Isaiah 1:10-20
Matthew 28:18-20
John 13:15-19
A LISTENING GOD
As
most of you have realized long since, the world around us
tends to emphasize the outside and minimize the inside. What
goes on in the overt world is interesting and important.
What goes on behind the scenes – in the inside dimensions –
does not count for much. We comprehend or connect with the
unseen dimensions inside our own minds, hearts, and souls,
but those dimensions are vast beyond imagination or
comprehension. They are where all our true meaning, love,
motives, longings, and hopes come from, yet the outer world
continues to assure us that they are of no real consequence,
since nothing from the unseen realms can be measured,
proved, codified, or defined. It may be “of interest” to
you, should you ever notice such realms, but they are of no
real consequence. Important news is about vast and sweeping
affairs in the outer world: economic trends, wars, political
conventions, major disasters. And if we want to make a
difference with our lives, we must join some large
organization, corporation, or movement that is going to have
a huge impact, in some way, on the physical realities.
Feeding one hungry
person never makes the news. Losing a puppy you love, or
even a child, will never be noticed beyond your own small
circle of acquaintances. An earthquake that kills only four
people will only get a line or two, for one day, in any
paper. If the four happen to be your family, it will shake
your life, but there are too many people for it to register
for more than a moment anywhere else. Quantity is
everything. Quality is a subjective issue, and so it doesn’t
count.
You understand where we are going with this, right? There is
something fundamentally different between the Christian view
of life and the view of life which is operative in the
culture all around us. This difference has enormous – we
could even say formative and fundamental – impact on our
values, on the principles we trust, on the purposes we hold
to, on the way we live our lives. It changes our priorities
and our methods – what we live for, where our hope is, what
we want in and from our lives.
We have suggested
over and over that the reason Jesus is so hard for us to
track, follow, and comprehend is because He does not see the
world in terms of the overt, physical realities that we all
grow up thinking are important. He sees life from a
spiritual dimension that changes the way everything looks.
Individuals are important. Jesus spent no time talking about
the biggest overt reality of His nation in His time: the
Roman Empire, the Roman occupation, the plight of the Jewish
people as a whole under Roman rule. All around Him people
were talking, thinking, and praying while focused on the big
picture. Something must be done! We have to make a
difference! We must start or join a new movement: The Zealot
Party! The Essene Movement! The Pharisee Revolution! We have
to do something! It is stunning to contemplate, but
Jesus was not part of any of these religious or political
movements. Contrary to almost everything you have been
taught or told, Jesus did not start or build an organization
to help the poor or feed the hungry. The temple ran an
extensive welfare system in His time; it had nothing to do
with Jesus’ focus or His ministry. He cared about internal
poverty and internal hunger: A kind of water that if you
once drank of it, you would never thirst again. A kind of
meal that would feed the soul. A kind of deliverance that
would free you from all earthly coercion forever. An EXODUS
that could never be repealed or reversed. A PROMISED LAND
that would never fade or betray us.
After all these generations, we still barely get it. What He
teaches still seems confusing because we constantly try to
mix it with familiar truth and warp it back to fit the
physical realities. We still find ourselves asking: Was
Jesus a lunatic? Did He make up all this ethereal nonsense?
Or was He truly the Son of God, the One who came to reveal
the truth and the principles that make life worth living –
that lead us out of bondage and into the light?
Of
course, Jesus did do something, or we would never
have heard of Him. But most people cannot figure out, to
this day, what it was. He went inside, to a personal
encounter with God – to an absolute allegiance and obedience
to the Spirit of God apprehended within. And in response to
the guidance He found in the prayer place – out of the power
of His surrender to that Higher Being that nothing in the
outer world could ever detect or truly believe in – Jesus
came out of His prayers to do what? To call a fisherman to
follow Him; to heal a blind beggar by the side of the road;
to tell a parable about a dishonest steward, a parable that
everyone thought was the strangest, and maybe the worst,
parable they had ever heard.
Doing nothing that any human, in their wildest imagination,
would have thought could make any dent at all on the
political, religious, economic, ecological, or unjust
realities of the time, Jesus changed a life here, changed a
life there – brought a tiny handful of people into awareness
and commitment to the unseen Kingdom that He Himself was
seeing and living for. And THAT, unbelievably, is what ended
up changing the world. Well, it didn’t really change “the
world,” but some people became aware of a New WAY. And most
of the people in the world today at least know Jesus’ name.
We
have to be careful with phrases like “changed the world.”
The world went right on being the world. The zealots fought,
the Pharisees taught, and the Roman Empire flattened all of
Israel a few years later. It would be almost three hundred
years before the Roman Empire officially turned Christian,
and even then, it would be more a political, overt thing
than what Jesus showed and what He was about. The world did
not really change, it just changed in the eyes of His
followers. They lived more and more for the unseen Kingdom
He had made them aware of. They loved Him, and when the
world caught them and challenged their New WAY, they died
for Him, as He had died for them. But they were not trying
to do all the overt, huge, and showy stuff our world so
loves to think is really important. They just wanted to live
the WAY He had revealed: prayer and obedience; a personal
connection with God, on the inside; a day-by-day commitment
to living their own lives by His guidance – the guidance of
His Holy Spirit.
Really and truly
they did not care what the results were in the outer world.
That was no longer their focus. If it brought benefit, well
and good. If it brought anger and hostility, even got them
killed, well, that was sad, and certainly unpleasant, but
not very important.
Big Christian movements followed, but they were never the
WAY. They only got in the way. Organization always
tends to get drawn back into the physical principles and
overt purposes of the world. True followers connect on the
inside. They always have. They find each other and form
tight family bonds – faith families of support and affection
and shared understanding. Jesus’ followers have always found
themselves drawn into such support groups. And these support
groups always threaten to get too big and successful, and
forget what they are really for and about. Still, they are
wonderful, and necessary to the Path.
What is the big
difference between the Way of the World and the WAY of the
Christ? There are many, many differences. But one of the
simple, huge, and clarifying differences is this: The WAY of
the Christ is always personal. The Way of the World is
always impersonal.
In the Way of the
World, you don’t matter, except insofar as you may serve the
world. Even then, you don’t matter; just the way you serve
the world matters. Individuals don’t count; trends count.
There may be some thought that if economic benefits
increase, individuals will benefit. Yet nobody really knows
or cares how any of these individuals are experiencing life;
what they are living for; what sort of hope makes life worth
living for them; what sort of morals or values govern their
lives. Trends are what matter. Trends have a bigger impact
than any individual choice or purpose. If an economic trend
puts an extra fifty dollars a month into the pockets of
every working American, that will have huge benefits. That’s
obvious. Well, it may be obvious, but it’s not true. Fifty
dollars does not increase or improve quality of life, except
for those who already have some quality in their lives. And
that quality does not come from money. Those with real
quality will use the money well. Those without will not.
“For to him who has will more be given, and he will have
abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will
be taken away.” That is not a political saying;
that is a Jesus saying. (Matthew 13:12) And He does not say
it from the perspective of the overt world. He says it from
the perspective of the unseen, spiritual world.
If it is the WAY of
the Christ, it is personal. YOU matter. What YOU do matters.
If you lie, cheat, or betray somebody, it matters because of
the way that conflicts with the principles of the Kingdom,
and because of the way it impacts your soul. It matters
because of what it does to the relationship between you and
Jesus. It may have repercussions in the outer world too, but
that is never the primary consideration. The interior world
and the unseen Kingdom are far more important, and they will
have far more impact in the long run. That is what is hard,
if not impossible, for the world to understand.
If
it is the WAY of the Christ, it is personal. If you look at
the moon and the stars, it is personal. If you sit and watch
the ocean, it is personal. If you look at the birds of the
air, you are part of a Creation that was personally wrought
by a personal God – who sees you as an individual, precious
child; who cares if you are hurt; who rejoices when you do
well, or learn, or grow, or help a friend. To the worldly
person, the sky is impersonal. Hunks of rock and balls of
fire are “out there,” but it doesn’t mean anything. Some
think it’s interesting; some think it’s threatening, because
sooner or later a stray bit of debris may blow us to
oblivion. But it doesn’t matter. It is not personal. It is
just the way it is.
For some birders, I
am discovering that there are no real birds, just
statistics: How many? Are they endangered? Let’s go on a
crusade to make everybody more aware so we can save this or
that species. It’s as close as they can come to caring. But
they no longer see the birds, except as information for the
crusade. They are too busy being angry and getting upset to
enjoy the birds. Of course, they would reply: “If we don’t
save this species, nobody will ever enjoy this kind of bird
again.” That is: In some far-off future, when we have
righted all the wrongs, they imagine they will have time to
enjoy the birds again. So maybe they believe in Heaven after
all. Only, like many Christians, their Heaven has nothing to
do with now. It is not a realm they have already entered. It
is for later, for after, and so is the peace and the love
that come from it.
Our world loves to say to us, “You can make a difference.”
That is the call to come join the crusade, to support the
movement. You can make a difference: Give your money, give
your time, and we can make a change in some trend or
another. Together we can save the world, or some part of it.
Jesus would never say, “You can make a difference.” That
puts everything on the wrong level, with the wrong motives,
and running on the wrong principles. And it is not personal.
The implication is that we are fine but something is wrong
out there; that we can band together and change what is
wrong out there, if we can just get enough of us together –
if we can get enough overt power to force the change.
In
the Christian perspective, you cannot make a difference; you
can be different. It is a broken realm, separated
from God. However faithful and powerful you become, you do
not have the power to change “The Fall” – the separation
from God. You cannot heal the world of the PRIDE that is
ruining everything. You cannot make a difference, but you
can be different. That is the interior WAY. Jesus
says: If you know me, feel my love, and feel the quality and
reality of the life I live and the Kingdom I serve – and the
God I live for. You can drop your earthly ways and come be
mine – come belong to my Kingdom. Turn your life toward me,
and you will be different.
What comes from that is none of our business. If we start
focusing on the results, we will not be able to stay focused
on Jesus. Nobody can look both ways at the same time. If we
look to the results, very quickly the world will have our
attention and own our lives again. Don’t try to make
a difference – ever! BE different. Don’t try to change or
control or coerce anybody else – into anything. But if you
are truly different, some people will get curious. Then you
get to tell them about Jesus. Don’t try to make them change;
just bring them to Jesus. He can love them better than you
can. And He knows who they truly are better than you do.
Sometimes, because He truly loves them, He will be harder on
them than you would be. And the transition from the Way of
the World to His WAY, as you yourselves now know, is often
tougher than people want to pretend.
I
never know how much connection there is between what you are
hearing and what I am saying. The personal relationship –
the personal connection – between each of us and Jesus is
the real power and excitement and delight of the Christian
Life. It is far more dynamic than most people know, and far
more dangerous, from a worldly perspective, than most people
want to know. But it is obscured by our efforts to keep one
foot in the worldly perspective while at the same time
trying to take baby steps into the spiritual domain. We
cannot finesse our way safely and comfortably into the
Christian WAY. We can delude ourselves into thinking we have
managed that, but it only cheats us out of the true joy and
terror of putting Jesus in charge of our lives.
What is the false,
or counterfeit, way of comfort and finesse that so often
goes under the name of Christianity in our time? That God is
always sweet and nice; love is always soft and gentle (and
unconditional); justice is always replaced by grace and
mercy. So there is no need for repentance and there is no
desire for forgiveness. I mean, all of us have already been
forgiven, right? And we can count on always being forgiven,
whether we repent or not, right? We cannot for the life of
us explain why we don’t act like we are forgiven, but
let’s not get picky ...
Most of you no longer believe in the pablumy Jesus or the
good-buddy God – not because you don’t like such notions,
but because of your own personal encounter. And it is borne
out by the encounters of all those we admire who have gone
before us. Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and all the rest were
unable to finesse their way into a true and personal
relationship with God, try as they might – and try they did.
But it came down to a difference so vast that they had to
choose: choose between seeing life and reality in the normal
ways, or moving to a very new and altogether different WAY
and kind of life. You have heard it so often, why do I keep
saying it? Because you know very well that it is possible to
hear it without hearing it.
And so we think we can do anything we want, as long as our
motives are good. We think that God will never punish or be
angry; that’s the old fundamentalist, primitive religion –
hellfire and damnation. So we can drink our way into
oblivion; eat our way into disease; regress our way from
love to sex until our lives are blighted by loneliness; do
good deeds that make no difference to any real human’s life
... and God will never care. God is only interested in the
big picture.
Around here, at least, we believe that God wants each one of
us personally, not generically. God cares every moment of
our lives – about what we are doing, and how we are doing
it. And God cannot really begin to make of us what we are
intended and designed to be until, in trust and love, we
turn will and life over to him. Therefore no two patterns
will be the same; no two of us will get the same guidance at
the same time. And therefore we cannot follow each other; we
must follow the Holy Spirit of Jesus our Lord. That makes it
even more fun to be interested and supportive of each
other’s journey, but if we all start looking and talking and
thinking like each other, that does not mean we have Christ.
It means we are pretending. Somebody made up a “Barbie doll”
image of what obedience was supposed to look like, and it
got easier for us to try to look good rather than for each
of us to keep going to our own prayers every morning.
Choosing this way of prayer and obedience is never a
turkey-shoot – never easy or automatic. While we often
suspect that we can see each other’s path more clearly than
we see our own, we learn to be a little cautious about such
opinions. One of the problems with the unseen Kingdom is
that it is unseen. Where and how Jesus is working on the
inside will often come to light weeks or even months later.
So we make our honest comments and voice our opinions, but
with ever-growing humility.
When I bring one or
another of you to mind, one thing is very clear: There has
been enormous change and growth in your lives in the short
time I have known you. Some of you don’t even notice it
yourselves, as you are rightly focused on where the Path
leads next. None of us are as bold and brave for our Lord as
we hope one day to be, but it is a privilege to be among
you. Not many churches have as much “unseen church” alive
and thriving in their midst. I am incredibly grateful to be
here.
Nevertheless, we may still pay attention to Isaiah. God
always answers prayer, but only if he decides to listen. And
according to Isaiah, God does not always decide to listen.
Only if our hearts are eager – and our souls are willing to
obey – will God decide to listen to us. If God listened and
answered when our hearts and minds were off their marks, it
could only do more damage than good. “Seek ye the Lord
while he may be found,” says Isaiah (55:6). God cannot
always be found at our whim. And if we lose our humility –
our teachableness – who knows how long before we get it
back?
We
are reminded of what an incredible privilege it is to talk
with Jesus. It is not our right. It is not a
prayer-on-demand system. There is no switch I get to flick
on or off at my own whim. It may be true that Jesus only
waits for my heart to be right; nevertheless, when my heart
is wrong, it feels like He is unavailable or uncaring or too
busy. And if He listens and inspires, it is sheer mercy,
grace, and love. Always His choice – never mine.
Over and over I find
that when we do connect, I want to talk about big and
important things: the affairs of His Kingdom, and how I can
be a good servant and really help Him a lot. But He wants to
talk about little things: my schedule for today; how I am
using my time; what I am angry about; who I need to see;
what I need to take out of my life, and sometimes what I
need to put in its place. How very annoying! I am willing to
be noble and grand, and He wants to talk about petty little
details? Yet life is made up of the details. If I will not
give Him the right to change the details, He can make no
difference in my life.
If
we ever see through the veil, we see that the real reason
for Bible study, theological reflection, contemplation, and
time in prayer – the real reason and purpose for it all – is
so we can have this relationship – this chance to walk and
talk with Jesus. And it is not somebody else’s notion of
Him, or who He is, or what He wants. What truly matters is
our own connection with the Holy Spirit of our Resurrected
Lord – our own individual encounter in the quiet of willing
minds and hearts and souls. It is personal. And only a
personal response will move us into His presence, and into
His WAY.
Thousands of people are cut off from the real glory and joy
and change of the Christian Life because they make it too
big, too theoretical, too institutional, too creedal. They
will not let Jesus in, to where He really belongs – into the
nitty gritty of the details of their everyday lives. It is
personal. And that is where and how He cares. Never ever try
to make a difference. Let Jesus show you how to BE
different.
Copyright 1996-2010 by
Bruce Van Blair. All rights reserved.