“My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.”
--2 Corinthians 12:9
Do you ever get wrong numbers? I do.
Apparently my phone number used to belong to Pedro, and Pedro has a lot
of friends. The first year I had this
number, I got several calls a day for Pedro.
As I answered Pedro’s calls, I got to know a little bit about him. For instance, Pedro speaks Spanish. So I
learned to say, “Lo siento, esta numero no es Pedro.” I’m sorry, this isn’t Pedro’s number. I also learned that Pedro is a mechanic, and
based on the number of calls he gets, I’m guessing he’s a good one.
I did my best to be polite and helpful to these callers, but
there wasn’t much I could do, because I’m not a mechanic, but especially
because I’m not Pedro. Those calls
weren’t for me.
Jeremiah’s response to God reminds me a bit of answering
calls for Pedro. “Are you calling me? But I’m too young. Surely you need someone older. You must have
the wrong number.”
God doesn’t dial wrong numbers, but sometimes we respond as
if he has. “Are you calling me?
But I’m too . . . “ How would you
fill in the blank? I’m too busy, I’m too
old, too young, or maybe, I’m not strong enough, smart enough, or healthy
enough.
Just like Jeremiah, God knew us before we were born and set
us apart to be his people, to be his church, to be his ambassadors (2 Cor
5:20). He calls us to trust in Jesus, to
be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit in us, and to go and do and say
what we might not otherwise go and do and say were it not for the prompting of
the Holy Spirit.
God is calling and we need to say yes.
Jeremiah was reluctant to say yes because he was just a
teenager, so he said, “I’m too young.”
Moses was also reluctant. He had
a bunch of excuses. He was already
40. He’d already killed a man. He didn’t speak well. He said, “I’m not good enough. I don’t know enough. People won’t believe me.” (Ex 3-4)
The problem with all those excuses is that they are based on
the wrong perspective. Yes, we’re
imperfect humans, but God is not calling us to do anything on our own. God is calling us to work with him. God is not too young or too old or too weak
or unprepared. God is not limited by our
insufficiency. In fact, God told the
apostle Paul that weakness is where God works best. Paul had a deficit, a problem that he called
a thorn in his side. He asked God to
take it away because he thought it was getting in the way. But God said no, “My grace is sufficient for
you. My power is made great in your
weakness.” (2 Cor 12:8-9)
God is calling and we need to say yes because God promises to
go with us and to give us his strength.
Maybe our weakness is vision.
We can’t say yes because we can’t see where we’re going if we do. God doesn’t always show us the whole
road. If God had shown Jeremiah all that
was ahead of him, Jeremiah might have gone running in the opposite direction. If
you read the rest of Jeremiah, you’ll see that Jeremiah had a rough time. Maybe he should have run away. That’s what
Jonah did. God told Jonah to go tell the
people of Nineveh to repent, and Jonah knew that they would. Jonah didn’t like those people, so instead he
ran the opposite direction. But God
helped him to turn around and go to Nineveh anyway.
God tells Jeremiah, “I will go with you.” God made the same promise to Abraham and
Jacob and Moses and Joshua. When Joshua
was leading the people into the Promised Land, God said, “Be strong and
courageous, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” (Josh 1:9)
Joshua couldn’t have led the people all by himself. We can’t do what God calls us to do alone
either. We need God because he’s the
brains and the strength and the heart. God
promises to go with us, too. We need
God’s strength because we’re too much like aluminum. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on earth
and the third most abundant of all the elements. It has all kinds of wonderful
properties. It’s light. It doesn’t burn
easily. It’s flexible. We probably all have a roll of aluminum foil
in our kitchens. But except for foil,
aluminum is not often used all by itself.
It’s too weak. So it’s combined
with other metals as an alloy. The
strength of these other metals combined with the lightness of aluminum makes it
great for cars, airplanes, cooking utensils, and a whole bunch of other things.[1] Aluminum can do more as an alloy than it can
by itself. And we can do more with God
that we can on our own.
We need to say yes to God, and we need to trust in his
strength, not our own.
God promises to go with us, and, like he tells Jeremiah, he
will give us the words to say. When
Jesus is speaking to the crowd one day, he tells them the same thing. He says, “When you need to speak, the Holy
Spirit will give you the words to say.” (Luke 12:12)
Maybe that’s the thing we wonder about the most. How does that work? How does God give us the words to say? Jesus gives us an answer to that. He says, “Stay connected to me. Abide in
me.” We have to stay connected to the
source of the words.
There’s an episode of I Love Lucy about this.[2] Ricky’s mother has come to visit. That by itself might be troubling, but
there’s a bigger problem than usual.
Ricky’s mother only speaks Spanish, and Lucy doesn’t know any Spanish. So, in usual Lucy fashion, she finds a
solution. She hires a man who speaks
Spanish to tell her what to say. The man
is hidden in the kitchen and speaks into a radio that only she can hear. It works great, until the man leaves
unexpectedly. Suddenly Lucy has no idea
how to say anything because she’s lost her source.[3]
Like Lucy, we need to stay connected to God, our source. The easiest, most basic way is through
prayer. In the moment in which we need
to speak, we can just say, “God, help me speak.” When there’s time for a longer prayer, I like
to use an adaptation of an old celtic prayer:
God be in my head and in my
thinking, in my mouth and in my speaking,
in my heart and in my feeling, in
my hands and in my doing,
in my feet and in my going.
Part of having God’s words is stocking up. The more we read the Bible, the more those
words become part of our thoughts, and the more the Holy Spirit can use them to
help us know what to say.
Another way to stock up is to take time to write down the
ways that God has helped you. This helps
us be able to remember them later when we face similar situations, or when we
have the opportunity to help someone else in the same situation. For example, those who are recovering from
addictions are the best people to help others learn how to fight their addictions
because they can tell about how God helped them.
God is calling. We
need to say yes based on his strength, not ours, we need to stay connected to
God the source of that strength, and we need to stay ready for whatever God
puts in front of us.
I learned this week at the citizen’s police academy about how
policemen prepare to be ready. As part
of their training, they get sprayed with pepper spray and have to face an
attacker in the midst of that crippling pain.
It sounds pretty awful. Pepper spray
is made out of habanero peppers, one of the hottest peppers. Over a hundred times hotter than a jalapeño. It makes your skin burn. The worst part, though, is how it feels in
your eyes. When someone gets sprayed
with pepper spray, they instinctively close their eyes to protect them. But the police trainees have to respond to an
attacker after they’ve been sprayed, so they have to open their eyes, even
though that is going to make the pain even worse.
They do this for two reasons:
One is so they know what it’s like, but the other is so that they learn
to do their jobs despite the difficulty, so they can be prepared to face
difficult challenges.
Hopefully we will not have to deal with pepper spray in our
faces, but we will face challenges when we say yes to God. In fact, it’s been said that one way to know
we’re on the right track in following God is when we find ourselves in
difficult situations, especially if they’re situations we wouldn’t have been in
if we weren’t following God. T.S. Elliot
said, “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” If we aren’t in over our heads, how will we
know how big God is?
Following God and trusting him in the midst of challenging
situations is how we grow. Being
prophets to the world around us, we help others grow by providing God’s
perspective about our situation and a word of hope as the antidote to
despair. This is what Jeremiah did for
Israel, and what we do for each other when we answer God’s call.
How will you answer God’s call?[4] Sometimes
when I don’t recognize the phone number as it rings in on my phone, so I assume
it must be another phone call for Pedro, so I don’t answer it. I just ignore it. That’s one way to deal with God’s call,
too. We can just ignore it. But unlike those people calling for Pedro,
God’s not going away. He will keep
asking.
Saying yes might not be easy, but
the best things in life never are.
God is calling us.
Let’s say yes to him.
[2]
Season 4, Episode 8
This sermon was preached at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Galveston TX on January 31, 2016.
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