Discipleship at Messiah

She has done a beautiful thing to me.-Mark 14:6

Dr. Paul S. Rees told about a poster, popular during WWII.  It showed a soldier rushing across a battlefield in a jeep, bullets flying, shells bursting, heading for his wounded buddy. The caption read, “Magnificent Fool”

When Mary (John names the woman), pours a pint of expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, the disciples are incensed.  That perfume was worth almost a year’s wages—it’s impractical, lavish, extravagant—foolish.  But Jesus saw something else.

There are two words for “good” in NT.  One means morally good—to do the right thing, the obedient thing.  The second word means not only good but beautiful, lovely, winsome.  The first word can be stern, hard, austere, unattractive.  But Jesus uses the second here—winsome, beautiful.  What the disciples called foolish, Jesus called beautiful.

Do you get it?  So many of those acts and deeds which give real meaning and zest to life have very little to commend them from a practical point of view.

Expressions of love are often spontaneous, not very practical or calculated.  Yet this is exactly what moves us and means so much to us.  A husband who really can’t afford it takes wife out to eat and spends more on one meal than on groceries for several days certainly isn’t practical and a little foolish.  But who calls him a fool?

True discipleship is more like being in love than using “commonsense” or arithmetic.  It often inspires deeds and actions that from a practical point of view seem foolish.

Many of us are so practical, rational and calculating.  We strive for a passable minimum.  How little is my duty?  What are the legal demands? We parcel out our time, resources, actions with  a “medicine dropper.”  And we never experienced the real joy of “stepping out on a limb” in a spontaneous expression of love or adoration.  We only give God what we have extra.  Someone has call it the “Blue rose melancholy”—i.e. “things I might do if roses were blue.”

It often can be a cover-up for selfish desires.  Remember Judas is here.  He later betrayed Jesus for less than this amount.  The only person Jesus ever called a fool was the completely practical man (Luke 12).

Please understand.  I am not saying God expects irresponsibility, or extravagance.  There is nothing wrong with prudence and practicality.  It would have been tragic if all the disciples had decided now this is what God requires and bought perfume worth a year’s wages and poured it on Jesus.  Had the woman asked Jesus about this he would have said, “No.” But Jesus is looking for love and devotion that sometimes get’s carried away.

Think of those men and women of heroic deeds, those who mean much to you and chances are, you will find that you do not remember them because they were completely rational, practical, and calculating but because they went beyond the expected—made fools of themselves!  There is something about those people who risk life, limb, property, and endure the head-shaking of those who consider them foolish to perform acts of love and devotion.

Bill Borden was raised in a mansion on Chicago’s “Gold Coast”, heir to Borden fortune (made in real estate not milk).  At Yale he was “merely one of the boys.”  He was an athlete—football, baseball, wrestling, crew—a leader.  He was president of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter his senior year.  In his graduating class of 800, he was among the elite in almost every area.

At age 25, he had everything any person could want–and more.  “He was good-looking, single, popular, well-educated, successful.”  And he was rich—by today’s standards, worth about $40 million. He astonished everyone when he gave away his fortune, set sail for the mission field and died five months later in Egypt.  “What a waste!”  “Foolish!”

A missionary who was martyred in South America, Jim Elliot once said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

What a joy to Jesus, soon to face death and betrayal, Mary’s act must have been.  This story would go with HIS story!—not useful, beneficial, profitable, or practical BUT BEAUTIFUL.  I think it was William Barclay who said: “We have not even begun to be Christian if we think of giving to Christ and his church in terms as little as we respectably can.” How Christians desperately need to be beautiful as well as good.

A village in India wanted to build a church but had no lot.  A man led them to his own house, told them to tear it down and build the church.

Impractical?  Certainly!  Foolish?  Probably!  BUT A MAGNIFICANT FOOL!

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now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, -I Peter 1:6
It becomes increasingly more obvious that people all around us are in pain.  And it is not just those outside our church family.  Many of you who are reading this are in pain.  It may not be physical pain, though there is plenty of that.  There are family struggles–husbands and wives, parents and children. There are financial struggles and job worries. There are spiritual struggles.  Indeed, every struggle has its spiritual dimension.  In some way it impacts our faith, our spirit, our relationship with God.
The longer I live, the more I realize that the very nature of life in a world invaded by sin assures pain in all its ugly and sickening power.
The Bible has a lot to say about pain and suffering.  From a Biblical/Christian perspective there are two dangers we face in a pain-filled world.
First, pain is a threat to our faith.  Or perhaps, more precisely, our reaction to pain can cloud our relationship to God.  We can begin to think that God has deserted us or that he doesn’t care.  Or what is equally as devastating, we conclude He can’t do anything about it (that was the answer that a popular book promoted).  To be left to deal with it alone because God doesn’t care or can’t help is spiritual disaster.
Second, to seek to avoid pain at any cost is the ultimate spiritual folly.  It is the course more of us are inclined to pursue.  Carried to its extreme, every thing is approached with a motivation that is totally self-centered.  How does it make me feel, give me pleasure or avoid trouble for me (or perhaps those close to me).
The Bible acknowledges that God’s people suffer, but not without help from God.  In fact, I Peter proclaims the possibility by God’s grace of joy in the midst of pain (I Peter 1:6).  More importantly, God can and does use suffering to achieve his purposes.  But the good news is that pain/suffering is of limited duration.  It will end because God’s final plan includes a life where there is no pain, sorrow, or tears.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. – Rev. 21:4

In the meantime, let us be there for one another, pray for one another, and live in joyful hope.

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The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen Luke 2:20

            The people of the Christmas story—what amazing people they were!
            Or were they?
            I believe the chief trait they shared was their ordinariness.
            Take the Shepherds for example.
From their story we learn ordinary people are not disqualified from an experience of God’s glory.  Aren’t we tempted to think they are?  Shepherds were people on the fringe of society, looked down on.  They couldn’t keep the conventional ceremonies, freely mingle with other citizens.
            There are people in every community, this community, on fringes.  To them the church may appear remote, scary because they are peopled by establishment, privileged citizens. Those in the church may look down on them, not understanding their hesitancy about participation.
            In this story it seems God says, “I will not let you think that in some rare place and privilege life will attain its infinite fulfillment” (IB).  Eternal holiness and beauty are not barred from most mundane, or even undesirable place or circumstances.  Jesus lived his life out among the ordinary.
            In fact, even when we experience God’s glory, we must return to the ordinary, everyday life with all its trials, struggles and pain. The shepherds returned.
            That is always a hard road—to go back, back from “shining happiness to humdrum things.”  As someone has pointed out: Ewes still miscarried, animals still preyed, sheep get lost, children get sick and die, neighbors disdain.  There are the pressures of the bottom line, difficult customers and a temptation to cut corners for profit.
            There can easily be a letdown after Christmas.  We can forget the mystery, the vision.  So we adjust to the “ordinary world” instead of believing it can be made over because of what we have seen and heard. (“determined it won’t change me” story)
            But there are the lasting elements of Christmas.  The day after there was “Glorifying and praising God.”  We need to remember that the highest happiness has its source in God.  The shepherds remembered and the ordinary did not undo what they had experienced.  It was focused in something very simple and human.  God is not distant, remote.  What they had seen would reach out to unlimited consequences.  They did not know how, did not understand, could not see the future.  But when we have come into contact with the one who holds the keys to human destiny even though we may not understand we can return to face life, confident of God’s nearness and God’s control.

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you are to give him the name Jesus -Matthew 1:21

            Do you remember the Lone Ranger—how the program ended?  Usually some variation of this:
            –“Who is that masked man?”
            –“Why don’t you know?  That’s the Lone Ranger.”
            All around the world, people with very little or no connection to Christianity will celebrate Christmas in some way or another.  If they were to stop and think about what they are celebrating—the birth of a baby over 2000 yrs ago, they might well ask, “Who Is That Baby?”
            That is  an important question.  The Bible takes great pains to answer it.  One way is by the names given to him.  William Barclay says, “It can very often happen that a name given to a man can be a one-word summary of what he has done and of what he is.”
            Alexander the Great
            William the Conqueror
            Bloody Mary
            Old Testament names
            John the Baptist
            How much more significant are the names and titles of Jesus since they are given or inspired by God.  In his book, Jesus As They Saw Him, Barclay identifies 42 separate titles or names.
            I want to focus on one—Jesus.  This is the name which the angel instructed Joseph give him.
            Technically, this is THE name, the others are more properly titles.  It is ironic that Jewish title “Christ” has replaced Jesus as the most common name among Christ ians.  Fifty percent of the Carols don’t mention Jesus.
            The point is not that it really matters what we call him.  However, we should not be blind to the fact that Jesus is the name which the angels gave to Him and it is the name by which the gospels know Him best (600 times).
            It was a common name in his day.  It meant savior or deliverer.  The world then (as always) was looking for a Savior—from political, economic, emotional problems to name a few.
            To many people, Christmas means the birth of a poor baby who rose to be a great defender of oppressed people.  His opposition to the establishment caused him to be executed.  But a band of his followers determined that the cause should not die and took his name and sought to perpetuate it and his ideals.
            The angel gives Joseph the reason for the name—he shall save his people from their sins.”  The tragic fact is that few people really want to be “saved from their sins” and many who do have never heard that message.  Martin Luther put it this way in a Christmas sermon: “The first link between my soul and Christ is, not my goodness, but my badness; not my merit, but my misery; not my standing, but my falling; not my riches, but my need.  He comes to visit his people, yet not to admire their beauties, but to remove their deformities; not to reward their virtues, but to forgive their sins.”  Another great preacher, Joseph Parker said, “What I dread amongst you most is not that you will destroy Christ, but that you will patronize him…Jesus Christ is nothing to me if he is not the Savior of the world….He is either the source of your keenest troubles, or he is the beginning and the end of your supremest joys.”
            Even those who have come to accept this sometimes are not sure of what it means.  It is not only forgiveness of past sins but a new person and future.
            “Who Is That Baby?”  He is Jesus who saves from sin those who put their faith in Him . He is the Lord of the lives of those who are believing in Him.  He is God with us.
            Do you personally know Jesus, Lord, present?
            Merry Christmas!

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 now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.
II Corinthians 6:2 b

            “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  We’ve all heard it.  It usually is an epitaph on failure.  “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”  That was a caption under one High School senior’s picture.  I must confess.  That senior was me.  Very early those who knew me recognized this tendency to procrastinate.  I’ve dealt with it all my life.  So when I talk about how spiritually dangerous it is I’m talking to myself.  From a purely rational standpoint when one arrives at age, as the Bible puts it, of three score and ten, it doesn’t make much sense to put anything off that needs to be done.
C.S. Lewis said it this way: “Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or happiness to the future.  Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.”  It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for.  The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.¹
            Soren Kierkegaard, wrote, “Learn to posses your experiences.”
It is possible to live always looking for something that is ahead of us and miss what is before us right now.  We fail to smell the roses.  We pass by needs.  We are blind to what we can do right now.
This is no support for the instant everything society or living with no thought of the future consequences of our actions or inactions.  It is simply a reminder that there are things that can’t be postponed.  There are opportunities that are not repeated.  The present belongs to God as well as the future.  Now is God’s time—to love, to trust, to obey.  Don’t put it off.

^{1 “}Learning in War-time.” Quoted in A Year With C.S. Lewis, 323

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Psalm 100:4 Give thanks to…[God].

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –G.K. Chesterton

            I read where someone said, “Something to be thankful for:  a kinder IRS.  A woman in Columbus, Ohio, received bills from IRS saying she owed $270 billion in back taxes.  However, she was informed she could pay in 3 easy installments of $90 billion each.”
            I once looked at issues closest to Thanksgiving of three Christian magazines which I read regularly.  In none of them could I find Thanksgiving even mentioned.  Now I’m sure that there are good reasons for that.  But it is my belief that in general, there is a rather strange ambivalence in the church about Thanksgiving.
            Of course there are our “Thanksgiving” events–dinners, ecumenical services and our prayers.  But, I get the feeling many times these are more perfunctory than vital.  Thanksgiving is a holiday and certainly we have a lot to be thankful for but it is more a side issue than a fundamental Christian one.  I suspect that for many, what Thanksgiving really means is the “kick off” to the Christmas season.
            What does thanksgiving mean for the Christian?
            In the book of Romans God’s charge against the wicked was: “although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” (Romans 1:21).  Failure to give thanks is the basic sin of the “ungodly” and “wicked.”
            Conversely, the most basic Christian act is thanksgiving.
            Thanksgiving is not complete just because we feel grateful.  Nor is thanksgiving just a day.  We need to verbalize it, say it.  Not to do that is a sure way to abort the joy.  It is like the manna which God provided in the Old Testament.  It will go sour if you try to hold on to it (Ben Patterson).
            It is a self perpetuating cycle.  Expressing thanks increases our gratitude.  Zig Ziglar writes, “The more you express gratitude for what you have the more things you have to express gratitude for.  Grateful people are happy people.  They’re achievers.  They have friends.”  He tells the story of a woman for Birmingham who hated her job.  She was told to list things she liked about it.  Then she was to repeat list with “I love my job because…” for thirty days.
            After six weeks, he asked, “How are you doing?”
            “She grinned so wide she could have eaten a banana sideways.  She said, ‘Mr. Ziglar, I’m doing wonderfully well.  You can’t believe how much those people down there have changed.’”
              How much more true is it as we express our gratitude, give thanks to God that we are grateful people.

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Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” (John 21)
             In light of those words, I am pleased to see a church sign in our town which says, “Jesus loves you. Is the feeling mutual?” Read simply the meaning is obvious—“Jesus loves you. Do you love him too?” That is truly the bottom line question. Do you love God/Jesus? It is what God is looking for from all of us.
            However, the form of the question on the sign reveals a bias in our culture which I believe causes many Christians problems. It is the notion of love as exclusively a feeling, an emotion or affection. Or, as I once heard Stuart Briscoe put it love, to many people, means “to like an awful lot.” So, when we are told to love our enemies or those we don’t like it seems an impossible dream. I believe, for many people and perhaps for all of us at times we do not really feel affection for God.
            If our understanding of marriage is based of the idea of love as a feeling (romance, affection) then can wholesale divorce be far behind?
            Don’t misunderstand. I am minimizing the importance of romance, affection or how great feelings can be. But, the Bible shows us a love more stable, more dependable, more wonderful still. It is a love which chooses to seek another’s good, to please another, to act in ways that are in their best interests whether we feel like it or not. The amazing thing is that when we do that the feelings often follow.
            John puts it this way: “This is love for God: to obey his commands” (I John 5:3). It is not, “do you like God a whole lot?” It is, “do you try to please God?” It is not, “when someone mistreats you, do you have a warm fuzzy feeling toward them?” It is, “do you treat them like you would want to be treated?” Jesus says it all depends on this:

 “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'” (Luke 10:27)

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            “We never did it this way before.”  -Every time a renewal movement begins, every time a reform movement begins, the argument, or one of the arguments against is that this is not the way it was or the way it has been.
            Jesus’ strongest enemies argued, resisted what he was doing and saying on the basis of what we call tradition.  Now tradition is a neutral word—it is not good or bad in itself.  Yet with only two exceptions in the New Testament, “tradition” is used in a negative sense.  Jesus never used it in a positive sense.  It was always when he was criticizing or blaming someone for using tradition to avoid hearing what he had to say–
            “you substitute  your tradition for the command of God.”
            “you make void the word of God through your tradition.”
            Paul, the apostle said he persecuted Christian because he was zealous of the traditions of his fathers.  Other places in the NT, we read that philosophy and vain deceit, that is human tradition are in opposition to Christ.  We are warned about the “empty folly of your traditional ways.”
            So we find from history and the NT one of the greatest enemies of spiritual growth and life has always been that argument this is different from the way we used to do it.”
            Those who should have been most prepared by their tradition to readily receive Jesus were his greatest enemies.  If those people had really been true to      their tradition, if they had really looked at the seed or the roots of their tradition, if they had realized what was basic to their tradition, they would have found at the heart was the promise of the coming Messiah and     that Jesus was the fulfillment of that promise.  They used the outward form, the branches and the leaves which had been so important to resist Jesus.
            This is a human tendency.  It is a natural reaction—to want to conserve what is old and familiar, and what is pleasant and comfortable.  Those of us today who are experiencing spiritual life and renewal can easily identify that life and renewal with certain forms.  We might identify it with a certain class, a certain ritual, a certain program, they become sacred to us (and they should). But we can easily begin to assume those outward things  are the cause or the substance of renewal and 10,20, 30 years from now can find ourselves  resisting a renewal movement because other forms and manifestations of it are not the way we have done it.
            In other words, where ever we are, whether we see God at work now or whether we remember when God worked it is very tempting to think the way things are around us at that time need to be recreated or preserved for God to work.  We have to worship God in exactly the same way.  We have to teach in exactly the same way.  We have to do everything in exactly the same way.  Many people have found spiritual life and renewal who have found vitality in a particular congregation identify spiritual life with the size of that congregation.  Many who grow up in a small church tend to believe it is impossible to experience vitality in a large congregation and vice versa.
            We tend to identify the leaves and the branches with the roots and to hold on to the old leaves and branches.
            The Novelist John Galsworthy–THE COUNTRY HOUSE tells the creed of the Pendyce family:

“I believe in my father, and his father, and his father’s father, the makers and keepers of my estate, and I believe in…my son and my son’s son.  And I believe that we have made the country….And I believe…in things as they are, for ever and ever.  Amen.”

            This can become our creed and an excuse to resist God’s direction and leadership.

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I came not to destroy but to fulfill.  -Matthew 5:17

A modern parable:

There was a certain man who had a very beautiful tree in his yard.  The branches and leaves with its shape and color was a source of admiration to all who saw it.  The man said to himself, “I’m going to protect and preserve the beauty of my tree.”
            Sometime passed and the leaves began to change color and even fall off.  Some of the branches and twigs grew brittle and dry.  The man became frantic and day after day he would go out and gather up the leaves and twigs which fell from the tree and tie them back on the tree and paint them green.  Every spring when the buds would appear, he would quickly clip them off because he didn’t want those ugly things to spoil the beauty of his green tree.
            So also are those who try to preserve past beauty at the expense of new life.

            Jesus’ stiffest opposition came from those who thought he was destroying the sacred teaching handed down to them.
            The Church has always been in danger of becoming a memorial society.  That is a society which spends all of its time paying tribute to its past glory and beauty.
            The past, of course, is important. It is important that we understand and remember where we have been because it has to do with why we are like we are.  The seeds or the roots of our spiritual life are all of past origin.  So we are not saying the past is unimportant, rather try to live in the past is folly and foolishness.
            Much of the history of God’s dealings with people shows how susceptible we are to trying to make yesterday’s blessings be sufficient for today.  Do you remember when the children of Israel came out of Egypt?  They were on their way through the wilderness and began to wonder what they would eat.  God wonderfully provided “mana” every day for them to eat.  It came like dew and every morning they would go out and gather enough for the day.  Some of them decided they wanted to preserve some of this mana in case it wouldn’t come one day.  So they stored it in a pot, since there was always more than they needed for one day.  But what happened to it?  When they went to get it–it had spoiled, worms in it, and smelled.  The lesson was they could only get enough food for each day.  The must take each day as it comes and trust God each day to provide the mana.  They could not lay some in store for the future, when they thought God might not provide.
            In the NT, there is the story of the woman at the well.  Jesus has a conversation with her about worship.  She was a member of a religious group whose whole attitude toward religion was in the past.  Everything was dependent on what their forbearers, specifically Jacob, had done.  History has been filled with examples of that.  It doesn’t matter when the glory days for us were.  It might be a certain time in the life of the congregation—Pastor ________’s ministry or the day someone saw a vision, It could be the day of our own conversion, childhood memories, or 100 years ago.  Whatever or whenever we must resist the temptation of trying to relive those days.
            Neither can we allow that to determine our life today.  We can remember and be grateful for what God has done.  But God is always doing something new.

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