Nov 24, 2006

"The God-life: Where our deep thankfulness and our deep struggle meet."

If you would flip to Matthew 4:18….

One of the fundamental realities we are called to live into as followers of Jesus is that God knows better than we do what we have been created for and what in the world that looks like. And, as people who agree that this is true, we also recognize that this is not easy, this business of giving up control of our wills and our lives and entrusting them to God.

I will walk out of this place of worship today and will find all number of ways to justify to God why I should be allowed to keep this part or that part of my life for myself, and God will continue to remind me through his Word here, through brother and sisters who will challenge me here and elsewhere, and through prayer that He knows better than me, and that that is a GOOD thing, a WONDERFUL thing, a HARD thing, but the most FULFILLING thing I will ever do.

Finding meaning in a growing relationship with God will plant, water, and cultivate a deeper and deeper thankfulness in our lives as we live into this business of following Jesus. But this deeper thankfulness will not come from a denial of the reality that living is more often than not a struggle, and requires from us a commitment to walking in the footsteps of Jesus no matter what else happens to us in our lives.

It is in the midst of this struggle, when we call out to God, and order our lives around who and what we have been called to be as His people, that this deep thankfulness settles in.

But it ALLLLLLL starts when we make the hard, fearful move to commit to follow Jesus no matter where the path leads.

And that is why it seems like it was just an entirely natural thing to do, if we open to Matthew 4:18, as if it’s totally normal that, as Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, who were casting a net into a lake, and Jesus said, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” and in response, they left their nets, their trade, their life, and followed him. Shortly thereafter, they’re walking further down by the Sea and see James and John, who were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets, and Jesus called them, and what happened?!?!?

We might stop to think here for a second, scratch our heads, and wonder…now how in the world did Jesus just talk to these guys and invite them to come along with him, and they left everything to follow him? Did he have an extremely charismatic personality? Did he smile just right? Did he flash some cash-money at them in his hand as he spoke? I think we can be fairly certain it wasn’t that last one, but that should be a mystery to us…

All things considered, it should strike us that it indeed DID sound natural and good and right for these disciples to abandon everything their lives centered around and follow Jesus. Maybe they had heard Jesus speak before, maybe his message of hope and reconciliation and this new thing God was doing inspired them to follow Him…

If we stopped here, we’d have a fairy tale ending…and they left their nets and followed him into the sunset, and lived happily ever after. The problem with that fairy tale ending, though, is that the story doesn’t exactly go that way.

You see, Jesus is sharing this message of hope and reconciliation, revealing to the people in Palestine what they’ve been created to be, and time after time in the gospels we see phrases like “everyone was AMAZED and gave praise to God” or “they were filled with awe and said, ‘We have seen remarkable things today!’” or “they were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority,” had some weight to it, some mmmmph! And “who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.” Wonderful, miraculous things are happening all around these disciples…it’s EASY to follow Jesus! Walking around in these massive crowds with people pointing and whispering, “I’ve seen that person with Jesus…they’re close to him,” feeling like a celebrity.

But THEN Jesus starts ruffling the feathers of the religious establishment of the day, getting enemies for straight-talk about the dangers of wealth and pride and self-sufficiency, and things start to get tense. Jesus busts off and says “If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” The disciples had to be confused here, muttering angrily to each other that maybe this guy wasn’t who they thought he was.

Then Jesus starts talking about something that I would guess would make us terribly uncomfortable today too in John 6, starting in verse 41, when he starts talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, to which the disciples respond the way I know I’d respond, “This is HARD teaching! Who can accept it!” and at this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

You see, Jesus didn’t end up fitting the definition for many of them of what the Messiah would look like, he didn’t toe the same line, allow the disciples to continue in their self-centeredness, or the Pharisees to continue in their twisted version of the faith they had received from their fathers. Jesus comforted, but also challenged, showed mercy, but also flashed with anger…and ultimately was murdered because his message was so offensive and so counter to everything folks had been expecting that he was too unsafe to allow to live.

And this was all driven because those who hated him and those who left him refused to give up their approach to life and embrace his, even though it was what they were created for. THAT’S how much your life and mine is turned upside-down and how desperate we are in need of submitting that God knows better than we do, and how THANKFUL we are as we find how empty and directionless our lives were before we made this decision to love God with everything we are.

And the disciples that stick through this all, even though they turned tail and ran at Jesus’ arrest, find in their gathering together, worshiping together, praying together, Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit, and God confirming the message of truth with signs and wonders…even in the face of intense persecution…find a deep gladness, thankfulness, and peace that nothing in the world can disturb.

And that is why it is SO NECESSARY after we’ve talked over the last two weeks about needing to admit as a church family that we are powerless, lacking in identity, that our lives are unmanageable without God, that we make the necessary move to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. Completely.

And I am unqualified to say this with ANY legimitacy because I will more than likely walk out of this place of worship and will show in many areas of my life that it’s more defined by me and my thoughts and my perspectives and my priorities than God’s. I think you will too. Not telling you, just suggesting.

Because if there’s one word that holds the potential to make us cringe, it’s this: Surrender

What does that word make you think of?

I think it’s a great word for us to run with today, because both the Old Testament and New are FULL of reminders for us that the world is in direct rebellion against God, a civil war if you will, where we simply refuse to LISTEN. And the process of turning our lives over to God, surrendering, is no small puppy of a problem!

As C.S. Lewis said, “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor--that is the only way out of our 'hole'. This process of surrender--this movement full speed astern--is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.

And that’s why this can be so hard sometimes, and why it was so hard for the disciples! Because we say to God, I give my will, my life to you, but we walk out the door and take things over ourselves. In some sense, we treat God as if he runs some sort of emergency crew we can call on when all else fails or when our control of a situation or person starts slipping. We say, “God gave me all these abilities, and I’m going to do what I can to solve each problem first. I’ll turn my problem over to him after I have done all that I can.” There’s a certain truth in that approach in that we try to solve a problem, attack it ourselves, recognize we can’t, and THEN turn the problem or issue over to God. But the process is backwards if we approach it like this.

We could look at it like this, a Christian businesswoman might get into a business deal, for example. She puts together a team to get the job done: an accountant a lawyer, a tax advisor, a banker, and God- and uses them in that order. When everyone else has done their part, the businesswoman calls on God to come through with the victory: the goal of the businesswoman. The bottom line is the woman is telling God what to do, and will be terribly upset if He doesn’t come through the way she wants.

The reality, I think, is that many of us are in denial, and we’re so confused that we don’t know God’s will, and we’re not pursuing God as fully as we could, so we’re not growing in deeper understanding of the voice of God, so we settle for what I call a slot-machine God…the God that pops up when things are out of control.

When a family member gets sick, I pray and expect God to Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! heal my family member and get angry and question his existence if he doesn’t.

When I mess up, I pray that God would remove the consequences of my actions and Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Maybe he does…but maybe he doesn’t and I get angry.

If I’m going through a tough time, I pray that God would lift my struggles and give me a direct answer…but He may not, and I don’t understand why I continue to go through these struggles…I don’t trust that God sees the bigger picture. It’s like I expect God to be a bigger version of Nate Myers to want what I want and do what I do; answer my every whim.

But, thankfully, that’s not God! And in order to let God cultivate, water, and nurture the seed of thankfulness and purpose and meaning in my life, I need to lose the image of the God I only need in the midst of catastrophe, or the slot-machine God who can be manipulated by me. I have to continually give my will and my life over to God. This change of direction is what the Bible calls conversion. But, unfortunately, the revolutionary reality of this change and commitment has often been lost, and we do not realize the extent of our rebellion. So we often continue to try to get God to do our will by the way we pray, worship, and live. That is a discouraging lifestyle to live, one I often find myself in.

But the God-centered life is one where we change the direction of our lives from the way WE THINK they should go to the way God thinks they should go. And in this process, we find roots, we find life, we find deep thankfulness.

In conclusion here this morning, I’m going to share a situation from the life of a man named Johannel Hamel, pastor of a small congregation in communist East Germany. Johannel and his church family existed in a system under communism which was atheistic and hostile to followers of Jesus, and Johannel struggled deeply with the issue of truth vs comfort: when he asked“Should a Christian in a communist land make an issue of honesty and faith?...or should they lie low and seem to accept the system and its injustices?”

Hamel made the decision to focus on the first, honesty, and that in the process God “opens doors” as the church walks obediently one step at a time: saying “time and again God creates loopholes, so to speak, open space in the midst of closed systems of unbelief and hatred of God. The possibility is offered and realized here for doing the good, reasonable, well-pleasing, (and faithful act), although this system seems to leave no room for such action.

Where we take our place in this honesty of the Gospel, there opens, usually by surprise, a door through which we can pass through to move on in our earthly life. To be sure most of the time this door is only visible in the last moment. We must have enough faith to run up against a doorless wall up to the last centimeter, in the certain hope that God who leads one this way will not allow his people to break their heads… More than once as a people we have believed ourselves to be finished…Then in the last minute God stepped in and made it clear to us, so clear that we were ashamed of ourselves, so that he only needs to move a little finger to make things come out quite otherwise that we could have ever imagined.

And I think that carries so much truth for us a church family at Middle River today. Placing God at the center of our church life and decisions and dreams will start an adventure for us…one with changed lives and a changed community of New Hope, and change taking place in the cities surrounding us, in our families…but it must start in our hearts as we make the decision each morning when we wake up to turn our will and our life over to God…and it is that crucial decision made each day that will enable you and me to look back on our lives and see the work of God amongst us.