Read Isaiah 48:1-11
The trouble with our generation is that it doesn’t take any work to make your own god. At least in millennia past, you had to carve something out of wood or chisel it out of stone or smelt it and shape it into the graven image of your choice. If you didn’t want to do this, you could take your hard-earned money and pay an artisan to make your god. If you weren’t too picky, you could just buy one off the shelf. It was sort of like prescription gods and over the counter gods.
Today you don’t even need a graven image to have a false god. You decide what your god does and does not like, would or would not do, and just how close all of his opinions happen to match yours. If you must have a graven image, you can make a Facebook post with color and emojis.
Now if you worship the twin gods of apathy and ambivalence, they don’t really care if they have an emoji or not.
The good thing about making your own god is that if your thinking or feelings change later on, your god changes with them. That’s the way we roll.
The bad thing is—and you know this all along when you make your own god—is that a god made in your own image is not the one true God.
The one true God is not obliged to agree with you on everything. If fact he is not required to agree with you on anything. He is sovereign. He is holy. He is righteous. He is your Creator. He is your Judge. And in spite of ourselves, he is our Savior, Redeemer, and the Atoning Sacrifice for our sins.
In spite of our stubborn nature, he still loves us. His blood was spilled on a cross for a stubborn, stiff-necked people. I am not just talking about the Jews.
Here’s a news flash. The past 2000 years did not really make us more enlightened, receptive, or conducive to hearing the truth. In fact, our advances in society have made is very easy to construct our own gods.
Of all the sins of God’s Chosen People, the one that would lead them into exile in Babylon was this tendency to worship other gods. They turned away from the one true God in favor of those made by human hands.
Let’s turn back the calendar a bit from Isaiah’s time.
Even when God’s Chosen People entered the Promised Land, they were not truly right with God. Their hearts and minds would wander again and again.
Even among God’s first people in a world begging for human life, Cain would bring death by murder. Well brother, I guess this world is just not big enough for the both of us.
Sometimes when we are in a contemplative mood, we might wonder: God what were you thinking? Knowing our tendencies if we were given a free will, how could you make us in this way? How could you give us a free will? Surely, you knew that we would make a mess of it.
In the time before the captivity, God’s Chosen People were saying all the religiously-correct words. We are God’s People. We live in the Holy City. We take our oaths in God’s name. None of these were done in truth or righteousness. What was done in God’s name was perfunctory. It was going through the motions.
God’s corrective action was severe and came at the hands of the Babylonians, and it was not like it was some kind of surprise. It’s not like one day, God just said: Surprise, I’m letting these pagans have their way with you.
Again and again, God had warned his people. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah were prominent during this time. It’s not like the people had not been repeatedly warned, but they were a stubborn people.
God would refine them not as silver, but in the furnace of affliction. God disciplines those that he loves. We are not talking wrath, but discipline. Now, when the Babylonians destroyed the temple and the holy city, the people who were left probably thought that this looks a lot like wrath, but it was discipline.
Of all the things that I could have brought into this discussion of love, love and action, love and rest and peace, God disciplines those whom he loves could have been left for another time. Or not!
To skip over this would be to deny that we do have trouble in the world. If it is because we follow the Christ and the world persecutes us for it, count yourself blessed. If it is because you have decided to redact your Bibles and take out the parts about God that you don’t like, your trouble might be God’s discipline.
Actions have consequences. You drink too much, you might just have a hangover. You don’t work, you might not pay your bills. You satisfy your every selfish need, you might be making a god in your own image and losing sight of the one true God.
This sounds like a lead-in to law-based salvation. It is not. It is simple optometry. It is about having eyes to see.
From creation to the present, humankind has never truly accepted God’s divine guidance for how to live. Some periods might have been better than others but this one unique characteristic kept resurfacing—stubbornness.
Here is the definition of stubborn from the Oxford Dictionary.
Having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, especially in spite of good arguments or reasons to do so.
In spite of knowing better… Think about it. Stubbornness is doing what we have decided to do in spite of knowing better.
In every age, it’s not that God’s people did not know, they chose their way over God’s way. That continues today. It is very much present today. If you are going to do things God’s way, you will be the oddball and sometimes the outcast from the mainstream.
If you profess one true living God who sent his Son into this world to take away your sin, you will be dismissed as archaic and out of touch with modern times.
If you insist on speaking the truth in a spirit of love, you will be called a radical and your life will be a free-fire zone for hateful comments.
James told his fellow Hebrew believers, that if this sort of stuff happens to you, count it as pure joy. Count it as a blessing. You are not being confused with the world and its ways. You have not signed up for the flavor of the month god.
If you have a hangover because you drank too much last night, do not count that as a blessing. Take it as an admonishment.
If you got fired, again, because you told your boss what he could do with his policies, do not count that as a blessing. Take it as a warning sign.
If you got a speeding ticket for going way over the limit and it’s going to take a week’s pay to cover it, do not count that as a blessing. It is a wakeup call.
We are a stubborn people. Left to our own inclinations, we can make a mess out of anything. But in our stubbornness, God still loves us.
He loves us when the world persecutes us for his namesake. He loves us when we abide in our own stubborn nature. His love is manifested in different ways for each. Blessing for the former and discipline for the latter.
Does God send bad things into the world to discipline us? No. But what about the Babylonians?
The Babylonians were on a course to conquer the known world. Jerusalem was beyond their reach until God stood back and let his people deal with the consequences of their stubbornness. But it did not have to be that way.
Consider what the prophet said in the second part of this chapter.
This is what the Lord says—
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go.
If only you had paid attention to my commands,
your peace would have been like a river,
your well-being like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been like the sand,
your children like its numberless grains;
their name would never be blotted out
nor destroyed from before me.”
So what are we to take from all of this?
We are stubborn. Don’t take this as always being a bad thing. We are equipped to be stubborn for the Lord. We can stubbornly follow the Lord and his ways even when the world does everything it can to convinces us otherwise.
Historically, we are often stubborn in the ways of the world even when God has been clear in his commands and decrees that he gave us for our own good.
God loved his people and loves us even in our stubbornness. He does not discipline those whom he does not love. He is not pleased when we stray, but he does not cast us aside. God sends wake up calls on alarms that we did not set. His Spirit is at work in our lives.
If we don’t like what the Spirit is telling us, we had better examine if we are being stubborn in God’s ways or stubborn in our own ways. Are we seeking the one true God or living by the rules of the god that we made in our own image?
When we hit a bump in the road of life, is it the world trying to throw us off course; or is it God sending us a wakeup call? How can you know?
Several years ago, I published an article titled, Can a Democrat be a Christian? I posted the link to the article on Facebook and it got a lot of likes and almost as many hateful remarks. Realize this was before you could select the heart or the angry face emojis.
I didn’t accidently happen upon that title. It was meant to be provocative. Titles are hooks to get readers to read, except in this century when reading an entire title is just so exhausting that you can never make it to the article.
For those who did make it to the article, I answered the provocative question, Can a Democrat be a Christian? And the answer was, of course, no. No!
Now for those who completed the entire article, I also posed the question, Can a Republican be a Christian? The Republicans got the same answer.
What? Do I think only Libertarians or Tea Partians or is it (Tea Partiers) can be Christians? No. I am sure that somebody is going to be upset that I did not equally abuse the Independents.
The question itself is not a matter of party affiliation but of identity. My identity is in Christ alone. I am a Christian. I belong to the Christ and I am stubborn about that. There is no argument to sway me from that stance.
I register in accordance with my political leanings, but that is not my identity. I agree with some things the party stands for and disagree with others.
I am not the party with which I am registered. I belong to Christ alone. I follow Christ. My allegiance is to him. I love America and cherish the very liberty that we enjoy every day, register as I choose, and vote my convictions.
But my identity is as a Christian. I am stubborn about that. I belong to the Christ.
I am not permitted a second and third and fourth identity. I live as a Christian and fulfill many roles. Many of them have a great impact upon who I am.
Son
Husband
Father
Brother
Grandfather
Pastor
American
Oklahoman
Writer
Marine
And surely some others.
Some of these are callings. I know without any doubt that I was called to be a Marine officer. I know with even greater certainty that God called me to ordained ministry. But I have only one identity. I am a child of God. I am a Christian—by definition committed to following Jesus wherever he leads me. I belong to him.
I am not following any political party wherever they lead me. On any given day I can change my political affiliation. I follow Christ forever. He is Lord. He is King. He called me servant, trusted servant, and even friend. My identity is in him.
That identity gives me incredible freedom. I can live fully. My future is not in the hands of the next president. My identity does not come from a political party. I belong to Christ. I am a Christian. I am stubborn about that.
The articles that I wrote made subtle title twists to get people to read them, but my point is as unchanging as it can be. I belong to the Christ and that is not going to change. I am stubborn when it comes to this.
So, back to the bumps in the road. Am I stubborn in the ways of God or am I stubborn in the ways of the world? That’s how you know what the bumps in the road are all about.
My challenge to us this day is to be stubborn in the ways of God. He showed us his way for our own good. His plans are not to harm us but to prosper us. He gives us hope and a future. He has never stopped loving us and never will.
Our salvation is all from him. Let’s respond by being disciples of Jesus who stubbornly follow in the ways of our Lord.
God loved humankind when we were stubborn in the ways of the world. Let’s love him back by being stubborn in the ways of the Christ.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment