truth is that I wasn’t created with the ability to fly. It’s important, for my continued well-being, that I believe the truth about this. Faith has no value in itself. It only has value in connection with the truth.
Thomas goes through a struggle to arrive at faith. At first, when the other disciples tell him they’ve seen the risen Lord, he says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He’s not gullible; he doesn’t want to be taken in. But then, a week later, the Lord appears to him and he immediately cries out, “My Lord and my God!” When he does come to faith, it leads him into a new relationship with Jesus; for the first time, he recognizes the truth about who Jesus is. He sees the truth of what we are told in the prologue to this gospel, that Jesus is the Incarnate Son of God, the Word made flesh. Genuine faith is not an end in itself. It leads us into a life-transforming relationship with God.
That’s the point John makes at the end of the chapter: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” Believing the truth about Jesus leads us to life. Believing the truth about Jesus brings us into a relationship with God. Listen to what John says at the beginning of his first letter: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us–we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 3:1-3). He’ speaking as an eyewitness, but his purpose in telling the things he’s seen is so that his readers can enter into fellowship with God. Faith is not an end in itself. It brings us into a life-transforming relationship with the living God.
John writes as an eyewitness. He’s not writing edifying religious stories to help us cope with the meaninglessness of life in this world. He’s telling us what he has seen and heard and experienced. But he also records these words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” We’re not eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, but we have the testimony of those who were. And Jesus says we are blessed, or happy, if we believe their testimony.
Peter writes to some people like this in his first letter. He’s writing to people who were suffering persecution for their faith, and he says this about their relationship with Jesus: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8-9). They haven’t seen Jesus, but they have believed the gospel and have come to love Him. And believing in Him, they’ve come into a life-transforming relationship and they are experiencing “indescribable and glorious joy” in His presence, despite the fact that they are suffering persecution. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus is indeed risen from the dead. He has paid in full the price for our sins and has risen to give us new life. This is what we are celebrating during this Easter season. May God grant us grace to live more in the light of this truth.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Following Jesus in Emptying Ourselves, Philippians 2:1-11
Palm Sunday, 2015
Shiloh Lutheran Church
Following Jesus leads us to live in ways that don’t make sense to the world. As we seek to live in obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, we find ourselves valuing things that the world thinks are worthless, ordering our lives according to priorities that are exactly opposite those of the world. Donald Kraybill wrote a book on the Kingdom of God entitled The Upside Down Kingdom. Here’s something he says in the book: “The Gospels portray the kingdom of God as inverted or upside down in comparison with both ancient Palestine and modern ways.... Kingdom players follow new rules. They listen to another coach. Kingdom values challenge patterns of social life taken for granted in modern culture. Kingdom habits don’t mesh smoothly with dominant cultural trends. They may, in fact, look foolish” (p. 19).
This passage in Philippians calls us to act in ways that run counter to everything we do by nature. Paul tells us here that following Jesus involves laying aside our desire to be first, our tendency to grasp for what we want; it involves considering the needs of others, especially others in the body of Christ. By nature, as fallen people, we are self-centered. Advertisers encourage us to focus on ourselves. We deserve a break. We deserve the best. If we don’t grasp for what we want, someone else will get it. We only go through life once, so we need to reach for everything we can.
This is the culture in which we find ourselves, a culture that tells us over and over again that it’s both good and right for us to be absorbed with ourselves, that to do anything else is sheer foolishness. But in the midst of this self-absorbed environment, Jesus calls us to lay aside our desire to be first. He calls us to care for others, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of the Body. He calls us to “fly upside down,” to live by the values of the “Upside Down Kingdom.”
The Philippians were in some difficulty. Near the end of chapter one, Paul makes it clear that they were suffering persecution: “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him” (v. 29). But they were also beginning to have conflict within the church. Paul is at pains throughout this letter to address all the saints, and he wants to be sure that they are standing “firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel” (1:27). In chapter two he has this strong exhortation about unity, and in chapter four he pleads with Euodia and Sytyche “to agree with each other in the Lord” (4:2). The situation wasn’t yet out of control: Paul was able to pray joyfully for them (1:4), and the tone of this whole letter is very warm. But they were in danger. They were under pressure from the surrounding society, and they were beginning to grate on each other.
I’ve sometimes heard Christians speak romantically about the effects of persecution on the Church. I’ve heard people describing some of the spiritual problems plaguing Christianity in America say “what the church in America really needs is a time of persecution.” It’s true that, by the miracle of God’s grace, Christians have often borne powerful testimony during times of persecution. Tertullian, the North African church father, was right when he said the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. But that’s not the whole story. Persecution puts tremendous pressure on God’s people, and one of the by-products of this pressure has often been disunity. One of the major controversies in the early centuries of the Church was over how to deal with those who turned away during a time of persecution and later wanted to return to the Church. Those who’d suffered and lost loved ones wanted them banned. After all, they’d denied Christ to save their own lives at a time when others were willingly facing death in His name. But, at the same time, many recognized the need to show grace and forgiveness. So it’s true that God’s people have been enabled to bear a powerful witness during times of persecution. But it hasn’t been easy, and the difficulty of bearing up under the pressure of opposition has often led to tension and disunity in the church. This seems to have been the case at Philippi.
The chapter division here interrupts Paul’s thought. There’s a strong connection with what Paul has been saying in chapter one. Most translations begin 2:1 with the word “therefore” (or some variation). For example, the NASB has: “If therefore there is any encouragement in Christ....” The Greek text has the particle oun, which is normally translated “therefore.” For some reason the NIV leaves this particle untranslated, but the flow of Paul’s thought seems clearer in the other translations (some of the commentators criticize the NIV at this point). Paul is drawing a conclusion from this earlier discussion, so the thought goes like this: “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him.... Therefore... make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.”
The first thing Paul does here, in verses 1-2, is to exhort them to make unity a priority on the basis of their common experience in Jesus Christ. Here’s how Peterson translates this in The Message: “If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care....” It’s interesting that he doesn’t begin with the assumption that they all think the same way. Churches all too often find their identity by stressing the things that set them apart from other churches. In 1976, I visited a church in Norfolk, Virginia, that had these words on the sign out front: Independent, Fundamental, Premillennial, Pretribulational. “Independent” stressed that they were not a part of a denomination, but independent churches of this type have certain things in common, in the same way that denominational churches do. “Fundamental” identified them with the conservative response to the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920's, and the other two labels advertised their beliefs about eschatology. Once we got inside, we found that they also identified themselves by a commitment to the King James Bible as the only acceptable English translation, along with a long list of other defining features. This is what bound them together as a body, and anyone in the church who had serious doubts in any of these areas would very quickly become an outsider. The thing that bound them together, the basis for their unity, was agreement with a very large set of standards.
What is the thing that binds us together as God’s people? It’s true that there are certain things we believe, but the primary thing, the thing that’s the basis for our unity, is that we are one in Jesus Christ. The Philippians have been united with Christ, they’ve known the comfort of His love, they’ve experienced the reality of fellowship in the Spirit. They’ve experienced these things as part of their “common life in Christ” (NEB). They may have little in common as individuals; we know the early church was made up of slaves, slave owners, Roman citizens and Roman subjects, Jews and Gentiles. These weren’t people who normally spent time together. These people, for the most part, saw each other as adversaries. But in Jesus Christ they became part of one body, and on the basis of this common bond, Paul urges them: “make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.”
This raises a question: if we are bound together in this way in Jesus Christ, what causes divisions? And how do we cultivate the sort of unity Paul describes here? We may recognize our common bond in Christ, but what are we to do about it? Paul answers both of these questions in vv. 3-4. The major causes of divisiveness in the church are 1) selfish ambition; 2) Obsession with our personal prestige; and 3) Concentration on ourselves (William Barclay, pp. 31-32). And the way to cultivate unity in the church is to follow Paul’s instructions here in these verses. These three things -- selfish ambition, obsession with personal prestige, and concentration on ourselves -- often go together and they inevitably lead to dissension. John’s third epistle has an example of someone like this. John had written earlier, instructing the church to welcome itinerant preachers and show hospitality to them. He says: “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, gossiping maliciously about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church” (vv. 9-10). He’s full of selfish ambition, vain conceit, and obsession with only his own interests. He “loves to be first.” I think we’ll one day be shocked to learn how many church splits have been caused by people like Diotrephes, who justify their actions with theological and biblical language, but who are really just grasping after first place.
Chronically divisive people like Diotrephes really belong under the subject of church discipline. Paul instructed Titus to “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him. You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11). But we all struggle with the kind of selfishness in verses 3 & 4. What can we do? The first step is negative: we refuse to continue cultivating a self-centered spirit. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.” Every time we feel compelled to act out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, we stop ourselves. And we refuse to continue being preoccupied with only what we want. When we find ourselves dwelling on our own desires, growing anxious and resentful because of things that are standing in the way, we stop, and refuse to continue cultivating this attitude.
But we won’t get very far if we stop here. In fact, we really don’t want to dwell too much on the negative side of the process, as that will only make things worse. We need to be alert enough to notice our own selfishness, but then we need to repent of it, lay it aside and cultivate the opposite, positive qualities. Getting rid of selfish ambition and vain conceit is not our primary goal; our purpose is to cultivate a humility that values others and seeks the best for them. Our purpose is not to forget about our own interests, but to lay aside our own desires long enough to care for the needs of others. So we don’t stay with the negative. We face and deal with our self-centeredness, but then we go on to cultivate humility and concern for others.
But Paul is not interested in setting up an abstract ethical ideal. Those who reduce Christianity to an ethical system really miss the whole point of the New Testament. We cultivate these qualities Paul describes in the context of a relationship with Jesus Christ. He is the perfect example of self-denial and self-sacrifice. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” We want to be first, we want our own way. But Jesus “did not demand and cling to his rights as God” (NLT). Adam and Eve grasped after equality with God. And we follow them when we grasp after the best for ourselves. Jesus “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” (The Message). He laid aside His own rights as God; and having done that, He continued to humble Himself, submitting to death as a common criminal. He didn’t take care of His own interests, but He laid aside His interests for our sake. This passage in Philippians is a more extended version of what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”
And because of this, God has exalted Him. Jesus refused to cling to His equality with God, and because of this God has given Him a name that is above every name. He humbled Himself, and God exalted Him. We’re afraid that if we don’t fight for our own interests we’ll lose in the end. We’re afraid others will get ahead of us. But when we think like this we’re leaving God out of the picture. We’re part of an upside down kingdom. Things don’t work here in the same way that they do in the world. The surest way to lose the things that matter most is to selfishly grasp them for our own benefit. The world’s way, seeking the best for ourselves, watching out for number one, leads to death. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:25-26).
The eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, who had every right to claim first place, laid aside His privileges for our sake. Following Him, being His disciples, means laying aside our desire to be first. We don’t have the right to claim first place anyway. He laid aside what was rightfully His; we grasp after what is not ours, that which we could only have by displacing God Himself. George Whitefield was the leader of the Evangelical Revival of the 18th Century. He introduced John and Charles Wesley to the idea of open air preaching, and had established religious societies all over England. When he traveled to the American colonies for a preaching tour, he left John Wesley in charge of his societies. Wesley was a capable leader, and the two men were close friends. They had theological differences though. Wesley was an Arminian, which means that he put more emphasis on the necessity of a human response to God; and Whitefield was a Calvinist, putting a stronger emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God, that He is in control of all that happens. (There’s a lot more to it than this, but this is enough for our purposes today). By the time Whitefield returned to England, four years later, the Methodist movement had developed into two parts: Calvinistic Methodism, following Whitefield; and Arminian Methodism, following the Wesleys.
During Whitefield’s absence from England, there had been a growing rivalry between the two branches of Methodism, and Whitefield’s followers expected him to give leadership to their faction. They expected him to take a stand for the truth, to defend the correct position. But he didn’t want any part in the schism. He “was determined to have no part in the prevailing competitive spirit, but rather to do everything in his power to quench it” (George Whitefield, vol. 2, p. 249). He gave up his position as leader of a movement and determined that he would serve both branches of Methodism, becoming, in his own words, “simply the servant of all” (p. 251). Here’s what he wrote shortly afterwards: “I have disengaged myself from the immediate care of the Societies, and am now still more at liberty to preach the Gospel of the blessed God. I have no party to be at the head of, and through God’s grace I will have none: but as much as in me lies, will strengthen the hands of all of every denomination that preach Jesus Christ in sincerity” (p. 246).
George Whitefield is comparatively unknown today, because he was willing, for the good of the Church, to say “may the name of George Whitefield perish.” He followed the One who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant....”
How do we become like that? Cultivating thoughts of our own worthlessness clearly leads us in the wrong direction. It just makes us more self-absorbed. The way to grow in humility is to know more of who God is. Early in his ministry, Paul said “I am the least of the apostles” (1 Cor. 15:9). Later on he calls himself “the least of all God’s people” (Ephesians 3:8). And, near the end of his life he says this: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners -- of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15). The more he knew of God, the more he became aware of his own sinfulness and unworthiness. The way to grow in humility is to seek God and spend time in His presence. The way to become less self-absorbed is to become more absorbed with God. “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
People like Paul and George Whitefield became the way they were because they were imitators of Jesus Christ, who laid aside His right to be first and emptied Himself for our sake. That’s what we’re celebrating on Palm Sunday as we enter into Holy Week. Take time this week to meditate on Jesus’ self-emptying and the suffering He endured to reconcile us to God, in anticipation of celebrating the resurrection next Sunday.
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