I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Psalm 1:1-3
Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
********************
How many of you have ever tried to
get a child to eat a balanced meal? If
you haven’t, you’ve probably witnessed the negotiations that take place at such
an event.
If
you eat two more chicken nuggets, you can have a cookie. Three bites of vegetables and then you can go
play. Two green beans might earn you
some ice cream.
Perhaps this is the arena in which
police departments ought to have hostage negotiators train. Anyone who can break the iron will of a three
year old can probably deal with any other problems life brings to bear.
The idea of bargaining is deep
within our culture. We strongly believe
that in order to get anything, you have to give something up. We’re strongly suspicious of anyone offering
a free lunch, and we are always trying to determine what the catch is to an
offer.
So it’s much easier for us to
believe that God works the same way, rather than simply accepting the free gift
of unmerited grace. It would make far
more sense to our 21st century American minds if this was the sermon
that came first in the series, if we flipped the vision on its head and talked
about how doing God’s will might earn us God’s kindness. Viewing good works as our ticket to escape
the fires of hell makes sense to us.
As Presbyterians, however, that’s
not what we believe. It might be an
easier sermon to preach, but I don’t believe that the motive for our good works
should be to escape damnation. I do
believe in hell, and I do believe that people end up there, but I don’t think
it’s because they haven’t done enough good works, that they haven’t earned
their way into heaven. I believe it’s
because people have rejected the free gift of God’s grace and love, just as I
believe that we make it into heaven only by accepting God’s free gift of
justification and redemption. Our good
works are the result of God’s salvation, not a precondition.
So we come to this sermon last, a
cap on the vision for New Hope in 2013.
I believe that we need to take some time to recognize God’s kindness
that is showered down upon us. I believe
that God’s kindness should lead us to repentance, to recognize the sin in our
lives and turn back to God. I believe
that God transforms us into a people who delight to do God’s will.
What does it mean to delight to do
God’s will?
That’s what we’re going to cover
today.
But first, if we’re going to talk
about delighting to do God’s will, we have to talk about what God’s will is,
right? How can we expect to delight to
do something that we don’t understand?
The best way to understand God’s
will is to read the Bible. All of
it. Cover to cover. After that, God’s will becomes clear. Since we probably don’t have time to read all
of it today and still make lunch, let me summarize: God’s will is to reach out and love the
other. This has been true since before
the universe was formed, and it will continue to be true long after the sun has
faded into dark. It’s who God is—we see
this at the root of the Trinity. It’s
love. God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—exist
in a permanent embrace of love. This is
what we mean when we say that God is love—God I constantly and permanently
involved in a loving relationship with Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is that
love going back and forth. The three
persons of the Trinity are engaged in a perpetual, loving dance, and when God
created humans, he invited us into that loving relationship. God wants us to join him in love, and so God
reached out in love to us.
The Bible bears witness to
this. Page after glorious page, we see
God reaching out in love. Even when we
have rejected God’s love, God is still reaching out in love. Even when humans gave him 10,000 reasons to
destroy us, he still reaches out in love.
There are times of punishment, but overwhelmingly, the Bible is a
witness to God’s never-ending love for humanity and the world in which we live. It’s written across every page.
We see this most fully in Jesus
Christ. When it was clear to all that
humans could not save themselves, God sent his own Son, Jesus Christ, to die on
a cross to save us. When we were in need
of a Savior, God had a plan, and there was no price that was too high to pay
for our salvation. God reached out in
love and invited us in.
So God’s will is for all people to
be wrapped up in his love.
So when the Holy Spirit transforms
us into a people who delight to do God’s will, what that means is that we
delight to share the love of God with others.
We don’t do it out of obligation or out of guilt, but out of something
far deeper than that—gratitude. We are
so overwhelmed with God’s love dwelling in us that we can’t help but share it.
Think about it like this. Let’s
say you win one of those crazy Powerball lotteries that gives away something
like $500 million. Let’s say that this
money changes your life, and unlike real life, it changes it in good ways. You’re healthier, happier and can’t believe
your good fortune. Then, imagine the
lottery board is so impressed with the fact that you didn’t go crazy like most
other lottery winners that they told you that there was no limit to the money
you could have. Here’s a credit card,
they said, just spend it.
Now, you’re so overjoyed with what
all this money has done for your life that you decide you’re going to dedicate
yourselves to letting others experience this kind of joy. You run around and give tons of money to
everyone you see, everyone you meet. You
can’t help but share it because you want them to experience the same kind of
delight that you have found.
That’s the essence of the kind of
life we’re supposed to live, only we have a treasure far more valuable than
money. We have something so much better
than anything money is or can ever buy, and yet I imagine that we’d all be so
much more excited if we won the lottery than we are at the truth of the
Christian message for us.
We have been given the greatest
treasure anyone could ever hope for. We
have been given the eternal grace, love and peace of God, and it should change
the type of people we are. It should
change the way we view our days, and it should change the way we look at the
world around us. We should be overjoyed,
because Christ died for us. We should
delight at the prospect of what God might do today.
Then, we realize that God’s love is
a bottomless pool, an ocean with no limits.
We should rejoice so deeply at this realization that we should seek to
give God’s love to everyone we meet, everyone we see. We want them to experience the same blessings
we have experienced, not out of guilt, but out of gratitude. Our lives should be so transformed that we
invite all into the endless wonder of Christ.
The world would think we were
crazy, right? There goes one of those crazy loving Christians. They are so generous. This is what Jesus means when he says that
the world will know that we are his disciples by our love—they will recognize
that all selfless love is rooted in Christ.
This is the identifying mark of Christians—not the clothes we wear or
the fish on our cars. Those are fine,
but the real mark is the love we have for one another. Again, this love isn’t rooted in guilt, but
in grace, in generosity. We should be so
overwhelmed at what God has given us that we can’t stop sharing it.
And this is what makes us truly
happy. We all want to be happy,
right? We’d do almost anything for
happiness. Well, the Psalmist tells us that
sin will never make us happy, despite what sin would have you believe. Sin promises happiness, but is always unable
to deliver. So what makes us happy?
Focusing on God.
And the more we focus on God, the
more we realize that God wants to reach out to the other in selfless love, and
then we want to imitate that. This, too,
makes us happy, because we become more like Christ and we lose our anxiety and
our stress and our worry. We stop
focusing on what we don’t have and are amazed at the endless love that fills
us.
Friends, this is the type of people
God wants to change us into. We can
refuse and resist, and I won’t stand up here and say that you’ll go to hell if
you don’t do things exactly right, but I will stand here and say that anyone
who spends a moment dwelling on the incredible gifts of God cannot help but
want to share this Good News. May we
seek to bless others as richly as we have been blessed.
Let us pray
No comments:
Post a Comment