Are we an earthly being formed of the very
humus to which we will one day return?
Are we a spiritual being that only
transits the time and space of this age?
Are
we from the earth or of the Spirit? Yes.
God formed Adam out of the dust and breathed life into
him. He breathed his neshamah (nesh-aw-maw')—his spirit into
him and only then did he become a living
being.
Jesus talked with Nicodemus about the flesh and
the Spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh and what
is born of Spirit is spirit.
Paul wrote that flesh and blood cannot inherit the
Kingdom of God. The perishable cannot
inherit the imperishable.
So how did we get from needing bread
in the middle of the night to flesh and the spirit? Through a parable, some count this pericope
as two parables; that’s how we got here.
Imagine awakening in the middle of the
night to knocking at your door. You
recognize the voice. Even though you
recognize the voice you still say to yourself, or perhaps out loud, “Just who
in their right mind would be knocking on my door at zero dark thirty?”
You talk through the door and discover
that a long lost friend had dropped in on one of your friends. Did you have some lunch meat, a microwave
dinner or two, or even some Pizza Rolls would be fine.
Your still half-asleep mind repeats,
“You’ve got to be kidding me! This town
really needs a Denny's.”
“You are really not over here in the
middle of the night asking for food, are you?
Are you?”
But that is surely a rhetorical
question as this zero dark thirty conversation is no dream. So what do you do?
As much as you didn’t want to drag
yourself out of bed, you have. As much
as you want to tell your friend to hit the road, you can’t. As much as you wish you had a drive through
window to just slide your buddy a six
pack of Ramen, you don’t, so you let your friend in and search though the
fridge, get him a couple partial loaves of bread, some cold cuts, a tomato that
you had been saving for a BLT, and you remembered that you did have a big bag
of Pizza Rolls in the deep freeze, and send him away with more than he asked
for—that’s what you do.
Then, of course, since you are awake
now, you post it all to Facebook.
Only a friend would have such audacity
to come to you at zero dark thirty. You
know that you are not going right back to sleep. You know that with a house full of kids you
are always two years or more behind on your sleep and this morning’s food
search for a friend will only add to that deficit. Such audacity for a friend to come to you in
the middle of the night—that will keep you up another hour or so just thinking
about it..
But that’s what he needed. That’s what your friend needed.
Jesus then moves from
parable to practice. This will be in a little different verb from
that you might have learned it, but consider our Lord’s guidance to us.
So I say to you, keep asking, and it will be
given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door
will be opened to you. For everyone who
asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the
door will be opened.
Again, Jesus has taken this quality of
persistence that we visited with the Parable of
the Persistent Widow—and
extended it to other areas of our lives.
If we continue to ask, it will be
given. Really?
If we keep seeking, we will find what
we are looking for? If we continue to
knock, the door will be open unto us?
That sounds like everything is in our control. If we keep after it then we will get what we
want. Is that the message?
I related this parable in modern terms—adjusting
the time a couple hours because we seem to stay up later in this post-modern
era—and did it from the perspective of the friend who was awakened in the
middle of the night. What if, as in the
original telling, you were the one knocking on the door in need of a little
food?
How did you bring yourself to wake up
someone at such an unreasonable hour?
The answer is that the person whose sleep you have so rudely interrupted
is a friend. He or she is a friend. This relationship is already in effect.
The story doesn’t read that you went
to a stranger’s house and started knocking and asking for food at 2:47 a.m.; at
least that’s the way it might read in the police blotter. If you do this in this part of the country,
you will likely hear a round being chambered in a 12 gauge or someone saying,
“I’m calling 9-1-1.”
Someone who is not a friend might
answer the door with a glazed look in his eyes and the smell of whacky weed
knocking you back a couple feet.
The story said that which one of you
shall have a friend and go to him at midnight.
The key word here is not midnight
but friend. It doesn’t matter which side of the door you
might be on—the knocking side or the suddenly awakened side—the governing word
here is friend.
You will ask things of friends that
your reasonable mind would tell you not to ask of anyone else. And your friends will give things to you that
they might balk at giving to anyone else.
You can be audacious. You are a little bolder. You might just persist a little more with
your friends.
Jesus continued in his teaching with
some rhetorical questions. If you son
asked you for some bread, would you give him rock instead?
If he asked you for a fish, would you
surprise him with a live snake on this plate?
And don’t say, “It tastes like chicken.”
Mom, if your kids asked you to
scramble some eggs, would you serve them plates of scorpions? If you have kids who are teenagers now, you
are exempt from answering that question.
We who try to be good parents but sometimes
let our anger or frustration or just that generally overwhelmed feeling get to
us when we deal with our kids—we still know how to give good things to those
that we brought into this world. We want
to give them good things.
Baseball gloves and bicycles and dolls
and trucks and good meals and even pizza or pizza rolls all seem to make their
way to those little darlings even when they have truly tested our patience and
burst our budget. We know how to give good
things to our kids.
We give to our friends. We give to our kids. We who are still imperfect at least know how
to give to friends and family. We have
figured some stuff out. But what is it that we give?
Food, money, stuff, and sometimes help
and instruction and counsel are all on the list. Sometimes the list grows to smart phones and
cars and car insurance. We like to give
good gifts.
So does our Father in heaven. He likes to give us good things. If we seek his kingdom and his righteousness before
anything else in the world, he gives us so many tangible things that the
ungodly have made into their gods. He
meets our needs. When we strive to
follow him, he goes beyond what we need.
We know abundance.
James tells us that every good
gift is from above. Let’s get back to Luke and what Jesus is
specifically promising
those who continue to seek God.
If you then, who are evil, know how to give
good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?
Yes, God will provision us with our
daily rations. Remember that the daily
ration in the desert was Manna but it was an all you can eat affair with no
leftovers or doggie bags save on the Sabbath preparation day. He will make a way for us to not only survive
but navigate this world with the tangible things that we need.
God will take away things that we
don’t need if we will ask him. Worry,
anxiousness, bitterness, covetousness, and so many other things that detract
from our abundance he will simply remove from our gotta do or gotta have
lists if we will seek the life that he has for us and be persistent about it,
not just on occasion say, “I’ll give God’s way a try this once.”
But more than the things that our
hearts desire now—things that so often occupy most of our prayer requests—God
will grant us his Spirit. God wants his
Holy Spirit to live inside of us more and more each day.
He wants us to stop asking for the
things of this world and seek the things of his kingdom. He wants us to believe him that if we seek
him and his kingdom and his righteousness first—at the center of everything
else in our lives—the things of this world that we must have in our lives will
be given.
So many people have this upside
down. They say, “When I get my life
together, then I will seek God.”
When I can pay all of my bills…
When the kids get out of school…
When I get a better job…
When I get everything in this world
sorted out, then I can think about living for God…
Jesus tells us that God wants to live
inside of us now so that he can give us the things that we need the most, not
the things that our selfish nature craves, but the good life that God made us
to live. In the course of this good
life, we get a lot of those things that the self-centered person craves but
they are just frosting on the cake for us.
Flesh seeks fleshly things—bread,
money, cars, a good movie and popcorn on a Friday night. That’s our nature. Humankind after all, was made from the
earth. We need physical things.
But we are also of the Spirit. God breathed life into humankind. We are not just from the dust of the
earth. We have a spirit within us and
God desires so much for his Spirit to live more and more abundantly inside of
us.
What’s it like to give ourselves
totally to God’s own Spirit? Jesus when
he finished talking to a woman at a well in Sychar, Samaria was met by his
disciples who offered him something to eat.
That’s why they had gone into town.
Jesus told
them that he had food
that they knew nothing about.
What?
The disciples were still thinking of carnal needs. Did Jesus have a couple loaves of bread
tucked away somewhere. Did he get
delivery?
Jesus told them and he tells us that
his food is to do the will of the One who sent him. His food is to finish the work given to him
by his Father in heaven. His sustainment
is living his purpose.
That’s more filling that bread or
pizza rolls. Jesus did eat the food of
this world. He dined with Pharisees and
with sinners. He ate with his own
disciples. He did
fast for 40 days in the wilderness
at the beginning of his ministry that would conclude on the cross. For most of this three-year period, he ate
much like those who live all around him.
He ate regular food but he had food
that was so much better than bread or wine or even a lamb roasted for
Passover. He had the food of
purpose. He lived to fulfill
the will of his Father.
That is the gift that God so wants to
give us. He wants to fill us with his
Spirit. He wants to take away our
selfish cravings. So that:
We when ask our Father in heaven for
something, it will be exactly what he wants to give us.
When we seek after something, it will
be exactly what the Spirit has led us to desire.
When we knock, we will be knocking on
the door that God has longed so much to open unto us.
The disciples did not yet know the
Holy Spirit as they would later. The day
of Pentecost was still something to come for them and it would change their
lives more than they could have ever imagined.
God’s own Spirit has always been
available to us. When we professed our
faith in Jesus Christ, knowing in our hearts that God not only sent him as an
atoning sacrifice but raised him from the dead, the Spirit came to be a part of
us.
We became more than clay vessels. We have more than the human spirit that God breathed into humankind and makes us a living being. We now have God’s own Spirit alive within
us. The Holy Spirit lives within us.
The answer to most of our prayers
already lives within us. God’s own
Spirit is not in some faraway place but is dwelling within this temple that we
call our bodies and that Spirit has made this a holy temple.
We know that Jesus intercedes for us
with the Father in heaven, but how often do we forget that God’s own Spirit is
within us?
If a friend knocks on your door in the
middle of the night asking for bread, you will give it to him. If you do the same to him, he will give you
bread as well. How could anyone deny
such audaciousness from a friend?
When we come to God asking and seeking
and knocking in lives governed by his Holy Spirit that lives within us and not
by selfish desires; how could he not give us what we ask for?
Think of the absurd things that we do
for our friends and family—that defy reason sometimes but that we are compelled
to do because they are our friends or family.
Now imagine how much more your Father
in heaven wants to give you the very things that his own Spirit is leading us
to ask for, or prompting us to seek, or showing us a door to knock on that we
have walked by so many times.
Before Jesus would go to the cross and
finish the work that he had been sent to do, he told his disciples that he was
leaving them, at least for a time.
Knowing their worry and anxiety and that they would scatter as the
scriptures promised, Jesus promised that he would
not orphan them. He would go and the Holy Spirit would
come.
Jesus even promised these few very
nervous men that they would do very great
things. With God’s own Spirit with them, they surely
did.
We have not lived a single day since
professing Christ when God’s own Spirit has not been with us and within
us. But how many days do we just forget
about this?
How many trials do we withstand
forgetting that God’s own Spirit is within us?
How many times do we pray and feel
like God is so far away and doesn’t understand?
How many days do we feel like we are
in this struggle all by ourselves?
I don’t know what your answers are,
but I would like you to put zeros by all of these questions going forward. From now until the end of the age…
How many trials do we withstand
forgetting that God’s own Spirit is within us? 0
How many times do we pray and feel
like God is so far away and doesn’t understand? 0
How many days do we feel like we are
in this struggle all by ourselves? 0
So many of our prayers are already
answered by the fact that God lives within us now. He is available to us now. He is leading us to ask and seek and knock
exactly where we need to now.
Let us not live just knowing that
God’s Spirit is alive within us. Let us
live Spirit filled lives that desire to do the will of the Father so much that
some days, we might not need bread or money or even pizza rolls.
Let us be so governed by the Holy
Spirit that God will grant our every request because the things we ask for are
exactly the things he was been waiting to give us.
Thanks be to God that his Spirit lives
so abundantly within us. Amen!
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