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January 14, 2007
Two Foundations of Trusting Jesus
Psalm 4 / Joshua 1: 1-8
John 10: 22-42
January 14th, 2007
This morning we ordain and install some of our folk to the sacred work of being deacons and elders. I could scarcely think of three more fitting passages from the Bible to read and ponder at a time like this.
The fourth Psalm is an evening psalm. Read it before you go to sleep at night. Did I honor God with my behavior and my words today? If I got angry, was it fair and reasonable anger or anger because I didn’t get my way? Spend time communing with your own heart on your bed. Take stock of your day. Then get a good sleep at night. Good advice for us all, and all the more so for us if we are in the work of the ministry.
Then we read God’s counsel to Joshua that he was to pass on to the Israelites. They were about to inherit the Promised Land after forty years in the wilderness. He and his people needed a new frame of heart and mind. So the Lord says to Joshua, “Don’t let God’s word depart from your mouth. Let it fill your mind day and night. Then you will prosper in all ways that matter. God will never fail you or forsake you. Live as God has told you to live.”
What better things could be said to us as we begin a new year and as we are on the threshold of a new stage in the life of this congregation. If it isn’t God’s word that fills our thoughts as a guide for our lives it will be other words and ideas that are swirling in our land and in the church. We want to prosper in all the ways that matter. The personal and private lives of those who lead in the church have a lot to do with the success of the congregation. Being a deacon, elder, or pastor asks a lot more of us than attending committee meetings, or going through the motions of church business.
A congregation’s life cannot rise higher than the personal lives of its people. Psalm 4 and Joshua 1 are excellent guides to the inner life of those who lead.
But this morning I want to focus on what Jesus said in our lesson from the Gospel of John. It has to do with a crisis of belief. The religious leaders you and I might think would be first to rally to Jesus didn’t believe He was who He said He was.
But we can’t correct the problems of people who lived two thousand years ago. The reason why John’s Gospel tells us of the crisis of belief of people long ago is because the problem has never gone away. This Gospel was written about sixty years after Jesus left this earthly scene. John showed us this episode in Jesus’ life to inform Christians of his day why Jesus was believable. He then spends much of his effort in the Gospel and three letters near the end of the New Testament answering the question, “so what?” So I say believe in Jesus. So what? What difference does it make? Well, if it has not made a difference in how we live we may fairly ask, “Do we believe in Jesus?”
Today there is a crisis of faith in the Western world—in Europe, in the British Isles, and in America. The crisis is a bit different in America where fish symbols are pasted on the back of a lot of cars, where radio and TV religious broadcasts are part of the culture. In Europe and Great Britain the problem is nearly total indifference to religion. Our crisis is indifference to what faith in Jesus really means.
Is faith in Jesus faith in the American way? Is faith in Jesus a way to prosperity, success, and our idea of the good life? Does faith in Jesus mean mingling with the approved people? Does it mean getting very excited under the fired-up rhetoric of leaders of mass movements? Our crisis is that faith and belief are oft-used terms but the ways of Jesus may not be our ways. Our standard of behavior is not very high. Our standard is some kind of average of what people like us tolerate and do. Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do as I command you.” The Christian faith is more a matter of what we do than what we say we believe. Because I fear we actually may not believe what we say we do.
Belief takes place deep in the heart. It is from our depths that our behavior arises. We show what we really believe by what we do. John’s Gospel tells us, “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life; the one who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” Belief, if it is not the same thing as obedience to God, requires it in order to be belief.
The setting for the passage from John’s Gospel we have read is the Feast of Dedication, that is Hannukah. Hannukah today takes place about the same time as our Christmas. Jesus walked in a colonnade in the Temple named after King Solomon. We can picture religious teachers gathered around Him, talking as they walked. The place and time of the conversation was significant to it.
About two hundred years earlier the scene here was very different. The Feast of Hannukah brought this to mind. Then the Temple was desecrated by the Greek king of these parts. He tried to stamp out Judaism. In 170 BC this king attacked Jerusalem, killing about 80,000 Jews, selling many others into slavery. Jewish parents who gave their little boys the sign of the Covenant, circumcision, were crucified with their little boys hanging around their necks. Then he had a pig sacrificed on the large altar in the Temple court.
The reason why John tells us when Jesus walked with the religious leaders of His people was because the Jewish revolutionaries who defeated their Greek overlords 200 years before and rededicated the Temple were models of the kind of Messiah they looked for. They wanted someone to topple the Romans as the Maccabees had toppled the Seleucids.
So we read that the leaders asked Jesus, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
Jesus reply must have puzzled them. “I told you and you don’t believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to who I am. You don’t believe them either.”
How puzzling Jesus must have been when He talked about His sheep knowing and following Him. They didn’t think of the Messiah as a shepherd, unless he was a former shepherd who became a great leader like King David.
People who listened intently to how Jesus taught noticed that He spoke differently from other teachers of His day. When He took the will of God in the laws of Moses to a new level, He did it differently from other religious teachers. Early in the Gospel of Mark we read that some people said of Jesus, “He doesn’t teach like the scribes but as one who has authority.” We wonder how this difference was perceived. Maybe He spoke softly. Maybe He spoke humbly instead of proudly. Maybe His use of folksy illustrations made things more clear than other teachers’ teaching. When He taught they laughed a lot because His illustrations were so funny and profound. He poked fun at self-righeous people who were like someone with a pole sticking out of his eye getting all hot and bothered about someone else with a splinter in his eye. Jesus was not unique in seeing deeper implications to the Ten Commandments’ statements on adultery and murder. Other teachers did too, but they saw implications that put unnecessary burdens on people.
This bothered the religious teachers who seemed to think we can impress God only by living very strict and unnatural lives. For Jesus to disagree with them and then say that He was speaking in behalf of God, whom He called his father, irritated them. They called it blasphemy—cursing God.
Not only that, but He said that the works He did were the works of the Father, of God. They didn’t really quarrel that Jesus healed people and fed great crowds of hungry people. It was that He did it on the Sabbath. That was the problem. Then to say He was doing all this as the works of God, His Father was the final straw. This was an outrage, blasphemy.
Jesus countered their accusation by quoting the 82nd Psalm where the psalmist wrote: “I say you are gods, sons of the most High, all of you.” In our Bibles the word “gods” here is not capitalized because the translators knew that the writer of the psalm referred to judges and not to deities. Judges have the duty to judge according to true justice, the kind that God will give to everyone. In fact, the psalmist calls them “sons of the Most High.”
So when Jesus referred to God as His Father, and said His deeds were the works of the Father, He was in good company. When Jesus referred to God as His father it was in a greater sense than the writer of the 82nd Psalm intended. But at least He could say as the psalmist did of the judges who did the work of God in rendering good justice. Fair justice is God’s justice. As the words of the judges were believable when they were fair, so were Jesus’ words were believable.
Jesus’ words were believable because His works were believable. None of Jesus’ enemies denied that people Jesus healed were really healed. When Jesus fed the multitudes we don’t read that anyone said He was a fake, or that the report was false. The problem Jesus’ enemies had with His deeds, was that He sometimes did them on the Sabbath. This they believed was a violation of the fourth commandment that forbad doing work on the Sabbath. They had not caught on that the Sabbath, the day of rest was made for the benefit of people. God heals and restores the soul of His people as they rest. Jesus did works of restoration more specifically for people He saw in need.
This was all far more than an argument about ideas and rules. Jesus spoke and did all that He did in front of those who followed Him as well as before enemies so they could get the idea that following Him was a matter of doing and saying. At one point Jesus said to His disciples, “If you believe in me you will do greater works than I do because I go to the Father.”
What does that mean? Doesn’t it seem to mean that if we have really believed in Jesus there will be a mysterious grandeur to what we do because we are governed by this One whom we follow? Imagine the effect of great masses of people who believe in Jesus, speaking with His grace, behaving with His gentleness, and finding in themselves a power to do things that defy explanation.
In our day we see those who purport to heal in Jesus name. We see a lot of religious muscle flexed in the cultural wars. There is no doubt of the religious quality of much of this. But instead of persuading people massively to become followers of Jesus, hearts won by the grace and sweetness of the life and Gospel Christians proclaim, there is massive cynicism that Christians have aroused. I had dinner recently with a Purdue professor who was very polite to me and asked good questions about what it was like to be a pastor. But he has been turned away from serious consideration of the Christian message because of the embarrassment of the image of Christianity today. He didn’t say this so as to insult me.
Brothers and sisters, this ought not to be. And I pray that in this place in the coming year, in the coming years, it may not be so. When you come to Jesus listen to all that He says to do in following Him. First of all and completely indispensable let it be indisputably evident that you love one another. Let there be no doubt. Let it be the first piece of evidence when people step foot inside these doors, or when they come to one of our group fellowships, or when they talk with us in private, that we love one another. Without this we have no Gospel worth hearing. This love has characteristics: patient, kind, not jealous, envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way, not irritable of resentful. It doesn’t rejoice when others do wrong, but in the truth. It hears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—and does not end.
Then let us speak humbly the great truths that we believe. And let the evidence that we believe the truth not be in the severity and force of our argument, but in the power of our simple obedience to Jesus. Privately live this life. So that when we are together the whole may be greater than the sum of our parts. Then we may see some works proceed from us that have the power of the Holy Spirit behind them.
The horse must come before the cart. First, in the privacy of our homes and in our hearts, love God and love one another. Then do the deeds of love. Then let the mass of those who love God and one another see what will arise as the special works of God that may be credible to those who see them.
I put this challenge before us all this year. But particularly I challenge you who have offered yourselves for service and been chosen by our people, we trust at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, let us live the Gospel we profess. Let our faith, our belief in Jesus, be evident in what we say and in what we do. And God will lead us by His Holy Spirit into the days ahead. They will be good and happy days, full of love and good works and right belief. That awakens faith in Jesus Christ in others.
Let us pray: O Lord God, how grand is your gift to us of being called your children. Help us to follow Your Holy Child Jesus in all that we think, and say, and do. And grant that this congregation may experience your love that passes all understanding, and display it. And that through us others may come to believe Jesus and to follow Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 14, 2007 02:01 PM