Is Your Ladder Leaning Against the Right Wall? Here's How You Know.

I really like quotes.   Heck, I have over 200 pages of the things I've collected over the years.  But I found something surprising in that list this week.  One quote was missing.  You see, years ago, I read this quote that I haven’t been able to forget.  Its words come to me all the time.  And yet, I never added it to my quotes list.  I checked.   Maybe it’s because the tragic image it gives so haunts me that I hadn’t needed to write it down to remember it.   So what is the quote?  The monk, Thomas Merton said it.   He said:  “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

There were times in school when I got an assignment wrong.  I read the wrong chapter or did the wrong set of problems.   I hated that.   I had spent time and energy for something that didn’t even matter.    But what if you do that with your life?  To get that assignment wrong, how devastating would that be?   Who wants to get to the end and realize that?   

But every day, I see people do it.    I see them pursuing things that in the end don’t ultimately matter.  At the same time, they ignore the things that do, things that in the end will give them the very life they seek.  How do you make sure that isn’t you?  How do you make sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall?   In these powerful words from Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, God shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 12:1-8

So how do you make sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall?  Here, the great Christian leader, Paul, tells you.  You make your life, body and soul, a living sacrifice to God.  In the end, in Paul’s words, God is telling us that is the only right wall there is.  But what does that even mean, a living sacrifice to God?    In Greek, it sounds even weirder.  The word for sacrifice Paul uses here, actually means killing.   So how can you be a living killing?   Isn’t that a contradiction? 

Let’s talk first about what the words don’t mean.  In ancient times, everyone knew about sacrifices.  Every religion did them.   And in every case, they did them for pretty much the same reason.   They used them to deal with guilt or wrong, to placate the divine, to avoid the gods’ wrath.  But this sacrifice doesn’t mean that at all.  Paul knows.  Jesus’ death ended the need for those sacrifices forever.   Because of what Jesus has done, our guilt is gone.  When God looks at us, all God sees is beauty and goodness, all our wrong has literally been washed away.   Paul with this sacrifice talk, doesn’t means an offering for guilt but an offering of gratitude for God’s infinite love and grace.

And that gift means this sacrifice doesn’t end in death, like all the other sacrifices did.  No, it opens you to life like never before.    Still, Paul does use the word sacrifice.   And that has to mean that something dies.   And something does.   To be a living sacrifice, means you take your hands of your life.   You give over the right to live your life as you choose to God.   You die to that.  Why?  You trust that whatever God will do with your life will be way better than what you could do.  Now what does that look like, to take the hands of your life?

I remember hearing a story about a young man who joined the army during World War I.  He ended up fighting in the trenches.   Now his mother, as she listened to the news, heard how awfully muddy these trenches became.  She wrote to him, concerned for his well-being, how he was dealing with the mud and mess.    And the son wrote back.  “Mom, I belong to the U.S. Army now.  And if they want their feet to get muddy then so be it.”    That man realized.   He didn’t belong to himself any more.  He had given that over.   While in that army, others determined the direction of his life, even if it cost him his life.  And it did many.  We will remember that next weekend.    

And Paul is saying much the same thing.  Do you want a life that is truly a life?  Then let go of it.  You have to give that life over.  You have to lay that life down, in trust that God will do more with it than you ever could.

But come on now, why would anyone do that?   Why give your life over to God when you can keep it for yourself?    Because you can’t keep it for yourself.  Nobody does.  If you are not giving your life over to God, you are giving it over to something.   

No one said this better than the writer, David Foster Wallace, in his speech to the graduates of Kenyon College.            

He began that talk with a joke.  Two young fish were swimming along one day when this old codger fish swam by.   He called out to the young’ uns.  Howdy there! How’s the water, boys?   The two young fish nodded and smiled and swam on.   After a moment, one of them turned to the other and asked.  What the heck is water?   Why did Wallace tell that joke?  He was making a point.  He was saying.  We are those fish.   We don’t see the water in which we swim, and the water in which we swim could be killing us.  How?  Here is how Wallace put it.  

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, Wallace said, there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – Wallace said, a non- Christian ……-- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. ……Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.  Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship, Wallace said, is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.  

In other words, they're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

Right now, if you’re not sacrificing your life to God, you’re sacrificing your life to something.  You may be sacrificing it to your parents’ ambitions or to your own.  You may be sacrificing it to your fears or insecurities.  You may be sacrificing it to the opinions of your peers or some image of success.   But none of those things give you life.   They drain your life away.  They consume you.   Only when you give your life over to God, do you get more life.   That is what makes it a living sacrifice.   This death opens you to life, to a life more abundant than before.   But this taking your hands off your life, it can’t happen through fear or compulsion.  Paul calls it an offering.  That means you give it freely, not because you have to, that it’s some duty.  No you give it freely.    What does that look like?

The preacher Martin Lloyd Jones tells a story of a man who had a dog that he dearly loved.   But he wondered.   How much does this dog really love me?  So one day, he decided to find out.   When they went on their walk in the park, he took the dog off the leash.   Immediately the dog dashed off, running who knows where.   The doctor began to grieve, fearing he had lost the dog he dearly loved.  But within a few minutes or so, the dog came dashing back to walk by his master’s side.   From that day forward, the doctor and the dog walked in that park, but the dog never wore a leash again.

What did that dog do?  He offered himself.    He gave his life over to his master.   No leash held him.  He gave it willingly.   Why?   He trusted the master, his love, his commitment to him.

Now why would you offer yourself to God like that?  Because God has offered himself like that for you and more.  Jesus didn’t have to lay down his life.  He freely offered it.  In John 10, he put it this way.  “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”     Now why did he do that?    Why did he go through infinite suffering?  Why did he become not just a living sacrifice, but a destroyed one?  Why did he take his hands off his life?  Hebrews 12 tells us that Jesus, endured the cross, disregarded its shame for the joy that was set before him.   What was that joy?  That joy was us.   He offered himself so he could bring you home, so he could give you life.   He took his hands off his life and became a dying sacrifice, so that when you take your hands off, you become a living one. 

That’s why Paul calls this offering a reasonable worship.  If God, the infinite creator of everything, has given his life for you, how can you not do the same?   This God laid down everything so that he might give you everything.   And when you trust him with your life, he will renew you, your mind; your soul.  And he will shower you with gifts to bless you and others.   

That’s why being a Christian isn’t a spectator sport.  It means laying down your life for others, every day, in any way God tells you to.   And if you’re here, and you haven’t found a place to do that in this community, that’s a problem.   For this is one of those places where God calls you to lay down your life for God and one another.  But if it isn’t here, where might it be?  Where are you holding on?  Where do you need to take your hands off your life?  What do you need to die to so that you may live?    

  

The One Truth That Enables You to Withstand Anything

Have you ever heard the phrase life verse?    It means that every person can have one verse from the Bible that most deeply connects with their life and personality.   For example, what do you think the life verse of Rick Warren is; the guy behind the bestseller, Purpose Driven Life?     It’s the first part of Acts 13:36.     “For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his generation, died.”    That makes sense doesn’t it?

Years ago I realized I had picked up a life verse too.  We’re going to read it in a few minutes.   “God works all things together for good for those who love God and who are called according to his purpose.”  Lots of people love this verse.   On one of the big Bible web sites, its No. 8 on the top ten verses searched this year.   Do you know what No. 1 was?  It’s similar.  It comes from Jeremiah.   “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, to give you hope and a future.”

Now I like that verse too, but do these verses make any sense?  It’s nice to think that God is working everything together in your life for good, but how can God do that, really do that?     And if God has plans for you, where do you fit in?  Do you have any choice about it at all?   It’s like that quote from the writer Isaac Singer.  “You must believe in free will; there is no choice.”   How is it possible for God, to both have plans for our lives, and still give us the freedom to choose, even choose wrongly?  

Well, not only can God do this.  God does do it.  In many of your lives, God is doing it right now.   And when you see that, truly see that, that there is nothing, not even your worst choices, that will defeat God’s love working in you and around you; that will give you a freedom, a confidence that nothing can shake.     But how does God do that?  In these verses God points the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 8:28-39

In these words, God is telling you the one, essential truth that when you get it gives you a freedom and security that can literally withstand anything.   And what is that truth?  Nothing that you do or the world does to you can ever, ever take away God’s love for you.   And even in even the worst things life throws at you, that love will ultimately work them for good for you and for the world.  What does that look like?   Maybe this story a friend told me over lunch will help. 

Once upon a time, a king had a servant, who helped him whenever he went on a hunt.   The servant strung all his bows, sharpened all his knives, pretty much made sure the king had everything he needed.    But one day, when the king pulled his bow back, the string snapped, and it cut off the king’s thumb.   Furious, the king threw the servant deep into the dungeons.  He promised.  He would keep him there until he died.    Later that year, the king went on a hunt in a new land.   And in this land, cannibals captured them.   Now the cannibals ate everyone except the king.  Him they let go.  Why?  They believed eating a man without a thumb was bad luck.   So when he got home, the king immediately released the servant and said to him.   “I’ve gotta thank you.  If the bow you strung had not cut off my thumb, they would have eaten me.”   Now what did the servant say?  He said.  “No, I must thank you.  If you hadn’t put me in the dungeon, I would have been on the hunt, and they would have eaten me.”

It’s a clever story, huh?  But doesn’t it still beg the question?   If God does this, how does God do it?    More importantly, how does God do it, yet still give us complete freedom to choose?   How can God be orchestrating everything to move towards good in our lives, and at the same time, be giving us complete freedom to choose what we do?  How can that be possible?

We wonder that because we have a false assumption that things in the world have to be either/or.   It’s either God plans our lives and guides our future and we have no choice.   Or we can freely choose, and God has no real control over the future at all.   But in reality, the world doesn’t work like this at all.   The world isn’t either/or.   It’s both/and

Hundreds of years ago, Isaac Newton, came up with these rules for how matter works.  And up until recently, we assumed everything in the universe operated by those rules.   They had to. Otherwise nothing would make sense. But then we figured out how to see matter at the tiniest level ever.  And guess what.  At that level, Newton’s rules didn’t work at all.   Were Newton’s rules wrong?  No.   They still worked perfectly everywhere but at this super small scale.  Scientists realized, it couldn’t be either/or.  It had to be both/and.

Let’s take this table.  As we see it, this table follows Newton’s rules.  Yet this same table at the smallest level is operating by completely different rules.  Both rules are working at the same time on this same table.  How can that be?   It’s the way it is.  We live in a both/and world.

And just because we can’t figure out how we can both freely choose yet at the same time have a God who orders the direction of our lives doesn’t mean it can’t be.  It just means how God does it is way above our pay grade.    And whether we believe it or not, we live our lives as if this both/and reality is actually true. 

For example, if you believed that God was determining the plan of your life, and you had no choice in the matter, why would you do anything at all?   Wouldn’t you simply just sit around and do nothing?  But that would be ridiculous.  But on the other hand, if you believed, really believed that your choices determined the future completely, it would paralyze you.  

Ray Bradbury wrote a story called A Sound of Thunder. It’s about an illegal time machine that took you back to the time of the dinosaurs.  But when anyone paid the hefty price to ride in it, those who ran it had one rule.   They had this metal anti-gravity path that hovered six inches above the ground.   And you could not step off the path for any reason at all.   Now when the leader named Travis explained the rule, one of the passengers named Eckels, asked why. 

And Travis said…. "All right,say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"

"Right"

"And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"

"So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"

"So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. …And from his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life….. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills….. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids…. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the path. Never step off!"

Now what happens?  Eckels steps off the path, and accidentally kills a butterfly.  And when they return everything has changed.   And Travis, the leader, shoots Eckels dead.   What Bradbury was saying is right.   Everything is connected.  Our decisions, even our most minor ones, affect countless other things, in ways we will likely know.   No way do we have enough knowledge or insight to evaluate the choices we make in light of that reality.   And if you tried too, you would be terrified to even get out of bed in the morning. 

But you don’t have to be terrified, because, if you are resting in God’s love, then God is working with your choices in ways that you could not foresee or even imagine.   Most of the time, you won’t see that, but every now and then you get a glimpse.  I got such a glimpse a few years ago when a man named Harold Phares died.   

You see, forty years or so ago, a young teenager named Greg Jordan started attending youth group here.  Why?   He heard we had the prettiest girls.  But once he came, God’s love grabbed hold of him.  The pastor, Roy Connor, began mentoring him.  He talked to him about going to seminary, about becoming a pastor.   And Greg Jordan did go to seminary, but he didn’t become a pastor.  Instead, he got his Ph.D and he became an Old Testament professor at King College in Bristol, TN.    And soon after he arrived, I attend that college. And he taught me, and become one of the folks who influenced me to go to seminary, where I did become a pastor.    

I learned all that because when Harold Phares died, I met his son-in-law, John Connor, Roy’s son.   John lived in Bristol, TN, and his wife, Harold’s daughter, whom he met here, worked at the college.   So I mentioned my connection to Greg Jordan, and John told me the whole story.     So because First Presbyterian had cute girls in their youth group, Greg Jordan came to know the gospel, and twenty years later, he mentored the student who became the pastor at that very church that nurtured him; quite a coincidence, one that reminds me that a coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous.   And if I had a few minutes more, I could tell you more glimpses I’ve seen.    

But these glimpses don’t even touch a millionth of all that God is doing in your life and mine, working through our choices, in ways we could not begin to comprehend.   You can know, no matter what happens, God is working in your life for good.  Why?  Because God loves you, and nothing can ever change that. 

But that won’t really impact your life, unless you make it personal.  Lots of people go through life saying God loves them.  But it isn’t changing their lives.  It’s all too abstract.  It’s not real.  It’s not personal.   And, until it is, knowing it doesn’t change anything.   You have to apply it to you.

Do you have a relationship with God, a real, living, breathing relationship?  To understand what this means, think of a relationship with God like walking through a door.    As you walk up to the door, you see these words above it from Matthew 10.   Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.    In other words, as you approach a relationship with God, it doesn’t just happen.  You’ve got to make a decision.   You have a choice to make.    But if you make that choice, if you walk through that door, then the moment you do, you look back and over the top of that door you see written this from John 15.  You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.  Everyone who has walked through that door has discovered that reality.  They know that their connection with God doesn’t have anything to do with them being more spiritual or accomplished.   It has everything to do with a God who relentlessly pursued them even though at the time they couldn’t see it.   As Paul puts it elsewhere, For by grace you have been saved, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.   What makes me a Christian is not that I came to God, but God came to me.   And that means, God loves me period, not for anything I will do or not do, but simply because I am.   The preacher Bill Coffin put it well:  God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value.  It is not because you have value that you are loved.  It’s because you are loved that you have value.  It is a gift. It’s not an achievement.  It doesn’t depend on you, but only on God’s unshakable love for you.  

And if you ever doubt how unshakable that love is, look at Jesus.   When Jesus prayed in the garden before his death, he faced the reality that all evil was preparing to come down on him: that he would experience infinite suffering.  And right then Jesus could have punted.  He could have walked away.   He could have walked away from us.  All hell was tempting him to do just that.   But he didn’t.   He went to that cross, and he stayed.   He held on to us when all hell was trying to get him to let us go.    Do you really think if he did that, that if you have a bad week, or even a bad year, he is going to walk away from you?  Are you serious?  That’s how you know. No matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you or bad things happening around you, you can know.  Jesus has not abandoned you.  Because if he didn’t abandon you on that cross, then nothing in all of creation will cause him to let you go.   And that love that will not let you go, it will work.  It will work in even the hardest things in your life for good.  And this is the love you have been looking for all your life.   This is the love that enables you to withstand anything.   And all you need to do is say yes to it.   Have you?  

Two Things You Can Know that Get You Through, Even Bring You Joy, in Life's Hardest Times

It always blows me away.    On one level, it doesn’t seem to make sense.  But the more I think about it, the more sense it does make.    This week I read another report confirming this surprising truth.  Research shows again and again that:   “Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy.  In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.”    

Do you get that?   Being richer or smarter, even generally more awesome, won’t make you happier.  It might even make you less.   Almost forty years ago, three university researchers compared two groups.   One group had recently won a big prize in the lottery, and the other had recently suffered tragic accidents that paralyzed either their legs or whole body.  Now,who do you think showed greater levels of everyday happiness?   It was the folks who had been paralyzed.   Granted, it wasn’t a huge difference, but it was definitely there. 

Most of the things people think will make them happy don’t do that at all.   So what does?  What truly brings a life of contentment, happiness, even joy, even in the face of the worst that the world can throw at us?   In these words from Romans, God shows us the way.   Let’s hear what God has to say.

Romans 8:28-39

If circumstances don’t really bring happiness, what does?  Here God tells us.  Happiness, even joy, comes when we know two profoundly true things.   Even in the worst things we face, God will work for good, and when it comes to the truly valuable things, no circumstance, no matter how hard, can take away.

But let’s first make it clear.  When Paul writes that God works all things together for good for those who love God, Paul isn’t giving some sort of sentimental, bumper stick sentiment.   He is not telling us something like every cloud has a silver lining.  Paul knows.  A lot of clouds don’t.  He quotes later a psalm that talks about people being slaughtered like sheep.  He quotes those words because he is talking to people who are getting slaughtered just like that.   And Paul knows.  There is nothing good in that. 

Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?   It’s two words.   Jesus wept.  And those two words tell us everything about how God views suffering.    Where was Jesus weeping?  He was weeping at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus.   Yet get this.   Jesus was getting ready to raise Lazarus from the dead.   So why was he weeping?   Shouldn’t he have been more like, “Hey, everyone!  No worries.  I got this.”   But the fact that Jesus was about to bring Lazarus back, did nothing to lessen the pain of Lazarus’ suffering or the suffering of those who loved him.   God hates suffering.  God hates disease.  God hates death.   And what God is saying to us is that.   If you love me, if you stay focused on my purpose, I will never let those evil things have the last word in your life.   Even out of those things, I will find a way to redeem them for good.

Now, in one way that we look at this, this promise of God makes sense.    As Paul points out here, God chose us with the intention of conforming us to the image of his son, to the image of Jesus.   And in life, you can think that your worst problems are your circumstances.   But you’d be wrong.   Circumstances cannot destroy your life the way your character flaws can, your foolishness or pride or blindness to your faults or most deeply the profoundly mistaken belief that you don’t need God in your life at all.         

But what knocks our character flaws out of us?  Usually, it’s facing hard things that does it.   When you go through suffering, that suffering has the potential to grow you in ways that the painless parts of your life could never do.    Each of us has things in our life that have caused us pain, sometimes incredible pain, but through that pain, we’ve learned things.  We’ve developed ways of dealing with life that we would not have had otherwise.    With every bad thing that happens in your life God can and will use it to conform you more deeply to the image of his son, to the image of Jesus.   And in the end, you will have no lasting joy, without that image of Jesus, being formed in you.

But of course that doesn’t address the biggest question.  In your life, and in the lives of others, you will encounter situations where you will not be able to grasp or understand how God might be working to bring about good.  You will not be able to see it.   So, don’t expect to. 

What if I had been there on the day Jesus died?    If I had just known what everyone else knew on that day, what would I have seen?   I would have seen a man who I knew to be incredibly good, who had healed the sick, who had welcomed with love everyone.  I would have seen him tortured, brutalized, mocked and killed in a brutal miscarriage of justice.  I might have known that religious leaders had behind it all.   I would have heard him cry out how he was forsaken even by God.  Now, what would I have thought?   I would probably have gone home, doubting that God even existed.  Why?  Because, in no way could I see how in the world God could be doing anything good in that.   Yet in reality, in the midst of all that ugliness, God was doing good, the greatest good in history even.   

God is always working good, but just because God is always working it, doesn’t mean you can always see it.   In reality, you and I will have times where we will not.  

The great Christian thinker, Augustine had a helpful way to think about it.   Have you ever looked at a tapestry?    Those things can be stunningly beautiful, breathtaking works of art.  But have you ever seen the other side?   It’s a mess or at least, it looks like a mess.   Threads of every color are going everywhere, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.  Only when you look at the front, it becomes clear.   All that seeming chaos has created remarkable beauty.  But this side of heaven we only see the backside of that tapestry.   We cannot see how God is weaving a tapestry of love and goodness even in the midst of suffering and evil.   But God is.  And when you think about it, does it make sense that we would see it?  

Recently I read that how our senses perceive reality has no real relation to what actually exists.  Now it works for us.   It keeps us alive for instance.  But the world we see, and the world that in reality exists are two very different things.   Now if we can’t even accurately perceive the basic aspects of the world around us, what makes us think we could accurately perceive the work of a being infinite in understanding and power?

But beyond knowing that God is working even in the midst of the hardest things we face, we can know more.  We can know that nothing we face can ever take away what truly and ultimately matters.  

When people think about religion, they generally think that religion is telling us how you can connect to God; how you can rise up to God.  But the gospel tells a radically different story.   The gospel talks about a God who comes down to connect with us.   And when God comes, this God doesn’t come in power.  This God comes in weakness and poverty.   Why?  It is because God is showing us that he has not come for the strong and the certain.  No, this God meets us even in our weakness, even when nothing seems certain to us.   When we feel as we have nothing, we can know.  God is there.   For this God does not come with a list of expectations for you to meet.  No, this God comes to give you a love without conditions, a love without end, a love that nothing, not even death can defeat.   And when you realize that, that your standing with God depends on a love that God has for you that is utterly unshakeable; that this God will never abandon you, then that realization gives you a profound confidence.   You know that no matter what the world takes away from you, it can never take that ever.   And in the end, that love is the only thing that truly and ultimately matters.  When you know that, even when you have nothing, you know even then, you have everything you need.    

The pastor Dan White tells a story of a homeless woman and her three kids who were getting settled down to sleep in the gymnasium that sheltered them.  She told him how she and her kids had fled from the abuse her husband had been inflicting on them.  Then she shared that every night she requests extra dinner portions from the local shelter, and then brings it back to her spot in the gym.   She then invites others she’s met on the street to join her in her family’s corner of the gym.   She sets up a dinner, dividing the food up equally, and then prays for each one’s needs around the circle.   She explained to Dan that she felt it was important to be generous, to give them a sense of family, even if she didn’t have a home herself.   And do you know what she told him?  She said.  “I feel so fortunate to have what I have.”

How can that woman carry such joy and generosity, even in the face of so much lack?  She knows that she has something that no loss can ever take away from her.  She can set up that table of welcome and generosity in that gym, because she knows about this table.  She knows what this table proclaims. 

At this table, God says to you, I became utterly forsaken, so that you can know you never will be.  I went through suffering and injustice to show you that in the face of whatever evils you face, my love will always have the last word.   I paid the price for your failings with all that I had, so that I might give you all you ultimately need, my grace, my forgiveness, my faithful love.  I died so that you might have life, abundantly, now and forever.   And when you know what this table proclaims, when you know it to be true, then no matter what you face, you can have peace, happiness, even joy.    

                      

The Three Things To Know that Give You Strength in Hard Times

My son had a rude awakening last week.  He got really sick with something called croup.   Now as bad as it is for anyone to get sick, what made it harder for Patrick is that he had never been really sick before.  You could just see him thinking.  What is happening to me?   My life was going so great, and now this comes along?   What is going on here?  

Patrick was facing what everyone has to face.   Everybody, to some degree, suffers.  Nobody gets a pass when it comes to hard things in life.  Granted some face harder things than others, sometimes incredibly harder.   I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in Syria right now.  But you don’t need to be in Syria to know about suffering.   Everybody faces it.  That’s not the question.  The question is how do you deal with it?   How do you, even in your sufferings, grow stronger rather than weaker?    How does that happen?

Hard things in your lives can either make you better or make you bitter.  How do you move toward better?    In these words, God shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 8:14-27

How, when suffering comes, and it will come, do you not only get through the suffering but come through stronger, even better than before.   In these words, God shows us.   The key to triumph in hard times is to know three powerful things.  You do not suffer alone.  You do not suffer without purpose.  And you are never without hope.   Now that can be nice to say, but how do you know those things are true, that they’re real?   You know those things are true, that they are real, because of one profoundly true thing that makes them real. But before we get there or even to unpacking the three powerful things, we need to get this.   

No matter what anyone tells you, you can’t avoid suffering.   Suffering is baked into the cake. Why?    As Paul puts it, creation is subjected to decay.  Everything in us and around us is winding down.   Think about it.    How many 50 year olds are playing in the NBA playoffs?   And why is that?   No matter how good any player is, at some point, he slows down.  He ages out.   And that happens to everyone.  Even if you have every creature comfort possible; if you live in total safety and security; if you have the best medicine money can provide, you can’t avoid that winding down.  Sooner or later, you’re going to die.  The people you care about, they’re going to die too.  Sorry to break it to you, but that’s the truth.   And all of that means suffering.   

It’s why the word that Paul uses here for groaning, doesn’t simply mean, mild pain.  No, Paul is talking about the sort of groaning a person faces who is close to death.    The Greeks used this word to describe the groaning of dying warriors on a battlefield or as Paul uses it here, to describe the groaning of child birth.   And in Paul’s day, every time a woman gave birth, she was close to death.   In ancient times a woman dying in child birth happened all too often. 

We need to make this clear, because we live in a society that wants to deny those hard realities.   So often people face some painful trial in their lives, and are shocked.  How can this be happening to me? It’s happening to you, because it happens to everybody.    But instead of accepting that reality, what do folks do.  They may get angry or bitter.  Or they may simply try to avoid the pain of it all.   

Do you know that almost 70% of people who take anti-depressants, have never experienced what you would call a major depression?   More than that, 40% don’t have any significant depression symptoms at all.  So why are they taking the drug?   Well, it’s because, life feels better when you’re a little drugged.   And if not, you can use your phone or TV to distract you, to deaden the pain of life.   But here’s the reality.   Drugging or distracting your way out of the hard realities of life never works.   It doesn’t only deaden you to the pain.  It deadens you to life.   But if you face the pain, if you move through it, instead of trying to go around it, you can rely on three powerful things.       

First, you can know that you are never alone.   Do you see that word that Paul uses for Father here, Abba?   Every language has a word like that.  Why?   It’s because no matter where you are, when a child first comes up with a word for their parents, it’s something like Abba.  It may be Dada or Mama or Papa, but it always has that aah aah sound.   And Paul uses that word to tell us something profoundly true in how God relates to us.   God really does see you as his child, as his son or daughter.   But more than that, God relates to you as a parent relates not just to any child but to a small child, a child who says Abba.  And that’s an incredibly important thing to know. 

If you have a young child, when your child cries out in distress, real distress, what do you do?  You run to that child.  You pick her up.  You hold him close.   What that happens it’s not that you love the child more in those moments.  But that cry stirs your love up.   It moves you to action.   And Paul is saying.  When you cry out to God, God runs to you just like that.   Not only does God not leave you alone, but in those moments, like any loving parent, God comes close.

But Paul goes further.  He tells us that in those moments, God works to meet your deepest needs, even the ones you don’t know you have.   When you don’t have the words to express your deepest need, then the Spirit of God speaks it for you.   Like any child, we don’t always know what we need, but our heavenly Father does.  And by his Spirit, he speaks that need and meets it.

Many years ago, I went through a devastating break-up.   I prayed many times for God to bring that relationship back.  In hindsight, I’m glad God didn’t answer that prayer.   But in the midst of those cries to God, God did answer my prayers, in the way that I most deeply needed. 

The last time I saw this woman happened to be a weekend when I was in Boston, where she lived, for work.  She agreed to get together. I went all out.  I booked a dinner at a great restaurant, got her a gift from her favorite store, and as we ate, I was thinking just maybe.   That’s when she told me, she was seeing someone else.   And that hurt. 

Yet as I cried out to God that weekend, he came running. As I was checking out where I was staying, the woman behind the counter looked at me and did a double take.  She looked at my card, and then at me.   Then she asked.  Did you travel across the country on this bus called the Green Tortoise?   Yeah, I said, I did.   Don’t you remember me?  (I didn’t.  But I said I did.  She was pretty attractive.).   Then she said I remember you.  You were one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.   Let me tell you.  After suffering a devastating rejection, I needed that.   I needed that more than I even knew.   And God knew that and he came running. 

Looking back on those days, I’m grateful not only for the consolation God gave, but because I saw something even more.  Any suffering we face can carry purpose.   That’s why Paul says that being a child of God doesn’t exempt you from suffering, it guarantees it.   Just look at Jesus.  Being God’s son didn’t exempt him from suffering.  It led him into it.  But in what he suffered.   Jesus knew.   God was using it for a larger purpose.  His suffering led to greater strength.  His death brought resurrection.  And that pattern holds true for us.  In our suffering, in our weakness, God can and will make you stronger.   Your suffering always has the power to make you better, if you let it.

But you don’t need to focus on Jesus to see this.  You can see it in the gym.   When you work out with weights in the gym, as you pull those weights up, you feel the pain.  You feel the muscles getting weaker and weaker.  Yet here’s the truth.  It’s only through the weakness and pain that the strength comes.   What trainers say in the gym is true in life.  No pain, no gain.

Think about a single acorn.  In it, you have the potential for a whole forest.    Out of one acorn can come enough trees to cover a continent.  But none of that happens, unless that acorn falls into the soil and dies.   Here’s the truth of that acorn.  It takes the soil of pain and suffering to grow.  You can’t have resurrection unless you have death first.   In each of us lies potential for incredible kindness, incredible strength, for an inner beauty that can take our breath away, but it does not come easily.   Only when you face your weakness, can you find your strength.  And if you doubt that, look to Jesus, a man unjustly convicted, brutalized and killed.  Yet in that seemingly senseless suffering, God was working.   And in whatever you face, God will work too.

But beyond that, you can know yet one more powerful thing.   No matter what you face, you need never lose hope.  Why?  You know the end of the story.   And when you know the end, that end gives you power right now in the present.

Why does Paul talk about the creation groaning in terms of childbirth?  It’s because when a woman suffers the incredible pain of labor, she knows to what end she suffers.  She is bringing a new life into the world, and that life she knows brings with it greater joy and love and beauty than she can imagine.  She endures the pain because she knows the hope fulfilled that lies at its end. 

Right now, in the midst of this suffering world, in the midst of our struggles and pain, God is bringing something wondrous to birth, a new creation.    As amazing and beautiful as this world is, it cannot hold a candle to what God will bring.  How amazing and beautiful?  Look at what Paul says.   He writes.  I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us.   They are not worth comparing.   Paul is writing to people getting slaughtered in the coliseums.   And he is saying.  No matter what you are suffering, what God is bringing will blow all that suffering away.   And knowing that hope, doesn’t just change your future, it changes your right now.

Do you remember that story from Easter?   Two folks get hired to do the same job, a tedious, unpleasant job, like fitting widgets into wodgets.   One person gets told that at the end of one year, they’ll make 20 thousand a year, but the other person gets told that they’ll make 20 million a year.   Now which one of them is going to come to work happier, with more enthusiasm?   The 20 grand guy or the 20 million guy.   Yet remember, each of them are experiencing the same thing right now.   What is the difference?  One of them has a very different future.   And if you know, that no matter what you face, it cannot compare to the beauty and wonder that God has planned for you, that gives you strength, not just in the future.  It gives you strength right now.   

But hold on a second.  How can you know all that I’ve said is true?   How can you know that God loves you like parents loves their kids, that any suffering can have purpose, that God has an amazing end in store?   Maybe you’re not feeling any of that?  How do you know it’s even real, and not just some sort of religious fantasy. 

In these words, Paul points you to how.   Paul tells us that the Spirit of God is groaning with creation as it suffers and struggles.   Think about that.  This word means death groans.  How can a being utterly infinite in power suffer death groans?  How can God possibly know the agony of a mother about to die to bring her child into the world?   How can God feel the pain of a warrior crying out for help as his wounds kill him, yet knowing that likely no help will come?  How can God know that pain and agony?   Look at Jesus. 

As Jesus died on the cross, he quoted a verse from Psalm 22.  He cried out My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? But do you know what comes next in that verse?   Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?  In Jesus, God came as a warrior on the ultimate battlefield, to fight the enemies that held us hostage.   In those moments he absorbed our sin, our evil, so we would be free. And like a warrior wounded to the death, he groans.   He cries out, but no one comes.     And because Jesus was utterly abandoned for you, you can know that in your suffering, you never will be.  Because Jesus was forsaken in his death groan, when you groan, God hears it the way a mother or father hears the cry of a child.  He meets your deepest need, the one you don’t even know you have.   And in your suffering, God uses it to make you greater.  He assures you that your suffering will never have the last word.   For someday, God will put an end to evil and all the pain it brings.  Like a mother, groaning in labor, God will bring a new creation, a new you. Right now in your hardest moments, God walks with you.  God runs towards you.  God works within you.  And God promises you a future more amazing than you can comprehend.    How can you know that?  Because on the cross, God sealed that promise with his very life.  

Remembering the Song That Changes Everything

I was really trying.  But I just could not get the tune right.   I could sense it right there, but I  couldn’t pull it out.   I was trying to sing to my son that great song, The Lion Sleeps Tonight.   Do you know that song?    But I couldn’t even get the a-wimowehs.    And if you can’t get the awimowehs, well, you can’t really do it justice. 

Have you ever had that frustration?   You’re trying to remember a tune, but you just can’t get it.  But beyond songs, it’s frustrating when you face memory lapses about anything.   Have you ever not be able to remember the name of someone, maybe someone who is standing right before you?  How uncomfortable was that?    Yet even so, those memory lapses, might embarrass us, but we can recover. 

But there is one thing you can forget.  It can feel almost like a song really.    And this thing, when you forget it, when you lose touch with it, it’s more than frustrating or embarrassing.  It’s devastating.   And yet this thing, this song is terribly easy to forget.  You and I can lose the tune so easily.   But when we do, we lose ourselves.

What is this tune that you so easily forget?  And how can you remember?  In these words, God shows the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 8:1-13

In these words, and frankly, in all the words of this letter, Paul is trying to give us a tune of sorts, the tune by which we need to live our lives.   And each week, in this hour or so that we gather, we come so God can remind us of that tune again and again.  But here’s the problem, even with all of that, you can all too easily lose this tune, and when you do, you lose yourself.  But here, God not only reminds you of the tune, so to speak, he reminds you of the way to hold it close.   But before you understand how to hold it close, you need to remember what it actually is. 

And right in this first sentence, God gives the tune.   There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.   It’s hard to grasp in English, what Paul writes in Greek.  But this word, condemnation means liability, like you’d have in a legal proceeding.   Paul is saying.  In Jesus, we are not liable to God for anything, not now, not ever.   And that’s great news, because, let me tell, before Jesus, we were liable.  We were sooo liable. 

As a church we’re currently dealing with a law suit that goes back to work done by a contractor years ago.    Basically, a worker got injured, and we got included because the contractor worked for us.   But the lawyer who brought the suit has to show we did something wrong, something that caused the injury; something that makes us liable.   And as that isn’t the case, it’s simply a nuisance for us, something for our insurers to handle.

But with us as human-beings, that’s not true.   We’ve done things, said things, thought things that brought injury and pain, if to no-one else, it brought injury and pain to us.  Do you remember how last week, I asked.  What if we had some technology that allowed us to show on that screen every thought, good, bad or ugly you had from just the last week?   Would anyone here feel comfortable trying that technology out?    

Each of us has stuff inside us that just isn’t right, things that we don’t like to even see, much less show anyone else.    As Romans 7 puts it, sin, evil dwells within us.   And we’re liable for that, for what it does in us, to others, to our world.   Yet here’s the beautiful paradox, in Jesus, all that ugliness, and the liability that goes with it disappears.  It died on that cross, and it will never come back again ever.   That’s the heart of the song. 

When you get that, it gives you an amazing freedom.  First, it frees you from judging anyone else.   Why?  You know.  You have no room to judge.    If you look at anyone, a prostitute, a criminal, even a terrorist, you are seeing someone who is really no different than you.   You have the same seeds inside you, only yours didn’t get watered and grow.  More importantly it frees you from judging yourself  

This week I heard a story from the preacher, TimKeller that I haven’t been able to shake.  Many years ago, a couple in Virginia, not too far from the church he pastored, suffered a tremendous tragedy.  In a bizarre automobile accident, their three children all drowned to death.   Yet, in the face of this devastating loss, the couple found a way through.  Folks talked about how moving they found their strength and faith.  The couple rebuilt their life.  They had other kids. The husband became a respected leader in a local church.  

Yet a number of years later, the husband came to his pastor, deeply troubled.   He had developed a powerful sexual attraction to another member of the congregation, and it was tearing him apart.  Now the pastor dealt graciously with him, got him counseling, spiritual support, lots of resources to help him cope with his both his desires and his guilt.  Yet, in spite of all that, in the end, do you know what happened?   The man killed himself.    Here was a man who handled one of the most awful losses any human-being can face, yet he could not handle facing the ugliness he saw inside himself.     

But if you listen to that song, if you let God play it in your heart, it will give you that freedom, that freedom that allows you to see yourself as you really are and not lose hope. The life and peace that freedom gives will help you face anything, even the worst parts of yourself.   And in that freedom, you will grow in love and compassion towards yourself and others like never before. 

But here’s the problem.   It can be terribly easy to lose touch with the song, with the freedom it brings just as that church leader in Virginia did.   So how do you not lose touch?  In the last sentence we read, Paul summarizes the answer.    “For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if, by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”  

Now when Paul talks about the flesh and the body, he is not talking literally.   He is saying. If you try to gain validation for your life simply through your own efforts, your flesh so to speak, it will kill you.   But if you let the Spirit kill that self-focused drive for approval and validation, then you will live.   And each of us has a certain way in which we try to prove ourselves worthy, to use Biblical language, to justify ourselves.   Whatever that way is, it blocks the song of grace and acceptance that we desperately need to hear.  

The movie Chariots of Fire tells the story of two extraordinary sprinters, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.  But each of these runners ran for radically different reasons.  Abrahams ran out of a desperate need to justify himself, to prove himself worthy.   When it came to the 100 yard dash, he said.  “I will raise my eyes and look down that corridor; 4 feet wide, with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.”   Ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence….wow.    But that need to prove himself, did not give Abrahams any peace or joy.   As he put it …. I'm forever in pursuit and I don't even know what I am chasing.

Now what did Liddell run for?   As he put it to his sister, he said, I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.   Because of his belief in the gospel, he felt no need to prove anything by his running.  He ran simply for the joy of it, and for the joy of the God who had given him the gift.   It’s why when he ran, he would tilt his head up to the sky with his mouth open wide, like acrazy man.  Why?  Because he wasn’t just running.  He was worshipping. 

Do you see the difference?    One man runs to praise his own savior, and the other guy runs to become his own savior.   One man is running for the sheer joy of it.  If he wins, it’s icing on the cake.  Why?  He knows he is already justified, already worthy.  But the other man is running in grinding anxiety and fear.  Why?  He is running to find worth, to justify himself, but even when he wins, the worth doesn’t even come. (Tim Keller)   He remains forever in pursuit, yet not even knowing what he is chasing.

To set your mind on the flesh doesn’t simply mean thinking some bad thoughts.  It means letting your mind get seized by anything else but God as that which makes you worthy, that which justifies you.   How do you know what that is?   Ask yourself. What do I let rent space in my head?   Whatever that is, is what is blocking the gospel for you.

I have a resentful thought that seizes me more powerfully than any other. And it says everything about what I am tempted to look to for worth.  It goes like this.   I do and I do for you, and this is the thanks I get?  Have you ever had that thought?

But that thought betrays where I am looking for worth?   I am telling myself if I do enough good things for people, then they will appreciate me, and their appreciation will give me the worth I need.   But here’s the twist.   They never ever appreciate me like I desire.  In fact, they can’t. Their applause no matter how loud it gets can never give me what I need.  So when that applause doesn’t happen.  I get angry.  I get resentful.   I get judgmental.  But the problem is not with them.  It’s with me.  My anger and judgment blocks the gospel, the only thing that will give me the sense of worth I seek, the sense of worth that every human being seeks. And if I let it, that anger and judgment will kill me.

But how do you break that block?   You let the story of what God in Jesus has done for you capture you, your mind, your heart, your everything.    And the more you let the Spirit of God open yourself to the beauty of that story, the more you will find the freedom you need.  The more you will know how ultimately God values you, how infinitely God loves you.  And that love will become far more real than any of those things to which you have looked for worth in the past.  And that story, you don’t find only in scripture.  No, the Spirit has sent echoes of that tune throughout time, in countless stories and songs.   And the more you hear those echoes, the more you will see the beauty, the utter reality of what God has done for you.      

At the end of A Tale of TwoCities, Sydney Carton resembles Charles Darnay.  And Charles Darnay is in the Bastille, awaiting the Guillotine.  Sydney Carton breaks into that jail, knocks Charles Darnay out, and has his companions take Darnay out.   And Sydney Carton takes his place, wears his clothes, and waits to die in his place.   The next day, as Sydney goes to the guillotine, he meets a young woman, who is also sentenced to death.  She comes up thinking he is Charles Darnay, but then realizes he’s not.  Her eyes get really big, and she asks.  Are you dying for him?    And he says, “Yes, for he and his wife”   And she says, “Stranger, I am afraid to die, but if I can hold the hand of someone as brave and true as you, I think I can face it.”

Do you not see that you are Charles Darnay, that in Jesus, God became Sydney Carton for you. He has broken into the prison, and died for you.   And there is no longer any condemnation for you, not now, not ever.  As you see the beauty of that gift, as that song of love fills your heart, it puts to death all the sad, self-centered ways you seek worth.   Here is love vast as the ocean, loving kindness as the flood, when the prince of life, our ransom shed for us his precious blood.   Who his love will not remember, who can cease to sing his praise. He will never be forgotten throughout heaven’s eternal days.    

As you let that song wash over you, the song of God’s ultimate sacrifice of love for you.   It will free you.  It will give you life and peace and joy.   And then as one poem puts it, this will be your story. 

I wandered long, methought, alone 
to the deep shadow where the dead dwell; 
but ever a voice that I knew well, 
like bells, like viols, like harps, like birds, 
like music moving without words, 
called me, called me through the night, 
enchanted drew me back to light!

Let that song draw you to the light, to the light that no darkness can ever overcome.