Even when I don't want to...

 Read Mark 10:17-31

At last, we get to a person of status in the world coming to Jesus and falling down before him. How do we know the man had status.? If you read the full pericope, we find that the man had great wealth.

And here he was before Jesus, giving proper reverence. Finally!

The man begins the conversation with the words good teacher. It sounds like an appropriate greeting. It least acknowledges that Jesus was a teacher—a rabbi.

But Jesus focused on the word good. Why do you call me good? Only God is good.

Now Jesus had told many that he and his Father were one. Did this man know that talking with Jesus was the same as talking with God?

Jesus did not send the man packing because he called him good. In fact, he heard the man’s question and answered it. What was the question?

It was “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

That question bears some exploration. Let’s consider the infinitive in the sentence: to inherit. He didn’t say earn. It didn’t say win. He didn’t say achieve. He didn’t say to discover.

He said, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

What must I do to inherit eternal life? Inherit is different from earning or winning or achieving. Typically, the inheritance goes to an heir.

Was this man asking to be an heir in God’s kingdom? It is an interesting question, which Jesus goes on to answer.

Don’t murder. No side chicks If it’s not yours, don’t take it. Don’t lie or defraud. Treat your parents right. The list sounded very familiar to this young man.

He said, probably with a mix of relief and excitement, “I’ve done all of those!”

 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I’m in for sure! Yes!

Compliance is good. Obedience is good. Following directions is good and they all put you on a good path to having a relationship with God, but they are not everything.

Jesus said to go sell everything you have and give the proceeds to the poor.  Jesus said that following the rules is good. It is important, but it is not everything.

In Mark’s gospel, we find these words before Jesus told this rich young man—some say ruler—to go sell all that he had, we are told that Jesus looked at the man and loved him.

Ouch! What kind of love is that?

It’s the kind that says you are playing by the rules but missing the relationship.

It’s the kind of love that says God is a jealous God and you can’t have another god on the side. Your wealth is your god.  My Father in Heaven is coming in second place or lower in your life and that dog don’t hunt.

You need to value your relationship with my Father in heaven over the rules for good living. They are not in conflict with each other. In fact, you can’t really understand most of what they are all about if you are not in good relationship with the one true God.

If you want to understand what God is telling you in his word, you need the Sprit of God to guide you.

The rich young man verified the assessment of the Lord. The young man went away sad because he had a big stake in this world. He had much wealth. He had a lot of stuff.

The young man went away sad.  We don’t know if he did what he was told or not. Put that on the list of things to find out in the age to come.

I’ve been working on a proposal for an orientation package in heaven. It would include excursions. One to them would be to talk with this young man to see if he did what he was told.

Did he put the words of his Master into practice? It sounds like he knew that Jesus was from God. He may not have known he was the Messiah, maybe he did, but he knew this man was from God.

And Jesus had told him to do something that he really didn’t want to do. God told him to do something that he really didn’t want to do.

We don’t all need to sell everything we have. This is not a universal call to poverty. We are not taking a vow of poverty in lieu of the hymn of invitation this morning.

We don’t all need to sell everything, but you can bet we all need to do some things that Jesus told us to do that we don’t really want to do.

Such as?

Forgive. How many of us have a person or people that we have not forgiven. Why? Because we don’t want to! Forgive.

Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing when we give.  Sometimes, we want a little acknowledgment when we give or give something extra. God says, that’s something personal between us.

God tells us to keep this between us. You want a personal relationship, this is personal.

How about love your enemy? That one is always going to be tough. It’s easier if you pray for your enemies while you are at it.

I don’t know what it is for you, but God is likely calling you to do something outside of your comfort zone. He is calling you to do something that you don’t want to do.

Do you know what it’s called when you do something outside of your comfort zone? It’s called growth, at least 95% of the time.

What about the other 5%?  Those are hold-my-beer moments that usually come with their own lessons learned.

If we are to truly grow, we need to put the words of our Master into practice, and that includes the things that we really don’t want to do.

Let me put it this way. Are you a Christian or a Christian Tourist?

What?

Do you live the words of Jesus or do you just know what he said and like to observe what people do without being on the playing field? The tourist is free to comment and advise but never gets any dirt under his fingernails from being a Christian.

Let me try it this way.  If you were accused of being a Christian would there be enough evidence to convict you?

What sort of evidence?  The kind that affirms you have put the words of your Master into practice—that evidence.  It’s hard evidence if it includes you doing what Jesus told you to do even if you don’t like it.

The disciples focused on the money and wealth part of this story which we discussed in the first service.  Today, I ask you to focus on doing those things that God told us to do with a special emphasis on those that we don’t like or don’t want to do or just those things we have been able to ignore before.

Maybe a false god is taking a prominent place in our lives and we need to kick him to the curb in favor of the one true God.

Your charge is to do the things that Jesus told you to do and don’t skip the hard ones. Don’t ignore his commands because you just don’t want to do that.

Your challenge is to put the words of our Master into practice, even those that we have been fighting hard for some time.  We must even do those things where our own understanding says, you get an exemption on that one.

No, we don’t!

The man went away sad because he had great wealth and it had taken the place of the one true God. The man still followed the rules but he was short on relationship with his Creator. He went through his Live the Good Life Checklist but missed the get to know the One who spoke it all into existence experience.

The man was only cheating himself out of abundant life. You have heard the quotes that the good keeps us from our best. There's a variation on this that works both ways, but for now, consider this.

This young man had it good—very good but he was missing out on abundant life in Christ—life in good relationship with God.

The question today is not so much what this rich young man did when he left, maybe he did what Jesus told him, and maybe not. The question is will we walk away sad when God calls us to do something that we don’t want to do?

The question is what will we do when Jesus calls us to do something that we just don’t want to do. Will we too be sad?

I have hated that person for a year now or is it two or ten. I can’t forgive them now.

I give what I give. Don’t be asking me for more, Jesus.

And this whole love your enemy business, that’s just too out there for me.

Let’s go back to the young man just for a moment. Before Jesus commanded him to sell everything, we read: Jesus looked at him and loved him.

Jesus told him to sell everything not as a test or evaluation but out of love.

The man wanted eternal life when he died. Jesus offered eternal life now.  Trade in your god of this world for the real God and follow me.  You have to kick the false god to the curb first—in your case that is your wealth—but then come follow me.

Do we not understand that God has good plans for us?  God has the very best in mind for us and in store for us. When will we let go of our own understanding and take on the yoke of our Master?

God has good plans for you.

God loves you.

If God tells you to do it and you don’t want to, you are fighting against your own best outcomes.  Father really does know best.

And when God calls us to something that we don’t like, we don’t go away sad. We do it with a smile on our faces knowing that God loves us and God has good plans for us.

We don’t go away sad. We step into whatever God has called us to do and we do it knowing it is for our own good and that the God who told us to do this thing also loves us very much.

Jesus looked at him and loved him, and then told him the thing he needed to hear and do the most—get rid of your false god and get to know the real God.

We will all have those moments when Jesus looks at us and loves us and tells us exactly what we need to hear and what we need to do.

Can we say these words with joy in our hearts and a smile on our faces?

Thy will be done!

God desires a wholesale exchange of everything that we seek before him for seeking him first. We can have no other gods that approach the one true God.

Do we not understand that God has good plans for us?  God has the very best in mind for us and in store for us. When will we let go of our own understanding and take on the yoke of our Master?

God has good plans for you.

God loves you.

Let us put his words into practice even when we don’t want to, with joy in our hearts and smiles on our faces for God loves us and has good plans for us.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wrestling with God

 Read Genesis 32

And so we come to one of the most unique stories in the Bible.  If you have subheadings inserted into your Bibles, most of them probably say: Jacob Wrestles With God.

I’m thinking that’s not a fair fight.

I wrestled for about 30 seconds in high school.  The assistant football coach had been a Marine and had gone to college on a wrestling scholarship, probably in conjunction with the GI Bill.

I was in the weight room one day in the spring.  The coach was there and there were some mats in the corner of the weight room.  He said, let’s wrestle.

I said I don’t know anything about wrestling.  I was bigger than the coach but really had never wrestled.  The school didn’t have wrestling and I was already playing 4 sports, so I doubt that I would have been a wrestler anyway.

He said, just do your best.

We both got on the mat and he said “Go!”  I think I got lucky because I got my arm around his neck and started choking him from behind. He was really choking.  I thought, how hard can this wrestling stuff really be?

Coach managed to squeak out, “That’s not legal.”

So, I let go.  In that instant, he grabbed me and threw me against the wall.  The wall was made of cinderblocks and they were not padded.

I think I said, “That wasn’t legal either.” I didn’t know for sure, it I didn’t think it was.

We didn’t wrestle anymore after that, but that was the extent of my wrestling experience, other than as a kid when you wrestled with classmates and cousins.

But Jacob wrestling with God, and that just seems bizarre.  Here’s the scripture.

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Was it God? Was it an angel?  Was it a man sent by God?

Jacob was convinced that he had been face-to-face with God.  He didn’t say that he held his own.  He said that God spared him.

Jacob—now Israel—lived to tell about this.

Now God had walked with Adam and Eve.  He had visited Abraham, but most of the time, God spoke in dreams and visions.

But here we see God or someone with supernatural powers wrestling with Jacob and when the match was a draw, he touched Jacob near the hip and twisted it to the point that Jacob would walk with a limp.

Jacob didn’t cry out, “That’s not legal!”  He focused on the fact that he had been face to face with God and God had spared his life.

It’s still a crazy story about wrestling with God, except that we do this all of the time.  We don’t wrestle physically, but we wrestle in our decisions.

Trust in the Lord or trust my own understanding?

You think by this point we would do more trusting than leaning, but the wrestling matches continue and it seems that God lets us win every once in a while.  We get to do things our way.

Most of the time we limp away from doing things our way. Sometimes the limp doesn’t show up until later. In hindsight, we realize the wisdom of God’s way.

Our human nature leads us to wrestle with God again and again in spite of directions that we know and have memorized and should be written on our hearts.

I think that sometimes, God lets us walk with a limp for a while whenever we rely on our own understanding over God’s promises.  That’s my take on it.

What I can tell you with certainty is that God is faithful even when we are not.

Even when God permits us to have our own way—and that brings us briefly to 2 words not used together in the Bible:  Free Will—he is faithful to his promises.  One of those is that he will never leave or forsake us.

Sometimes in hindsight, we wish God had just body-slammed us into the right way, but we do get to choose how we respond to God’s great love.  Sometimes we wrestle with that response.

So, we will probably have a few more wrestling matches with God in our remaining years.  Hopefully, we wrestle less and trust more, but remember that God still has good plans for you.

So what do we take into our week?

Trust more. Wrestle less.

Amen.

Walking in Wisdom

 Read Proverbs 28

Here we are 28 chapters into the Proverbs and Proverbs 3:5-6 keeps making an appearance.  The wording is a little different, but the messages are congruent.

Those who trust in themselves are fools,

    but those who walk in wisdom are kept safe.

How many times must we try to build a tower to heaven before we realize that our own understanding will always fall short of God’s plans for us?

God’s ways are higher than our ways could ever be, but how often do we retreat to living by our own understanding.  It’s understandable.  We think we understand our own understanding.

Let’s return to chapter 1 briefly.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,

    but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Fools don’t want knowledge, wisdom, instruction, or discipline.  They believe in only what their finite minds can conceive.  They trust in their own wisdom.  A fool’s wisdom should be an oxymoron.

They do not want to even conceive of a Being whose thoughts and ways are higher than our own.  The fool wants everyone brought down to his level.  The very idea of God is repulsive to him.

We often want to believe in our own understanding—our own wisdom if you will, but we recognize that God’s wisdom far exceeds what we can comprehend.  The wisest thing we can do is to trust him—completely.

We want to believe what we understand over what God tells us is best, but we know that to be foolish.  God knows more than we can comprehend and the wisest thing that we can do is to trust him.

When we make a habit of trusting our own understanding over God’s, then we have become fools. We have been given eyes to see when this happens and we who desire to be wise, slam on the breaks as far as trusting our own understanding goes.  We trust God with everything that we have.

It is an ongoing wrestling match with our flesh.  Our own understanding always seems to be right, but we must trust that God is always right and is always looking out for us.  We must trust him.

The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

The circumstances were different, but the struggle is the same.  Our human nature naturally thinks it’s always right.  We must embrace our new nature—the new creature that we have become in Christ Jesus.  Then trusting God becomes our first nature.

Those who trust in themselves are fools,

    but those who walk in wisdom are kept safe.

How do we trust God more?  Walk in his wisdom.  Put his words into practice.  We have to walk the walk.  Doing helps our believing and our trust.

The more that we practice living God’s way, the more it moves from theoretical to actual in our hearts and minds.  Walking in God’s way is not only right, it keeps us safe.

Remember, that all of the minefields lie in the everything else.  Safety lies in God’s way—in walking in his wisdom.

There is God’s way and there is everything else.  Live God’s way.

Amen.

Do we truly understand our own way?

 Read Proverbs 20

 

Do this.  Don’t do that.  This action has this consequence.  This is good.  That is bad.  Wise is good.  Foolish is bad.  Better off poor than a fool or a liar. 

OK, Solomon, we get it.  Give us something more challenging.  Here we go.

A person’s steps are directed by the Lord.

    How then can anyone understand their own way?

Don’t I get to make my own decisions?  How can I not understand my own way? 

Let’s put this in the context of Proverbs 3:5-6.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart

    and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways submit to him,

    and he will make your paths straight.

The promise of this proverb is that the Lord will direct our steps.  He will keep us on the right path. We have to trust him with our very being to realize this promise, but God will keep us on the right path.

I’m going to modify something that I have said before.  I have said that we understand our own understanding because it’s our own understanding.  Now, I should refine it to say, we think we understand our own understanding.

Here’s the dichotomy.  We don’t always understand God’s ways.  His ways are higher than our ways.  His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.

But Solomon goes on and says that we really can’t understand our own ways either.  Of course, we think that we can.  They are our own ways.  How could we not understand them?

While we are creatures that think we understand almost everything in the universe; it turns out that we don’t know diddly on the big scale of things.

There is a whole scale of human wisdom that purports and I subscribe to that says the more that I know, the more I realize what I don’t know.

So, is Solomon telling us that we are all a bunch of dummies? Sort of, but not exactly.  He is saying that trust in the Lord is the only solid foundation for knowledge. For as much as we learn and understand and synthesize and think that we know, trusting the Lord to guide us is the only thing that we can know for sure.

The Lord knows the way.  Let me trust him.  He alone keeps me on the right path.

Knowledge is good.  Wisdom is good. Understanding is good. Trusting the Lord is certain.  Of all the wisdom and knowledge and expertise that we may acquire, trust governs.  If we want to stay on the right course, we must trust God completely. 

In so many ways, God directs our steps.  Will we accept his direction or rebel? 

Accept or rebel?

Live God’s way or rebel against him—there really isn’t a figure it out on your own option.  For all that we want to believe that we can figure out things on our own, we never really have complete knowledge.

We like to think that we are super smart creatures, but our true intelligence boils down to trust.  Will we walk in the way set by the Lord?

How do we know this way? By design.

The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord

    that sheds light on one’s inmost being.

Our spirit is designed to know God’s Spirit and thereby know God’s will—his steps for our life.  It’s not that we have a good chance of doing God’s will.  It’s that from the onset of creation, we have been designed to live God’s way.

I have my own personal mantra that I put forth sometimes.  It’s don’t complicate the simple.

Don’t complicate the simple.

It’s along the lines of the Law of Parsimony.  You probably know it as Ockham’s Razor. 

Our nature is to say this is what God says, but…

Solomon tells us this is what God says, now put away your other conditions.  No ifs, ands, or buts if you will.  God has already computed the consequences and sequels to what he has directed us to do.

Just do it.  God has factored in what we can and cannot understand and just told us the right answer. He has directed our steps without us having to resolve all the possible contingencies.

We are creatures who long to learn.  We long for God’s wisdom and knowledge and for understanding, but Solomon tells us that trust is what gets us through the day.  Learning to trust God is likely the wisest thing we can learn.

The only thing that we have to know and understand completely is to trust God.  Everything else will always be just a bit beyond our grasp.  It’s fun to pursue knowledge and wisdom, but the one thing that we can comprehend completely is to trust God with everything we have.

Here’s the kicker.  Solomon says that when we lean on our own understanding, we don’t really understand it anyway.  Quit fighting the Lord as he directs our paths.

A person’s steps are directed by the Lord.

    How then can anyone understand their own way?

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.  It’s just that simple.

Amen.

Trusting God is Wisdom

 Read Proverbs 3

I begin our journey into chapter 3 by going to Deuteronomy 6.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Solomon and Lady Wisdom both speak here in this chapter.  They speak not of their own accord but of God’s.  The commands are simple and should have sounded familiar.  These proverbs were in accord with what God had spoken five centuries earlier.

·       Keep my commands in your heart

·       Let love and faithfulness adorn your neck so you never leave them

·       Internalize love and faithfulness—write them on your heart

In so doing, you will:

·       Prolong your years

·       Live in peace and prosperity

·       Win God’s favor and a good name in his eyes

These are more conditional promises of God’s wisdom.  Keep my commands.  Live long and prosper.

But now we come to the best-known proverb within this group. Trust in the Lord…

So are we still talking about wisdom or have we moved on to trust?  Yes.

If you revere God so highly that the fear of anything in the world pales in comparison, you have begun a journey that leads to knowledge that leads to wisdom that embraces the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Wisdom leads you to trust in God.  Trust in God leads you to wisdom.  Trust is wisdom, at least when that trust is placed in the Lord.

So, why is this hard to realize?  We comprehend that the God of creation wove wisdom into the fabric of the universe at the moment of creation.  Wisdom is part of the divine design, so why is it so hard to get in sync with wisdom?

Consider the second part of the 5^th verse—lean not on your own understanding.  Why not just leave it at trust God with everything you have?

We must understand that we can understand our own understanding.  Understanding God and his wisdom are beyond us at times.  We can wrap our minds around our own understanding.

We easily define our paradigm, our efforts to navigate this world, our blueprint for living based mostly upon our own understanding.  Trusting in the Lord with everything we have is in constant conflict with our own human nature and our own understanding.

And you can’t straddle this fence without getting a splinter in your butt.  We must follow God’s way or we surrender to the everything else.  If we chose the latter, we should not question why we are not blessed.

God longs to bless us.  He waits patiently for us to walk in his way so that we may receive bountiful blessings.

Let’s try it this way.  God through his Spirit that lives within you has instructed you to plant tomatoes this year.  You want to plant okra.

You buy one discount tomato plant and hastily stick it in the ground in a spot that never produces anything.  You buy the top-of-the-line okra seed and plant half a dozen rows in your best soil.

You pray every day that God will bless your garden with a good crop.

Weeks go by and your okra finally starts putting on some pods.  They are just too small to pick.  You will check them again in the morning.  When morning comes the pods are a foot and a half long and the fiber in the plant has hardened so much that you can barely cut them off the stalk and surely, they are not edible.

Meanwhile, you continue to harvest tomatoes off the one plant in the sorry soil.  You harvest and it keeps producing more fruit.  Those are some good-tasting tomatoes.

God told you to plant tomatoes but you wanted okra. Your own understanding was that you wanted okra.

There is God’s way and there is everything else.

God says trust me and I will bless you.

The proverb says to trust in the Lord with all of your heart—with everything you have and don’t hold back anything.  The coupling to this part of the proverb is to lean not on your own understanding.

The conditional part is now that you have chosen trust over your own understanding, is to acknowledge God in everything that you do and he will keep you on the path best designed for you.

God wants to bless you in your obedience!  Obedience is not punishment but the path to blessing.

God wants to bless you in your trust.  Trust may bring you through trials and trouble but trust is not trouble itself.  It leads to the path marked with blessings.

Distrust, lack of obedience, and rebellion don’t have the same promise.

What do you call a blessing in your disobedience?  What do you call a blessing in your rebellion?

A rebuke!  A reprimand!  A call to turn away from your path of rebellion and return to God.

There is God’s way and there is everything else.

When you trust God’s way, the best blessing that you receive is wisdom.  Trusting God is wisdom and you will be blessed with even more wisdom for God loves to be very generous with his wisdom for those who seek him.

You know how we finish this morning’s message.  Trust in the Lord…

Amen.

Matthew 17 - Part 3

 

Read Matthew 17

The disciples headed back to the region of Galilee.  Jesus again told them that he would be handed over to men to be killed, but on the third day he would rise from the dead.

Again, the disciples must have been fixed only on the death part.  The man who stilled the waves and walked on water said he would rise from the dead and the disciples knew only grief.

He had told them what would happen before and each time they rejected God’s way for their own understanding.

Why did Jesus have to tell his disciples again and again?  Why do we need to read Proverbs 3:5-6 over and over?

Our own expectations are sometimes our biggest enemy.  Trust that God’s way is better.

Amen.

John 16 - Part 1

Read John 16

Trouble was coming and Jesus was speaking beyond his journey to the cross.  He was telling his disciples that they would have trouble come upon them because of him. 

In the previous chapter, Jesus told his disciples that the world would hate them because a of him.  Now he tells them that hate will be manifested in actions.  People will want to kill them and think such actions to be a good, a godly thing.

They will be thrown out, kicked out, barred from the synagogues.  What does this tell us?  Their troubles will not be so much from the Romans who regarded one building like another.  If you were not causing trouble for the empire and paid your taxes, Rome did not care if you worshiped Jehovah or Baal or made up a different God each week.  It would be the religious Jews who would wage war against those who followed the way that Jesus had given.

If you were to flip ahead in your Bibles to Acts, you would find one notable Pharisee named Saul who made it his mission in life to persecute the followers of the Way.  Jesus warned his disciples that this was where they would engage their first opposition.

Jesus told his disciples that they needed to know what was ahead of them so they did not fall away, so they did not give up.  Jesus told his disciples that he didn’t tell them this earlier because he was with them.  Remember how so many times it looked like the religious Jews would seize Jesus but they could not because his time had not yet come.

Now Jesus was leaving.  His time had come.  Now was the time for the disciples to call it quits or to Christian Up and live out their purpose.  Jesus had prepared them for 3 years.

Jesus told his friends that this was something of a phased operation.  Jesus would go home to his Father and the Advocate—the Holy Spirit would come. 

OBTW—Jesus and the Spirit would have the best turn-over brief ever.  Everything that Jesus had learned from his Father and observed in the world would be given to the Spirit.  There would be no need for introductions and orientation.  The Spirit would arrive and the Lord’s work would continue and grow without missing a step.  It would a hit the deck running turnover.

You have heard of a seamless transition before.  This was the mother of all seamless transitions.  We have never walked through Galilee or Samaria or Judea with Jesus, but because the Spirit has and knows everything that Jesus did, having the Spirit dwelling within us is like walking with Jesus, maybe with fewer parables.

The Spirit will also do seven things that I will specifically enumerate.  Make no mistake, the Spirit is not limited by my list.

1.    Guide you in the truth.  The Spirit—the Advocate or Comforter or Helper—will guide you.  The Spirit will not force you but guide you.  He will make your path straight.  You must choose to stay on that path.

2.    He will speak in one accord with Jesus and the Father. 

3.    He will give you insight as to what is to come.  Never discount good reconnaissance. Without reconnaissance, you are subject to ambush.  We know there is trouble ahead.

4.    He will bring glory to the name of Jesus.  Jesus did his part.  Now it’s time for the Spirit to go to work on us and the world.  We have a commission to deliver the gospel.  The Spirit does the work of conviction.  The Spirit moves upon the unbeliever.  We deliver.  The Spirit moves.  This brings glory to God.

5.    He will convict the world of sin because they do not believe in Jesus.  Why do we preach Jesus?  Jesus is the lifeline for the world.  The world will never be able to comply with the Law given at Sinai.  Only Jesus did that.  The Spirit will use the law to convict hearts and turn them to Jesus.

6.    The Spirit will reveal righteousness to us and help us live in righteousness that we gained from the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We did not earn righteousness, but the Spirit will help us remain in the righteousness that we have been given by the blood of Jesus.

7.    He will convince you that the devil—the prince of the world—has been condemned.  The world will still look like a mess.  There is trouble all around us, but the one who concocts evil in the world has already been condemned.

Jesus told his followers that everything that belongs to the Father has been given to him and he likewise has held nothing back from the Spirit of Truth.

When we say trust in the Lord with all your heart, we are saying trust in the Spirit that lives within you, knowing that the Spirit is in perfect accord with Jesus who is in perfect harmony with the Father.

When we say lean not on your own understanding, we acknowledge that the Spirit of Truth resides in our very being and we don’t’ have to decide which network to watch to get the truth.  We do have to be on guard that we are listening to God’s own Spirit and not our own ego and selfish desires.

When we acknowledge God and his Spirit in all our ways, we are divorcing the old self and committing to a monogamous relationship with God through his Spirit.

When we think that he will direct our paths, we believe with all of our hearts that the Spirit of Truth will illuminate the path that God desires for us.

For those of you who bet that Tom couldn’t work Proverbs 3:5-6 into a message from John 16, you can pay up now.

Jesus did two things to prepare his disciples to continue his work once he was gone.  First, he told them that trouble awaited them.  He gave them a good reconnaissance of the years ahead. Second, he reminded them once again that they would not be left alone and that the Spirit who would come would propel them into the world fully equipped for what was ahead.

We know the same things.  We will be hated and opposed by those who do not know God and we don’t run our races alone.

You know there are significant challenges ahead because you follow Jesus.

The Spirit of God goes with you wherever you go.

Amen.

Faith not resting on Human Wisdom

Read 1 Corinthians 2

We continue our exploration of faith, so let’s begin with what should be a very familiar defining verse from the King James Version.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

This morning, I hope that you all understand that we have received God’s grace in the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  Regardless of your story, this is a main element. 

We all have that faith only connection.  For all the studying, for all the fancy preaching you may have heard and all of the terrible jokes you have endured in so many sermons, it was faith and faith alone that brought you to salvation. 

Faith in the Christ and his victory over sin and death stood alone, at least at one point in your life. 

There may have been a verse in a hymn or a sentence in a sermon that prompted you to come forward and profess that faith, but it was faith alone that brought the gift of salvation into your life.  We all received grace by faith.

We grow and mature now, but at the inception of this journey, it was faith alone that put it all in motion.

In Chapter 16 of Matthew’s gospel, after the religious leaders wanted a sign from Jesus and after admonishing them for being so worldly-minded, he told them that all they would get was the sign of Jonah. 

Jesus then warned his disciples about the worldliness of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  Their teachings were void of God’s Spirit and intent.  They knew the words but did not know the divine heart of God.

Jesus then asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.”

The world says, “seeing is believing.”  Faith says, “believing is seeing.”

If we see it and can touch it and it exists in the physical world, it’s probably not faith.  Paul would say that we walk by faith not sight.  We live by faith not what we can see and touch and feel. 

Faith says, there is more to us than what we can actually see and touch and feel in this world.  There is more to our life than what human wisdom can comprehend.  Understand that because we have faith, we can see God’s hand in so many things of this world, but the other way around never gets you all the way there.

What am I saying?  We can’t get to God through human wisdom.  Logic may get us close.  Examination of the creation may get us close.  Math, science, literature, and a well-rounded education may get us close, but there is always an element of faith involved.

Sometimes our own understanding, our own human wisdom, actually gets in the way.  Sometimes it is easier to come to Christ by faith unencumbered by math, science, or any human argument.

Paul told his readers in Corinth that when he first spoke to them, he was not eloquent.  He did not hone his metaphors the night before.  His analogies were few.  He said that you received the Christ, you proclaimed Jesus as Lord, that you believed not because of any human wisdom on his part or theirs, but because God’s own Spirit was at work.

The message that they received was not built upon human wisdom and therefore no barrage of human wisdom can tear it down.  That holds true today.

Our faith is not built upon human wisdom.  Just as God’s own Spirit revealed to Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, so too God’s Spirit has revealed to us that Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is the way.

He is the Son of the one true God.  He did enter this world in the flesh.  He did die for our sins.  He did rise from the dead.  He lives!

God has revealed this to us.  We may have had a lot of help along the way, but we still had to receive his grace by faith.  Our own spirit had to receive this gift of faith that came by God’s own Spirit.

Paul would go on and use many metaphors and analogies and various figures of speech to get his point across to this church and others, but his initial invitation was void of his own human understanding.  He did not want to get in the way of the Holy Spirit. 

Once you have received this gift of grace that comes by faith, then our disposition should be one of a teachable spirit.  We should hunger for God’s word.  We should long for those daily conversations with God’s Spirit.  We should desire wisdom.  Our new nature will desire to rightly divide the word of truth.

As we embrace God’s wisdom, we can discern what is from God and what is of the world, but we all begin with faith.  Paul explains it this way.

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.  

No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.  None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.  However, as it is written:

“What no eye has seen,

    what no ear has heard,

and what no human mind has conceived”—

    the things God has prepared for those who love him—

 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.

The person who has not received God and his Son by faith just can’t understand.  They don’t get it.  They have not yielded their human understanding to the Spirit of God.

They have not taken a leap of faith.  That could seem like a huge leap for many.  It may be a mustard seed’s leap in reality.  Some don’t like the term leap of faith but I think it’s accurate.

We step out in faith all of the time, but our journey began with a leap, perhaps of a very small distance.  What’s the difference?

With a step, only one foot loses contact with the ground and any time.  With a leap, you lose contact with where you are and can only land where you are going.  At some point we all had to do this.

Imagine someone going off the diving board and trying to hold on at the same time.  Consider small children learning to swim for the first time.  They do just that.

They try to get into the water and hold onto the edge of the pool at the same time.  At some point, you have to let go if you want to swim. 

At some point, we all had to let go of the world’s grip on us.  We had to depart from human wisdom and take a leap of faith to truly know God.

Since then, we have studied to gain wisdom and understanding so that we can continue in faith by putting our Master’s words into practice.

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.  The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments,  for,

Who has known the mind of the Lord

    so as to instruct him?”

But we have the mind of Christ.

Our human nature wants God to fit inside of our model or paradigm.  Our human wisdom says that we can make him fit.  Any God who fits into your box is not really the one true God. 

He defies our human wisdom and the world calls us fools because we believe God over human understanding.  We put God’s words into practice in spite of what the world has to say about it.

We trust in the Lord with all of our heart and lean not on our own understanding and do it on a regular basis because somewhere along the way, we took a leap of faith.  At some point in our lives, we acted solely, exclusively by faith.

Somewhere along the way, we had to act solely upon our faith.

Paul told the church in Corinth that he had divested himself of his own best arguments and persuasion so that the people could believe by faith alone. 

When we examine ourselves and try to figure out what’s next, remember where our journey started.  It all began with faith unencumbered by human wisdom. 

When we do our best to put God’s kingdom and his righteousness first in everything we do, remember, this journey began in faith alone.

When we try to apply the power, love, and sound mind that we have been given, remember that those things only bring us to godly choices.

When we are of sober mind and seeking God’s wisdom, remember that we do not care if the world calls us fools.

When our human wisdom does its best to convince God that our way is better, consider Paul’s words that we heard earlier.

Who has known the mind of the Lord

    so as to instruct him?”

But we have the mind of Christ.

Our faith has taken us from being governed by human wisdom to be directed by the mind of Christ.  Our starting point is faith unencumbered by human wisdom.  Our present location is that we have power, love, and a sound mind. 

Our true wisdom is that we have the mind of Christ.

At some point we let go of human wisdom and received the grace of God. 

Since that time the world has been calling you to come back.  Sometimes, it makes a convincing appeal.  Sometimes, living as a stranger in this world seems too tough.  Sometimes, human wisdom is just so much easier.

So remember, this journey of faith began with faith alone.  God has not ceased the good work that he began in you and your faith must not be cluttered by human wisdom.

We must continue to be people who trust in the Lord with all of our hearts and people who do not lean on our own human wisdom and understanding.

We all began with the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  We began this journey with believing is seeing.  Let us not return to the wisdom of the world.

Let us continue to live by faith alone.

Amen.