The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
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How many of you want more mature
faith? Stronger faith? More faith?
We all do, right? We want our faith to grow, to take over our
lives, so that the love of God is coursing through our veins at all times. We want to be tuned in to the reality of
Christ’s love and grace. We want our
every waking moment to be wrapped in the love of God.
And, being Americans, being take
charge people, we want to know how to do this, how to get there. We want clear steps, concise directions. We know the destination, and we want the book
or the guidance on how to get there. We
want 40 days of purpose or 10 steps to grace or whatever the path is… we want
to obtain this.
Today, I’m going to tell you how to
get there. I’m going to tell you how to
do this. And you may not be happy about
it.
Yesterday, Rachel and I got into an
airplane in Miami, where it was much warmer than it is here. We spent a lovely week in the Florida Keys,
but home beckoned, and so north we traveled.
Flying is an extraordinary
thing. Humans have been trying to fly
ever since we’ve noticed that birds can soar on the air. Artwork from centuries ago indicate that
humans came up with various contraptions to aid in flight, some of them more
successful than others. We eventually
devised a machine capable of aiding us in our flight, but even though the plan
can fly, humans cannot. Were I to have
jumped out of the airplane yesterday, it might appear as though I was flying,
but in fact I would just be falling.
With style, hopefully, but we cannot escape the clutches of gravity
without machinery.
Now, I do believe it’s possible for
God to make humans fly. We have record
that the Holy Spirit spent some time in Acts snatching people up and whisking
them from one place to another. We know
that Jesus ascends into the heavens, and both Enoch and Elijah ascended
directly into heaven. Without God’s
help, however, humans cannot fly.
This doesn’t stop us from
assembling the appropriate mechanical devices, however, to get us around by
flying. But we’re not doing the flying.
This isn’t so different than our
faith. Faith is a gift of the Holy
Spirit. We cannot manufacture it by our
own accord. We can’t create faith any
more than we can flap our wings and fly.
Only God can create faith in the heart—it is a gift of God, given
freely, that we cannot make.
What humans tend to do, however, is
convince ourselves that faith is our own work.
Just as we create airplanes that make us think we’re doing the flying,
we often create a faith that fools us into believing it is something we have
done. We think we’ve built our
faith. We think faith depends on
us. We think we have to earn it, have to
lead the proper life so that God will love us.
We get anxious because then we believe that it all depends on us. We worry because when we mess up, as we inevitably
do, that God then takes away our faith.
We talk about backsliding and falling away from God, as though we could
ever be separated from the God who promises us that even death itself shall not
separate us from him.
So we make faith about ourselves,
rather than God.
Faith, my friends, is a work of the
Holy Spirit. It is a gift of God. You cannot build it. You cannot create it. You cannot think it into being, and you
cannot take a 10 step program to obtain it.
You can only accept it.
Three weeks ago, we talked all
about God’s kindness. We concluded with
the idea that God pours his kindness out upon us not to make much of us, but
rather to lead us to repentance, to help us see that we should be living for
God. Two weeks ago we focused on
repentance, on the idea that our lives should be about turning back to God and
turning away from our sins. Today, we’re
talking about what happens after we repent.
After we’ve turned back to God,
then it’s about trusting God to do a work in us. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within
us, and it’s a work that takes our whole lives.
Now, I’m not going to stand here and say that we don’t have a part to
play in this—but I am going to stand here and say that this is primarily the
work that God does in us. God leads us
through our lives, transforming us into a certain kind of people if we will let
him do his work.
This is the key—we have to be
willing to trust God enough to let him do a work in us. We have to be willing to get out of the way,
to stop trying to do everything ourselves, and to let his grace and his love
flow in us and through us. It’s about
letting God mold us into the type of people God wants us to be. To do this properly, we need to let go of our
preconceived ideas, to let go of our assumptions about how life should go, and
to let God be in control. To do
otherwise is like hiring a guide to lead you through the wilderness and then
storming off on your own, insisting that your expert guide ought to follow your
advice. It’s like taking a magic marker
to the Bible and telling God that he could learn a few things from you. When have to be willing to turn everything over
to God, to let him mold us and shape us, to trust him enough to lead us in the
direction that he wants us to go. This
is God’s work, not our own. We can
cooperate or not—that is our choice, but it is primarily God’s work first.
God talks about this in Jeremiah—God
talks about writing the covenant on the hearts of the people. He says that he’ll write the covenant there,
and they’ll all know him. He’ll forgive
all their sins, and they won’t remember their sins—not because of what they
have done, but because of what he has done.
In Hosea, God talks about how he’ll be the dew, and he’ll shower his
delight and life upon the people, and they will blossom in beauty. In Revelation, Jesus says that he stands at
the door and knocks, and those who invite him in will dine with the Lord and
Savior. It is God who approaches the
door. It is God who writes upon our
hearts. It is God who transforms.
Friends, our faith is a work of
God. We have a role to play, but we
cannot be in control. We must trust God enough
to let him lead. We must accept that we
cannot make our own faith, we cannot create it, and we cannot make ourselves
mature in faith. Only God can do this.
So let us cast ourselves entirely
upon the mercy of God. Let us accept our
limitations, trust in his mercy and grace, and let him do a work in our
lives. God wants a beautiful future for
us, but we must let him grow us into it.
We are not in control, and that is a wonderful thing. We are in far better hands than our own!
Let us pray
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