Read John 10:7-10 and Deut 30:15-20 here.
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Today we start a new series called Thrive. It’s a word that
isn’t in the Bible. But the idea is
there. . . in the scriptures we just read and in many others. One of the most prevalent images of thriving in the
Bible is the tree…and this would be a really good place to make a pun, but
instead I think I’ll just leaf it alone.
Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 both give us the picture of thriving
as a tree planted by a river that sends its roots deep so that it stays
connected to that life-giving water, and so it continues to thrive even when
there is drought.
That same image of trees by water is found in Genesis in the
Garden of Eden (Gen 2:9-10) and in Revelation 22:2 in the New Eden at the end
of time. The standard for thriving in the Bible is that we grow and
“let our roots grow down into [Christ]” (Col 2:7) and bear fruit, the signs of
the Holy Spirit working in us – fruits like love, joy, peace, patience (Gal
5:22-23).
We are called to thrive – as individual Christians and as a
group of Christians. We are given new
life in Christ through the power of
the Holy Spirit living in us. “God intends every
servant of the Resurrected Christ to be a servant of life.”[1]
We are called to choose life, to choose to thrive, to say yes to God’s
work in us and to God’s leading. This
will sound harsh, but sometimes, instead, we choose death by saying no to God,
no to Jesus, no to the Holy Spirit.
The key to abundant life is the presence of God, the Holy
Spirit, who lives in us through our trust in Jesus. In our reading from John
today, Jesus says, “I am the gate.” The
way to abundant thriving life is through saying yes to Jesus. Will we go through
the gate? We get to choose. Life or
death?
Choose life.
We choose
life by saying yes to Jesus.
We say yes to Jesus in a lot of different ways. The most obvious is what we say when we
profess our faith in our church services in our baptism vows, and in our
membership commitments. We are asked,
Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and
renounce evil and its power in the world? I do.
Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love? I do.
Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his
love? I will, with God’s help.
We say yes, of course.
And this is an important step. We
say it in our minds. Hopefully we also
say it in our hearts. We are saying yes
in a general way. We aren’t thinking
about the specific implications of this.
But the basic yes is still important.
The core question is, “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” If we are choosing life, we say yes to Jesus.
Sometimes it’s not so clear what Jesus is asking, or that
it’s Jesus asking. Or fear gets in the
way. Or what God brings us doesn’t look like we were expecting. That’s what
happened when the Israelites got to the Promised Land the first time. None of them had ever been there, but they’d
probably been hearing about it from their parents and grandparents. God had first promised this land to
Abraham. Abraham had lived there, along
with his son Isaac, and his grandsons Jacob and Esau. Jacob’s twelve sons had lived there, too,
until they moved to Egypt because of the famine. Now, 400 years later, their descendants are
finally getting to go back there. God
had told Moses what to expect.
The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. –Exodus 3:7-8
If you look back at the genealogies in Genesis, you’ll see
that the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites are
all the relatives of the people in Egypt.
They are second, third, fourth, fifth, twentieth cousins, but their
family trees are all connected. Coming
into the promised land should be like one great big family reunion, one great
big homecoming, and maybe that’s what they were expecting. But when the scouts go take a look and report
back to the rest of the people that have crossed the desert from Egypt, they
don’t see the land as being very welcoming.
They say. . .
“the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” –Numbers 13:28
Moving in to the Promised Land looks scary and challenging
and Israel feels small and powerless, and although God has promised to help
them and to give them this land, they say, “No thanks, God.” And so, because they refused to trust God and
follow his lead, God told them they would die in the desert instead of getting
to live in the Promised Land. And they
wandered in the desert for forty more years, until all of that generation of
people had died. They, in effect, chose death.
When we get to Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy that we read from today, it
is their children who are now getting ready to enter the Promised Land. Moses is giving them advice and
encouragement. Don’t be like your parents.
Trust God and obey God’s commandments.
Do this and you will live. Don’t
do this, and you will die. We know that
everybody dies, but some people live dead lives. That’s what Moses wanted to stop them from
doing. So he says, “choose life.” Say yes to Jesus. Even when it’s challenging and scary.
Saying yes to Jesus can be about big things or smaller
things. Somebody asks us to do something
that doesn’t fit with our plan for the day, or our plan for the next week, and
so we say no, just because it’s not what we had in mind. But what if it was Jesus asking?
Choosing life means saying yes to Jesus. It also means talking to him.
I will talk
to God
Praying has become the cliché Christian thing to do. That’s
unfortunate because praying is the most important thing to do, the thing that
we need to always do more than anything else.
Saying yes to Jesus is a prayer because prayer is talking to Jesus. Prayer might seem like some big formal thing
because when we pray together in church or in meetings we make it a big formal
thing, but it’s really not. It can be
just a few words, or even no words. It’s
simply how we keep on connecting to Jesus.
It’s a vital part of choosing life.
Here’s how really important prayer is. In Jesus advice and encouragement to the
disciples on that last night before he was arrested and put to death, he tells
the disciples:
I am the
vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear
much fruit [thrive]; apart from me you can do nothing. -
John 15:5
If we stay connected to the vine, to Jesus, we will
thrive. But if we don’t, we can’t do
anything.
·
Remain in me. Stay connected to Jesus. Choose life.
·
Otherwise you can do nothing. Death.
Prayer is how we keep on aligning our hearts and minds
with God[2] It is helpful to put God in our calendars. I have a regular God meeting time every
morning. I make it a priority so that it
sets the tone for my day. The danger for
me, for all of us, is that we then get to thinking that once that time is over,
our time with God is done for the day. Like a job. Clock in. Clock out. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. –Romans 8:6
Jesus came so we could know the fullness of life lived with the
continual awareness of God’s presence.
Apart from him, we can do nothing.
Choosing life means saying yes to Jesus, talking to God, and
. . .
Moving with
the Holy Spirit [I will move with the Holy Spirit.]
Movement is life. Let
me tell you a funny story . . .
Three friends die in a car accident . . . and attend an
orientation in Heaven. An angel asks, "When you are in your casket and
your friends and family are mourning you, what would you like to hear them say
about you?"
The first guy says, "I would like them to say that I was
a great doctor and a loving family man."
The second guy says, "I would like them to say that I
was a caring husband and a schoolteacher who made a huge difference to
kids."
Movement is an important sign of life. One of the big reasons that prayer has become
cliché is that we don’t take the next step.
We don’t take action. We don’t move. Movement is an important part of
choosing life. We say yes, God, I’m going to talk to you about this, but then
we leave it at that. Or we take action but we don’t take a moment to talk to
God about it first. We separate prayer
and action, instead of doing them together.
The passage we read from John 10 this morning is part of a
longer speech in which Jesus is trying to explain to the Jewish leaders how he
himself is the key to breaking through spiritual blindness. He is the good
shepherd and the sheep hear his voice and they know his voice so they follow
him. He is the gate, the opening through
which we have access to God. He is the
key to knowing God’s presence in our lives.
Through faith in Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit’s powerful presence with
us 24/7. It’s the Holy Spirit that is
our God translator, helping us to hear and understand God’s word, and God’s
guidance. It’s the Holy Spirit moving in us that makes us thrive.
Thrive is a clinical term…a medical diagnosis. When a child is not growing, or not growing
as much as children normally do, the medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.”[4] When a
doctor diagnoses that a child has failure to thrive, one of the treatments is
intensified feeding. Super
nutrition. When a soul isn’t growing,
that’s what a soul needs too. Soul
food. More Jesus. Jesus is the living water that feeds our
souls. More soul food, more Jesus water,
means more prayer, more Bible, more connecting with the things in life that
feed our souls . . . saying yes to the work of the Holy Spirit in us.
It might sound like I’m saying that saying yes means that
everything is going to go well and be easy.
That has not been my experience.
Saying yes to Jesus was been wonderful in so many ways, but it’s also
been hard because Jesus wants us to be better, to be more like him, and that
takes some work, work that takes all of our lives.
Over the next six weeks, we’re going to look more deeply into
how we thrive as God’s people and how we make sure nothing is getting in the
way of thriving. There will be lots of
different actions we’ll be called to take over the next six weeks, but today,
I’m asking for your commitment to choose life over death – to say yes to Jesus,
to keep talking to God, to move with the Holy Spirit. If you are making this commitment today,
would you let us know?
Write in the comments below: I’m choosing life.
Over the course of the next six weeks, keep talking to God
about this, keep praying for our church.
- Pray for me as your pastor, and I’ll be praying for you.
- Pray for the session and deacons and committees meeting to lead us.
- Pray for one another as we all seek to thrive in God’s presence together.
- Pray for God to be present among us, as he already promises to be, and for us to hear and trust and follow in all the ways God is leading us to be his people in this place and time in big and small ways.
This week I’ve been hearing in my head the song by Lionel
Ritchie, “Hello.”[5] It slowly dawned on me that this could be
God. “Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?”
Maybe you know this song enough to know that it’s a guy
watching a girl walk by and she doesn’t even notice he’s there, but he would
really like to get together with her. He
doesn’t know how to get her to love him, so he starts by saying, “I love you.”
I know it’s not an exact parallel, but there are some striking
similarities. God has given us free
will, and because of that he respects our right to choose. But he’s right here
with us all the time, watching as we try so many ways to find happiness, as we
make ourselves so busy doing the things we feel we need to do to find
fulfillment.
Hello. Is it me you’re
looking for?
God knows the answer to that.
It is him we’re looking for, we just don’t always realize it.
God says, “Hello. Is
it me you’re looking for?
I can see it in your eyes
I can see it in your smile
You're all I've ever wanted, and my arms are open wide…”
I can see it in your smile
You're all I've ever wanted, and my arms are open wide…”
To help us choose, God says, “Let me start by saying, ‘I love
you.’”
It is God we’re looking for, and it is
God who gives us life.
The key to thriving is the presence of God, the Holy Spirit,
that we have by trusting Jesus.
We get to choose. Life
or death?
Jesus says, “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. --John 10:10 Message Version
To help us choose, God says, “Let me start by saying, ‘I love
you.’”
Choose
life.
Say yes and thrive.
[1] Nixon, Paul. I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church!
(Kindle Location 81). Pilgrim Press/United Church Press. Kindle Edition..
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