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February 19, 2006
The Importance of Believing Right
Psalm 24 / II Kings 10: 18-27
II John 4-11
February 19th, 2006
This morning I want to talk about the importance of believing right.
I think you were all with me when I spoke to our children about Jesus’ statement, “You are the light of the world.” You liked it when I reminded them that Jesus said people should recognize our light by the good works by which we glorify our Father in heaven. You liked it, but maybe thought it a bit extravagant, when I gave them each a flashlight to remind them of this—and maybe have some fun with it too. But the light God gave to each of us is pretty extravagant.
You want our children to believe in Jesus and to know it is important to live right. Keep away from drugs, go to Sunday School, obey your parents, do your homework, tell others about Jesus too, and invite them to Faith Church.
But I can feel some people bristle when I say to the adults among us that it is important to believe right. Believing right means believing what is true, that is the Big Truth about God, about Jesus, about living in God’s way.
I may preach from this pulpit but who am I to talk about believing right? There are lots of opinions abut what is right to believe; it is arrogant to say I believe what is true, isn’t it?
I can feel other people bristle at the idea that the idea of “believing right” should be even discussed as ever in doubt. Give no quarter to any other views about what is true. Here at least we must say without caution, “I’ve got the truth; I believe right; here it is; believe it.”
There are hazards that accompany a pastor’s claim that it is important to believe right. You know why.
On the one hand we’ve all seen the tragic consequences that have been the result of some peoples’ ideas about having a lock on truth. Islamic extremists have not kept their views to the realm of argument. Suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq, 9/11 2001’s massacre of three thousand people in the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, and a general atmosphere of terror have been these extremists’ bequests to the world community.
Muslim extremists must share their infamy with Christian extremists. Christian anti-abortionists who kill doctors who do abortions and those who protested at the funeral last month in Evansville of Army Pvt. Jonathan Pfender with placards that read, “God hates fags” share the infamy. In the land of my birth the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP is intent on driving out of India all that don’t share their unique take on Hinduism.
The result of some people’s thinking they “believe right” is disastrous.
On the other hand there are those who think it is pointless to think there is any such thing as believing right. Lesslie Newbigen described ours as a pluralist society, which means “a society in which there is no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct.” Doubt has become the hallmark of an honest person.
Then there’s the fear that religious dogma is enforced by coercion. We sometimes hear the term “religious brainwashing.” The memory lingers of the Spanish Inquisition and people being burned at the stake because they didn’t believe right. People have wearied of the scarlet letters religious people pinned on people whose lifestyles are outside the lines drawn by the Bible. Estimates differ abundantly today about the what the Bible teaches about various lifestyles.
Beside that, not everyone by any means takes the bible seriously. Muslims call the Koran their Bible. Jews don’t regard our New Testament as Scripture. Hindus read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other mysterious ancient texts. Atheists say it’s all bunkum. There is a website (adherents.com) that lists more than four thousand ‘religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, etc.’
When Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists live next door to each other, talking over the fence while working in their gardens or mowing the lawn, maybe sharing a cup of sugar when the neighbor runs out in the middle of baking a cake, common courtesy says “Don’t say to your neighbor ‘I’m right’.” Be respectful of others easily translates into keep your beliefs to yourself, and eventually into courteously saying, there is no right belief—just your opinion and my opinion.
Today the extremes of fanaticism and pluralism have us off balance. When we read this morning the account in II Kings 10 about King Jehu’s massacre of people who worshipped Baal it seems that here is an example of the very intolerance we deplore in Muslim extremists. We could see them luring all the Christians into a church in Baghdad and torching the place, but surely any who worship the God of the Bible wouldn’t do this. What happened to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” an Old Testament command before Jesus spoke taught this?
Those were hard times. Jesus would not have told His followers to do anything like King Jehu did. But in the days when God was preparing the path for the ultimate cure for the sins of the world, it was important that Baal worship not win in Israel. The Ten Commandments began, “I am the Lord your God . . . You shall have no other gods before me.”
Extreme measures were needed to protect their identity because they were the vehicle through which God would bring salvation to the world. Maybe we would see that the extreme measures President Truman took to end the Second World War had a similar goal.
In the second passage of Scripture we read of the problem the early Christian community faced. John, the elderly apostle who still lived after the other apostles were either dead or had moved on to other parts of the world with the Gospel, wrote with concern to some congregation, perhaps in Asia Minor—Turkey as we would call it today. The truth of the Christian faith was threatened by a secret menace that crept into the Christian community. Using the same words, but with different meanings, the truth about Jesus Christ was being perverted unwittingly.
This challenge came from people who said they believed in Jesus, but said He only seemed to be a man. He hadn’t really been a man at all. About these John, who had lived with Jesus three years wrote, “Everyone who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God.” The Gospels are very clear in letting us know Jesus was a physical human being. His hands could be penetrated by nails. His side bled when it was punctured by a spear as He hung dead on the cross. It was basically important to believe Jesus was a real man. More challenges to basic truth would come.
Another kind of challenge came from those who taught that love was not essential to being a Christian. You and I would say, “What?” Because we have no doubt that Jesus taught us to love one another. But John had in mind not just acting lovingly toward one another. In II John verse six John writes, “This is love that we follow his commandments.” Love was following Jesus’ commandments.
The Apostle John is pointing out that the truth is not just a matter of believing that Jesus Christ came in the flesh but also a matter of loving, that is, not just being nice, but obeying Jesus’ commandments. We tend to reduce loving to “being nice.”
He called attention to “many deceivers [who have] gone out into the world.” A deceiver is one who makes you believe that what is false is true. The risk of believing wrong is two-fold: first, in believing what is false about Jesus; second, in believing that following Jesus’ commands is optional.
A song we sang when I was a boy, “Give of your best to the Master,” included the line, “Throw your soul’s fresh, glowing ardor _into the battle for truth.”
This battle has taken on broader proportions as the Christian community fragmented and each fragment spelled out refined details about what to believe and defended them against others. Apologetics was once a defense of the Christian faith for the benefit of non-believers; it has become a defense of ones’ views against other Christians too. The battle for truth has lost focus, so that it can seem arrogant to claim to have the truth at all.
I intend no arrogance in saying I believe Jesus is the Way to the Father, the Truth and the Life. It is not my duty or yours to browbeat others into trusting that this is true. It is our task to live the Way not argue about it. Jesus said in effect, “I am the way, walk in it,” not “I am the way, argue about it.” There is something widely attractive about a person who patiently lives the Jesus-way.
John makes clear in this little letter that believing the truth includes trusting that the way Jesus commanded us to live is true. We have usually separated conduct from truth, but conduct and belief are the two ingredients of the Truth Jesus taught us to believe. And it has become commonplace for people to argue for their take on truth much as they will argue for their views on politics. No wonder that many polite people set religion and politics together as out-of-bounds for serious conversation.
But if the Bible is our guide, matters of faith ought not to enter the arena of debate in this way. There is agreement throughout our New Testament on this matter. Paul, the champion of justification by faith, divides his letters into two parts: one part about the great ideas of our faith; the other part about how Christians behave as a consequence. Right belief has to do with ideas and conduct.
James wrote sarcastically, “Show me your faith without your works and I’ll show you my faith by my works.” I wonder if in our emphasis on believing right ideas, and in our hesitation about normative kind of Christian behavior we are teaching what James calls “dead faith.” Dead faith is the topic of a lot of argument, but a faith that lives may make a person’s jaw drop to observe.
I think of these things in terms of the statement with which I began this morning: The Importance of Believing Right. If by believing right all we have in mind is believing what the Bible tells us about Jesus, about the effectiveness of His death on the cross and rising from the grave, we are believing only half the Gospel.
And if in the market place of religions Christianity appears defective, I wonder if the defect is seen not
so much just in the peculiarity of our beliefs, but in the unchallenged lack of inclination of Christians to follow Jesus’ commands.
I know of no other way for our belief to be right—and convincing--than to accept the hard-to-believe miraculous aspects of the Gospel message and the hard-to-do commands as well.
Jesus told His disciples, “You are the light of the world.” “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples—and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Light is recognizable in what it illumines. Light illumines a dark room or a dark path. Light keeps a person from stumbling; its benefit is practical. But if all people notice when they encounter Christians is the self-confident views in the noisy marketplace of religions, “so what?” they ask. Our “truths” can seem to be only like the strange and dogmatic views of any other religion.
If we believe “right,” that is, trust that what the Bible says about Jesus really happened, and that Jesus’ commands are to be obeyed, we are light in this world. People may not be drawn instinctively to the ideas we say we believe true, but how attractive are the ways of those who try to obey Jesus’ commands. Light has a way of finding all the available corners to which its rays reach. Light discovers hidden corners no one thinks about—and people too.
When the love of Christ inhabits your heart and mine there are no boundaries to which this love cannot extend. The world waits to see the effects of our right belief, if indeed it is right, as it extends to the needs of the world. While they may balk at believing the Virgin Birth, they will not balk if we lavish care on broken people. They will believe what they see.
It was Jesus’ plan that the second aspect of our belief would direct peoples’ attention to God—glorifying Him when they see our good works.
One further thing, when I see doubt arise in a Christian, I wonder which part of their belief is the cause. Sometimes our doubts are entirely over intellectual problems because there are things hard to understand. And when we hear convincing arguments from intelligent people who don’t accept ideas basic to our understanding it can be confusing.
But is it maybe the second part, the obeying Jesus’ commands part that has run aground so that it has affected the idea-part of their belief?
I think that doubt may reflect a failure of nerve in the face of the challenges of pluralism and fanaticism. These two hazards of our day cannot be overcome by argument alone. Proofs of the reliability of the Bible won’t do the trick. What is needed for belief to seem right is for its two parts to remain in tact: trusting that what the Bible says about Jesus, and that what Jesus commanded us to do is to be done—or at least attempted.
It is important to believe right.
Let us pray: O Lord, grant to us to trust and to obey, and thus to believe in your aright. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
February 12, 2006
How Can I Love a Sinner Like Me?
Leviticus 19: 17-18 / Luke 10: 25-28
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 4
February 12th, 2006
Perhaps the most popular religious song of all is “Amazing Grace.” We all know it well. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Bagpipes play this around the world when a religious song is called for. It’s a second Scottish national anthem, written by an Englishman, adopted everywhere.
John Newton may have meant it when he wrote these words. But if you went up to anyone who’d just sung this song and agreed with them: “You’re a wretch,” you’d better be wearing a safety helmet.
I suspect this song is beloved because it has us sing of grace. It’s so good to sing about God’s grace. A person in prison for the most violent crime, a truly wretched person, can sing it knowing it is true. Any of us who think of God’s unmerited favor is grateful.
But nowhere in the Bible do I know of anything that says we are to think of ourselves as wretches. It is true that we have all sinned. It is true that if we do not acknowledge we have sinned we deceive ourselves. But it is not at the foundation of our faith to think of ourselves as wretches. “God don’t make no junk,” the bumper sticker rightly tells us. You are not junk. It is not a virtue to think of yourself as of no value. Jesus asked, “What can a person give in exchange for his soul?” Your soul is you; it is precious to you.
But just before this Jesus asked, “What profit is there if a person gains the whole world and loses his soul?” The way to gain my soul is not to gain the world. The feeling of wretchedness comes as the residue of trying to gain the whole world as the means of loving yourself and it doesn’t work.
I picture the sad last days of Howard Hughes in 1976. His world was reduced to himself and his craving for drugs. Broken needles were found in his arm after he died. How many far less wealthy people have died in the same way? Self-indulgence may not always lead to such a tragic end I know. But the presupposition of every ad on TV and in the newspapers that urges you that you “deserve” this or that presumes self-indulgence is the irresistible response of self-love. This turns out to be a very bad way to treat yourself.
Let’s back up and see what Jesus taught us about how to think of this business of self-love. We just read of a lawyer who tested Jesus’ outlook on what is most important. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied with a question, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” The man replied summarizing two passages from his Bible: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Actually this lawyer added to what is written in the Old Testament. Moses did not write to love the Lord your God with all your mind, just with all your heart, soul, and strength. But in a day when the religious lawyers were thinking perhaps a bit too much about the law it was in the spirit of the Lord’s command to add, “love Him with all your mind” too. Jesus did not disagree with this addition to Moses’ teaching. He said, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”
Before moving on to the part of God’s law that involves loving ourselves and our neighbor let’s note what is unique about our love for God. The standard by which we are to love God is not the same as the standard by which we are to love ourselves or our neighbor. The foundation for self-love and love for neighbor is loving God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength, and all our minds. How is it possible to do this if your job is to be a teacher, or a doctor, or a businessperson, or a homemaker, or a student?
Sometimes the Bible puts before us something huge and says, “Here’s the job, figure out how to do it.” And it is in the figuring things out that we do it. Because there is a way of being a student in which you realize that loving God with everything you have makes an impact on the way you are a student. There is a way of being a doctor governed by loving God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. There is a way of being a nurse, a teacher, a merchant, a homemaker, a husband, a girlfriend, a whatever—governed by loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.
Jesus taught us that we are not alone in this task. He has given us the Holy Spirit to be inside us. What the Apostle Paul calls “walking in the Spirit” is daily keeping alive our desire to love God in this way and then the Spirit takes over and moves us along.
Here then is the basis for loving ourselves. Because I love God who loves me, I have value. As I love God with all I am I find a peace inside that somehow overcomes the ordinary stresses of life. You and I have various weaknesses that plague us. We are tempted every day with laziness, greed, inappropriate fascination with that instinct that drives the generations—sex, with anxiety, fear, doubt, and much else. But if we have set our face, set our feet in the way of loving God no matter what, God the Holy Spirit leads us along.
Joseph Ratzinger reminded me recently of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “If you will not hold firm to the Lord then you will have no foothold.” I have the strong hunch that what ails some of us in the task of loving God with all we have is simply giving up in moments when we feel weak. If you and I don’t keep our foothold when we feel weak we will be washed away by the torrent. Keep your finger in the hole of the dike when you feel you’re about to be washed away. These times pass.
How well I remember the earnest singing of a Gospel song in an African American congregation in the south side of Chicago many years ago. It was a part of town ravaged with the evils often accompanying poverty. The walls shook as the people sang to each other, “Yield not to temptation for yielding is sin; each victory will help you some other to win.” Hold firm in times when you are tempted to quit, to give in. Each time we keep our feet firm when we are tested we come hold on to loving God more securely. The best kind of self-love comes to us from over-coming when we are tempted to quit. When we let our love for God move us past these moments, He infuses something into us that helps us love ourselves.
The whole tenor of the Old Testament, the Bible of the ancient Hebrews was to help people think well of themselves. The Bible tells us how to live--how to treat others, how to do our work, how to love our wives and husbands, how to rear our children, how to respond to our parents—and so much more.
When we follow these ways we love ourselves because we act loveably. Acting loveably overflows into love of others. The result in us of loving ourselves, having loved God wholly, is to love others. Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus told a man who asked him to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot, “Love your neighbor as yourself. All the rest is commentary.”
Jesus didn’t teach us that we are to love our neighbor with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; only as we love ourselves.
This is something we need to look at a bit more closely. I would be troubled if you all left here thinking I’d said the Bible tells us to think of ourselves first. I didn’t. Neither does the Bible teach us to love ourselves first. Loving ourselves is simply natural.
When we see situations of the lack of self-love it is because a person has been abused as a child or lived under criticism. One of my convictions about the role of Christians in community is that we are to overwhelm such people with our love so that we are an antidote to a painful past.
There is in all of us an instinct for self-preservation, which is not the same thing as self-LOVE. Self-preservation often leads to self-indulgence, which is very different from self-love. Self-indulgence may be very self-destructive. You and I have watched some pretty self-destructive behavior by people who indulged themselves. Indeed, we can hardly imagine worse ways to treat themselves than self-indulgence leads them to do.
We see on the TV so many tragic stories taken from the courtroom. I am intrigued with the investigative reports that follow the trail of crime as people steal, lie, and kill to attain their desires. As each step is uncovered by the detectives, the foolishness of the self-indulgent person is laid bare. How often it is the love of money that prompts a crime. How often jealousy, anger, a bitter spirit that makes people sink deeper and deeper until they are destroyed.
I can’t remember how often I’ve heard someone tell me in the County Jail that they were glad they were caught. It came to be the turning point in their lives. In jail they turned to their Bible, discovered its call to love God with everything in them, and they started to have a good feeling about themselves. And guess what direction these people start to move—in the direction of caring for others. How wonderful it sometimes is on a Tuesday evening at our Bible study to listen to participants in the Work Release Program care for each other. How beautiful to see how the love for God transforms the heart so that it can love itself, a love that then turns outward to love others.
But it’s not just people who end up on the other side of the law that need to catch on to this truth. Our churches are filled with people whose lives consist in the abundance of things they own.
We buy and buy, more and more, thinking this is how to love ourselves. But it is impossible to be satisfied. I remember one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales my mother read to me one summer when I was a little boy. It was of the fisherman who caught a flounder that was a prince in disguise. It spoke to him, “I am an enchanted prince. How will it help you to kill me. I would not taste good to you. Put me back into the water and let me swim.” So he put the talking flounder back into the sea. He went back to the filthy little shack where he and his wife lived.
She asked him, “Did you catch anything today?” He told her about the talking flounder that was an enchanted prince. She asked him, “Did you ask for anything before you put it back into the water?” When he said no, she sent him back to call the flounder and ask that he give them a nice little cottage to live in. The flounder said, “Go home, your wife already has a nice cottage. It has a little front yard, and a garden with vegetables, fruit and some chickens and ducks. It had a beautiful little parlor and a bedroom, kitchen, and dining room. Everything is beautifully furnished.”
Well, the fisherman’s wife was happy for a little while with her cottage. But then she grew tired and asked her husband to go back and ask for a palace. So he went back and asked for a palace. The flounder gave them a palace. But then she wanted to be a queen, and then an empress, and then she wanted to be pope. But after she was the pope she felt bad she couldn’t tell the sun and the moon when to rise and set. So she demanded her husband to ask the flounder to make her like God. The flounder said, "Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again."
And they are sitting there even today.
Don’t we give ourselves a better feeling in our hearts if we have been generous with others than when we have lavished on ourselves the next thing we want? So that if you and I want to love ourselves, we will probably give away more than we spend on ourselves. And we’ll be happy for it as we see hungry people able to eat, and homeless people find shelter, and oppressed people find relief. We’ll realize that we were able to make a difference for good—and to give oneself this joy is a very kind thing to give ourselves.
The foundation of loving ourselves is not in loving others first. I doubt this is possible unless we first love God with all we are.
But I am troubled as I say this because I think we have heard this often enough that we like the sound of it but few of us have let it sink in that this must be a way of life to have any effect. I despair at the words of some of the songs that we sing that express love for God because we are tempted to think that singing these fine words is what is expected. Sing it in church and then go live as everyone else lives. When we sing this often enough without governing our lives to do as we sing we are immunized against the inclination to love God.
And so Christians may be guilty of the worst kind of selfishness, a kind that takes place while singing generously, “Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee; take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold; take my moments and my days, let them flow in endless praise.”
It is no wonder that very often Christians aren’t very happy people. Their hearts are heavy with the burden we have put on themselves; habits of living at cross purposes with how we say they believe. It is odd to say it, I suppose, but what we need is to accept that there is wisdom in living as we say we believe. Our faith is not a matter of talking, of singing, of praying, or even saying we believe; but of living the faith we profess.
When we talk about love how confused we can get. We know that "me first" is bad ideology, but when you come down to it, we're pretty much at the center, between our eyes, just behind our noses. Our idealism gets misty eyed and we put on our license plates "Kids' first." But what about former kids, now grown, now very old and not as cuddly as little kids. We feel honorable to say, "Family first." But then what about other peoples' families? Are my kids more precious than theirs? We sing with tears in our eyes the "Star Spangled Banner." Country first sounds so noble. "Breathes there the soul so foul that never to himself has said, 'This is my native land?" But what of those who live in other countries?
It's God first, to love with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength, and with all our minds, and then to realize His great love for us, indeed for the whole world, and then we bask to know we are included in the beloved. Knowing God loves us without condition, we turn His love in our hearts to others. Then we are happy. Then--how can I begin to express "the then?" This is the will of God for you and me.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father grant that we may love as you love us. In Jesus’ name. Amen
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
February 05, 2006
Joy Unspeakable and Full of Glory
Isaiah 29: 17-19 / I Peter 1: 3-8
February 5th, 2006
The title of this morning’s message was engraved on my mind and heart many years ago by a dear old friend, Nini Stewart. She had been a Latin teacher at Sunnyside Junior Hi but was now retired. She was an avid fan of the writings of C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia Chronicles she introduced to her students. She came to our home to listen to a tape of this Oxford don’s voice reading The Four Loves, and one of the dearest friendships of my life began.
Nini doted on our toddler son, Stu, and as Bonnie was in the hospital with complications that set in as she carried our not-yet-born daughter, little Stu and I were over at Nini and Uncle John’s home often for dinner. One of my fondest memories of Nini was when her face would light up and she would say, “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
She meant something like, “What we have here is a foretaste of heaven.” Her face glowed. Her face remains before me as an image of grace, kindness, and joy. Nini knew about suffering. How patiently she accepted it. No complaining. No blaming. Till the very end when she languished in a nursing home, her face lit up quickly as I visited her. Her joy bubbled to the surface and she’d say, “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.” She didn’t make that term up.
The Apostle Peter coined this phrase for the benefit of suffering Christians in the early Church. They suffered persecution for being Christians; Christianity was then an illegal religion. How cruel was their suffering. The Roman government tormented them for their obedience to Jesus with ingenious cruelties. No matter what they’d not reject Jesus.
Apologists for Christianity a few years later wrote to the Roman Emperors, “Look at the way they live! Don’t persecute them for a name you know nothing about.” But despite the nobility of their character our earliest forbears in the faith suffered terribly for bearing the name, “Christian.” Why did they stick with it? It had much to do with the joy they discovered inside. JOY is a gift of God.
Interestingly, there are several related words in the New Testament that suggest what joy means. Xara, joy, is related to xaris, grace, and xarisma, a gift of God’s Spirit, xaragma, a mark made by engraving or branding, and xaracter, the impress that is made on wax by a signet ring. Joy is the impression on us of the Spirit of God—if we have it. It is conspicuous in its absence if we don’t. The persecuted Christians had this joy—an inward cheerful reflection of the nature of God. Joy bubbled up and was more precious than the passing security they could have found if they renounced their faith.
Paul and Silas sang at night in a dungeon in Philippi with their backs bleeding and oozing from the brutal beating of the day before. Why? They weren’t taunting the prison guards. They sang because they found joy like a fountain bubbling up from within them. Their joy struck their jailor. It put him at their mercy, odd to say. Fortunately, they were full of mercy—an outcropping of joy. So when his life was in jeopardy as the prison doors were all open and every prisoner’s shackles broken making it impossible to fulfill his duty to guard them, he turned to them and asked, “What must I do to be saved?” Surely he meant, “What can I do to escape execution for the escape of the prisoners?” But why should he ask them this?
It was because their joy that caught his attention. Instead of the moaning and cursing that suffering convicts usually emitted he heard songs in the night. Their joy demanded an explanation. People whose backs are beaten to a bloody pulp don’t sing, they cry. Cheerfully Paul and Silas told him, “Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Thus he was invited to the joy of their salvation. In his moment of total vulnerability he found the joy of his salvation.
It was of this joy that Peter reminded the widespread tormented Christians in Asia Minor, letting them know that as they suffered their faith was being purified. They perhaps didn’t understand what was going on inside of them. Why didn’t they back away from their faith as a reflex? It is normal to take your finger off a hot burner on the stove, to run from danger. But here they were clinging to their faith despite the pain it brought them. Why?
What made them think that keeping on in the Jesus-way was better than security and freedom? They found that their faith was more precious than gold—even than life itself. They didn’t protest as their money was taken, their homes confiscated. Maybe they didn’t understand what was going on in them that they should endure as they did. Peter explained to them what was going on. Their faith was being refined. That’s why they found it more precious than gold. That’s why they were finding “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Peter didn’t tell them they had to keep on being faithful. He explained to them the reason for the joy they found as they kept on being faithful—unto death. It was Jesus Christ in their hearts.
They had what Jesus gave them. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read of this same reflex in Jesus. “Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame.” Jesus in their hearts made them do as Jesus did. They too endured their crosses and despised their shame.
These early Christians were like us in that though they hadn’t seen Jesus they knew this of Him and could love Him. I think we often assume that all Christians described in the New Testament knew Jesus personally. But the Christians to whom Peter wrote were a mix of Jewish and Gentile believers scattered in a land to which Jesus never once came. They knew of Jesus only from a distance. So they were like us in never seeing this Jesus in whom they trusted.
They were unlike us in that we do not suffer because of our claim to faith in Jesus Christ. I wonder if this difference is part of the reason why joy is not conspicuous among most of us Christians today. We keep looking for happiness, the chance favorable circumstance that brings momentary cheer. If we suffered a bit we might know a bit more about joy.
We share with these early Christians that if we live the life of faith in Jesus Christ we too may rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory—even though we do not face persecution. But we must give ourselves to the life of faith in spite of the fact that suffering does not goad us to it. I get the feeling God crafts XARA in us, and His tool is difficulty of one kind or another. It is hard to be steady in faithfulness to Jesus when it is so entirely optional, so totally lacking in any risk—other than to personal convenience. Nowadays the idea of expending some cost of inconvenience for the sake of our faith is perceived as extraordinary.
I sometimes wonder if it is possible to have this joy without some inconvenience, some element of suffering. How can our faith mean much to us if we identify with it so easily and loosely? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose book, The Cost of Discipleship I am now reading with one of you, discovered in the harsh climate for Christians in Nazi Germany, that grace, though free, was costly in its demands. Grace that we would accept without cost, cheap grace turns out to be not Christianity. It has the name, but none of the stuff of the way Jesus commanded. Christianity, as Bishop Westcott put it, becomes a euphemism, only a nice-sounding word.
Jesus said to those who follow Him, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” We are not Jesus’ friends if we don’t do what He commands. It seems to take suffering, or at least some inconvenience to help people realize whom they have in Jesus Christ. Obeying Jesus’ commands always seems more an imperative if it costs something to obey. Obeying Jesus commands is the key opening the lock on joy.
From what the New Testament tells us, the evidence of this joy is the litmus test of being a Christian. Some would be known as Christians for the intensity of their convictions about this or that. Some would be known as “proper” Christians. Christendom is criss-crossed with fingers pointing at others who call themselves Christians whose doctrines are not proper, whose morals, particularly sexual ones, defy the Bible’s teaching. A lot of people like to be identified as Christians by the display of bumper stickers or the use of pious vocabulary. But a clear distinguishing mark of the faith of Jesus Christ is this joy, “unspeakable and full of glory” that results from a life of obedience to Jesus’ commands.
It is hard to accept this in churches that take justification by faith alone seriously. It is hard to teach this because we have focused so hard on Paul’s reminder that it is “by grace we have been saved, through faith; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” But Paul goes on to remind us that we are saved for good works that God has before ordained that we should walk in them. There can be no works that please God if we do not accept the discipline of obedience to Jesus’ commands.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us that there is no faith where there is no obedience, and no obedience without faith. They are the warp and the weft result of being adopted into the family of God. And the clear evidence of lives of disobedience to Jesus’ commands is the absence of joy.
We read together from the Prophet Isaiah a bit earlier this morning. Somewhat earlier in the passage from which our Old Testament lesson came the prophet told his people, “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote; therefore, behold, I will again do marvelous things with this people.” But first their wise men’s wisdom had to die. Those clever religious leaders had to be shut-up--who trotted out their commonsense feel-good advice that if they did their bad deeds in the dark God wouldn’t see them, and that they had the right to tell God, their heavenly Potter, how He should make them.
Isaiah goes on to write that it is the deaf, the blind, and “the meek that will obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.” There has always been a common element in popular but wrong religion. Whether in ancient Israel or in modern America, what grabs the popular mind, that brings teeming results, always misses the point of the way of God. Upstanding Judahites in Isaiah’s day would have protested against any suggestion that they followed a religion other than the Divinely revealed religion. They maintained the sacrifices and perhaps carried on other ceremonial functions. As Cardinal Ratzinger points out in his marvelous book, Introduction to Christianity, the religion of Israel was essentially a religion of faithful observance of the law. But it was possible to live a way of life totally at odds with the way God commanded, while maintaining the system of Temple sacrifices. The elite of society carried along this way unaware how distasteful to God they were. They trusted their prophets, after all.
But God found in the deaf, the blind, and the poor those who could receive His word. “In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.” He goes on to promise, “Jacob shall no more be ashamed . . . for when he sees his children, the work of my hands, in his midst, they will sanctify my name.”
The prophet Isaiah pointed at a way of life fulfilled in the life and promises and commands of Jesus. Sanctifying God’s name meant a way of life obedient to God in ways of worship and in ways of life. The plan of God had not yet unfolded with One who would be wounded for Israel’s transgressions, bruised for their iniquities—as we read in Isaiah 53. The finished work of grace; the gift of salvation received by faith was not yet understood. But the way of life was already there in Isaiah’s words to Israel.
We might say that Jesus calls us to sanctify His name by bearing the name Christian in such a way that we trust in Him for His forgiveness of our sin, and then proceed to obey His commands—proving to be His friends, and thus discover joy arising from within us—as individuals, and as a community that meets together to worship, and then, by the grace of God, as a world-wide communion, the Body of Christ. Oh, if it were only the distinguishing feature of the Church before the world, “Look at their joy!”
I remember that Jesus said, “If I be lifted up I will draw all people to myself.” How do we lift up Jesus? Not by saying His name loudly everywhere. Not by demanding external observances as a right in a pluralistic society. But by living together as Jesus’ friends, keeping His commands, and displaying the joy that is the inevitable consequence of living in trust and obedience to Jesus.
Two weeks ago we presented to you a plan for reaching the families of our area with the love of the Christ. If the joy of the Lord shines through us, we will succeed beyond our wildest dream. If it is evident that here people trust in Jesus, love one another as Jesus loves, serve one another as He served His disciples, and deal with one another’s faults tenderly with forgiveness, who will be able to resist what we will bring. But if we do not bring the way of joy, any amount of well-conceived programs will fail.
What does this say to you and to me? “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.” What a good ring that term has to it. It is ours if we trust Jesus fully, if we prove to be His friends, obeying His commands—and receiving joy, fullness of joy, joy unspeakable and full of glory.
Let us pray: O Lord, we bless you for your great kindness that you should be pleased to give us joy. Grant that we may receive your gift with hearts wide open to receive your Son, Jesus, to be His friends, doing as He commanded us. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM