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November 26, 2006
Jesus, the Trustworthy Shepherd
Jeremiah 31: 7-14
John 10: 1-6
November 26th, 2006
Every Sunday morning for many years you have heard me end the service with an ascription of praise to God that includes a blessing, a benediction. With three fingers of my right hand extended, an ancient sign of the Holy Trinity, I will say, “Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus that great shepherd of the sheep, make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” You leave worship with these last words ringing in your memory. Jesus, the Great Shepherd has a good and perfect will for me to.
The blessing goes on with another word-picture that suggest Jesus is like a lamb—“through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” Jesus, the Lamb of God, took away the sins of the world. The goal of this Shepherd-Lamb is to make you and me perfect in every good work to do His will, leading us in a life well pleasing in God’s sight.
This was what the Great Shepherd did, after all. He said, “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me.” And He leads us to do the will of the One who sent Him. Through His blood of the everlasting covenant He makes this possible.
Increasingly I savor the words of this benediction. They come to me during the day. I say them slowly every Sunday so they may sink in to us all. We leave worship reminded of our purpose in life, to do what is well-pleasing in the sight of our Great Shepherd. I see some of you moving your lips, repeating with me those familiar words.
Here is the hope of the Gospel—Jesus the Great Shepherd that I can claim as my Shepherd. Here is the goal of the Gospel, to make us “perfect in every good work to do His will.” Perfect means complete, fulfilled, the purpose of your life and mine achieved. Here is the means of the Gospel, the blood of the everlasting Covenant. It applies to us sheep that leave worship to follow the great Shepherd of the sheep.
As I pondered not only the Scriptures before us this morning but also the many other Bible references to God as shepherd I saw so many directions I could lead us in our thinking this morning. How clever it is possible for us sheep to become with this teaching!
Indeed, if I were to open up the tenth chapter of John carefully, many questions come to mind. What did Jesus mean, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold?” Who are these other sheep? In the sixteenth verse Jesus speaks of one fold (in Greek, aules) and one flock (in Greek, poimen). The fold of the sheep is the enclosure in which they are kept. All sheep in the flock not in the same enclosure. But there is still one flock that belongs to the shepherd. How suggestive are these words of Jesus. We scrutinize and interpret them in our day of great diversity and splintering of Christendom. We set out to prove how we are in the right fold, the one for which Jesus is shepherd, while others may not be in the right fold. Who are these other sheep of His, we wonder? Because we believe strongly we are sure ours is the one fold as well as the one flock.
I see the vast development of ideas since New Testament times and how this doctrinal development has occurred here and there as a means of self-approval as well as an attempt to understand. And I think, “O if we could see ourselves as sheep more than as theologians, how would we see the Shepherd differently.”
When we look at the relationship between shepherds and sheep, do the sheep think of the meaning of that strange creature with two legs that guides them, protects them, provides them enough to eat and drink, pours oil over their wounds, and goes hunting for them when they stray? Sheep probably think nothing at all about their shepherds. But we do. Of course, we are sheep with different brains than the four-legged kind have.
In the metaphor of sheep and shepherd we see that all the sheep do is trust their shepherd. Faith for them is a verb, an action word not a noun. It is not a synonym for “right belief.” Faith is trust in the shepherd. They go where the shepherd leads. They eat what the shepherd feeds them. They drink from the still running water to which the shepherd leads them. They feel safe in the shepherd’s presence. And in that most favorite of all psalms that we want to hear when death is near they trust that “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Of course, one reason why we don’t think of ourselves only as sheep is that the Bible gives us more images of God than of a shepherd. God is a righteous Judge too. He is angry with the wicked every day. Our thoughts of God are tinged with fear, reasonably so, in the presence of One who knows all about us. God is the Lord of Hosts, the Commander of invincible heavenly forces. God is the Creator of all things. The Bible does not only tell us of God as our Shepherd, with Jesus as the personification of this gentle image. So we do not think of God only as our Shepherd.
Not only that but we are not of the species called “sheep.” We are human beings. We are at the top of the heap in the animal world, with minds capable of brilliant thoughts. Real sheep are not capable of great art, great virtue, and great sins. We are. We can launch space-craft to the moon and Mars. We discover quantum theory and the vocabulary of DNA. We can produce gifted artists like Michaelangelo who can paint glorious pictures and sculpt marble into detailed likenesses of David and Moses.
We can become suicide-bombers and follow leaders like Adolf Hitler. Sheep have no capacity for this. Their thoughts, such as they are, never stray far from eating and drinking. So it is harder for us to remember that “we are the sheep of God’s hand,” when we are busy with the many things that people think about.
So there are red herrings we go chasing after that deflect from this basic teaching of the Bible that puts us into the humble position of sheep.
The sheep and shepherds that we read about in the Scriptures are different from western images of sheep farming that we see on TV or reading National Geographic. We know of vast sheep farms in New Zealand. There helicopters as well as horseback riders are used to move great populations of sheep from here to there. Since the market for wool has been reduced by cheaper synthetic materials for making clothing, the sheep are headed for market as lamb chops rather than as providers of wool for wool coats and blankets. Those who herd sheep to the butcher shop do not come to know them well over the years.
Agri-business sheep farmers hardly fit the image of the shepherds in the Bible. Sheep-for-meat-farmers don’t know their sheep by name. They don’t worry about the one lost sheep because when there are thousands of sheep to care for it’s far different from leaving ninety and nine. It is economically unfeasible to leave the ninety-nine thousand to look for the one lost sheep.
So we have to let our minds drift to olden times in the Middle East where there was an intimate relationship between a small flock sheep and the shepherd. Then sheep were kept for the wool they could give, year after year. So shepherds knew their sheep by name. “Here brown-leg. Here “Black Ear.” The shepherd calls, and Brown-leg and Black-ear know their names. They know the voice of the shepherd. Some times shepherds talk in sing-song sounds using a strange language developed between him and his flock. Over the years the language grows, unique to this flock known by name to the shepherd, and known uniquely by voice to the sheep. This is the picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd we are to see.
In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus is a good shepherd, the kind that gives his life for the sheep. William Barclay reminds us that when John refers to Jesus as the “good shepherd” he uses a word for “good” (kalos) that means winsome, loving, and kind. Jesus is not just a skilled (agathos) shepherd, one simply good at caring for sheep. He is kind. Not only that, He puts their wellbeing before His own. He lays his life on the line to protect them.
But I see that I have gone on and done what I proposed we need to do less—talk about the Shepherd. What we need is to recover some sense of being the people of His pasture, the sheep of His hand. How can we do this in a day of so many competing ideas of what it is to follow the Shepherd?
In past weeks we have noticed that faith is an action verb rather than a noun. Obedience has far more to do with being faithful sheep than believing great ideas about Him. When you and I come to the end of the day we may discover that our present orthodoxies more or less hit the mark, but we can tell for sure if we have obeyed the will of the Shepherd.
When I remember that the Lord is my Shepherd and I am His sheep, I will try far more to follow the voice of my Shepherd than to argue about what He means. I know where my Shepherd guides me—in ways of righteousness—that is, deep goodness. I know that my Shepherd wants me to love God with all I am, and that an index of whether I love God is how I’m doing with loving my neighbor. I know that God wants me to feel as He does about people who suffer from want or sickness, or who are in jail. I know that God is compassionate over all, so I should be too. And I know that following in these ways that my Shepherd guides me gives me a lot to do that I can only do if I keep my eyes on Him, and my ears—listening to His voice rather than to my own self-protecting voice.
Above my father’s desk was a plaque given to him by Moravian missionaries in Costa Rica when he taught one summer in their seminary. It is the Moravian “coat of arms.” I showed it to the children this morning. It depicts Jesus as the Lamb of God striding forward, its right leg raised to take the next step. It seems to hold in that hoof the pole on which hangs the banner of the cross. Around its head is a yellow halo with a Latin cross on it. It walks on green grass. Around the border we read: Vicit agnus noster; eum sequamur. Our Lamb conquers. We will follow Him.”
Let us pray: O God our Shepherd, we thank you for Jesus our Good Shepherd, the Good Lamb of God. Grant that we may follow Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 19, 2006
Jesus, the Sight-Giver
Isaiah 35: 1-10
John 9: 1-17
November 19th, 2006
This morning we have read about one of Jesus’ loving acts of healing that reminded early Christians of the prophecy of Isaiah. “When our God comes then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Jesus was not equally successful in healing all kinds of blindness.
There is more than one kind of blindness. This story is about our God’s encounter with two kinds of blindness. Jesus did not always heal physical blindness in the same way. Sometimes He spoke a word and a blind person could see. In one instance he spat on a man’s eyes and he gradually began to see. He needed another dose of Jesus’ touch to see clearly. Maybe Jesus healed this man gradually as an illustration of how gradually we are healed of spiritual blindness.
Physical blindness is not as harmful as spiritual blindness. A person whose eyes don’t see is not destructive. A blind person often has other senses that become sharper making up for the loss of eye-sight. Part of the charm of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and the glorious Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, blinded at age twelve, is that they sing from their hearts in a way that reaches deep inside us all.
Not so with a person who will not “see,” whose heart is hard, who is locked in a bias, a prejudice, a habit of mind. This kind of person will not admit to being blind. “I see things right,” such a person insists. Jesus came to heal this kind of blindness too. A physically blind person lives with her uncertainty as a fact of life. A spiritually blind person may not be lacking in certainty. “Maybe wrong, but never in doubt,” we poke fun uneasily at such a person.
Unfortunately with the best intentions things we “see” we may see in error. Honestly we may be dead wrong, imagining that we see. This is our predicament when it comes to things of God. As Paul reminds us in Romans 1, there are those who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, often unwittingly I think. Blindness, after all, is a problem of not being able to see.
In our story this morning both physical and spiritual blindness are spread before us. The man was blind from birth. The religious leaders whose eyes worked just fine, grew more blind as they refused to accept the obvious, that Jesus healed the man born blind. Their trouble in “seeing” had to do with their confusion as to the purpose of the Sabbath Day. How could Jesus be from God if He healed on the Sabbath? Did God not command Israel to do no work on the Sabbath?
I don’t think the purpose of this story was so that Christians should forever poke fun at Jewish Pharisees for being so blind as not to recognize that Jesus did the work of God. Indeed, the Pharisees had a point. They raised a question interesting in itself.
Behind the question that seems so obviously answered to us they dithered with the question, “If a man’s work is that of a “faith-healer,” shouldn’t He refrain from this work on the Sabbath the way a carpenter should?”
Why did it bother them so much that Jesus healed people on the Sabbath? Was it just a passion for keeping God’s law? Is there not a scale of values, so that routinely keeping the Sabbath Day holy can be interrupted when there is the opportunity to do good? All sorts of exceptions find their way into the Jewish oral law. It’s the intention that matters.
Sure Jesus could have waited till the following day, but He was here now where and as there was a need. Was their concern for the Sabbath a smokescreen “principle” hiding jealousy, or some other human smallness? We wonder, but we should not presume on them ill motives.
Some religious kinds of refusal to see seem obvious to us but not to others. How can the Muslim Al-Qaida terrorists fail to see the evil of their deeds? We call them terrorists; but they call themselves defenders of God’s true way.
Otherwise devout Christians in the Union of South Africa and in our country were blind to their sin of racial prejudice. They claimed they merely accepted the curse God placed on Noah’s son Ham—the father of all the dark-skinned races.
Abusive husbands and fathers are customarily blind to their ill behavior. Christian husbands believe they are merely exercising their headship in the home as they grow impatient when their commands fall on deaf ears. Thus they may become emotionally or even physically abusive to enforce God’s law as they perceive it. The list could go on and on of blindnesses that affect us all.
Thus we knowingly quote Robert Burns’ poem with regard to other people, “Wad some power the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us. It would from many a blunder free us.” It’s remarkable how we think others should heed Burns’ poem.
Let us come back to the story again. The man in the Gospel story this morning was born blind. Unlike the other blind folk who may have been blinded by disease or accident, this man’s blindness was perceived as God’s punishment for sin--maybe his own, maybe his parents’.
The religious leaders who challenged Jesus believed that if God was punishing this man for sin it was wrong to interrupt the judgment of God—particularly on the Sabbath. But Jesus said this man was not blind because of anyone’s sin.
A friend of mine of years ago became a Christian after reading this story. Dr. Purushotman Krishna was a professor of Oriental philosophy at Durban University in South Africa. Christian students in house to house visitation left him a copy of the New Testament. Some time afterward he picked it up, opened to John 9, and read this story. The penny dropped; the light went on in his mind. We are not punished in future lives for sins in previous lives. It melted his heart and he trusted in Jesus.
Perhaps this awareness was one purpose of this story. But another purpose is that we should stoop beneath the load of people with handicaps of any sort. Jesus said the divine reason for the man being born blind it was that the works of God might be made manifest in Him. The work of God was to restore his sight.
We draw inferences from this about other hard things in our lives and in the lives of others. Romans 8: 28 tells us “All things work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose.” “All things?” Mike Bergmann and I spoke of this truth to young folk in the Work Release Jail this past Tuesday. Even the Holocaust? Even Saddam Hussein’s genocides? Even 9/11? It’s hard to think this. Certainly the immediate good is hard to see in the wake of great evil. But looking for good that God may bring, brings immediate healing effects inside us.
I look for the good that God will bring out of the “evil” He sends my way. Simply thinking this softens me inside. It is an antidote to bitterness. It makes you and me possible sources of blessing we would not be otherwise. God has to use strong medicine to cure the hardness of the human heart. When my hard heart is softened so that I can become of use to God, I may well look back and thank God for the hard things that came my way. I realize this does not satisfy us in trying to imagine the good that can come from immense evils.
What Jesus did in this story targeted in particular the blindness of religious people. We might say that for religious reasons these spiritual leaders took issue with Jesus. I think of this and realize that we who have strong beliefs may not realize how God needs to heal us.
I see how this story asks us religious folk to open the eyes of our hearts to areas of our own blindness. Andrew Sullivan has called attention in a recent book to how the great tension between Muslims in the East and we in West is due to the certainty on both sides that we know the will of God for sure. He writes that the fervor and fanaticism that grips millions across the Muslim world is because they know the will of God regarding us in the West. Thus a suicide bomber may go to her violent death with a smile on her face, in total calm—knowing God willed her to. You and I read this and we are appalled.
The natural response to this is to develop a counter-weight of fervor and fanaticism, or, lacking that, of force. Let’s fight the fanatic enemy with greater force. In the West we have a problem; few of us take matters of faith as seriously as do many Musims. A faith that does not regulate our lives is not a very strong force against an enemy that takes extremes for granted. We see they are blind to reason and decency. They see that we are blind to truth; indeed that we tolerate great evil in our materialistic society. They see how listless is our devotion, while they bow their foreheads to the ground five times a day towards Mecca in prayer, wherever they are.
I see a glimpse of Jesus speaking to us in this story. Jesus did not engage the Pharisees who challenged His healing on the Sabbath by arguing about the Law of Moses as a lawyer might do. He did not stand up to them and say, “I’m right.” He did not exercise the force He might have used. He quietly did what was the right thing to do.
He healed the man.
And we may suspect that if one of the Pharisees had been afflicted with a stroke as He stood pointing a finger at Jesus on that Sabbath Day, Jesus would have healed the man—just as he replaced the ear of the High Priest’s soldier in the Garden of Gethsemane after Peter whacked it off.
How do the eyes of our hearts need changing? Are we open to the question? Isaiah said, “When our God comes, then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Indeed, we should acknowledge that Jesus was God and worship Him.
But seeing that Jesus indeed healed this man is not enough. Physical blindness was not the only kind of blindness Jesus came to heal. The deeper and more difficult healing is the blindness inside of us. To acknowledge that we may not see is the first step in God giving us the gift of sight.
Maybe if you and I will concede there may be a need for this, the Holy Spirit may open this squinting observation so that our eyes may open still wider, till we take vigorous stock of ourselves. I often remember that Scripture tells us that God looks for humble and contrite hearts for His residence. Humility and reticence hardly seem virtues in a day of religious conflict. But they are still needed for God to be at home in our hearts.
What blindness do I need to see in myself? It is a good question. God can heal us of our blindness—through Jesus Christ our Lord, who still opens the eyes of the blind.
Let us pray: O Lord, thank you that Jesus healed people whose eyes didn’t work. Grant that He may heal us of our blindness too. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 12, 2006
Father Abraham
Genesis 15: 1-6/John 8: 39-48
November 12th, 2006
There was a rabbi who lived about the same time as the Apostle Paul who taught that there are three things important to know: “know where you came from, know where you are going, and know before whom you are about to give account and reckoning.”
Our dad used to tell us boys about an early Robertson who came to the aid of King Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. “Stout Duncan,” this early Robertson was called. He arrived on the scene in the nick of time. With his aid the Scots defeated the detested English King Edward I. So our Robertson forbears were awarded the tartan that has appeared on our Christmas wreathe at Faith Church for the past 20 years. Imagine that! These old memories undoubtedly grow with time, but this lore becomes precious. It matters to us where we have come from.
Jews and Christians remember fondly their connection with Abraham, a man who lived nearly 4000 years ago. For Jews it is a hereditary link because Abraham was the grandfather of Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. For Christians it is a spiritual link. The Apostle Paul taught us that Abraham was the first one about whom it is said, “He believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Christians point back to Abraham as the trail-blazer of the life of faith.
Who was this Abraham? We learn of him in the book of Genesis at the end of a genealogy that begins with Noah. Noah and his family survived the Great Flood. Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Genesis tells us of Shem’s family line into which Abraham was born. At first he was called Abram, but I’ll call him Abraham. We learn that his father, Terah, had planned to go to Canaan—later the Promised Land of Israel. He followed the Euphrates River north to Haran, perhaps because this way he thought he could travel by water all the way to his destination. There were no east-west waterways to follow. He stayed in Haran. We don’t know why. The chemistry of life mixes odd ingredients along the way for us. It did for Terah too.
No doubt Terah told his sons why he wanted to go to Canaan. They knew why he didn’t get there. Then Terah died and his son grabs center stage. The Lord spoke to Abraham, “Go from your country . . . to the land I will show you.” We know that the land God would eventually show him was Canaan, where his father intended to go. But Abram apparently didn’t know this would be his destination or he would have gone straight there.
I think of how the ambition that God may stir in a person’s heart may never be fulfilled in his lifetime. But God uses this unfulfilled ambition to speak to coming generations. God begins to lead in a child’s life as she hears of the unfulfilled longing in the generation before. There are stages we don’t see along the way of God’s leading a family.
In my own life I see how my father’s aspirations to know the Bible in its original languages led him to excel as a seminary student. I’ve seen his grade reports in seminary where he was a top student in Hebrew and Greek—straight As. As the years rolled on he became a missionary in India. He put his linguistic interest to work mastering India’s two main languages to do missionary work. He hadn’t the time to continue his studies in the biblical languages.
One of my cherished books is an edition of the Greek New Testament in which I read inside the cover: “Irvine Robertson, 3.6.90, in hopes of a resurgence of Greek.” Seven months later he died. My father told me of his desire to regain the biblical languages in our last walk together. At the time I was finishing my Ph.D.—with Greek and Hebrew as my principal languages. I see how God worked through my dad to foster in me a longing to know the languages of Scripture. That’s why I pester you with Hebrew.
If the tale were fully told, did God use the father’s longings to move the son?
After first telling Abram to leave home for an unknown destination his life became complex. God promised him a family and a land. But for many years he had neither. He wandered not knowing where he was going; he had no children. How hollow God’s promise must have seemed: “I will make of you a great nation.” Indeed!
Put yourself in his place. How we become discouraged when our dreams aren’t panning out. You maybe intended to go to college, but life’s circumstances interrupted your dreams. Or you began your studies with a vision of becoming a research scientist, or a doctor, or a professor, or a successful entrepreneur. But things didn’t work out. You’re not the lone ranger! The tapestry of life has many loose threads. Abram’s life was pretty low at the point we came to this morning. Then God said to Him words that have made a huge impact on world history. “Go outside on a starry night and look up; that’s how many children you’ll have.”
“Of course I will,” he thought with bitter irony. We read of his doubt. “O Lord God, Sarai and I continue to be childless and the heir of my house is a servant.” In the verses that follow we learn of great dread and darkness that came to Abram. Perhaps for the first time he began to realize how powerless he was to do anything but the next thing God told him to do. He could not affect his destiny.
We read Genesis 15: 6, “He believed the Lord; and [the Lord] reckoned it to him as righteousness.” But did Abram know he was righteous? For that matter did he care? It wasn’t righteousness that Abram wanted; he needed an heir and a place to settle down.
There isn’t time this morning to trace the story of his and Sarai’s life. But it’s interesting to see how Jews and Christians have remembered two different aspects of Abraham’s importance. The Jews remember the physical heredity, and keep on applying the sign of circumcision that God commanded Abraham’s descendents to put on their sons.
Christians remember that “He believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Because we think how often we’ve heard of the importance of belief, belief in God, belief in Jesus.
The background of Abraham’s story rests behind Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees. They tell Jesus, “Abraham is our father.” They meant their biological father. Jesus replied, “If you were Abraham’s children—meaning his spiritual rather than merely biological children—you would do what Abraham did.” What did Abraham do? “He believed God.” Of course, they believed in God but they did not accept that Jesus was sent by His heavenly Father to be the Messiah. This was one thing they did not believe. Indeed, in the blanket belief we bring to our trust in God there are ingredients in what we are asked to believe that we little know are there. The Jews to whom Jesus spoke did not see that their belief in God should include trust in Him, who addled them at every turn.
The Jews could rightfully claim God as their Father. When God told Moses to get the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, he was to tell the king of Egypt, that Israel was God’s first-born son. But Jesus spoke harshly to these fellow Jews who challenged Him: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” It was like when Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus did not tar all His fellow Jews for all time with one brush even as He did not mean Peter was the devil. The word “Satan” means adversary. For a moment Peter was Jesus’ adversary, albeit unintentionally. And in their opposition to Jesus His fellow Jews acted against aspects of the faith in God that they could not comprehend.
It did not seem obvious to the Jews that Jesus was the Son of God—as we understand. It seems obvious to us because we’re used to the idea. But there is an anesthetic effect of knowing something so well without taking to heart its implications. Generation after generation of Christians have spoken of believing in Jesus so that it seems the stress on belief has numbed the will to obey Him. Obedience sounds too much like good works—which Paul said were not able to secure for us salvation.
Even though Jesus’ fellow Jews did not then believe He was the Son of God many of them were obedient to the way of life that had been passed on to them from Moses. Obedience to God’s command was important to Abraham’s belief-system. And obedience was important to the Jews’ way of life. But they missed trusting something essential: Jesus was the promised blessing that God promised would come through the seed of their father, Abraham. But we Christians have minimized obedience as a specific ingredient in the faith by which we are saved.
I remember the parable Jesus told of a man who had two sons—because my father reminded me of this parable a number of times. It haunted him as he watched the trials and tribulations of Christendom. The father said to the first son, “Go work in the vineyard.” The son replied, “No.” But he went and worked in the vineyard. The father said to the second son, “Go, work in the vineyard.” He said, “Yes, dad,” but he did not go. Jesus asked, “Which one did the will of the father?”
Two perceptions capture my interest here. First, Paul tells us that there was considerable benefit in being a physical descendant of Abraham because through his family line came a knowledge of the will of God in the law given through Moses. But second, as Jesus and then Paul made very clear, it is even more important to have Abraham as a spiritual ancestor.
How is Abraham our spiritual ancestor? Because of what went on inside his head? Maybe, just a bit. He believed, but his belief was not just a head-thing. We know Abraham believed because he did something. He left the comfort of home as an old man to obey a command which God gave without even telling him why He gave the command. Abraham believed God; that is, he left home, not even knowing the end point of his destination.
At the time we read of Abraham’s life in Genesis 15 there was very little content to his belief. It was blind trust that God would lead him somehow. We point to our belief in Jesus and all the other things we believe as though this fulfills God’s intentions for all who are heirs of Abraham’s faith.
But we must notice that Abraham worked out his faith day after day for many years. And so must you and I. We get tired, sometimes very tired. I get bone tired, thinking sometimes that Christianity may be an impossibility in the way Jesus taught us. The unfaithfulness of others hurts. Indeed, sometimes it seems Christians use unfaithfulness as a means of hurting others whom they no longer care for. How wearying the chemistry of the Body of Christ can get.
But God never told us we have to feel rested, or that it is bad to feel tired, or that the Body of Christ will always appear ideal. The New Testament picture of the early Church shows a well-flawed Body of Christ. God says to you and me, “Keep on believing and do the deeds that belief causes to happen. Never quit believing; that is, never stop obeying. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God at work in you to will and to do of His good pleasure.” The same apostle who wrote our salvation is “not of works” said, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”
We are so easily distracted. So was Abraham.
When we think of belief we often have a fairly specific idea of what we are to believe. We think we must know of God and Jesus Christ, His Son, correctly. But it is obvious that Abraham knew little of God when he began to obey God. His son knew of God only that this deity was the God of his father, Abraham. And Isaac’s son and his son’s extended family only knew that their God was the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was not till more than 450 years after Jacob died that God revealed His name to Moses: “I am the Lord.” “Lord” is our English translation of the name of God, too sacred for the Jews to pronounce.
Aspire to be faithful much more than to know the details of God’s identity—details that are simply beyond us to know. Let faithfulness guide you and when your days come to a close, you will see that the God made known to us in Jesus Christ guided you to the extent you were faithful. When our lives are over, God will continue in the next generation what he has begun in ours. I pray God will be known to our children and our children’s children as the One before whom you and I lived in righteousness.
Let us pray: O God, grant that we may so follow you in the life before us, though we cannot see the way ahead. Grant to us to trust you and to obey. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 05, 2006
The Truth that Liberates
Leviticus 26: 3-13
John 8: 31-38
November 5th, 2006
A favorite motto at a number of great universities in the western world is drawn from Jesus’ words in our passage today. “You will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Why Gothic architecture in so many old university buildings? Well, because of the origins of universities in the monastic and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages. Even great more modern universities like Princeton and Duke reproduce the architecture of the church schools of long ago.
The genius pushing the search for knowledge on a broad front in all these universities traces back to a somewhat shortened form of Jesus’ words which were, “And you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Without the word “and,” this is a self-evident principle that is supported by reason. Truth, the product of honest investigation brings freedom to those who live by it. No axe to grind about which we might squabble; just many people honestly going after the evidence. We help each other and rejoice when we come on truth supported by the evidence.
But there is little rejoicing and mutual regard in our troubled world. Is this because we’re not all research scientists? Richard Dawkins argues that it is because religion has thrown the world into a tail-spin. The great battle is between reason and religion, the search for truth against the shackles of religious ideology.
I listened to a video made by Richard Dawkins that illustrates the tragic evidence of ideology as the source of violence and hatred in the world. He interviewed leaders from the primary religions contending for influence in the world and was overwhelmed by the animosity he encountered from them all. I watched the interview with fascination and sympathy. Such ferocious animosity from a Muslim convert from Judaism. Such bland acceptance of tradition by various Jews and Christians in Jerusalem. Then he went to Colorado Springs where he attended worship at Pastor Ted Haggard’s mammoth church. Afterward he interviewed the now scandalized pastor. I thought I would have responded to Dawkins’ challenges very differently. Why the hostility? Why the command to get off church property?
This behavior does not follow from the teaching of the Jesus of whom I read in the New Testament. What is the most basic thing Jesus taught? Many who have come to Jesus say that what drew them was His invitation, “Come, learn of me, because I am meek and gentle of heart and you will find rest.”
Let us get back to the quotation from Jesus with which we began this morning. It actually begins, “And you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” That one word, “and,” that points to what he said before is a very important word.
The word “AND” attaches “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free” to this: “If you continue in my word you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
What did Jesus mean when He said, “If you continue in my word?” What is the word to which Jesus alluded? What does it mean to continue in this word? And what is to be free? At the risk of getting picky I want to pick a bit into what this means as I see it. I am pushed farther and farther back as I follow the trail of the word ‘Word.”
You remember that the Gospel of John starts out describing Jesus Christ this way, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In verse fourteen that we read as the last Scripture each Christmas Eve, John writes with awe and wonder, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
In between we read of this Word, “He was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, and the world did not recognize Him.” I use the word “recognize” instead of “know” that we are used to hearing because the Greek word here is the foundation of our word “recognize.”
I see a thread here. The Word about human behavior—come, learn meekness and gentleness of heart—has something to do with the Word that spoke at creation, causing all things, and the Word that was born at Christmas. How can I possibly prove this remarkable belief? I can’t. But there is something about this that rings true to me.
A thread weaves through the mysterious tapestry of creation, a principle of the connectedness of all life. Biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics to be sure, but also psychology, curiosity about our past--history, languages and the thirst for something that explains the reason for the existence of all the evidence.
John’s Gospel, written long before the explosion of scientific knowledge, tells us that the Son of God played a key role in the physical world and in the unseen spiritual fabric of life—that gives life meaning. “In Him was life and the life was the light of people.” This John writes of this Word that was in the beginning with God.
There is an artificial boundary between spiritual truth and empirical truth. The truth that scientists ferret out in the lab is different from the truth that sets us free in that we can’t discover the truth that sets us free by examining how people think and act. We have to be taught the Truth that sets us free inside. This is part of our dignity and part of our dilemma.
Last year a Korean scientist made up evidence supporting his theory about cloning, a bit of fraud that not only showed reports of his “research” could not be trusted scientifically, but also brought shame to his country? Why shame? Because we must be able to trust the honesty of those who report the evidence uncovered in their research. We tell lies out of the desire for power, or out of fear, or out of embarrassment.
“Continue in my word,” Jesus said to those who wanted to continue learning of Him. Jesus said many things. We point to the sermon on the Mount with all its “blessednesses.” Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek; blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness; blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart.” If we are quietly reflective we see these words are at the foundation of Jesus’ word to us.
I wonder if it were evident that we Christians continued to live, tried hard to live by these words of Jesus if Richard Dawkins would see our way of life needed debunking. Would he see superstition as the foundation of our faith if the most evident part of it were that we were gentle in spirit, un-aggressive in disposition, hungry for goodness, merciful, and pure in heart? If we speak of the Virgin Birth and the Deity of Christ and the bodily resurrection as the heart of our faith, but cannot point to the effect of this on our lives, there is no wonder that honest skeptics say it’s hogwash.
Jesus did not tell us to defend a superstructure of esoteric doctrines as our primary call. He said, “Continue in my word.”
Continuing in Jesus’ word affects your research as much as it affects your attempts to understand theology. Continuing in Jesus’ words affects what we are like as husbands, wives, neighbors, citizens, soldiers, children, athletes, etc., as much as it points us to try to understand what is true about God and the Christian faith.
It is when we continue in Jesus’ word that we will know the truth that sets us free. If we are not continuing in Jesus’ word, we may have a lot of beliefs, but we will not be free in the desirable way Jesus sets us free. We may have political freedom, freedom of action and belief, and all the rest of the external absence of restraint. But within all this external lack of restraint, it is evident we are in bondage to every trait that creates havoc in this world. Fanaticism is no substitute for continuing in Jesus’ word.
Jesus said, “If the Son shall make you free, you will be free indeed.” “Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.” But if you are continuing in His word, you will not be a slave of sin. If our faith is so consumed with matters of words that we haven’t the energy or motivation to continue in Jesus’ word of life, we have missed the boat.
I envision the church as a community, a sub-set within our culture in which people try very hard to take Jesus at His word. We don’t have everything figured out about the natural world, so we are glad to turn you scientists loose to discover what you can. But meanwhile we will continue to live by Jesus’ word—which is not hard to understand, just hard to do.
How can we continue in Jesus’ word? I am convinced that you and I must first have in mind to do this and want to do it very badly. We must want to continue in Jesus’ way so much that it is a more consuming desire than to be approved by other people—who want us to be like they are.
And in our private determination to stay in the Jesus’ way we must avoid conceit if we see that others don’t share this private discipline. Because when pride comes in we’re out of the Jesus’ mode of life. There is the temptation in everyone who tries hard to look at others and think an unspoken prayer, “I thank you God that I am not like other people, adulterers, unclean, or even like this tax-collector.” The moment any hint of that comes in, we’re off the Jesus’ way.
I pray that Jesus’ word will sink into all of our consciences and infect us: “If you continue in my word, you are indeed my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” We believe this. But we must try to continue in it.
And so we pray to God, “O God, grant to us so to continue in Jesus’ way that we may enjoy the glorious freedom for which you created us. Amen. And then let us not deliberately act contrary to what we pray, and God will grant us what we ask.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 11:35 AM