Probably the most joyful person I’ve ever met was a missionary in northeastern Madhya Pradesh, in India. He was 92 years old when I knew him, and he’d been working in India for 65 years. He and his wife had retired in their mid-60's and returned to the West, but after a year or so the Lord had called them to return to India and begin working in an area that was untouched with the gospel. So they went back and lived in a tent for the first two years then continued to live in a mud hut. His wife had died the year before I met him, and his intention was to stay in India until he died.
We worked with him for two weeks, and I was able to have breakfast with him each morning. The thing that struck me was that he seemed to be constantly aware of God’s presence. No matter what else was going on around him, he was filled with a deep, abiding sense of joy. He wept when he told us about his wife’s death, and he expressed grief at the condition of the church in the West. But underneath everything there was still a strong sense of assurance; when the cloud passed what he returned to was this deep rejoicing in the Lord. He wasn’t afraid to express sorrow, but His joy in God wasn’t shaken by the sorrow he experienced. In his book, Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan describes a place near the end of the journey called Beulah: “In this country the sun shineth night and day: wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach of Giant Despair: neither could they from this placed so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the City they were going to: also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof; for in this land the shining ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of heaven” (p. 146). I believe that’s where this man was living when I knew him. He was upon the borders of heaven, living within sight of the Eternal City.
But he didn’t spend his whole life there. He’d been walking with God for a very long lifetime, laying aside his own desires and plans and submitting to God’s lordship. There was nothing contrived about his joyfulness; there was nothing superficial about him. The danger for us, in looking at someone like him, is to think that we can become like that immediately, without struggle or difficulty. We think, “I believe the same gospel he did; I should be like that.” So we determine that we’re going to rejoice all the time, and whenever something happens that threatens to overwhelm our superficial happiness, we push it under the surface. I’ve known Christians like this; they really wanted to rejoice in all things, but they seemed, in reality, to be depressed. The joy wasn’t real, and the sadness was.
I’m afraid some of our worship songs even encourage this sort of thing. In the early 18th century, Isaac Watts wrote a great hymn: “Alas! And did my Savior bleed?” Here are verses 3 & 4: “Well might the sun in darkness hide, and shut his glories in, when Christ, the mighty Maker died for man the creature’s sin. But drops of grief can ne’er repay the debt of love I owe; [he experiences grief when he looks at what our sin cost Jesus] here, Lord, I give myself away, ‘Tis all that I can do.” In the late 19th century, a man named Ralph Hudson added a refrain. Refrains were popular at that time, and maybe he thought the hymn wasn’t joyful enough. So he added this: “At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, and the burden of my heart rolled away, It was there by faith I received my sight, and now I am happy all the day!” Is that true? Is it true that since you became a Christian you are now “happy all the day?”
Trying to rejoice in God without confronting reality leads to phoniness and superficiality. We can’t short-circuit the process. We don’t learn to find joy in the Lord by denying the reality of sorrow and grief. Habakkuk, in this chapter, comes to a strong affirmation of joy and strength in God, but he doesn’t begin there. He begins crying out for judgment, grieving over the wickedness of God’s people, then he wrestles with the problem of God’s justice. Then, having begun by speaking the truth in God’s presence, he’s finally able to come to a place where he finds joy and strength in God. This prayer in chapter 3 of Habakkuk is one of the greatest expressions of joy in the midst of difficult circumstances, but we need to remember that this doesn’t stand at the beginning of the book. This isn’t where we begin; this great hymn in chapter 3 only makes sense in the context of what has gone before. And, even as he’s expressing confidence in God in this chapter, he’s filled with dread at what is coming: “I hear, and I tremble within; my lips quiver at the sound. Rottenness enters into my bones, and my steps tremble beneath me” (v. 16a). He’s not just “happy all the day,” he’s finding joy and strength in the midst of real struggle and difficulty. The question for us is, “How does he get there?” How is he able to rejoice at this time?
The first thing to notice is that Habakkuk celebrates in prayer the great things God has done in the past. “I have heard all about you, Lord, and I am filled with awe by the amazing things you have done. In this time of our deep need, begin again to help us, as you did in years gone by. Show us your power to save us” (NLT). He remembers that God has done great things for His people in the past, then he celebrates some of those things in prayer. Verses 3-15 are a poetic rehearsal of some of the ways God has rescued His people, ending with this: “You marched across the land in awesome anger and trampled the nations in your fury. You went out to rescue your chosen people, to save your anointed ones. You crushed the heads of the wicked and laid bare their bones from head to toe. With their own weapons, you destroyed those who rushed out like a whirlwind, thinking Israel would be easy prey. You trampled the sea with your horses, and the mighty waters piled high” (NLT).
This is a common theme in the Psalms. In Psalm 18, for example, the psalmist celebrates God coming to his rescue, pulling him out of deep waters. Psalm 107 describes at some length how God’s people have gotten into trouble, often through their own sins, and yet when they’ve cried out to God for help, He’s been faithful in coming to their rescue. When we’re in trouble, we need to remember that our situation is not unique. God has dealt with people in trouble before. This situation is not beyond Him; it may be beyond us, but we’re not on our own. We saw in our last sermon that a false god will corrupt every area of our lives and will destroy us in the end. Idols are powerless. But the living God is able to rescue us; we have plenty of evidence for this both in Scripture and in the history of the Church. And the longer we go on with the Lord, the more evidence we have from our own experience.
So we stop ourselves and begin remembering the great things God has done in the past. We remember the Exodus, how God miraculously delivered His people from their slavery in Egypt. Then we remember how He brought them back to Israel after the Babylonian captivity. Then, several centuries later, when the Incarnate Word was put to death on a cross, God raised Him from the grave. We remind ourselves that God has exercised extraordinary power on behalf of His people. One reason we need to be reading Scripture regularly is to remind ourselves of these things. We’re forgetful, and we lose our sense of perspective. So we need to stir ourselves up by reading these things over and over throughout the course of our lives. Then we bring these things into God’s presence in prayer, and we cry out, “O God, you have done great things for your people in the past; we desperately need your help now. Come to our rescue!” And we look back over our own lives and see how God has been with us, and we bring those things into His presence in prayer, not because He’s forgotten, but because remembering in this way stirs our faith. That’s what Habakkuk is doing here; he’s remembering, in prayer, the great things God has done for His people in the past.
The second thing to notice is that there’s a change in the direction of Habakkuk‘s prayer. Although he began, in chapter one, crying out for judgment, he now begins crying out for mercy: “in wrath may you remember mercy.” He’s praying here for the very people he was praying against in chapter one. Habakkuk knows that God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others. This God has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem is, what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? This outrage is, at least at the beginning, part of being creatures made in God’s image. Living in a society where people get away with bullying and oppressing others fills us with outrage; that’s what was happening to Habakkuk at the beginning of this book. But how do we put this together with the command to love our enemies, or with Jesus’ prayer “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing”? What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us?
I think we make a mistake when we jump too quickly to forgiveness and grace. We deny the reality of what we feel and try to push it under the surface. We pray for forgiveness for others, but inside we’re full of bitterness and resentment. It’s not that we’re faking it. We’re genuinely trying to pray in the way we think God wants us to, but we can’t get beyond our emotional response to the evil around us.
Praying like Habakkuk does in chapter one is a good first step. This kind of prayer helps us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” This kind of prayer gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them. Walter Brueggemann talks about using the Psalms in this way: “The Psalms serve to legitimate and affirm these most intense elements of rage. In such speech, we discover that our words (and feelings) do not destroy the enemy, that is, they are not as dangerous as we thought. Nor do our words bring judgement from heaven on us.... Our feelings brought to speech are not as dangerous or as important as we imagined, as we wished, or as we feared. When they are unspoken, they loom too large, and we are condemned by them. When spoken, our intense thoughts and feelings are brought into a context in which they can be discerned differently” (Praying the Psalms, p. 59).
We often move too quickly to the point of forgiveness and grace without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to do. We need to admit the truth and then bring it before God in prayer. Praying like Habakkuk does, or like the psalmists do, helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can then be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to pray for our enemies, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our anger and desire for vengeance. It’s important that Habakkuk’s prayer for mercy, “in wrath remember mercy,” happens in chapter 3, not in chapter 1. He prays for God to show mercy, but that’s not where he begins.
The third thing is this: seeking God, turning to Him during a time of distress, brings Habakkuk to a place where he’s able to rejoice in the Lord. At the end of the prayer, even though he knows his whole world is going to fall apart, he finds joy and strength in the Lord. Listen to verses 17-19 in The Message: “Though the cherry trees don’t blossom and the strawberries don’t ripen, Though the apples are worm-eaten and the wheat fields stunted, Though the sheep pens are sheepless and the cattle barns empty, I’m singing joyful praise to God. I’m turning cartwheels of joy to my Savior God. Counting on God’s Rule to prevail, I take heart and gain strength. I run like a deer. I feel like I’m king of the mountain!” The Babylonians are going to come and take them into captivity. Life as he’s known it is going to be turned upside down. The fabric of the society is going to be torn apart. And yet, he’s able, looking at what’s coming, to find joy and strength in God.
Does that mean that he never again experiences what he says in verse 16? “I trembled inside when I heard all this; my lips quivered with fear. My legs gave way beneath me, and I shook in terror.” In verses 17-19 has he crossed over a line, so that now everything is joy and gladness and now he is “happy all the day”? No. He continues to experience sorrow and grief, but underneath it all is the certainty that God will accomplish His purposes. Even in the midst of great sorrow, he knows that it is going to end. No doubt there are times when he sees this more clearly than at other times. But his perspective has been enlarged by seeking God and coming to Him with his struggles and questions.
Two things that he’s said earlier in the book have prepared the way for what he says in these closing verses. 1) “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). Habakkuk knows that day is coming, whatever happens in the meantime. He’s assured of a future that fills him with hope. Having remembered in prayer the great things God has done in the past, we need to go on to remember His promises for the future. Our present situation is temporary, and soon we’ll be in God’s presence, worshiping Him face to face in His eternal kingdom where there is no more sorrow or pain or separation from those we love. 2) “But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him” (2:20). This God, who has come to the rescue of His people over and over again throughout history, and who has promised to fill the earth with the knowledge of His glory, is exalted in heaven and calls us to worship Him. He is still the same, yesterday, today and forever, and this God has promised to be with us always, to lead us to His eternal kingdom. We are weak, and we lose our perspective, but He is with us and will lead us till the end.
That’s why Paul is able to say, in Romans 5: “we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who he has given us.... Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ....” We don’t rejoice in the midst of sufferings because we’re masochists. We are able to rejoice because we have a certain hope for the future: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” We don’t always feel the power of that hope, but it’s true whether we feel its power or not. And, as we remember this over and over again throughout the course of our lives, it transforms our perspective. That’s why A.R. Fromman, the man I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, was so filled with joy. He’d been living in the light of these things all his life. He’d experienced sorrow and difficulty, but in the midst of it he’d experienced God’s grace carrying him through. He’d read about, then experienced, God’s deliverance in the past. He’d faced the truth about himself and about the world he was living in. And then, having faced the truth, he found that God is sufficient. It was a great thing to hear him affirming that so close to the end of his life.
We don’t need to pretend. We don’t need to fake it. God is enough. But we begin by facing the truth, crying out to Him and pouring out our deepest struggles. Then we remind ourselves, over and over again, about who He is and what He’s done for His people, and also for us, in the past. And as we do that, He gives us foretastes of heaven, glimpses into the kind of joy we will know when the earth is filled with the knowledge of His glory. That’s what happened to Habakkuk at the end of chapter 3. That’s why he was filled with joy in the midst of the certainty of destruction. And the more we live in the light of this hope, the more it will transform our perception. Even if we continue struggling and doubting all our lives, this is still true: “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” But since it is true, may God enable us to say, along with Habakkuk, “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls; yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength.”
Saturday, February 2, 2013
The Foolishness of Resisting God's Rule, Habakkuk 2:6-20
One of my favorite stories when I was little was the book, “The Little Engine that Could.” I remember hearing that story over and over again as a child, and I’ve also read it to my own children. It’s about a small engine that accomplishes a seemingly impossible task, pulling a load of toys to the top of the mountain, by repeating over and over, “I think I can, I think I can.” It’s a good story. We often give up too soon, and by perseverance and determination we can accomplish surprising things.
But, like any story, the moral can be taken too far. It’s one thing to say that we can often accomplish more than we think if we persevere with faith and determination; it’s another thing altogether to say that we can accomplish anything we set our minds on. A lot of the hype I hear about sports today seems to be based on the assumption that if you believe in yourself you can do anything. Losing is the result of not believing strongly enough. Several years ago, when I was working in human services, I was sent to a motivational seminar. The speaker was very upbeat and cheerful (as well as being one of the most hopelessly shallow human beings I’ve ever encountered), and his basic assumption was that we can do whatever we set our minds to, as long as we believe in ourselves.
G.K. Chesterton has an interesting discussion about this idea. Here’s what he says: “Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written ‘Hanwell.’ [Hanwell was a London institution for the mentally ill.] I said to him, ‘Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.’ He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. ‘Yes, there are,’ I retorted, ‘and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter [a morally reprehensible person]. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief...: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus’” (Orthodoxy, pp. 9-10). These verses in chapter 2 of Habakkuk are written about people who believe thoroughly in themselves.
In our last sermon we saw that Habakkuk is wrestling with the problem of God’s justice. How can God make use of these wicked people, the Babylonians, to execute His justice? How does this fit with what we know to be true of Him? God gives Habakkuk an answer in the early part of the chapter, and part of the answer is this: although He is not carrying out His judgment immediately, He will do so in the future. A day of perfect justice is coming, in God’s own time and according to His perfect wisdom. Because of this, resisting His will, refusing to submit to His lordship, is foolish and self-destructive. Those who persist in this direction are on a collision course with reality. No matter how strenuously they believe in themselves, they’re going in a direction which is certain to fail miserably.
The first thing to notice is that these people are making false claims about themselves. These are people who delight in using power over others, but the power they’re using is not their own and one day it will be taken from them. The strength they are misusing has been given to them by God, but soon He’s going to take it away, and then everything they’ve done will crumble. Listen to verse 13: “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing?” They have a certain amount of freedom to misuse the gifts they’ve been given, but they don’t have control over the final outcome.
Everything we have in this life has been entrusted to us by God, and He’s going to call us to account one day for how we’ve used it. He’s entrusted us with the ability to influence others, and He entrusts some of us with a limited amount of power, but these are dangerous gifts. First of all, for a definition of power. It’s helpful to distinguish between power and authority. Power is primarily related to ability, and authority is primarily related to right. Authority is the right to command. If I say that someone has authority, I am saying that he has the right to give me a command, and to expect me to obey. If someone, in the rightful exercise of authority, gives me an order, I am obligated morally to obey.
Power, by contrast, is the ability to coerce. It’s the ability to make people do what I want. It’s the ability to compel people, contrary to their will, to obey my wishes. Both power and authority come from God, and He alone possesses both absolutely. To us humans, He gives limited authority and a degree of power. Human authority is always limited, and our use of power must always be limited by our God‑given authority.
The problem is that we have the ability to do things that we have no right to do. Strong people have the ability to bully those who are weaker. That’s what the Chaldeans were doing to all the other nations in the region. The rich and powerful have the ability to oppress the poor. This is a misuse of power; it’s an ability that one has no right to use. But power is not evil in itself. A mother has the authority to tell a small child not to run into the street, and if the child tries to do so anyway, she has the right to forcibly stop him. This is a legitimate exercise of power. If she then throws the child to the ground and starts kicking him, she has exceeded the bounds of her authority and is now misusing her superior strength. The police have the right to forcibly stop a person who is committing a crime, but if they take him back to the station and torture him, they have exceeded their authority. They may have the ability to do so, but they do not have the right.
So this is an important principle to hold onto: power must always be limited by authority, and power that is divorced from legitimate authority is always wrong. It’s also important to remind ourselves often that power, even when it’s legitimate, is a dangerous thing. We very easily become corrupted by it. George Whitefield, the great evangelist, says this about the temptation to power: “I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above. For my own part, I find it much easier to obey than to govern, and that it is much safer to be trodden under foot than to have it in one’s power to serve others so” (quoted by Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield, vol. 2, p. 339). The temptation to exercise absolute power is the temptation Satan used on Eve: the temptation to be like God. We need to be always aware of the tremendous power of this temptation. The Babylonians, at the point in history that Habakkuk is describing, have become intoxicated with the lust for power. It’s corrupted them and dehumanized them. They’ve forgotten who they are as human beings, and they’ve begun to do things that they have no right to do. In abusing their power, they’re making false claims about themselves. They’ve forgotten that they are creatures who will one day be called to account for this power with which they’ve been entrusted.
The second thing is that they’re making false assumptions about the future. They’re assuming that things will always be as they are now, and that they can do things that will enable them to stay in control. They’re grasping for security by oppressing others: “Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!” Here it is in the New Living Translation: “You believe your wealth will buy security, putting your families beyond the reach of danger.”
The problem with that way of thinking is that the world is headed in a direction that they are unaware of. They think the current arrangement is just the way the world is; that this arrangement, in which it’s possible for one nation to lord it over others and to become rich by oppressing and stealing from those who are weaker, will continue forever. But this situation is temporary; things are ultimately headed in a different direction: “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
One of the most dangerous mistakes we can make, in looking at the condition of the world, is to assume that things will always be this way. The world is in an abnormal state. Things are not the way God created them to be. Sin has brought corruption into the world; oppression and tyranny are part of the world because people want to be like God. But this situation will not continue forever. The One the Babylonians are resisting is the One whose presence is going to fill the earth with overflowing abundance in the future. They’re resisting the lordship of the One who “accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will” (Ephesians 1:11). This One whose lordship they’re resisting is going to fill the earth with His glory; what will happen to them then?
The third thing to notice is that they’re making false assumptions about God. They’re trusting in gods that don’t exist at all: “Of what value is an idol, since a man has carved it? Or an image that teaches lies? For he who makes it trusts in his own creation; he makes idols that cannot speak. Woe to him who says to wood, ‘Come to life!’ Or to lifeless stone, ‘Wake up!’ Can it give guidance? It is covered with gold and silver; there is no breath in it.” They’re putting their trust in an illusion, in gods that simply don’t exist; and soon the illusion is going to be taken away. The reality is stated in verse 20: “But the Lord is in his holy temple.” All the time that they are worshiping and serving false gods, the living God is exalted in His holy temple. He’s the One who gave them the power they’ve been abusing, but they’re giving the credit to these gods that don’t exist at all. These false gods are going to let them down, and they are going to be called to give account to God their creator, the One whose lordship they’ve rejected.
This passage divides up into five sections, each pronouncing condemnation on some aspect of the Babylonian nation. The last section, vv. 18-20, condemns their idolatry. Why have they become such evil, oppressive people? Partly because they’ve been worshiping gods made in their own image. The living God, who created us, confronts us with our sinfulness and calls us to repentance; but idols made in our own image affirm the worst things about us. They permit us to go on in our self-destructive ways; they tell us that everything is going to be fine. Here’s a good description of idolatry: “Pagans take that which is simply found within their nature; and taking what is as the measure of what is good, they represent it to themselves and make of it a god: man as the measure of all things” (Jeffrey Burke Satinover, “Jungians and Gnostics,” in First Things, October 1994, p. 44). They make gods in their own image, like the Babylonians. And here’s how it works out in practice: “In thus spiritualizing the instincts, pagan worship therefore tends naturally to the violent, the hedonistic, and the orgiastic. Pagan religious ritual arouses the instincts, especially sexuality and aggression, to the keenest possible pitch.... Violent intoxication, temple prostitution, the ritual slaughter of enemies, self-mutilation, even child sacrifice: all these historical phenomena can be understood not as pathological, but as predictable end-points to the unfettering of human nature” (Ibid.). The Babylonians became like they were by worshiping gods made in their own image, gods that affirmed the worst things about them, rather than calling them to repentance.
Those who resist God’s lordship are on a collision course with reality; they’re on a foolish, self-destructive course. They can’t possibly succeed. They’re trying to go against the grain of reality: the truth about themselves; the truth about the certain direction of the future; and the truth about God, the Creator of all things. Habakkuk’s series of woes ends with idolatry, because being deceived about God, worshiping idols, leads us to be deceived in all the other areas. So, if we don’t want to become like them, we need to begin by examining our assumptions about God. Are we bowing before God, the Creator and Lord of the universe, or are we manufacturing gods in our own image? Have we created a comfortable god, who tells us only things we want to hear, who affirms all the things we want to do, or are we bowing before the One who calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him? We may not be bowing before gods of wood or stone, but if we’ve created a safe, comfortable god, who only tells us things we want to hear, we’ve become idolaters. We’ve found a respectable way to evade God’s lordship in our lives; and we won’t succeed any more than the ancient Babylonians did. A false god will corrupt every area of our lives and will destroy us in the end.
We’re faced with two alternatives. We can invent gods that make it easy for us, for now, to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll destroy ourselves in the end. And even in the meantime we’ll find, again and again, that these things are not what we were hoping for. St. Augustine was right: our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. So the only real solution is to surrender to His lordship and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of his book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT).
And that’s where Habakkuk, after all his questioning and struggling, leads us in the final chapter: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength.” Why can he say this? Because he knows things the Babylonians don’t know. He knows the truth about God, about himself, and about the future that this God is going to bring about: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” In the meantime, because we also know the truth, let’s press on to know this true, living God. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him and to walk under His lordship.
But, like any story, the moral can be taken too far. It’s one thing to say that we can often accomplish more than we think if we persevere with faith and determination; it’s another thing altogether to say that we can accomplish anything we set our minds on. A lot of the hype I hear about sports today seems to be based on the assumption that if you believe in yourself you can do anything. Losing is the result of not believing strongly enough. Several years ago, when I was working in human services, I was sent to a motivational seminar. The speaker was very upbeat and cheerful (as well as being one of the most hopelessly shallow human beings I’ve ever encountered), and his basic assumption was that we can do whatever we set our minds to, as long as we believe in ourselves.
G.K. Chesterton has an interesting discussion about this idea. Here’s what he says: “Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written ‘Hanwell.’ [Hanwell was a London institution for the mentally ill.] I said to him, ‘Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.’ He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. ‘Yes, there are,’ I retorted, ‘and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter [a morally reprehensible person]. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief...: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus’” (Orthodoxy, pp. 9-10). These verses in chapter 2 of Habakkuk are written about people who believe thoroughly in themselves.
In our last sermon we saw that Habakkuk is wrestling with the problem of God’s justice. How can God make use of these wicked people, the Babylonians, to execute His justice? How does this fit with what we know to be true of Him? God gives Habakkuk an answer in the early part of the chapter, and part of the answer is this: although He is not carrying out His judgment immediately, He will do so in the future. A day of perfect justice is coming, in God’s own time and according to His perfect wisdom. Because of this, resisting His will, refusing to submit to His lordship, is foolish and self-destructive. Those who persist in this direction are on a collision course with reality. No matter how strenuously they believe in themselves, they’re going in a direction which is certain to fail miserably.
The first thing to notice is that these people are making false claims about themselves. These are people who delight in using power over others, but the power they’re using is not their own and one day it will be taken from them. The strength they are misusing has been given to them by God, but soon He’s going to take it away, and then everything they’ve done will crumble. Listen to verse 13: “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing?” They have a certain amount of freedom to misuse the gifts they’ve been given, but they don’t have control over the final outcome.
Everything we have in this life has been entrusted to us by God, and He’s going to call us to account one day for how we’ve used it. He’s entrusted us with the ability to influence others, and He entrusts some of us with a limited amount of power, but these are dangerous gifts. First of all, for a definition of power. It’s helpful to distinguish between power and authority. Power is primarily related to ability, and authority is primarily related to right. Authority is the right to command. If I say that someone has authority, I am saying that he has the right to give me a command, and to expect me to obey. If someone, in the rightful exercise of authority, gives me an order, I am obligated morally to obey.
Power, by contrast, is the ability to coerce. It’s the ability to make people do what I want. It’s the ability to compel people, contrary to their will, to obey my wishes. Both power and authority come from God, and He alone possesses both absolutely. To us humans, He gives limited authority and a degree of power. Human authority is always limited, and our use of power must always be limited by our God‑given authority.
The problem is that we have the ability to do things that we have no right to do. Strong people have the ability to bully those who are weaker. That’s what the Chaldeans were doing to all the other nations in the region. The rich and powerful have the ability to oppress the poor. This is a misuse of power; it’s an ability that one has no right to use. But power is not evil in itself. A mother has the authority to tell a small child not to run into the street, and if the child tries to do so anyway, she has the right to forcibly stop him. This is a legitimate exercise of power. If she then throws the child to the ground and starts kicking him, she has exceeded the bounds of her authority and is now misusing her superior strength. The police have the right to forcibly stop a person who is committing a crime, but if they take him back to the station and torture him, they have exceeded their authority. They may have the ability to do so, but they do not have the right.
So this is an important principle to hold onto: power must always be limited by authority, and power that is divorced from legitimate authority is always wrong. It’s also important to remind ourselves often that power, even when it’s legitimate, is a dangerous thing. We very easily become corrupted by it. George Whitefield, the great evangelist, says this about the temptation to power: “I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above. For my own part, I find it much easier to obey than to govern, and that it is much safer to be trodden under foot than to have it in one’s power to serve others so” (quoted by Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield, vol. 2, p. 339). The temptation to exercise absolute power is the temptation Satan used on Eve: the temptation to be like God. We need to be always aware of the tremendous power of this temptation. The Babylonians, at the point in history that Habakkuk is describing, have become intoxicated with the lust for power. It’s corrupted them and dehumanized them. They’ve forgotten who they are as human beings, and they’ve begun to do things that they have no right to do. In abusing their power, they’re making false claims about themselves. They’ve forgotten that they are creatures who will one day be called to account for this power with which they’ve been entrusted.
The second thing is that they’re making false assumptions about the future. They’re assuming that things will always be as they are now, and that they can do things that will enable them to stay in control. They’re grasping for security by oppressing others: “Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!” Here it is in the New Living Translation: “You believe your wealth will buy security, putting your families beyond the reach of danger.”
The problem with that way of thinking is that the world is headed in a direction that they are unaware of. They think the current arrangement is just the way the world is; that this arrangement, in which it’s possible for one nation to lord it over others and to become rich by oppressing and stealing from those who are weaker, will continue forever. But this situation is temporary; things are ultimately headed in a different direction: “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
One of the most dangerous mistakes we can make, in looking at the condition of the world, is to assume that things will always be this way. The world is in an abnormal state. Things are not the way God created them to be. Sin has brought corruption into the world; oppression and tyranny are part of the world because people want to be like God. But this situation will not continue forever. The One the Babylonians are resisting is the One whose presence is going to fill the earth with overflowing abundance in the future. They’re resisting the lordship of the One who “accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will” (Ephesians 1:11). This One whose lordship they’re resisting is going to fill the earth with His glory; what will happen to them then?
The third thing to notice is that they’re making false assumptions about God. They’re trusting in gods that don’t exist at all: “Of what value is an idol, since a man has carved it? Or an image that teaches lies? For he who makes it trusts in his own creation; he makes idols that cannot speak. Woe to him who says to wood, ‘Come to life!’ Or to lifeless stone, ‘Wake up!’ Can it give guidance? It is covered with gold and silver; there is no breath in it.” They’re putting their trust in an illusion, in gods that simply don’t exist; and soon the illusion is going to be taken away. The reality is stated in verse 20: “But the Lord is in his holy temple.” All the time that they are worshiping and serving false gods, the living God is exalted in His holy temple. He’s the One who gave them the power they’ve been abusing, but they’re giving the credit to these gods that don’t exist at all. These false gods are going to let them down, and they are going to be called to give account to God their creator, the One whose lordship they’ve rejected.
This passage divides up into five sections, each pronouncing condemnation on some aspect of the Babylonian nation. The last section, vv. 18-20, condemns their idolatry. Why have they become such evil, oppressive people? Partly because they’ve been worshiping gods made in their own image. The living God, who created us, confronts us with our sinfulness and calls us to repentance; but idols made in our own image affirm the worst things about us. They permit us to go on in our self-destructive ways; they tell us that everything is going to be fine. Here’s a good description of idolatry: “Pagans take that which is simply found within their nature; and taking what is as the measure of what is good, they represent it to themselves and make of it a god: man as the measure of all things” (Jeffrey Burke Satinover, “Jungians and Gnostics,” in First Things, October 1994, p. 44). They make gods in their own image, like the Babylonians. And here’s how it works out in practice: “In thus spiritualizing the instincts, pagan worship therefore tends naturally to the violent, the hedonistic, and the orgiastic. Pagan religious ritual arouses the instincts, especially sexuality and aggression, to the keenest possible pitch.... Violent intoxication, temple prostitution, the ritual slaughter of enemies, self-mutilation, even child sacrifice: all these historical phenomena can be understood not as pathological, but as predictable end-points to the unfettering of human nature” (Ibid.). The Babylonians became like they were by worshiping gods made in their own image, gods that affirmed the worst things about them, rather than calling them to repentance.
Those who resist God’s lordship are on a collision course with reality; they’re on a foolish, self-destructive course. They can’t possibly succeed. They’re trying to go against the grain of reality: the truth about themselves; the truth about the certain direction of the future; and the truth about God, the Creator of all things. Habakkuk’s series of woes ends with idolatry, because being deceived about God, worshiping idols, leads us to be deceived in all the other areas. So, if we don’t want to become like them, we need to begin by examining our assumptions about God. Are we bowing before God, the Creator and Lord of the universe, or are we manufacturing gods in our own image? Have we created a comfortable god, who tells us only things we want to hear, who affirms all the things we want to do, or are we bowing before the One who calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him? We may not be bowing before gods of wood or stone, but if we’ve created a safe, comfortable god, who only tells us things we want to hear, we’ve become idolaters. We’ve found a respectable way to evade God’s lordship in our lives; and we won’t succeed any more than the ancient Babylonians did. A false god will corrupt every area of our lives and will destroy us in the end.
We’re faced with two alternatives. We can invent gods that make it easy for us, for now, to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll destroy ourselves in the end. And even in the meantime we’ll find, again and again, that these things are not what we were hoping for. St. Augustine was right: our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. So the only real solution is to surrender to His lordship and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of his book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT).
And that’s where Habakkuk, after all his questioning and struggling, leads us in the final chapter: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength.” Why can he say this? Because he knows things the Babylonians don’t know. He knows the truth about God, about himself, and about the future that this God is going to bring about: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” In the meantime, because we also know the truth, let’s press on to know this true, living God. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him and to walk under His lordship.
God's Justice in an Unjust World, Habakkuk 1:12-2:5
When I left India, in early 1979, I spent a few months in Belgium before returning to the States. The OM base where I was staying revolved mostly around two areas: finance and maintaining OM vehicles. I wasn’t of much use in either of these areas, but I guess the leaders decided I was likely to do less damage helping the mechanics. So I worked for three months, assisting in the garage. The head mechanic would give me simple jobs to do, by describing to me exactly what he wanted and what tools I’d need. Almost always, though, the jobs turned out to be more complex than I was expecting. I’d run into unexpected problems and find myself in over my head, so I’d have to go back and pester my boss with more questions. Because my understanding was so limited, this was a regular experience during the whole time I was there. The jobs were never really as simple as I expected, and they nearly always led to more questions than I could answer myself.
This is the position Habakkuk is in by the middle of chapter 1. We saw in the first sermon that he is struggling with living in a society that is in serious spiritual decline. The people are living in persistent rebellion against God and are even persecuting those who speak in His name. So Habakkuk cries out to God about the situation: “Why are you allowing these things to happen? Why don’t you do something?” And God responds, “I’m raising up the Babylonians to come and punish my people.” Habakkuk knows something about these Babylonians, so he responds, “what kind of an answer is this?” The answer he received to his first question hasn’t helped at all; it’s created more problems, raised more questions.
Conditions in this fallen world are such that it often looks like no one is in charge. Those who manage to get the upper hand, who gain an advantage over others by seizing power, or by having lots of money, or by learning to manipulate people, end up tyrannizing those under them. People, looking at this situation, often conclude that there is no God, or that if there is a God, He is either unjust or is powerless to bring about justice.
This is the problem Habakkuk is faced with in the middle of chapter 1. How can this answer he’s been given – that God is going to use the Babylonians to punish His people – how can this be consistent with what he knows about God? Listen to him, as his words are translated in The Message: “God, you’re from eternity, aren’t you? Holy God, we aren’t going to die, are we? God, you chose Babylonians for your judgment work? Rock-Solid God, you gave them the job of discipline? But you can’t be serious! You can’t condone evil! So why don’t you do something about this? Why are you silent now? This outrage! Evil men swallow up the righteous and you stand around and watch!” Habakkuk was complaining about his own people in the beginning, but the Babylonians are clearly worse. “How can they be the ones to deal out punishment? How can this be, and is it going to keep going on indefinitely? Is this the way things are, and are they going to continue in this direction? How can I reconcile this with what I already know about God?” God’s response to Habakkuk, at the beginning of chapter 2, tells us some important things about His justice in this world that’s so full of injustice.
The first thing is that God’s justice is not apparent on the surface of things. Habakkuk needs to be attentive and put himself in the way of receiving an answer to the question: “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” Some of the commentators are very concerned about whether or not Habakkuk actually goes up into a watchtower. They want us to be sure to understand that this is a spiritual exercise that Habakkuk is engaged in, and that he doesn’t actually need to go anywhere special. It’s something that happens within him, in his heart.
But this is a false dichotomy. What we do, and where we are, has an immense impact on the things that happen within us. A friend of mine told me about being on a fishing trip, and one of the men he was with said, “I don’t need to be in church; God speaks to me right here.” So my friend asked him, “Is that true? What does He say to you?” And, of course, the man didn’t have a response. God wasn’t speaking to him, he was just doing something he liked and he felt good about it. When I hear people say, “I can worship God anywhere,” or “I don’t need to set aside special times and places for prayer; I can pray anywhere, anytime;” I usually assume that these people are spending very little time, if any at all, in worship and prayer. It’s true that we can pray anytime, anywhere. But it’s also true that God calls us to set aside times and places to worship Him and cultivate His presence, and when we refuse to do this we end up not praying and worshiping much at all. Was Habakkuk literally stationing himself on one of the watchposts of the city? Probably not. But I’m certain that he had specific times and places where he cultivated God’s presence, and that’s what he’s describing here. He raised the question, then he diligently and persistently put himself in the way of receiving an answer from God.
The author of Psalm 73 is wrestling with a similar question. He begins the psalm by affirming the goodness of God: “Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.” He believes that this is true, but then he goes on to say that he went through a time of doubt in this area. He looked around him and saw wicked people prospering; they oppressed others and got away with it; they seemed to live charmed lives, not struggling like other people: “For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people.... Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning” (vv. 4-5, 12-14). He looked around and saw that wicked people had a much easier, less painful life than he did. So he began wondering, “what’s the point of my obedience?” But here’s the turning point in the psalm: “until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end” (v. 17). He went into the place set aside for corporate worship, the place that God had set aside for making Himself known to the people, and then God enabled him to see the truth. What we’re doing, and where we put ourselves, will have an effect on our spiritual perception. Can we pray and worship God anywhere, anytime? Yes, but only if we begin by praying and worshiping Him together with His people in those places and times where He has chosen to make Himself known. God’s justice is not apparent on the surface of things. Habakkuk needs to be attentive and put himself in the way of receiving an answer to his question. The same thing is true for us.
The second thing is that God’s justice is not going to appear in its fullness right away. He’s not going to crush injustice immediately. He tells Habakkuk two things that point in this direction: 1) write it down (so that if will be available for people to read in the future); and 2) be patient and wait for it to come. Here it is in The Message: “Write this. Write what you see. Write it out in big block letters so that it can be read on the run. This vision-message is a witness pointing to what’s coming. It aches for the coming – it can hardly wait! And it doesn’t lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait. It’s on its way. It will come right on time.” It will come right on time, but not on our timetable. Our calling is to “wait for it” in confidence that God will carry out His plans in His own time and according to His own wisdom.
But waiting patiently is not resigning ourselves to the injustice all around us. It doesn’t mean that we just say, “oh well, that’s just the way things are; there’s no use getting worked up about it.” If you never get worked up about the injustice of this world, you don’t understand what’s going on; you may have managed to safely insulate yourself from the suffering of others in this world, but what you’re doing is not the thing God is calling Habakkuk to do. Psalm 37 is another psalm that addresses this problem. The psalmist begins with the words, “Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers” (v. 1). Why does he begin this way? Because fretting, getting worked up about it, is a very natural response. So he’s saying, recognize the larger truth about the situation (“for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb”), and turn your heart to the Lord (“Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security”). He’s saying, “you’re going to need to be intentional to keep yourself from fretting over this; you’re only going to be able to do this by turning to the Lord for help and recognizing that He will set things right in His own time and way.”
Waiting on God’s time is not stoic resignation. Paul has a good description of what it’s like to wait on God for the fulfillment of His purposes in this world: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:22-25). We’re waiting in patience for the fulfillment of our hope, but during this in-between time we “groan inwardly.” We’re filled with longing, and we cry out to God, like we see Habakkuk, and the psalmists, doing: “How much longer, O Lord?”
This leads to the third point, which is this: though it may, at present, appear otherwise, those who trust in God and obey Him are better off now and will be infinitely better off in the future. Even while we’re waiting in faith and hope, we are better off than those who appear to have the upper hand right now. Listen to verse 4 in The Message: “Look at that man, bloated by self-importance – full of himself but soul-empty. But the person in right standing before God, through loyal and steady believing is fully alive, really alive.” Jesus said, “What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?” (Mark 8:36-37, The Message). That man, “bloated by self-importance,” is in the process of losing his soul.
If we only look at things as they are right now, in this particular slice of time, we’ll get an inaccurate picture. Those who live by faith in God have life and are moving in the direction of greater fullness of life in eternity. The wicked are dead, alienated from the source of life and of all good, and they are moving in the direction of ultimate, final separation. The consequences of the life of faith are infinitely more desirable than anything the wicked are able to take by force in this life.
So, how do we, as Christians, respond to the reality of injustice in the world? We cultivate God’s presence and influence in our lives. He is the source of all justice. If we’re concerned when we see injustice, our concern should drive us to Him, not away from Him. Habakkuk models that for us. As we draw closer to Him, we’ll be able to see things in clearer perspective. We bring our concerns and questions to Him, like Habakkuk did, then we put ourselves in the way of receiving an answer. Then we accept the fact that injustice is going to be part of this world until the Lord returns. We don’t like that, and we don’t just resign ourselves to it. We do all we can to reduce injustice and to work for justice within the context of our individual callings. Christians have historically been engaged in seeking to make this world a better place to live by showing compassion and working for laws that prevent brutality and exploitation. But we do that within the context of a world that’s in rebellion against God and that repeatedly asserts its independence from Him. Because of that, our success is always less than what we desire, and we pray and long for that day when we will live together in the new heaven and new earth. We live by faith, in anticipation of that time when everything will be made right, and we will see God face to face. We work for justice, but we recognize that we won’t be able to eradicate injustice until that day when God makes all things new.
And when we begin crying out to God about injustice, we see that the problem is not just “out there.” The problem is also within us. Injustice is a result of sin, and we are sinners. Our central focus is in these words in verse 4, which in many ways are the central point of the book. This phrase, “the righteous will live by their faith,” is quoted three times in the New Testament, twice by the Apostle Paul and once in Hebrews (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38-39). Paul uses it at the beginning of his great exposition of the gospel in Romans: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.” We’re made right with God by faith, and we continue to live in a right relationship with Him through faith. This gospel is the “power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith.” This gospel is the only hope for sinful people living in this fallen world with all its injustice. Jesus has borne the weight of the world's sin, ours included; the price has been paid in full, not just for our individual salvation, but for the healing of this world.
As people made right with God by faith, this is what we look forward to: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 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 or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:1-5). Until that day, may God help us to walk with Him, cultivating His presence in every area of our lives; may He help us to live increasingly according to the life of His eternal kingdom, seeking to show mercy and grace to others in His name; and may He enable us to hold firmly to the hope of the gospel and to proclaim that message to all in the hope that they will believe and be saved. “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered” (Psalm 130:3-4). That forgiveness comes to us in the gospel, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” May we, having contributed, even in seemingly small ways, to the injustice of this world, know the power of that forgiveness in our own lives, and may we offer it to others and pray that they will believe and be reconciled to God.
This is the position Habakkuk is in by the middle of chapter 1. We saw in the first sermon that he is struggling with living in a society that is in serious spiritual decline. The people are living in persistent rebellion against God and are even persecuting those who speak in His name. So Habakkuk cries out to God about the situation: “Why are you allowing these things to happen? Why don’t you do something?” And God responds, “I’m raising up the Babylonians to come and punish my people.” Habakkuk knows something about these Babylonians, so he responds, “what kind of an answer is this?” The answer he received to his first question hasn’t helped at all; it’s created more problems, raised more questions.
Conditions in this fallen world are such that it often looks like no one is in charge. Those who manage to get the upper hand, who gain an advantage over others by seizing power, or by having lots of money, or by learning to manipulate people, end up tyrannizing those under them. People, looking at this situation, often conclude that there is no God, or that if there is a God, He is either unjust or is powerless to bring about justice.
This is the problem Habakkuk is faced with in the middle of chapter 1. How can this answer he’s been given – that God is going to use the Babylonians to punish His people – how can this be consistent with what he knows about God? Listen to him, as his words are translated in The Message: “God, you’re from eternity, aren’t you? Holy God, we aren’t going to die, are we? God, you chose Babylonians for your judgment work? Rock-Solid God, you gave them the job of discipline? But you can’t be serious! You can’t condone evil! So why don’t you do something about this? Why are you silent now? This outrage! Evil men swallow up the righteous and you stand around and watch!” Habakkuk was complaining about his own people in the beginning, but the Babylonians are clearly worse. “How can they be the ones to deal out punishment? How can this be, and is it going to keep going on indefinitely? Is this the way things are, and are they going to continue in this direction? How can I reconcile this with what I already know about God?” God’s response to Habakkuk, at the beginning of chapter 2, tells us some important things about His justice in this world that’s so full of injustice.
The first thing is that God’s justice is not apparent on the surface of things. Habakkuk needs to be attentive and put himself in the way of receiving an answer to the question: “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” Some of the commentators are very concerned about whether or not Habakkuk actually goes up into a watchtower. They want us to be sure to understand that this is a spiritual exercise that Habakkuk is engaged in, and that he doesn’t actually need to go anywhere special. It’s something that happens within him, in his heart.
But this is a false dichotomy. What we do, and where we are, has an immense impact on the things that happen within us. A friend of mine told me about being on a fishing trip, and one of the men he was with said, “I don’t need to be in church; God speaks to me right here.” So my friend asked him, “Is that true? What does He say to you?” And, of course, the man didn’t have a response. God wasn’t speaking to him, he was just doing something he liked and he felt good about it. When I hear people say, “I can worship God anywhere,” or “I don’t need to set aside special times and places for prayer; I can pray anywhere, anytime;” I usually assume that these people are spending very little time, if any at all, in worship and prayer. It’s true that we can pray anytime, anywhere. But it’s also true that God calls us to set aside times and places to worship Him and cultivate His presence, and when we refuse to do this we end up not praying and worshiping much at all. Was Habakkuk literally stationing himself on one of the watchposts of the city? Probably not. But I’m certain that he had specific times and places where he cultivated God’s presence, and that’s what he’s describing here. He raised the question, then he diligently and persistently put himself in the way of receiving an answer from God.
The author of Psalm 73 is wrestling with a similar question. He begins the psalm by affirming the goodness of God: “Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.” He believes that this is true, but then he goes on to say that he went through a time of doubt in this area. He looked around him and saw wicked people prospering; they oppressed others and got away with it; they seemed to live charmed lives, not struggling like other people: “For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people.... Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning” (vv. 4-5, 12-14). He looked around and saw that wicked people had a much easier, less painful life than he did. So he began wondering, “what’s the point of my obedience?” But here’s the turning point in the psalm: “until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end” (v. 17). He went into the place set aside for corporate worship, the place that God had set aside for making Himself known to the people, and then God enabled him to see the truth. What we’re doing, and where we put ourselves, will have an effect on our spiritual perception. Can we pray and worship God anywhere, anytime? Yes, but only if we begin by praying and worshiping Him together with His people in those places and times where He has chosen to make Himself known. God’s justice is not apparent on the surface of things. Habakkuk needs to be attentive and put himself in the way of receiving an answer to his question. The same thing is true for us.
The second thing is that God’s justice is not going to appear in its fullness right away. He’s not going to crush injustice immediately. He tells Habakkuk two things that point in this direction: 1) write it down (so that if will be available for people to read in the future); and 2) be patient and wait for it to come. Here it is in The Message: “Write this. Write what you see. Write it out in big block letters so that it can be read on the run. This vision-message is a witness pointing to what’s coming. It aches for the coming – it can hardly wait! And it doesn’t lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait. It’s on its way. It will come right on time.” It will come right on time, but not on our timetable. Our calling is to “wait for it” in confidence that God will carry out His plans in His own time and according to His own wisdom.
But waiting patiently is not resigning ourselves to the injustice all around us. It doesn’t mean that we just say, “oh well, that’s just the way things are; there’s no use getting worked up about it.” If you never get worked up about the injustice of this world, you don’t understand what’s going on; you may have managed to safely insulate yourself from the suffering of others in this world, but what you’re doing is not the thing God is calling Habakkuk to do. Psalm 37 is another psalm that addresses this problem. The psalmist begins with the words, “Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers” (v. 1). Why does he begin this way? Because fretting, getting worked up about it, is a very natural response. So he’s saying, recognize the larger truth about the situation (“for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb”), and turn your heart to the Lord (“Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security”). He’s saying, “you’re going to need to be intentional to keep yourself from fretting over this; you’re only going to be able to do this by turning to the Lord for help and recognizing that He will set things right in His own time and way.”
Waiting on God’s time is not stoic resignation. Paul has a good description of what it’s like to wait on God for the fulfillment of His purposes in this world: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:22-25). We’re waiting in patience for the fulfillment of our hope, but during this in-between time we “groan inwardly.” We’re filled with longing, and we cry out to God, like we see Habakkuk, and the psalmists, doing: “How much longer, O Lord?”
This leads to the third point, which is this: though it may, at present, appear otherwise, those who trust in God and obey Him are better off now and will be infinitely better off in the future. Even while we’re waiting in faith and hope, we are better off than those who appear to have the upper hand right now. Listen to verse 4 in The Message: “Look at that man, bloated by self-importance – full of himself but soul-empty. But the person in right standing before God, through loyal and steady believing is fully alive, really alive.” Jesus said, “What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?” (Mark 8:36-37, The Message). That man, “bloated by self-importance,” is in the process of losing his soul.
If we only look at things as they are right now, in this particular slice of time, we’ll get an inaccurate picture. Those who live by faith in God have life and are moving in the direction of greater fullness of life in eternity. The wicked are dead, alienated from the source of life and of all good, and they are moving in the direction of ultimate, final separation. The consequences of the life of faith are infinitely more desirable than anything the wicked are able to take by force in this life.
So, how do we, as Christians, respond to the reality of injustice in the world? We cultivate God’s presence and influence in our lives. He is the source of all justice. If we’re concerned when we see injustice, our concern should drive us to Him, not away from Him. Habakkuk models that for us. As we draw closer to Him, we’ll be able to see things in clearer perspective. We bring our concerns and questions to Him, like Habakkuk did, then we put ourselves in the way of receiving an answer. Then we accept the fact that injustice is going to be part of this world until the Lord returns. We don’t like that, and we don’t just resign ourselves to it. We do all we can to reduce injustice and to work for justice within the context of our individual callings. Christians have historically been engaged in seeking to make this world a better place to live by showing compassion and working for laws that prevent brutality and exploitation. But we do that within the context of a world that’s in rebellion against God and that repeatedly asserts its independence from Him. Because of that, our success is always less than what we desire, and we pray and long for that day when we will live together in the new heaven and new earth. We live by faith, in anticipation of that time when everything will be made right, and we will see God face to face. We work for justice, but we recognize that we won’t be able to eradicate injustice until that day when God makes all things new.
And when we begin crying out to God about injustice, we see that the problem is not just “out there.” The problem is also within us. Injustice is a result of sin, and we are sinners. Our central focus is in these words in verse 4, which in many ways are the central point of the book. This phrase, “the righteous will live by their faith,” is quoted three times in the New Testament, twice by the Apostle Paul and once in Hebrews (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38-39). Paul uses it at the beginning of his great exposition of the gospel in Romans: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.” We’re made right with God by faith, and we continue to live in a right relationship with Him through faith. This gospel is the “power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith.” This gospel is the only hope for sinful people living in this fallen world with all its injustice. Jesus has borne the weight of the world's sin, ours included; the price has been paid in full, not just for our individual salvation, but for the healing of this world.
As people made right with God by faith, this is what we look forward to: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 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 or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:1-5). Until that day, may God help us to walk with Him, cultivating His presence in every area of our lives; may He help us to live increasingly according to the life of His eternal kingdom, seeking to show mercy and grace to others in His name; and may He enable us to hold firmly to the hope of the gospel and to proclaim that message to all in the hope that they will believe and be saved. “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered” (Psalm 130:3-4). That forgiveness comes to us in the gospel, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” May we, having contributed, even in seemingly small ways, to the injustice of this world, know the power of that forgiveness in our own lives, and may we offer it to others and pray that they will believe and be reconciled to God.
A Surprising Answer to Prayer, Habakkuk 1:1-11
Awhile back, I heard about some studies that have been done recently on the benefits of prayer. Researchers were discovering, to their surprise, that prayer is immensely beneficial, that people with a strong prayer life have more resources for dealing with difficult things. They couldn’t help coming to the conclusion that prayer is a good thing, that prayer is very effective therapy. The reports I heard didn’t have anything to say about the object of prayer; there wasn’t much concern about whether or not there is anyone there listening to our prayers. The whole point was that prayer tends to make people feel better. We tend to function better as human beings if prayer, any kind of prayer, is a regular part of our lives.
Now, I don’t want to dismiss this. I think these researchers were discovering something that is true about us as people made in God’s image: we’re made in such a way that we function better when prayer is part of our lives. We could go even further and say that if we never pray at all our humanness is diminished. God has made us to commune with Him for eternity, and when this part of our lives is not functioning we are less than what He created us to be. We function better, we’re better off on the whole, when prayer is a regular part of our lives.
But then, having said that, we need to recognize that this is an inadequate view of prayer. Prayer does tend to be therapeutic, but prayer is more than therapy. Prayer does tend to benefit us emotionally and psychologically, but prayer is about more than making us feel better. When we come into God’s presence in prayer, we are not in control of the outcome. We never know what God is going to do in response to our prayers. When we make prayer a regular part of our lives, no doubt we will experience some emotional benefits, but we need to be careful not to reduce prayer to this. When we come before God in prayer, we’re involved in something we don’t fully understand, something that’s beyond us. We’re not the ones in control. We’re interacting with the living, sovereign God. We’re in relationship with the One who rules the universe, who acts in His own ways and according to His own wisdom. We can see this clearly in this short book of Habakkuk.
Notice, first of all, that Habakkuk’s prayer is a dialogue. The first two chapters of this book are in dialogue form; Habakkuk speaks, then God replies. Habakkuk is a man of prayer; we have some of his prayers recorded in this book. But his prayer isn’t over when he stops speaking. He speaks to God, but his relationship with God involves more than speaking. He speaks, then waits in anticipation for God to answer him. His prayer is part of a relationship.
During the first few years after I became a Christian I read about people who spent large amounts of time in prayer. I read David Brainerd’s diary, where he describes whole days that he set aside for prayer and fasting, while he was serving as a missionary among the American Indians. I read about George Whitefield and John Wesley, who became great evangelists because they were people who knew God, who spent hours in prayer. I read that E.M. Bounds, who wrote several books on prayer, spent 6 or more hours in prayer each day. And there were lots of others, enough to depress me with my own inadequacies. So I decided, at one point, that I should set aside two hours each day for prayer.
The problem was, what was I to do during that time? I know this might not be a problem for everyone, but I found myself wondering how these great Christians found so many things to talk about in God’s presence for hours each day. I quickly ran out of things to talk about, so I’d sing hymns and choruses, but then I felt guilty, because I thought I wasn’t really filling the time with prayer like I wanted to. I made lists and prayed through missionary prayer letters, trying to fill up more of the time. But I got bored doing that day after day. I’ve since that time realized that my understanding of prayer was too limited. I don’t doubt that these great people who spent hours each day in prayer were doing more than making requests the whole time. Prayer includes worship, singing in God’s presence, and sitting before Him in silence. We don’t need to fill all the time with chatter. Habakkuk speaks in God’s presence, but then he stops and waits. He’s willing to be silent before God.
The second thing to notice is that Habakkuk brings before God the deepest concerns of his heart. He complains to God about the things that are overwhelming him. He’s free to speak the truth to God; he doesn’t feel compelled to dress up his prayers to make them acceptable. When I was a young Christian I remember speaking to an older Christian about something difficult that had happened. I don’t remember what the incident was, but I do remember this man’s response. He said, “I don’t know, but I do know that we don’t have the right to ask God why this happened.” So I didn’t. I accepted this man’s word for it, since he was older and more mature as a Christian than I was.
But listen to Habakkuk: “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?” He feels free to ask God “why.” Things are not right in the nation. Habakkuk is living before the nation was taken into captivity in Babylon, but we don’t know the exact time. He gives us almost no information about himself. But we do know that he was living in a time of serious spiritual decline. These people who were called by God’s name were acting unjustly, persecuting those who spoke the truth.
Here’s an example from Jeremiah, who may have been a contemporary of Habakkuk (and even if they didn’t know each other, they lived in similar circumstances). Jeremiah had been prophesying, speaking in God’s name and at His command, and because of it was beaten and put into the stocks. Here’s Jeremiah’s response: “O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long” (20:7-8). God’s people are acting wickedly, even to the point of persecuting His prophets. That’s what Habakkuk is complaining about in verses 1-4: why does God keep putting up with this? Why does He tolerate wrong?
The distress of living in the midst of wickedness has often been difficult for God’s people. Peter says that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who lived in Sodom just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, was “sick of all the immorality and wickedness around him. Yes, he was a righteous man who was distressed by the wickedness he saw and heard day after day” (2 Peter 2:7-8, New Living Translation). Following Jesus brings us into conflict with the ways of this world. In this fallen world, the wicked often prosper and succeed. They oppress others and get away with it, and often it seems like their lives are charmed. The author of Psalm 73 struggled with this problem: “For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.... This is what the wicked are like--always carefree, they increase in wealth” (Psalm 73:3-6, 12). It’s not very difficult to find examples of this in our own society. And watching this causes us to grieve. But the psalmists and prophets don’t just grieve. They don’t just get depressed about it. They cry out to God in their distress. That’s what Habakkuk is doing in these early verses.
Part of Habakkuk’s prayer life involves complaining to God, instead of complaining to others. I’m afraid our tendency is too often just the opposite. Maybe we’re not comfortable with the idea of bringing our complaints to God. Maybe we feel like we need to be at our best in prayer and feel guilty about venting these emotions in God’s presence. These things don’t seem spiritual enough to be part of our prayer lives. But then what often happens is that we vent our frustrations to one another. And things just get worse. We become more angry and resentful at the situation, and the more we talk about it the more we realize our powerlessness to bring about any change. It’s far better to bring these things into God’s presence in prayer. Habakkuk cries out to God with the deepest concerns of his heart.
The third thing to notice is this: in response to Habakkuk’s prayer, God does something that Habakkuk could never have anticipated, something he wouldn’t have believed even if he were told: “The Lord replied, ‘Look at the nations and be amazed! Watch and be astounded at what I will do! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if somebody told you about it. I am raising up the Babylonians to be a new power on the world scene. They are a cruel and violent nation who will march across the world and conquer it” (NLT). Habakkuk has been praying about the wickedness of his own people, but these people God is raising up are clearly worse. How can this be an answer to his prayers? It doesn’t make sense (and he addresses this complaint to God in his next prayer).
We need to know, in coming before God, that His ways are not our ways: “‘I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work.’ God’s Decree. ‘For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think” (Isaiah 55:8-9, The Message). In coming before God, we need to know that there are mysteries that surpass our understanding. He is God, and we are not (that’s the thing that comes across clearly in the book of Job). As creatures, our calling is to humble ourselves before the ultimate mystery of our infinite God. There is much about Him, and much about our relationship with Him, that we don’t understand. When we come into His presence in prayer, we’re in over our heads. We’re not in control of the outcome, and much of the time we don’t even fully understand what we’re doing.
God is wiser than we are, and He is doing things that exceed our comprehension right now. How could Habakkuk have ever imagined that this infinite God, shrouded in the mystery of unapproachable light, would a few hundred years later be born of a virgin? How could he have ever guessed that this God, who seemed unconcerned about the sins and suffering of His people, would one day die on the cross to bear the weight of the world’s sin? God is wiser than we are, and He is doing things that exceed our comprehension right now. His perspective is larger than ours. He’s proven Himself to be trustworthy. Our calling, as His people, is to humble ourselves before Him, recognizing that He is God and we are not.
If we want to pray like Habakkuk prayed, we need to get beyond the idea that prayer is nothing more than asking things from God. Here are two exercises that can help in this area. Spiritual exercises are ways of training ourselves spiritually, just as physical exercises train our bodies to do things we couldn’t do otherwise. 1) The first is a prayerful reading of Scripture called Lectio Divina (which is just Latin for divine reading). Set aside 10 minutes to read through a short passage of Scripture. Begin by asking God to speak to you, then read the passage out loud. Then read it again, slowly, and pray in response to it. Allow God to speak to you through the Word, and let your prayer be a response to His speaking. Don’t force it, just keep reading through the passage until you have something to pray about. Then, for the last few minutes, sit in silence, attentive to God in the presence of this passage you’ve just been reading. Don’t try to do anything during this time; just be attentive to God. When your mind wanders, bring it back to the text. And then end the time by giving thanks.
2) The second exercise is a form of silent, contemplative prayer. Set aside the last 5-10 minutes of your prayer time for silent prayer. The point of this prayer is not to coerce God into speaking to you. We don’t have control over God in that way. This prophecy of Habakkuk is something he “received” (v.1), something given by God in His own time and way. The point is to be attentive to God, to be silent in His presence. It’s helpful to have a word or phrase to help bring your attention back when your mind starts to wander (something simple: “Jesus,” or “Father,” or “Lord help me”). Each time your mind wanders, use your word to bring your attention back to God. Simply sit in his presence, and then end the time by slowly praying the Lord’s Prayer. Both of these exercises are ways of stopping our own incessant chatter and turning our attention to God Himself.
When we come before God in prayer, we’re involved in something we don’t fully understand, something that’s beyond us. We’re not the ones in control. We’re interacting with the living, sovereign God. We’re in relationship with the One who rules the universe, who acts in His own ways and according to His own wisdom. We’re in relationship with the One who “sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5). It’s because God is wiser, more powerful, and more loving than we are that we are able to be rescued from our sins.
Now, I don’t want to dismiss this. I think these researchers were discovering something that is true about us as people made in God’s image: we’re made in such a way that we function better when prayer is part of our lives. We could go even further and say that if we never pray at all our humanness is diminished. God has made us to commune with Him for eternity, and when this part of our lives is not functioning we are less than what He created us to be. We function better, we’re better off on the whole, when prayer is a regular part of our lives.
But then, having said that, we need to recognize that this is an inadequate view of prayer. Prayer does tend to be therapeutic, but prayer is more than therapy. Prayer does tend to benefit us emotionally and psychologically, but prayer is about more than making us feel better. When we come into God’s presence in prayer, we are not in control of the outcome. We never know what God is going to do in response to our prayers. When we make prayer a regular part of our lives, no doubt we will experience some emotional benefits, but we need to be careful not to reduce prayer to this. When we come before God in prayer, we’re involved in something we don’t fully understand, something that’s beyond us. We’re not the ones in control. We’re interacting with the living, sovereign God. We’re in relationship with the One who rules the universe, who acts in His own ways and according to His own wisdom. We can see this clearly in this short book of Habakkuk.
Notice, first of all, that Habakkuk’s prayer is a dialogue. The first two chapters of this book are in dialogue form; Habakkuk speaks, then God replies. Habakkuk is a man of prayer; we have some of his prayers recorded in this book. But his prayer isn’t over when he stops speaking. He speaks to God, but his relationship with God involves more than speaking. He speaks, then waits in anticipation for God to answer him. His prayer is part of a relationship.
During the first few years after I became a Christian I read about people who spent large amounts of time in prayer. I read David Brainerd’s diary, where he describes whole days that he set aside for prayer and fasting, while he was serving as a missionary among the American Indians. I read about George Whitefield and John Wesley, who became great evangelists because they were people who knew God, who spent hours in prayer. I read that E.M. Bounds, who wrote several books on prayer, spent 6 or more hours in prayer each day. And there were lots of others, enough to depress me with my own inadequacies. So I decided, at one point, that I should set aside two hours each day for prayer.
The problem was, what was I to do during that time? I know this might not be a problem for everyone, but I found myself wondering how these great Christians found so many things to talk about in God’s presence for hours each day. I quickly ran out of things to talk about, so I’d sing hymns and choruses, but then I felt guilty, because I thought I wasn’t really filling the time with prayer like I wanted to. I made lists and prayed through missionary prayer letters, trying to fill up more of the time. But I got bored doing that day after day. I’ve since that time realized that my understanding of prayer was too limited. I don’t doubt that these great people who spent hours each day in prayer were doing more than making requests the whole time. Prayer includes worship, singing in God’s presence, and sitting before Him in silence. We don’t need to fill all the time with chatter. Habakkuk speaks in God’s presence, but then he stops and waits. He’s willing to be silent before God.
The second thing to notice is that Habakkuk brings before God the deepest concerns of his heart. He complains to God about the things that are overwhelming him. He’s free to speak the truth to God; he doesn’t feel compelled to dress up his prayers to make them acceptable. When I was a young Christian I remember speaking to an older Christian about something difficult that had happened. I don’t remember what the incident was, but I do remember this man’s response. He said, “I don’t know, but I do know that we don’t have the right to ask God why this happened.” So I didn’t. I accepted this man’s word for it, since he was older and more mature as a Christian than I was.
But listen to Habakkuk: “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?” He feels free to ask God “why.” Things are not right in the nation. Habakkuk is living before the nation was taken into captivity in Babylon, but we don’t know the exact time. He gives us almost no information about himself. But we do know that he was living in a time of serious spiritual decline. These people who were called by God’s name were acting unjustly, persecuting those who spoke the truth.
Here’s an example from Jeremiah, who may have been a contemporary of Habakkuk (and even if they didn’t know each other, they lived in similar circumstances). Jeremiah had been prophesying, speaking in God’s name and at His command, and because of it was beaten and put into the stocks. Here’s Jeremiah’s response: “O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long” (20:7-8). God’s people are acting wickedly, even to the point of persecuting His prophets. That’s what Habakkuk is complaining about in verses 1-4: why does God keep putting up with this? Why does He tolerate wrong?
The distress of living in the midst of wickedness has often been difficult for God’s people. Peter says that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who lived in Sodom just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, was “sick of all the immorality and wickedness around him. Yes, he was a righteous man who was distressed by the wickedness he saw and heard day after day” (2 Peter 2:7-8, New Living Translation). Following Jesus brings us into conflict with the ways of this world. In this fallen world, the wicked often prosper and succeed. They oppress others and get away with it, and often it seems like their lives are charmed. The author of Psalm 73 struggled with this problem: “For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.... This is what the wicked are like--always carefree, they increase in wealth” (Psalm 73:3-6, 12). It’s not very difficult to find examples of this in our own society. And watching this causes us to grieve. But the psalmists and prophets don’t just grieve. They don’t just get depressed about it. They cry out to God in their distress. That’s what Habakkuk is doing in these early verses.
Part of Habakkuk’s prayer life involves complaining to God, instead of complaining to others. I’m afraid our tendency is too often just the opposite. Maybe we’re not comfortable with the idea of bringing our complaints to God. Maybe we feel like we need to be at our best in prayer and feel guilty about venting these emotions in God’s presence. These things don’t seem spiritual enough to be part of our prayer lives. But then what often happens is that we vent our frustrations to one another. And things just get worse. We become more angry and resentful at the situation, and the more we talk about it the more we realize our powerlessness to bring about any change. It’s far better to bring these things into God’s presence in prayer. Habakkuk cries out to God with the deepest concerns of his heart.
The third thing to notice is this: in response to Habakkuk’s prayer, God does something that Habakkuk could never have anticipated, something he wouldn’t have believed even if he were told: “The Lord replied, ‘Look at the nations and be amazed! Watch and be astounded at what I will do! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if somebody told you about it. I am raising up the Babylonians to be a new power on the world scene. They are a cruel and violent nation who will march across the world and conquer it” (NLT). Habakkuk has been praying about the wickedness of his own people, but these people God is raising up are clearly worse. How can this be an answer to his prayers? It doesn’t make sense (and he addresses this complaint to God in his next prayer).
We need to know, in coming before God, that His ways are not our ways: “‘I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work.’ God’s Decree. ‘For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think” (Isaiah 55:8-9, The Message). In coming before God, we need to know that there are mysteries that surpass our understanding. He is God, and we are not (that’s the thing that comes across clearly in the book of Job). As creatures, our calling is to humble ourselves before the ultimate mystery of our infinite God. There is much about Him, and much about our relationship with Him, that we don’t understand. When we come into His presence in prayer, we’re in over our heads. We’re not in control of the outcome, and much of the time we don’t even fully understand what we’re doing.
God is wiser than we are, and He is doing things that exceed our comprehension right now. How could Habakkuk have ever imagined that this infinite God, shrouded in the mystery of unapproachable light, would a few hundred years later be born of a virgin? How could he have ever guessed that this God, who seemed unconcerned about the sins and suffering of His people, would one day die on the cross to bear the weight of the world’s sin? God is wiser than we are, and He is doing things that exceed our comprehension right now. His perspective is larger than ours. He’s proven Himself to be trustworthy. Our calling, as His people, is to humble ourselves before Him, recognizing that He is God and we are not.
If we want to pray like Habakkuk prayed, we need to get beyond the idea that prayer is nothing more than asking things from God. Here are two exercises that can help in this area. Spiritual exercises are ways of training ourselves spiritually, just as physical exercises train our bodies to do things we couldn’t do otherwise. 1) The first is a prayerful reading of Scripture called Lectio Divina (which is just Latin for divine reading). Set aside 10 minutes to read through a short passage of Scripture. Begin by asking God to speak to you, then read the passage out loud. Then read it again, slowly, and pray in response to it. Allow God to speak to you through the Word, and let your prayer be a response to His speaking. Don’t force it, just keep reading through the passage until you have something to pray about. Then, for the last few minutes, sit in silence, attentive to God in the presence of this passage you’ve just been reading. Don’t try to do anything during this time; just be attentive to God. When your mind wanders, bring it back to the text. And then end the time by giving thanks.
2) The second exercise is a form of silent, contemplative prayer. Set aside the last 5-10 minutes of your prayer time for silent prayer. The point of this prayer is not to coerce God into speaking to you. We don’t have control over God in that way. This prophecy of Habakkuk is something he “received” (v.1), something given by God in His own time and way. The point is to be attentive to God, to be silent in His presence. It’s helpful to have a word or phrase to help bring your attention back when your mind starts to wander (something simple: “Jesus,” or “Father,” or “Lord help me”). Each time your mind wanders, use your word to bring your attention back to God. Simply sit in his presence, and then end the time by slowly praying the Lord’s Prayer. Both of these exercises are ways of stopping our own incessant chatter and turning our attention to God Himself.
When we come before God in prayer, we’re involved in something we don’t fully understand, something that’s beyond us. We’re not the ones in control. We’re interacting with the living, sovereign God. We’re in relationship with the One who rules the universe, who acts in His own ways and according to His own wisdom. We’re in relationship with the One who “sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5). It’s because God is wiser, more powerful, and more loving than we are that we are able to be rescued from our sins.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
All Things in Jesus' Name, Colossians 3:15-17
All Things in Jesus’ Name
Colossians 3:15-17
First Sunday of Christmas, 2012
Shiloh Lutheran Church
Whenever we come to a passage of Scripture, it’s important to take note of the context. Paul didn’t write this letter in chapters, and the people who received it didn’t read it in sections as we’re doing. They read straight through it, as we do when we receive a letter. So as we come to a brief passage like this, we need to notice what Paul has been saying up to this point; otherwise we’re in danger of misreading Scripture. And we’ll certainly miss out on much of what is being said.
At the beginning of this chapter, Paul reminds 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. It’s not just something to agree with in a catechism class. 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 churches, 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 their church, of the reality of God’s grace.
The church is a body of people called together 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 saw 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. It’s 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.” It’s easy to get sidetracked and argue about whether Paul is speaking here about an objective reality or a subjective feeling of peace. But I think he has both in mind. 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. We don’t know what to do, and when we act out of a sense of guilt, thinking “I need to do more, I need to be ministering to others,” it usually doesn’t go well. We often do more harm than good.
Our inadequacy is especially clear when we try to minister to people in crisis. In the early 1980's, some workers from Operation Mobilization, the mission group we served with, were in a serious car accident, and Jonathan McRostie, the leader of the work in Europe, became a paraplegic. While he was still in the hospital, a young member of one of the OM teams visited and informed him that there were only two possible reasons for his condition: unconfessed sin, or lack of faith. Why did he do that? Yes, he was seriously wrong theologically; and yes, he was being incredibly insensitive. But he wasn’t seeking to do harm. He was seeking to minister; he thought he had a word from the Lord, and he was seeking to deliver it.
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.
Colossians 3:15-17
First Sunday of Christmas, 2012
Shiloh Lutheran Church
Whenever we come to a passage of Scripture, it’s important to take note of the context. Paul didn’t write this letter in chapters, and the people who received it didn’t read it in sections as we’re doing. They read straight through it, as we do when we receive a letter. So as we come to a brief passage like this, we need to notice what Paul has been saying up to this point; otherwise we’re in danger of misreading Scripture. And we’ll certainly miss out on much of what is being said.
At the beginning of this chapter, Paul reminds 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. It’s not just something to agree with in a catechism class. 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 churches, 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 their church, of the reality of God’s grace.
The church is a body of people called together 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 saw 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. It’s 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.” It’s easy to get sidetracked and argue about whether Paul is speaking here about an objective reality or a subjective feeling of peace. But I think he has both in mind. 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. We don’t know what to do, and when we act out of a sense of guilt, thinking “I need to do more, I need to be ministering to others,” it usually doesn’t go well. We often do more harm than good.
Our inadequacy is especially clear when we try to minister to people in crisis. In the early 1980's, some workers from Operation Mobilization, the mission group we served with, were in a serious car accident, and Jonathan McRostie, the leader of the work in Europe, became a paraplegic. While he was still in the hospital, a young member of one of the OM teams visited and informed him that there were only two possible reasons for his condition: unconfessed sin, or lack of faith. Why did he do that? Yes, he was seriously wrong theologically; and yes, he was being incredibly insensitive. But he wasn’t seeking to do harm. He was seeking to minister; he thought he had a word from the Lord, and he was seeking to deliver it.
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 and think there’s only one acceptable form of worship.
The third thing to notice, in verse 17, is that when we’re living with an awareness 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 awhile, 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 bests 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 it 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 our conflicts 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? Put 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 reading and meditating on 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.
In 1978, I was working with a team in India and we spent two weeks with a missionary named A.R. Fromman. He was 92 years old at the time, and he’d been in India for 65 years. He’d been walking with God over a very long lifetime, and he exemplified these qualities more than anyone I’ve ever met. He lived with a constant awareness of the reality of Christ’s presence, and he was overflowing with joyful assurance. But he wasn’t that way at the beginning of his Christian life. He became that way by walking with God, by spending time in His Word, and seeking to apply it to his life. And the interesting thing is that being around him didn’t lead me to put him on a pedestal; it made me want to know God better. He didn’t draw attention to himself; he pointed us to Jesus. There are no shortcuts to the things Paul describes in these verses. These are qualities that become a reality as we cultivate Christ’s presence day by day for a lifetime. That’s what we’re celebrating in this Christmas season: the Word became flesh and lived among us so that we could become citizens of heaven. May God increasingly enable us to seek Jesus with all our hearts and all our strength, to praise and exalt Him above all others, and to invite Him into every area of our lives. And may He enable us to persevere in doing this until that day when we see Him face to face.
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 and think there’s only one acceptable form of worship.
The third thing to notice, in verse 17, is that when we’re living with an awareness 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 awhile, 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 bests 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 it 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 our conflicts 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? Put 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 reading and meditating on 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.
In 1978, I was working with a team in India and we spent two weeks with a missionary named A.R. Fromman. He was 92 years old at the time, and he’d been in India for 65 years. He’d been walking with God over a very long lifetime, and he exemplified these qualities more than anyone I’ve ever met. He lived with a constant awareness of the reality of Christ’s presence, and he was overflowing with joyful assurance. But he wasn’t that way at the beginning of his Christian life. He became that way by walking with God, by spending time in His Word, and seeking to apply it to his life. And the interesting thing is that being around him didn’t lead me to put him on a pedestal; it made me want to know God better. He didn’t draw attention to himself; he pointed us to Jesus. There are no shortcuts to the things Paul describes in these verses. These are qualities that become a reality as we cultivate Christ’s presence day by day for a lifetime. That’s what we’re celebrating in this Christmas season: the Word became flesh and lived among us so that we could become citizens of heaven. May God increasingly enable us to seek Jesus with all our hearts and all our strength, to praise and exalt Him above all others, and to invite Him into every area of our lives. And may He enable us to persevere in doing this until that day when we see Him face to face.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
A Mission Born in Prayer, Nehemiah 2:1-10
A Mission Born in Prayer
Nehemiah 2:1-10
19th Sunday after Pentecost
Shiloh Lutheran Church
The sermon this morning is a follow up on last week’s sermon on the power of prayer. That’s why we’re looking at Nehemiah 2 rather than one of the lectionary readings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, four children are visiting their uncle during their holiday from school. It’s a large old house, full of great places to explore. At one point, visitors come to the house and the children hide in a wardrobe to avoid having to talk to them. But once they enter the wardrobe, they find themselves in another world, the land of Narnia, where they experience many adventures and where the whole course of their lives is changed. They enter the wardrobe to hide, and the things that happen affect them for the rest of their lives. Surprising things happen to them, things they never could have anticipated.
Prayer is like that. When we come before God in prayer, we never know what is going to happen. When we pray, we come into the presence of the One who claims absolute lordship over our lives. We need to know that our prayers may set in motion things that will change the entire direction of our lives. This may not be our intention at all; it may be the last thing that enters our minds at the time. But because we’re dealing with God, our Creator and Redeemer, we never know what might happen when we begin to pray.
Prayer is not a safe, tame activity. When we begin praying, we’re not the ones in control. We’re not in charge. After the children enter the land of Narnia, they begin hearing about Aslan, the King, and learn that He is a lion. So Susan asks, “Is he–quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” And the conversation continues: “‘That you will, dearie, and no mistake,’ said Mrs. Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’ ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pp. 75-76). God is good, but He is not safe. He’s the King, and He claims absolute lordship over our lives. When we come into His presence, we never know what is going to happen.
And, when we begin crying out to God about a situation that concerns us, we never know when He is going to call us to become part of the answer. That’s what happened to Nehemiah. He began praying to God about the situation in Jerusalem, and then God called him to leave his home and become part of the solution. He had a very good position in the king’s court. Things were going well for him professionally. He had a stable, prestigious job. But when he started praying, God called him to leave all that behind and travel to Jerusalem, a place that was in ruin and disarray. Let’s look at how this all happened in Nehemiah’s life.
The first thing to notice is that it did not happen immediately. He had heard about the problems in Jerusalem late in the fall, and chapter two begins “Early the following spring” (NLT). The events Nehemiah is describing in chapter two came after several months of prayer and waiting on God (you can read about that in chapter 1). Nehemiah didn’t make a hasty decision. He didn’t rush off in foolish zeal. When we were working on the ship Logos, an American pastor and his wife visited for about two weeks, teaching, preaching and ministering to the people on the ship, then they returned home. Several weeks later, they showed up at the bottom of the gangway with their suitcases. They had resigned from their church, sold their home, and traveled to the ship without consulting anyone. No one knew they were coming, and the leaders weren’t quite sure what to do with them. They had been stirred spiritually on their first visit, and when they got home they made a hasty decision to leave everything behind and join permanently. Nehemiah’s decision was not made in haste. He waited for the right moment.
We need to know that God is not in a hurry. He’s not in a hurry in answering our prayers, and He’s not in a hurry about showing us what our part is going to be in the answer. He calls us to continue going about our duties right where we are, to cry out to Him and submit to His lordship. And as we do that, He makes His will clear in His own time. In the late fall, when Nehemiah started praying and fasting, he had a strong concern but it’s unlikely that he had any sense of direction about what he would be doing about the problem. But as he prayed and waited on God, an idea started forming in his mind. As he continued praying, that idea became so clear and unshakable that he just couldn’t get away from it. When the time came to take a definite step, God had prepared him. Those months of waiting and prayer were an important part of the process.
The second thing is that when the right moment did come, Nehemiah needed a great deal of courage to act on his plan. In verse 2, Nehemiah says, “I was very much afraid.” He’s been confronted by the king about his sadness: “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” Why does this frighten him? First of all, because his personal sadness doesn’t belong in the king’s court. He’s supposed to be cheerful in the king’s presence; he’s not supposed to be there dragging everyone else down with his personal struggles. In those days when kings exercised absolute power, Nehemiah could have been put to death for allowing himself to show sadness while he was serving the king.
But that’s not the only thing. The king’s question opens the door for Nehemiah to make his request, the thing that’s been weighing on his mind. He’s been waiting for the right moment, and now it’s arrived. It’s not just a private idea any more; Nehemiah is at a point where he needs to step out and act on the things God’s been showing him. There are two opposite dangers when we’re confronted with a situation like this. The first danger is to rush ahead without seeking God’s direction. Nehemiah hasn’t fallen into that danger. But the opposite danger is that we endlessly form ideas that we never act on. We wait on the Lord, like we’re called to do, but then when the time comes to act, we lose our nerve and back down. We get used to waiting and never get out of that mode.
T.S. Eliot has a poem that describes a person like that, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At the beginning of the poem, Prufrock sounds very bold. In the first section of the poem he’s calling for action: “Let us go then, you and I.” He repeats that line a few times early on, then the key phrase in the next section is “and indeed there will be time.” He’s hesitating now; he can’t seem to get over his sense of inertia. In Nehemiah’s place, he would have let the moment pass: “I’ll bring this up another time, not right now.” Later in the poem, he’s looking back, saying “And would it have been worth it, after all” (T.S. Eliot: The Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 3-7). The longer he waited, the more paralyzed he became, and finally he just gave up. He lost his courage. His bold intentions became fantasies in the end.
Nehemiah doesn’t do that. When the moment comes, he speaks tactfully but honestly to the king: “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” He doesn’t make his request yet. He answers the king’s question tactfully and wisely. The burial place of one’s ancestors was an important thing to people during this time, so the king would likely feel sympathy. And Nehemiah doesn’t immediately name Jerusalem; sometime earlier, the king had ruled against the rebuilding of the city (you can read about that in Ezra 4), so what Nehemiah is asking for is a reversal of the king’s earlier decision. On the whole, this is a very touchy situation, but Nehemiah doesn’t back down, like J. Alfred Prufrock does. He moves ahead cautiously, but he does move ahead.
His initial response opens the way for a further question from the king: “What is it you want?” Then notice what he does next: “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.” Before he responds to the king’s question, he turns his heart to God looking for help. But this isn’t the first time he’s prayed about the situation. He’s spent the past four months or so crying out to God on behalf of Jerusalem, so this brief prayer when he’s in the presence of the king is rooted in months of unhurried time in God’s presence. He prays briefly, then he goes ahead: “and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.” It took great courage for Nehemiah to bring this to the king. Those months that he spent praying brought him finally to this point where he had to step out of his comfort zone. It wasn’t easy for him. He was very much afraid, as he tells us. But he did it, looking to God for help.
The third thing is this: while he was waiting all those months in prayer, Nehemiah made good use of his time. He’s been thinking through the details of a plan. He’s been waiting, but he hasn’t been idle. He’s made good use of his time during this waiting period, so when the time comes he is ready. The king says yes to the initial request, and then notice what Nehemiah does next: “I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters... so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?”
We make a serious mistake when we set spirituality and practicality at odds with each other. There was no conflict between Nehemiah’s intense prayer and his practical planning. His awareness of these practical needs that he brings to the king here is part of the way God has equipped him for the work. The time Nehemiah has spent planning out these details is not less pleasing to God than the time he’s spent in prayer and fasting. He’s doing it all in obedience to God’s lordship; it’s all part of the same work.
God calls us to pray, but He doesn’t call us only to pray. He calls us to bring every area of our lives under His lordship, to offer everything we do as an act of worship. For Nehemiah, this meant long hours planning out the details of what he was going to do. I’ve known many people who assume that the leading of the Spirit always happens spontaneously, when we act on the spur of the moment. In this view, Nehemiah would have been better off not planning, simply trusting God to put the right ideas into his mind when he needed them.
Some years ago, I was in a church service and when the pastor stood up to give the sermon he said, “I don’t have a sermon for you this morning; I have a word from the Lord.” We were supposed to be impressed that he was subject to the immediate inspiration of the Spirit in this way; he wasn’t giving us a sermon, he was giving us something better. But it wasn’t better. His “word from the Lord” sounded like the unfocused rambling of someone who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say. If he had a “word from the Lord” he’d lost track of it sometime before he got into the pulpit. He was relying on God to give him a word right then, while he was standing in the pulpit, but God had given him a whole week to pray and seek a message from Scripture. He was deceived by a false view of spirituality. There’s nothing unspiritual about planning and preparation. It’s part of what God calls us to do. God had given that preacher the gift of a whole week to come up with a message for the church; but he squandered that gift and was hoping to be bailed out by the immediate inspiration of the Spirit.
As Nehemiah has been crying out to God all these months, God has been preparing him for this moment. He responds well. He acts with courage; when he gains the king’s favor he presses further to get the things he needs to carry out the job. He’s not jumping out into the dark. He knows what he’s doing and what it will take to carry out the task. And he also knows why everything is going so well. Listen to what he says: “And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests.” He attributes it all to God. God has been preparing Nehemiah for this moment.
Prayer is not a safe activity. We never know what God is going to do when we come into His presence. As Nehemiah prays, God leads him out of his secure position into the insecurity of trying to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem. Everything falls into place when Nehemiah is with the king, but as soon as he arrives in Trans-Jordan, he encounters the beginnings of the opposition which will plague him throughout this book. The life God calls him to in Jerusalem is filled with hardship, sacrifice, difficulty and opposition. His life, in many ways, was easier as cupbearer to the king. But as he prayed, God called him to leave that behind.
Prayer is not a safe activity, because we follow One who perfectly modeled the sort of thing we see in Nehemiah: “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death–and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever” (Philippians 2, The Message). Knowing all that He’s done for us, let’s come before Him in prayer acknowledging His right to do whatever He wants with our lives. And then, having prayed, let’s seek to order every area of our lives in obedience to Him, no matter what He calls us to do, no matter what He calls us to give up, no matter where He calls us to go in His name. God is not safe, but He is good and He has good things planned for His people in the future. In the meantime, let’s offer ourselves in gratitude to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and follow Him wherever He leads.
Nehemiah 2:1-10
19th Sunday after Pentecost
Shiloh Lutheran Church
The sermon this morning is a follow up on last week’s sermon on the power of prayer. That’s why we’re looking at Nehemiah 2 rather than one of the lectionary readings. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, four children are visiting their uncle during their holiday from school. It’s a large old house, full of great places to explore. At one point, visitors come to the house and the children hide in a wardrobe to avoid having to talk to them. But once they enter the wardrobe, they find themselves in another world, the land of Narnia, where they experience many adventures and where the whole course of their lives is changed. They enter the wardrobe to hide, and the things that happen affect them for the rest of their lives. Surprising things happen to them, things they never could have anticipated.
Prayer is like that. When we come before God in prayer, we never know what is going to happen. When we pray, we come into the presence of the One who claims absolute lordship over our lives. We need to know that our prayers may set in motion things that will change the entire direction of our lives. This may not be our intention at all; it may be the last thing that enters our minds at the time. But because we’re dealing with God, our Creator and Redeemer, we never know what might happen when we begin to pray.
Prayer is not a safe, tame activity. When we begin praying, we’re not the ones in control. We’re not in charge. After the children enter the land of Narnia, they begin hearing about Aslan, the King, and learn that He is a lion. So Susan asks, “Is he–quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” And the conversation continues: “‘That you will, dearie, and no mistake,’ said Mrs. Beaver, ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.’ ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pp. 75-76). God is good, but He is not safe. He’s the King, and He claims absolute lordship over our lives. When we come into His presence, we never know what is going to happen.
And, when we begin crying out to God about a situation that concerns us, we never know when He is going to call us to become part of the answer. That’s what happened to Nehemiah. He began praying to God about the situation in Jerusalem, and then God called him to leave his home and become part of the solution. He had a very good position in the king’s court. Things were going well for him professionally. He had a stable, prestigious job. But when he started praying, God called him to leave all that behind and travel to Jerusalem, a place that was in ruin and disarray. Let’s look at how this all happened in Nehemiah’s life.
The first thing to notice is that it did not happen immediately. He had heard about the problems in Jerusalem late in the fall, and chapter two begins “Early the following spring” (NLT). The events Nehemiah is describing in chapter two came after several months of prayer and waiting on God (you can read about that in chapter 1). Nehemiah didn’t make a hasty decision. He didn’t rush off in foolish zeal. When we were working on the ship Logos, an American pastor and his wife visited for about two weeks, teaching, preaching and ministering to the people on the ship, then they returned home. Several weeks later, they showed up at the bottom of the gangway with their suitcases. They had resigned from their church, sold their home, and traveled to the ship without consulting anyone. No one knew they were coming, and the leaders weren’t quite sure what to do with them. They had been stirred spiritually on their first visit, and when they got home they made a hasty decision to leave everything behind and join permanently. Nehemiah’s decision was not made in haste. He waited for the right moment.
We need to know that God is not in a hurry. He’s not in a hurry in answering our prayers, and He’s not in a hurry about showing us what our part is going to be in the answer. He calls us to continue going about our duties right where we are, to cry out to Him and submit to His lordship. And as we do that, He makes His will clear in His own time. In the late fall, when Nehemiah started praying and fasting, he had a strong concern but it’s unlikely that he had any sense of direction about what he would be doing about the problem. But as he prayed and waited on God, an idea started forming in his mind. As he continued praying, that idea became so clear and unshakable that he just couldn’t get away from it. When the time came to take a definite step, God had prepared him. Those months of waiting and prayer were an important part of the process.
The second thing is that when the right moment did come, Nehemiah needed a great deal of courage to act on his plan. In verse 2, Nehemiah says, “I was very much afraid.” He’s been confronted by the king about his sadness: “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” Why does this frighten him? First of all, because his personal sadness doesn’t belong in the king’s court. He’s supposed to be cheerful in the king’s presence; he’s not supposed to be there dragging everyone else down with his personal struggles. In those days when kings exercised absolute power, Nehemiah could have been put to death for allowing himself to show sadness while he was serving the king.
But that’s not the only thing. The king’s question opens the door for Nehemiah to make his request, the thing that’s been weighing on his mind. He’s been waiting for the right moment, and now it’s arrived. It’s not just a private idea any more; Nehemiah is at a point where he needs to step out and act on the things God’s been showing him. There are two opposite dangers when we’re confronted with a situation like this. The first danger is to rush ahead without seeking God’s direction. Nehemiah hasn’t fallen into that danger. But the opposite danger is that we endlessly form ideas that we never act on. We wait on the Lord, like we’re called to do, but then when the time comes to act, we lose our nerve and back down. We get used to waiting and never get out of that mode.
T.S. Eliot has a poem that describes a person like that, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At the beginning of the poem, Prufrock sounds very bold. In the first section of the poem he’s calling for action: “Let us go then, you and I.” He repeats that line a few times early on, then the key phrase in the next section is “and indeed there will be time.” He’s hesitating now; he can’t seem to get over his sense of inertia. In Nehemiah’s place, he would have let the moment pass: “I’ll bring this up another time, not right now.” Later in the poem, he’s looking back, saying “And would it have been worth it, after all” (T.S. Eliot: The Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 3-7). The longer he waited, the more paralyzed he became, and finally he just gave up. He lost his courage. His bold intentions became fantasies in the end.
Nehemiah doesn’t do that. When the moment comes, he speaks tactfully but honestly to the king: “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” He doesn’t make his request yet. He answers the king’s question tactfully and wisely. The burial place of one’s ancestors was an important thing to people during this time, so the king would likely feel sympathy. And Nehemiah doesn’t immediately name Jerusalem; sometime earlier, the king had ruled against the rebuilding of the city (you can read about that in Ezra 4), so what Nehemiah is asking for is a reversal of the king’s earlier decision. On the whole, this is a very touchy situation, but Nehemiah doesn’t back down, like J. Alfred Prufrock does. He moves ahead cautiously, but he does move ahead.
His initial response opens the way for a further question from the king: “What is it you want?” Then notice what he does next: “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.” Before he responds to the king’s question, he turns his heart to God looking for help. But this isn’t the first time he’s prayed about the situation. He’s spent the past four months or so crying out to God on behalf of Jerusalem, so this brief prayer when he’s in the presence of the king is rooted in months of unhurried time in God’s presence. He prays briefly, then he goes ahead: “and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.” It took great courage for Nehemiah to bring this to the king. Those months that he spent praying brought him finally to this point where he had to step out of his comfort zone. It wasn’t easy for him. He was very much afraid, as he tells us. But he did it, looking to God for help.
The third thing is this: while he was waiting all those months in prayer, Nehemiah made good use of his time. He’s been thinking through the details of a plan. He’s been waiting, but he hasn’t been idle. He’s made good use of his time during this waiting period, so when the time comes he is ready. The king says yes to the initial request, and then notice what Nehemiah does next: “I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters... so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?”
We make a serious mistake when we set spirituality and practicality at odds with each other. There was no conflict between Nehemiah’s intense prayer and his practical planning. His awareness of these practical needs that he brings to the king here is part of the way God has equipped him for the work. The time Nehemiah has spent planning out these details is not less pleasing to God than the time he’s spent in prayer and fasting. He’s doing it all in obedience to God’s lordship; it’s all part of the same work.
God calls us to pray, but He doesn’t call us only to pray. He calls us to bring every area of our lives under His lordship, to offer everything we do as an act of worship. For Nehemiah, this meant long hours planning out the details of what he was going to do. I’ve known many people who assume that the leading of the Spirit always happens spontaneously, when we act on the spur of the moment. In this view, Nehemiah would have been better off not planning, simply trusting God to put the right ideas into his mind when he needed them.
Some years ago, I was in a church service and when the pastor stood up to give the sermon he said, “I don’t have a sermon for you this morning; I have a word from the Lord.” We were supposed to be impressed that he was subject to the immediate inspiration of the Spirit in this way; he wasn’t giving us a sermon, he was giving us something better. But it wasn’t better. His “word from the Lord” sounded like the unfocused rambling of someone who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say. If he had a “word from the Lord” he’d lost track of it sometime before he got into the pulpit. He was relying on God to give him a word right then, while he was standing in the pulpit, but God had given him a whole week to pray and seek a message from Scripture. He was deceived by a false view of spirituality. There’s nothing unspiritual about planning and preparation. It’s part of what God calls us to do. God had given that preacher the gift of a whole week to come up with a message for the church; but he squandered that gift and was hoping to be bailed out by the immediate inspiration of the Spirit.
As Nehemiah has been crying out to God all these months, God has been preparing him for this moment. He responds well. He acts with courage; when he gains the king’s favor he presses further to get the things he needs to carry out the job. He’s not jumping out into the dark. He knows what he’s doing and what it will take to carry out the task. And he also knows why everything is going so well. Listen to what he says: “And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests.” He attributes it all to God. God has been preparing Nehemiah for this moment.
Prayer is not a safe activity. We never know what God is going to do when we come into His presence. As Nehemiah prays, God leads him out of his secure position into the insecurity of trying to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem. Everything falls into place when Nehemiah is with the king, but as soon as he arrives in Trans-Jordan, he encounters the beginnings of the opposition which will plague him throughout this book. The life God calls him to in Jerusalem is filled with hardship, sacrifice, difficulty and opposition. His life, in many ways, was easier as cupbearer to the king. But as he prayed, God called him to leave that behind.
Prayer is not a safe activity, because we follow One who perfectly modeled the sort of thing we see in Nehemiah: “Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death–and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever” (Philippians 2, The Message). Knowing all that He’s done for us, let’s come before Him in prayer acknowledging His right to do whatever He wants with our lives. And then, having prayed, let’s seek to order every area of our lives in obedience to Him, no matter what He calls us to do, no matter what He calls us to give up, no matter where He calls us to go in His name. God is not safe, but He is good and He has good things planned for His people in the future. In the meantime, let’s offer ourselves in gratitude to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and follow Him wherever He leads.
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