Showing posts with label John 10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John 10. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Choosing Life Over Death

This is a sermon that was preached on Sunday, April 15, 2018 at United Presbyterian Church, Sterling, KS.  Listen to the audio here.

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. 
It’s not.  God goes with us throughout the day.  Every step we take, every decision we make can be a little God meeting all day long. We get to choose whether we’re doing things on our own or we’re doing them with God.  We can be like Israel looking at the Promised Land and say, “No thanks, God,” I can’t do that, or we can say, “I’m trusting in God’s strength and God’s power.  What do you think, God?”
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."
The last guy says, "I would like them to say – OMG LOOK, he's moving!"[3]

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…”
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.

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Monday, May 12, 2014

Something There Is That Doesn’t Love A Wall


What do you get when you cross an English major with a pastor?  Someone who reads the Bible and sees parallels to literature.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall[1].
This is the first line of a poem called Mending Wall by Robert Frost, the poet who’s probably best known for his poem The Road Less Traveled.[2]  In the poem about the wall, a man and his neighbor meet at the wall between their properties, as they do each spring, to repair the gaps that have opened up during the winter, replace stones that have fallen out, and maintain the barrier that they have built between them.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.  In this poem, that “something” is portrayed as the forces of nature, but to me it is actually someone who doesn’t love walls.  God doesn’t love walls.  Walls keep us from each other, and from God.
Something else God doesn’t want are people getting in the way of people seeking God.  Throughout the Bible those people are being challenged.  Some of those people had been appointed to lead people to God and weren’t doing their job.  They are often referred to as bad shepherds.
Jesus is the antithesis to walls and bad shepherds.  He says in John 10:9, “I am the door” and in verse 11 “I am the good shepherd.”  And he expands on that by also telling us, “I came that you might have life, a life lived to the fullest” (10:10).
It helps us to understand what Jesus is saying better if we know more about the environment in which he is speaking.  There are two aspects of that situation in Jerusalem at that time that give us a broader picture.  One is that it is Hanukkah, and the other is that Jerusalem in is the middle of a desert.
Hanukkah is the celebration that remembers a time when the Jews were trying to regain control of the temple.  When they finally did, one important task was to relight the flame that was supposed to be burning 24/7 to symbolize the eternal presence of God.  Special oil was required for this sacred flame.  God had given Moses specific instructions for preparing this oil, and the process took seven days.  They could only find one day’s worth of oil that was already prepared, but they lit the flame anyway, and that one day’s oil lasted until the new oil was ready.  A miracle.  That’s why Hanukkah is 8 days long—celebrating how that oil lasted. 
During Hanukkah celebrations in Jesus’ time, one of the scriptures that would have been read was chapter 34 of Ezekiel which chastises bad shepherds.  Bad shepherds had allowed the Jews to fall away from God and lose the temple.  They would have also read God’s promise in Ezekiel 34 that he himself come be the good shepherd.  In Ezekiel 34:16 God says, “I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak.”[3]  And in the midst of this Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd,” affirming that he is God and he is the one who God promised.
The other aspect of the situation here is that Jerusalem is in the middle of lots of desert.  Shepherds taking care of flocks of sheep in this region are doing this in a desert.  It’s rough terrain.  There are lots of rocks and cliffs.  It’s hard to find water or grass.  A shepherd would have to keep the sheep from wandering off cliffs, rescue them—maybe using his shepherd’s crook—if they feel into a crevice or off a cliff, and lead them to water and to grass.  Jesus says in the midst of this, “I am the good shepherd.”  I will lead you to what you need.  I will help you find water and the way to life lived well.
Shepherds also had to bring the sheep into enclosed areas to rest.  This might be a pen with a fence, or a ravine with rock walls on three sides.  To get them there the shepherd had to show them the way in, and then sometimes the shepherd would stand or sit or lay across the opening in lieu of a gate, making sure sheep got in, and predators stayed out.[4]  Jesus says, “I am the gate,” or “I am the door.”
So a shepherd, a good shepherd, is a caretaker, making sure sheep have what they need, and making sure they stay together and don’t get lost, and don’t get eaten by predators.  A shepherd is kind of like a mom.
Isaiah 40:11 says that God “tends his flock like a shepherd:
    He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart;
    he gently leads those that have young.”
We may have lots of people in our lives who function like a mom or a shepherd to us, who make sure we have what we need and show us the way.  Parents, teachers, pastors, bosses, mentors, grandparents, other family members, friends, people in our church, neighbors.  In a broader sense our governments are also like shepherds called to promote the general welfare, establish justice and tranquility.  Make sure we can get what we need and are protected from predators.
As you are reading this, you are probably thinking of specific people who fill these roles, and maybe thinking how that person is a good shepherd or maybe how that person is not such a good shepherd.  Or maybe thinking about how we ourselves fill these roles.  Every one of us has been shepherded by someone in some way, and every one of us is a shepherd in some way to someone.
It would be wonderful if all of us and all the people we’re thinking of were all good shepherds.  But the reality is that all of us and all of them fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).  We celebrate about the ways in which we have been shepherded well, and are thankful for the good shepherds in our lives, and thankful for the opportunities to be good shepherds.  At the same time we need to have grace for all the ways in which we fall short, and ask God to help us forgive ourselves and others for all the ways in which we were not good shepherds and forgive all those who were not good shepherds to us.  We’re all human and none of us is perfect.  Even with the best of intentions, we will fall short of the glory of God.
Forgiving ourselves and forgiving others isn’t always easy.  That’s why Jesus said we need to forgive someone 70 x 7 times.(Matt. 18:21-22)  We may have to keep forgiving, and keep asking God to help us forgive….ourselves and others.
Through grace and forgiveness we move forward into the future seeking the better life Jesus offers.  We accept grace and forgiveness, and follow Jesus to a better life, a fuller life, not weighed down by our faults or the faults of others, trusting Jesus to guide us.
The way to a better life is by following Jesus.  He is the door, and the only perfect shepherd.
Something else about doors.  They can be open or shut.  I think sometimes we fall into thinking of Jesus as a door that’s closed.  Keeping out the riffraff, maybe.  But Jesus says in verse 16, “I have other sheep that aren’t among us yet.”  There are more sheep out there.  That’s why he also said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” (Luke 19:10, Matt. 18:11)
A closed door might just as well be a wall.  Nobody can come in if the door is shut.  But we see throughout the gospel stories that Jesus was inviting people in.  He is the OPEN door.  He loves us all so much that he laid down his life in order to be that open door.
The door is open—Jesus is the door—but someday it will shut.  There will be a day when Jesus comes again and the time for going through the door will end.  And there will be no more opportunity to step through ourselves, or to show other people the door.
Maybe going through the door sounds like a bad thing to some—going into an enclosure, a pen, being confined.  Psalm 23 paints a different picture.  On the other side of the door is abundant life with the Good Shepherd who leads us beside still waters, leads us to green pastures, and protects us from our enemies.
The last verse of that psalm says “Surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.”  That word “follow” doesn’t quite say enough.  A shepherd doesn’t follow, he leads.  And that’s why some translations instead use the word “pursue.”  Surely goodness and mercy will track us down!  Jesus said he came to SEEK the lost.  To find them and not leave them out wandering in the desert all alone.
He is the good shepherd who calls us to enter by the door.  He is the door.
…who calls us to a better life.  He is the way to goodness and mercy.
…who calls us to forgive ourselves and others for falling short
…who calls us to help others find the door, to offer hope, to show the way to that hope.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
…because walls keep people out.  Walls divide us.  Walls keep us from God.
Jesus is the door, the open door, waiting for all to come in.
Walking through the door and being forgiven and forgiving and thankful for all of that are important.  And just the beginning.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
Jesus came to break down those walls, but like the men in the poem we can be people who rebuild them.  Who shut doors or just simply fail to open them.
There’ve been some very famous walls in our world.  The walls around the city of Jericho.  The Great Wall of China.  Hadrian’s Wall that divided England and Scotland.  The Berlin Wall.   Most of those wall have come down.  But what continues to divide us are the walls that we can’t see.  The walls of difference and misunderstanding.
You probably know the story of how God helped Joshua and the Israelites break down the wall around the city of Jericho.  There was a Sunday school supervisor who went to visit a classroom and see how things were going, and she asked one of the children, “Who broke the walls of Jericho?”  And one little boy said, “I didn’t do it.”  The supervisor was dismayed that the boy didn’t know about this Bible story that she expected was already being taught in the Sunday school, and so she went to talk to the curriculum committee about it.  Someone on the curriculum committee said, “I know that boy and if he said he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it.”  Frustrated with the lack of understanding, now the supervisor went to talk to one of the church elders and tell him what the boy said about the walls of Jericho.  The elder said, “I don’t think you need to worry.  I know this boy’s family and if he said he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it.  Now, let’s work on getting that wall fixed.  I’ll get 3 quotes.”[5]
It can be hard to know where we will find barriers to communication and understanding.  Where we will find walls that need to be broken down.
Even the steps across the middle of the front of the church can be like a wall between the people up above and the people down below.
If we let them, they can be barriers.
Jesus came to be the way through those barriers.  His mission and ours is to make sure the doors are open and the way is clear for each of us, and all of the people we meet outside the doors, to know God and know the hopeful, merciful, goodness of God’s love and grace.  To seek the lost sheep and show them the way.  To tell about God’s great love for all of us that came to earth in Jesus Christ.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. 
Jesus invites us all to come in.
May you have the courage to step through the door to accept your forgiveness and grace and mercy, to forgive others as we have been forgiven, and to show others the way to abundant life lived with you.  May God help you to see where there are walls and barriers that need to come down and to have God’s eyes, to see the people around us the way he sees them, as people for whom his son laid down his life, as people God loves and who God wants to know how much he loves them. 

[1] Adapted from sermon preached May 11, 2014 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Galveston TX entitled “This Way to a Better Life” based on John 10:1-18 and Psalm 23
[4] Burghe, NIV Application Commentary: John (Zondervan), 289.
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