Keep Yourself There

If you've ever heard anyone say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I," you either rolled your eyes or nodded your head.  What we mean when we say such a thing is that we are not in the gutter because God is gracious.  Never mind that His grace is sufficient for the one in the gutter; we say it intending to thank God for the good things that we have.

First of all it's important to know that grace is not dependent on anything going on in your life, that is: your circumstances.  It is dependent on your heart.  You can be down and out - in the gutter - and be flush with the grace of God.  You can also be high on the hog and be utterly spent of grace.  It comes down to a matter of will, of choice.  You get to choose to walk in God's grace.

In Hebrews 4:16 we are given a simple instruction for how to choose it: walk in and get it.

"Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

That last phrase is interesting, "in time of need".  I would submit to you that you probably never have a time when you don't need the grace of God, and so the takeaway is that you shouldn't leave the throne.  Stay there.  Camp out.  Keep yourself in the presence of God.

And that's it, that is how you make it through life the best possible way, you keep yourself in the presence of God.  Every other sermon you hear, book you read, song you sing, Epiphany you receive; anything you will ever learn about God is subordinate to this simple instruction: keep yourself in the presence of God.  And note that we are to walk up to the throne with confidence.  Confidence?  What confidence?  The confidence that we are called sons and daughters of God, adopted into His family by the blood of Jesus.  And so there are two things that you need.

1) the blood of Jesus
2) a camping spot at the foot of the throne

But really - really - there is only one thing you need, as Jesus pointed out.

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.  And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.  But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me."  But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.  Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her." (Luke 10:38-42)

Give Us a King

When the elders of Israel demand a king, God hears them and he obliges.  But He warns them through Samuel what it will cost them.

"These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.  And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.  He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.  He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work.  He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day."

And as any rational group of human beings would, they said:

"No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles."

They rejected the King of Kings for the sake of conforming to the standards of the nations of the world.  This is what we do individually all the time; we forsake the leadership of God for what the world tells us will work, and when we come up empty handed we say, Where were you, God?  But God has given us our warnings.  This very scripture is one of them.

It makes no sense to give up so much just to have someone you can heap the blame on, but can you think of anything better?  God is mysterious, invisible, and far too immense for us to understand.  But if we establish various kings over our lives, we can point to them when we fail.  Jobs, plans, family, friends, pastors, spouses; these are the kings we establish, the kings we push out in front of us when the enemy is coming, and these are the kings that fail us time and again.

There is one King who never fails.  He will give you the other kings because He loves you; but you and He both will lament that poor choice.

What We See...or Don't See

You would think that, in his day, Jesus would have been a hard one to miss.  When I read the Gospels and think about Jesus performing all of those amazing miracles, and fulfilling all of those age-old prophecies, I wonder, How did so many people miss that he was the one?  Never mind that this question is just as significant for our day.  Jesus is just as present and relevant now as he ever was, and still many of us just miss him.

I was particularly thinking about when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt.  Jesus had a hand in most (or all?) of the prophecies that he fulfilled.  There are many scriptures in the Gospels that say that Jesus did such-and-such so that the prophecy could be fulfilled.  It is interesting to read this and know that the disciple writing that particular book knew this.  I doubt that, for example, when Jesus told the disciples to go into the city and get the donkey and her colt, that he also said, "So that the prophecy from Zecheriah can be fulfilled."  Jesus knew he was fulfilling the prophecy, and perhaps even some of the disciples realized it.  Certainly Matthew realized it when he wrote his book.  And so it stands to reason that the Pharisees and other educated Jews of the day would have recognized the prophetic nature of Jesus's entrance in to Jerusalem.

Why is it then that they refused to believe in him?  It seems likely that any Jew who was educated in the scriptures would have been keen to see signs of the Messiah.  It seems likely that any intimation of the fulfillment of messianic prophecy would have set the learned Hebrew men buzzing with anticipation.  But the Gospels don't show the educated class the least bit excited about Jesus.  Almost from the outset they can't stand him.  I suspect that they thought he might be the Messiah, but since he threatened their way of life - since he proved to be a threat to their conception of righteousness and authority - they resolved to be done with him.  And, incidentally, they were a part of fulfilling more messianic prophecies.

But this willingness to overlook who Jesus is and what he's come to say and do, this continues.  We do it a lot.  For years I dressed Jesus up in my own image.  I put words in his mouth and dusted him off and told him to follow me around for a while.  I freely interpreted the Gospels so that he conformed to my idea of who Jesus is.  In short, I missed him.  Jesus began his ministry and the disciples said, Yes, the Messiah has come to win us our dignity and be king!  But Jesus said, No, I've come to die.  And even though the power was in his death (and resurrection), you can't blame them for begrudging this seemingly hopeless end to things.

This happens to us, too.  Jesus comes and we say, Fix me!  Make my life easier!  And Jesus says, I came so that you could die to yourself.  Dying is never easy.  It wasn't easy for Jesus, but he did it for the joy that was set before him; not the joy in the act, because there is no joy in dying, but for the joy of what was to come: his glorification, the completion of the Father's plan, the great rescue of all humanity.  Dying isn't easy for us either, but we have Jesus to show us how it's done, and with only a fraction of the pain he endured.

But we won't see what Jesus came to do if we're only looking for what we want him to do.  To some extent this probably happened to Judas Iscariot.  He couldn't reconcile what he had hoped Jesus would be with what Jesus actually was.  His is an extreme case because he betrayed Jesus.  Most of us don't betray Jesus, we just ignore him.  Or we do what I did and we dress him up in our own expectations, but still we don't see what he's come to do.  When I finally let Jesus do what he wanted to do in my life, everything changed.  I stopped looking in mirrors and started looking at the world around me; but especially I started looking to the Father, and I began learning more about myself than I ever knew.  This is the wonderful thing about God, that he will not only show you who He is, but in the process He will show you who you are.

This is truly seeing; this is real vision.  It reminds me of the two blind men in Matthew 20, one chapter before Jesus's triumphal entry.  They stand on the roadside crying out to Jesus, "Son of David, have mercy on us!"  And the crowd rebukes them.  Jesus asks the obvious and almost callous question: "What do you want me to do for you?"

They said to him, "Lord, let our eyes be opened!"  And Jesus in pity touched their eyes, and immediately they recovered their sight and followed him.

The Kind of Friend We Have

This week at my church Messiah's House, we celebrated Resurrection Week, and Jake Hamilton and his band came to play music, lead worship, and, in Jake's case, to prophesy.  On Tuesday night as we entered the church we each were handed or took for ourselves green half-sheets of paper.  Each had a scriptural name of God written on it, with an exemplary Bible verse written beneath.  Names were diverse, and included things like "Father", "High Priest", "Rose of Sharon", and so on.  On Tuesday Jake prophesied over individual people based on the name of God that they drew.  The intent of this exercise was to inspire us to encounter the characteristics of God represented by and in His various names.

I received the name "Friend", and on its face I thought I understood the name.  Jesus said to his disciples (and says to us), "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15:15)  The implication is that we are intimates with Jesus, not outsiders.  We are invited into the private space of the master, and we participate in what he is doing.

The verse associated with the name "Friend" on my card was Matthew 11:19, which reads:

"The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds." (ESV)

For context, Jesus is speaking to the crowds just after some disciples of John the Baptist have come to ask him, on John's behalf while he is in prison, whether Jesus is in fact the Messiah.  Jesus says yes and more or less rebukes John for being offended that Jesus is not in the same boat as him, i.e. imprisoned for his preaching.  Then Jesus speaks to the crowds about John: how he is a great prophet, and how he was not accepted.  He says, "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, 'He has a demon.'"  and the next verse is my verse, Matthew 11:19.  Jesus seems to be saying in these two verses, "Well, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't."  He is not saying that, but he kind of is.  Jesus knew that, for the religious, for the hard-hearted, for the unteachable, it didn't matter what he or any other prophet did, they simply would not be accepted.

What this meant for the nature of God as "Friend" I was unsure, so I got into the concordance.  I looked at some of the important words in verse 19; wisdom, justified, and deeds particularly interested me.  But of course since "Friend" was my name, I looked up that word as well.  The Greek word used in this verse, and also incidentally in John 15:15, is philos (fie-lohs), which means just what we would expect: friend, associate, familiar companion.  And then there is this additional definition:

One of the bridegroom's friends who on his behalf asked the hand of the bride and rendered him various services in closing the marriage and celebrating the nuptials

I think my jaw may have literally dropped at this definition.  Without too much effort one can read into this the spiritual significance of being a friend of God.  We are called to be the intimates of God; so intimate, in fact, that we are sent to the bride to ask for her hand on God's behalf, and arrange the marriage event in all its solemnity and celebration.  This is both a calling and a privilege for believers, that we will be the friends who usher in the marriage of the bridegroom to his bride with such deep involvement.  Our position is divine.  We are the ones He trusts to go after His bride on His behalf.

But we will never know this until we know Him.  To consider what kind of friendship is required for such a favor to be asked, you have to consider what an important task this would be.  If you were the bridegroom, you wouldn't ask just anyone to go and ask for your (future) bride's hand in marriage on your behalf.  You wouldn't trust just anyone to organize the wedding and the celebration.  You would only entrust this most important of tasks to your most intimate friend, the one who knows your heart and in whose hands you know you can entrust it.  And this is what God is looking for; this is what Jesus says that we are.  This is exactly what I want to be, a friend of God, because I've had no greater friend than Him.

No Regrets

I want to say a quick word about regrets.  Here is the thing we need to admit about regret: it's just guilt under a different name.  And those of us who are in Christ are guiltless before God.  Feeling guilty should be as alien to us as feeling hopeless.  There is no reason to feel guilty if you aren't guilty, unless you just plain don't appreciate your guiltlessness, your freedom.  Guilt equals bondage, plain and simple.  It was for freedom that we were set free.

Since guilt has a stigma amongst many believers - because of its associations with shame and worry; because of the burden that it places on us; the way it is used by others to manipulate our lives - we prefer other words, surrogates for guilt.  Regret is a big one, a special kind of guilt because it was done long ago and we really and truly can't do anything about it.  Regret is the worst kind of guilt because what you regret you can't redeem.  But the Lord can.

This is my word against regret of any kind: it is to deny that God can redeem you.  Stop regretting what you've done and start letting Him redeem the time, redeem the relationships, redeem your heart.  Let Him go back in time and take care of it, because He stands outside of time.  God does not have temporal limitations.  He can quite literally reach into our past and redeem it.  So let him.

Contradictions

At my church we have "Resurrection Week" each year the week following Easter Sunday.  I love Resurrection Week.  I love the Resurrection of Jesus and everything that it means for humanity, and especially what it means for me personally.  I love Jesus.  And I love going to church when you wouldn't normally go because you tend to expect more out of those times, and you tend to bring more of yourself to give away: in praise, in friendship, in love.

Jake Hamilton is here in our small church this year.  This man and his band can command much larger venues than Messiah's House in Amarillo, TX and are, for all intents and purposes, rock stars.  Jake is also a prophet and a zealot.  He brings to an event like Resurrection Week all of the power and baggage that any prophet or zealot would bring.  He brings deep truth, fervor, prophecy, and contradictions.  And he can't help himself.  As long as he is in pursuit of God he will carry these things with him and they will spill out wherever he plants his feet for even the shortest space of time.

None of us who are passionate about God can help it that we bring our contradictions along .  I personally have a hard time containing my excitement about the Lord, or my anticipation about what He will do, when I'm in a body of believers.  I am less fervent outside of a group of believers, which is characteristic (I suppose) of someone that is not a prophet nor a zealot.  The Lord often delivers deep truth and prophecy through me, when I am willing to be the bearer.  And always - always - I carry around my contradictions.

Isn't this just what and who we are: a people of contradictions?  Paul recognized as much.  In the book of Romans he lays out lots of contradictions, like when he says "we rejoice in our sufferings."  Huh?  That's bass-ackwards; no one rejoices in their sufferings.  Ah, but the people after God's heart do because "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope."  To get to hope, to get to an assurance of God's promises in our hearts, we have to suffer so that we can learn that God is always good, that He is always for us, that He is always reliable, and that we can always make it through the sufferings, which are inevitable.  But oh, we still don't want to suffer.

There is a contradiction that beds itself in the notion (and command) of being "set apart."  We believers know that we are to be holy and different, not conforming to the world, and so we should "look" different.  We should be different.  Maybe even have different musical standards, different entertainment standards, maybe even different "set apart" places to live...wait.  Weren't we called to "go into all the nations and preach the Gospel"?  How can we take Jesus into the world if we start closing ourselves off from the world?  But how do we take Jesus into the world without becoming a part of the world?  How do we resolve these contradictions?

The pursuit of being "set apart" is a poor pursuit if we fail to stop at the boundaries.  Surely Jesus himself was set apart, and yet he found himself at many an undesirable dinner table.  Jesus blazed the trail of being set apart, and I believe he also laid the boundaries of that activity.  While setting himself apart he might have said, Here's where I'll stop; right here before 'alienation', and I'll stay on this side, 'love'.  And so we find that, as in most things in life, pursuing God is about balance.  If we leave the world entirely, to whom will we preach?  And if we stay in the world completely, how will they know we're any different from them?

Also like most things in life, being set apart will not be an issue if we do this above all else: go after God.  The Christian experience in America (and probably other parts of the world; I don't know because I live in America) is rife with ways to better our spiritual lives.  Our cultural obsession with self-help carries readily over into our spiritual lives.  But the thing is, your spiritual life will find its proper course if you will pursue this one thing: God.  If you will make knowing him and spending time with Him - developing a relationship, basically - your paramount concern, everything else will fit.  We would be pleasantly surprised at how easy it could be to be "set apart" if we would only go after God.  Instead of trying to figure out how we should do it, we need to get to know Him and let Him do it.

There is a lot to be said for zeal, and there is a lot to be said against it.  Peter the apostle had great zeal.  Time and again he proved his passion for Jesus and for the mission of God.  He also time and again proved how a zealot will cross the line without blinking.  Jesus had to rebuke Peter on several occasions - like when Peter cut off the centurion's ear at Jesus' arrest.  In that instance we see the balance of the love of God butting up against the zeal of a believer.  The zealot draws his sword to defend God, but God does not need defending; rather, the world needs healing.  Peter had a hard time figuring this out, and yet this zealot was the rock on which Jesus built his church.

You see, God's is the original big tent party.  No one is excluded from the Father's plans, if only they'll take Him up on the invitation.  There is a sort of contradiction in this: that the God of the universe, perfect and holy as He is, would take just anybody in.  It doesn't jive with what we do, what we see happening around us.  If we were God we might be a bit more exclusive.  We wouldn't use a murderer with a speech impediment to free our people.  We wouldn't have the savior of mankind birthed in a stable.  And we wouldn't let just anybody in, because in our minds some people are past hope.  But fortunately we are not God.  And thank God we are not.

Here is the good news: He is God, the one and only, and He resolves our contradictions and shortcomings and baggage in this: He redeems us.  He loves us.  He has given absolutely everything He can to get us back.  This is why I love Easter, this is why I love the Resurrection.  The Resurrection is the point in human history - what's more, in the history of the universe - when it was finally done and we could come back to Him.  Come back to Him in His garden and finally have what it was intended we should have: a relationship with the true and living God.