Lord, Who Am I in You? – Equipped and Under Orders

Preached on Sunday, May 5, 2019

Scripture readings: Genesis 1:26-31; Matthew 28:16-20

There’s a friend of mine who has told me that he became a Christian when he held his first baby child in his arms. He knew, in his heart that he, as he was, was not the man to raise this child. He needed to become a new man. So, my friend gave his life to Christ, so that he could be a wise, loving, faithful father.

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA
Late April, 2019

The truth is that my friend was raised in a Christian home and seemed to belong to Christ already. But, his baby daughter became the witness commissioned by Jesus to go to the nation of Washtucna and make a disciple out of her new father, teaching him to observe all the Jesus had commanded her.

Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 RSV) My friend became a new man for a new world: the new world of fatherhood. By the way, my friend’s wife was always a saint. She must have seen his future when she said, “I do.”

My friend saw his old world passing away. In the bigger sense our whole world is passing away, ever since Jesus died and rose from the dead. (1 John 2:17) A new world has begun because of Jesus.

To us, this world still looks like a dying world. We will only see that new world of Jesus when he comes again. We live in a new creation and we, who are in Christ, are a new creation, even though we don’t look anything like new.

We are called by the Lord to live as his new images in this new creation. We know there must be different rules and a different calling than we had in the old creation, when we were trying to make ourselves in our own image, in those bad, old days in that bad, old world that was turned away from God.

God gave my friend a new calling, with his new heart, in the new world called fatherhood. This new calling was what we might call a covenant; a fancy Bible word for a holy promise bringing and holding God and human beings together.

The last few lines of the Gospel of Matthew are such a covenant, such a holy promise, that brings us and holds us together. Through this promise, we have a relationship of grace and empowerment with the Lord Jesus.

Jesus begins his new promise like this: “Behold, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” And Jesus completes his new promise like this: “And, lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Jesus places himself at the beginning and at the completion of the promise to show that he is the one who holds it all together, for us, from the beginning to the end. The grace and the empowerment promised to us by Jesus is very clear, here.

What Christians commonly call “The Great Commission” is our calling and mission in the world that has been claimed by the authority of Jesus. Jesus came into our old, broken, rebel world from the throne that he shared with his Father in heaven. He dispensed with his heavenly authority for a while: while he was growing up, and working, and journeying toward the cross and the tomb. Jesus became truly human for us, in order to claim us from the inside out.

The classic way for an explorer to claim a new land for your own nation is never by gazing at its shoreline through binoculars and saying some magic, claiming spell. You have to set your own foot inside the new land and raise your nation’s banner.

Jesus set his feet inside the broken world of the human race, in flesh and blood, as though he was making himself a citizen of the place. Then Jesus raised the banner of the cross and claimed us for his kingdom.

Jesus built the only kind of human life in which we can follow in his footsteps. He built this new shape of human life for us when he was baptized for our repentance, and received the Holy Spirit, just as we all must baptized for repentance and receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus opened the door into what we must all receive, in order that we may be washed clean in our hearts, and be moved, and enabled, and directed by the Holy Spirit in our own lives. So, Jesus moved in first, into the new world of repentance, and baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus claimed authority over our transition from our old life into our new life.

He did this before us, and he did it for us, so that we don’t take those alone. Our repentance, our baptism, and our life in the Holy Spirit are just as good as his, because he walks with us through it.

Jesus pushed his authority further when he made his way to the center of our hearts and took our sin and rebellion upon himself, on the cross, and made our lives stronger than sin and stronger than death in the resurrection.

Jesus reclaimed human dominion in this world when he reclaimed us in birth, in life, in death, and in resurrection; and defeated the powers of Hell and the Devil. In Jesus, there is no longer any place for us to go where he hasn’t been already. He is with us always, in so many ways, until all the ages and all the places of creation are brought together for the new heaven and earth.

Now that he has created and claimed the new earth and our new life, Jesus has sent us on a mission a bit like the mission of Adam and Eve in the old creation. They were commissioned to “dress and keep the earth”; or to “work it and take care of it”. (Genesis 2:15 KJV and NIV) This was the dominion of Adam and Eve. It was their rulership over the earth: to work on the earth and take care of it, to be servants and guardians of it.

The Great Commission of Jesus for us doesn’t take the First Commission away. Instead, Jesus adds the mission of partnering with him to care for and protect the new human world by bringing our living witness to Jesus wherever we go, into all the nations, or just into our own nation.

We are to go to all nations. If we don’t go to all the nations, then we go to all the people around us.

We take part in the Lord’s work of recreating everyone who will listen, and be moved, and follow. Everyone is beloved by the Lord, and the Lord’s greatest joy is for them to become new creations where the old has passed away.

This is where being in the image of God comes in. The image of God is not having a face, and hands, and feet, and internal organs. The image of God is not some spirit, soul, mind, and body thing. God’s image isn’t even a matter of being a person of self-awareness and purpose, although that comes a lot closer. God’s image is intimate relationship. God’s image is intimate, faithful love.

The idea of a mirror comes into this, in the Bible: “seeing in a mirror dimly, and then face to face (2 Cor. 3:18)” or looking into “the law as into a mirror (James 1:23.” Human sin interrupted the faith that comes from looking into the Lord. Human sin interrupted our ability to look at any time and see all that God is; and caring for all that God cares about. In Jesus, God has stopped and untangled this interruption.

Because of this, you can pay good attention (quality attention) to everything that matters most to God in your life and, yet, center your attention on God at the same time. You can play with your kids. You can pay your bills. You can work at your job, and your art, and your garden. You can work on your check book or online banking site. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

You can write a book or read a book. You can watch television and hear the news. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

That’s what being the image of God is about. Then, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are saying, whatever you are doing is what God would do if God were you. Then people will look at you and see God: see Jesus, see God in Jesus Christ, in you. They may not know it. But they may crucify you for it just as easily as they may praise you for it.

That will be one of the ways you can measure your competence, your abilities, your success. For better or for worse you will play and fit the role of Jesus. You will spread the new creation for the new world; the new heaven and earth that are coming.

Making disciples means bringing people into the image-changing and image-making that comes from this intimate relationship. You learn from Jesus by listening and watching. You learn from Jesus by following, which means going where he wants to go: not to the righteous but to sinners. You will be the good physician. You will be the good nurse to those around you.

To baptize them means to give them a good, Christ centered death and resurrection in Jesus. They will die to themselves and live in Christ.

Teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded you means bringing them all back to your own calling. Wherever Christ has found them, that is the starting line of their part of the race in the image-of-God relay.

They will love taking care of and protecting the least of the people around them. They will love bringing others into the life that makes us the image of God by intimacy: looking and listening and following the presence and purpose of God. You teach others to observe all that the Lord has commanded you by sharing your life’s work and your life’s discoveries and your greatest loves with them.

Then the whole business spins around, and around, and around. It goes from generation to generation, family to family, country to country. It’s like a country folk dance, or a square dance, passing under the over-arching arms of the ones who are smiling at you through the lands and the ages of the kingdom of God.

There was a man whose name I can’t remember, and whom I have never met, but Christians in my home town used to talk about him. He came to my home town, from South Korea to America, because God called him to be a missionary to us.

The Americans had brought their faith to his country. Now the Lord called him to bring his faith to ours.

He was smart but, most of all he was humble and childlike. He was in a new world, for him, and other Christians helped him as they could. By helping him, they learned to grow in their own faith through him. Non-believing Americans understood the good news of Jesus better for having known him.

I don’t remember what became of him. It’s only one example of how The Great Commission works. It’s how the sacrifice and the resurrection of God in Christ creates the new creation around us, as we live face to face with the presence of Jesus.

Jesus holds us together, through the strength of his promises, for as long as the ages and worlds gather together in his kingdom. Jesus is with us always, as we go with him into this bold new resurrection world.

The Battle Primeval – Desires, Wishes, or Hope

Preached on Sunday, November 25, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:17-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-22; Luke 24:1-12

Southern California and Santa Catalina Island, June, 2018

Once upon a time, there was a Bible Zoo. The owners collected animals from all over the world so that people could come and see all the animals mentioned in the Bible. As much as they could, the owners tried, in each exhibition, to show the animals in the scene, or in the action, mentioned in the Bible

So, a guy was taking his family through this Bible Zoo, and around these exhibits. They came to the one with the verse from Isaiah 11:6-7 “The lion shall lie down with the lamb”. That’s not actually in the Bible that way. (There are wolves and lambs, and lions and calves, but not lions and lambs. We shouldn’t fuss about this.) But, the zoo had them lying down together, anyway, on a small lawn with a lily pond, because everyone was expecting to see them like that.

This guy was amazed to look at them: the lion and lamb together and quiet. He turned to a nearby groundskeeper and asked him: “How do they do that?” And the groundskeeper replied, “Well, they have to replace that lamb every day.”

There are plenty of people who look at the promises of the Word of God that way. Even Christians find it hard to understand the very concept of hope. Even the common English language is confused at the concept of hope, to say the least.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about what I had to get done that day. I said to myself, “I hope it doesn’t freeze tonight.” I hoped that because I hadn’t gotten around to insulating my outdoor faucets yet. In spite of my hopes, I left my other stuff undone, for a while, in order to get those faucets covered.

Of course, once that was done, I didn’t have to hope that it wouldn’t freeze that night. In fact, I didn’t need hope at all, anymore.

People like me say that kind of thing all the time. “I hope this doesn’t happen. But I sure hope that happens instead.” We’re not talking about hope at all. We’re talking about wishes: only wishes.

It’s as though we have no idea what hope means.

In the Bible our hopes are only wishes when we place our hopes in something else, or in someone less, than God; or else, our hopes are only wishes when we make our God too small, or when our hopes have forgotten who God truly is, and what our God can do.

Our three readings from the Scriptures are about hope, or about the lack of it, or about why our hopes are so weak and small.

The reading from the third chapter of Genesis (Genesis 3:17-20) tells us that we humans, who were given the opportunity to live abundantly and forever, chose death over life when they ate the fruit of a knowledge that was way too much for them to digest. They ate the knowledge that was too much for them, in order to make themselves like God.

They knew they shouldn’t do this. They knew that death was part of their choice. Waiting for the God who walked with them in the garden to choose a time to give them the fruit if he thought it was time for it, that could have been one of their greatest hopes, but they chose against hope and for their own destructive desires. We inherited from them a nature that prefers desires (and even wishes) to hope.

Only in Jesus does God offer us a life of hope again. When we choose him, we choose hope, but first we must relearn, from Jesus, the hope we’ve never known before.

Adam and Eve believed false hopes (or wishes) in the form of lies, because choosing the lies served them better than faith and hope. The result of this lost capacity for a reliable, God-centered faith and hope, is that we find ourselves in this broken world, and in these broken lives, where death seems stronger than life, and evil seems stronger than love, and stronger than God.

Because we have inherited the mental and spiritual deformities of sin, and of this world, we can only see the evidence of what has gone wrong, and we can only see that the odds are against hope. We don’t realize that God isn’t bound by what we see, or by how we count our chances. In God, in Christ, hope is not about the evidence. Hope is not about the odds.

Writing to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul responded to the rumors that his friends, there, found it hard to hope in a resurrection of their bodies. They were convincing themselves that not even Jesus defeated death with his own physical body. They liked the idea of heaven much more than they liked the report of the resurrection.

They thought that perfection and glory were only possible for spiritual beings, because they believed that all matter (like their bodies) marched in lock step with decline and decay. If Jesus raised his own body from the dead, then he was doomed and so were they.

They didn’t want to save the world they lived in, and they didn’t want themselves to be saved in flesh, and blood, and bone. They wanted to escape from the world. They wanted to escape from their bodies. They wanted to be souls only; flying around freely in a far-away heaven.

Paul told them that exactly the opposite was true. Paul told them that the salvation and life that came from Christ was a lie if Christ was unable to conquer this world, and their bodies, and everything wrong with this universe. Christ was able to do anything he chose. Christ could conquer and heal and empower everything good. Christ could conquer everything created by God for good, no matter how much of a lost cause it may seem.

Timothy Keller says this about the conquest of Jesus, and what it means for our lives. “If Christianity is true, the good things we have cannot be lost.” Jesus enlarges our hopes to include every gift that lifts our hearts and gives us joy.

Christ could only save them if he was Lord of All. Jesus is Lord of the creation. He is Lord of the atoms, and Lord of the galaxies. He is the Lord of our souls, and the Lord of our bodies. He is the defeater of sin, and death, and the devil. He is able to replace the whole universe with eternal, and victorious, and overcoming life.

The Corinthians had made the mistake of settling for hopes that were much too small. They felt safer with smaller hopes, but small hopes don’t make a full life. They would only find life if they had a large and daring hope; only if they hoped for the unimaginable and the seemingly impossible and stake their faith and hope on a God who promised to take care of it.

In Luke’s telling of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the angels told the women who had come to the tomb: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you….” (Luke 24:5-6) Jesus had already told all of his followers, many times, what he had to do. Jesus had promised them, many times, that he was more than able to truly do it all.

Here, again, they had made their capacity to hope too small. They had made their hope small because they had made Jesus small, and they had also made the Father, who sent Jesus, small. They had made the Son and the Father smaller than the evils of this world.

The women at the tomb, and the other disciples, had made God smaller than sin, and smaller than death. They measured their God by the yardstick of their own loss and grief.

They had made their God too small. They had hearts too small for the hope that comes from God: the hope that God insists on giving us. And we often do the same.

The greatness of God, that we see at work in Jesus, is the Lord’s yardstick to measure our hopes and dreams. So here it is.

God’s goodness is stronger than evil and sin.

God’s forgiveness is stronger than guilt, or shame.

God’s peace-making is stronger than our division and alienation from him, and from others, and from the creation.

God’s peace-making is stronger than all our divisions, our conflicts, our covetousness, our envies and jealousies; stronger than the wounds we give and the wound that we receive.

God’s abundance is stronger than our needs.

***

If we have faith in this God; if we trust this stronger God, then our faith will grow. Then, Hope will sprout out from our faith. Our lives will be empowered, and changed, and set free by faith, and hope, and love, in the form of Jesus.

We will live up to God’s gifts more than we live down to our losses and griefs.

We will live up to God’s promises more than we live down to our fears, our worries, and the world’s low expectations.

We will live up to God’s eternity more than we live down to the limits of our time and strength.

We will live up to God’s crosses more than we live down to our compromises.

We will live up to God’s mysteries more than we live down to human common sense.

We will live up to God’s self-giving in Christ more than we live down to our own self-preservation.

We will live up to God’s humility and servanthood in Jesus more than we live down to our own dignity.

We will live up to the abilities of God’s grace more than we live down to our own sense of weakness and disqualification.

We will live up to the life that says “Our life is hid with Christ, in God” more than we live down to our weariness of life. Those who grow tired of life need to know that what they truly need. What they truly need to desire, and to hope for, is more life, and not less.

Living by great and daring hopes, as well as living by great and daring faith and love, will make us faithful witnesses to the good news of the gospel. We’ll join the fellowship of all God people in heaven and earth in the unimaginable purpose to which God has called us, in Jesus: “To make known among the Gentiles (or among the nations) the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

The Battle Primeval - What's at Stake?

Preached on Sunday, September 16, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelation 12:7-12; Matthew 4:1-11

In my studying I found out that there was an excuse that Adam gave to his children for the reason they weren’t living in the Garden of Eden anymore.

“Your mother ate us out of house and home!”

Along the Columbia River, Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
August and September 2018

That’s true, but there was a deeper failure on Eve’s and Adam’s part, and a deeper issue than disobedience at stake.

The truth is that it was all a matter of love. The issue was their failure to choose love. Their failure was their sad choice of something that was not love.

Spiritual warfare is ultimately the struggle to make the right choice and carry it through to the end. The right choice is the choice of love: love for God and love for others.

Adam and Even trusted knowledge more than love. Trusting is the nitty gritty factor of faith. They didn’t love because they didn’t trust. They didn’t trust because they didn’t love: at least, they didn’t love nearly enough.

The Victory of Jesus over the Devil was the power of love in the heart of Jesus: his love for the Father and his love for us.

In the Book of Revelation, in chapter twelve, the picture chosen to depict the people of Jesus on earth fighting and resisting temptation, sin, and evil is the picture of an Angelic Army defeating a great Dragon and his army in heaven. The victory in that battle is also a matter of love.  Part of that love is the love of Jesus, the Lamb, lovingly shedding his blood for our sins, and the sin of the world, on the cross. Another part of that love is the loving testimony that the people of Jesus are able to give about the faithfulness Jesus at work in their lives. The caliber of their love that turned the tide of the battle was powered by their willingness to lay down their lives for Jesus, and for each other. They could lay themselves down this way in death, because they knew how to lay their lives down for Jesus and each other in life.

Adam and Eve did just the opposite. They defeated, or deflated, the power of love in the human race, in the human heart. Since God had designed them (and us) to love and to be loved, they couldn’t destroy God’s design for them, but they could mess with it, and distort it, and infect it. They could turn it from a gift into a gamble. Well, that’s what love often becomes in the world as it is.

They couldn’t harm God’s love. God’s love has remained what it has always been. Their only victory (if you could call it) that was to vandalize their own heart’s capacity for love.

The Devil in the snake told them that God had withheld from them the real meaning and power of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Satan Snake told them that God had not given them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The Ruthless Rattler implied that God was deliberately maintaining a false advantage over them by keeping the secret of the fruit to himself. The Snake suggested that God must not love them.

God must be a liar. The snake didn’t use that word, though, because Adam and Eve might not have known what it meant.

God had designed the woman and the man with the gifts that they needed for learning and maintaining the knowledge and the gifts that they needed in order to be beings of reason, and sense, and discernment, and good judgement.

They were God’s image. They already had this. They had learned to do their thinking from God himself. Most of all, they had known the loving care of the Lord all their lives.

They had the gift of fellowship and communion with the Lord. The Lord would come to the Garden of Eden, near the time of rest in the cool of the day. The Lord would walk with them, and talk with them, and tell them that they were his own. They hadn’t known the Slippery Serpent for very long, and the extent of the knowledge he claimed to have should have surprised them.

The man and the woman had never heard a lie before and maybe they didn’t even know the definition of the word. So, you might think that their lack of experience with lies had tricked them into believing the snake. But, then, if they couldn’t recognize a lie when they heard one, why were they able to believe that God had lied to them?

They were designed to understand things and have dominion over the earth. In a sense, at that time, Eden was their school, and maybe they hadn’t the time to graduate yet.

The snake was offering them the chance to graduate early, and to be grown up. And knowledge and wisdom are such wonderful and desirable things. Maybe God would even be pleased that they had learned so much so quickly and they might even bless him by saving God from trouble when he was at risk for making a mistake.

This could make them into an enormous help to God, if they only they took some initiative on their own. Even though that would mean doing the very opposite of what God had told them.

Everyone knows that if you allow a child to do absolutely anything he or she wants, except for one forbidden thing, the child will do that one forbidden thing.

But even if that is true on this side of Eden, we don’t see it being true then and there. When they ate the forbidden fruit and gained the forbidden knowledge, they were not smarter than they had been. They were much dumber than they had been.

They became afraid of looking at each other when had hadn’t been afraid before. The forbidden knowledge made them afraid of knowledge. They were afraid of what they now saw in each other.

They forgot that God knew everything, which is part of what knowing good and evil means, and so they thought they could hide from God in the trees, and they thought they could hide what they had done.

The forbidden knowledge made the first people unable to know each other, and to know themselves, and to know God. They forgot that they were each other’s beloveds. They forgot that they were gifts from God to each other. So, they blamed each other, and they denied their own responsibility for their own actions, which is another way of not even knowing yourself. Adam even blamed God for giving him the woman who had given him the forbidden fruit.

The truth is that sin makes us stupid. Anyone with a bit of sense knows this. When we make a mess of our lives, we make ourselves stupid. But never call another human being stupid, or you’ll make Jesus mad at you.

It’s worse than being stupid to make a choice that deprives you of the wisdom and understanding of love. It’s the worst choice in the world to make your love generator, and your love transmitters, and your love receptor break down.

The poet John Milton thought that the only knowledge of good and evil that came from the forbidden fruit was the knowledge of good lost and evil gained. I think Milton was much too generous in his opinion of them.

Now, in a world where the knowledge of good and evil is the rule, and where we pray to be delivered from evil, we must know both good and evil in order to pass muster for the battle between them. The use of the knowledge of good and evil must go like this, as the apostle Paul told us: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

If the man and woman had chosen to love God instead of doubting his integrity, they might have found a way, by using the power of goodness, to stomp on the snake Devil. If Eve and Adam had used the power of goodness that they had at their disposal, they wouldn’t have got bitten.

If they had used the power of the goodness that they had learned from their daily walks with God, they might have passed their graduation exams. They would have had a much wiser knowledge than the stupidity of sin that they got from the forbidden fruit.

Adam and Eve stupidly wrecked their own love, but they couldn’t wreck its source. They couldn’t change God’s love.

And, so, God loved them by kicking them out, but this wasn’t because he couldn’t live with them, or vice versa. In love, God simply didn’t dare to let them live forever without a cure for sin and evil. That would make them worse than mortal. Sin kills the beauty of God’s design for life just as it kills the purity of love. To live forever in the clutches of that poison is to become, more and more, like some creature that could be called the living-dead. A loving God would not leave them to that fate worse than death.

The future of our fallen race had to be disciplined by living faithfully and lovingly toward God and each other in our choices. Those choices required a tougher life that Eden could give them. They and we somehow need the discipline of hardship, and pain, and a life-long battle with the Devil and his minions.

God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for the tough world to come by giving them tough leather clothing to go through it all. God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for a tough life giving them a promise. God promised that generations of mothers giving birth would win the prize of victory over the snake, and over our own fallen nature. The pain of childbirth would finally receive the prize of a savior whom we would call Jesus.

Men work hard. So do women. But women are the ones whose work gives birth to life.

If you think that it is God’s order of things for the man of the house to rule his wife, guess again. Man’s lordship is a thing that happens, and it doesn’t have to happen. Men have a choice. A man must be very full of the forbidden fruit indeed, and made very stupid by that fruit, if he wants to be the punishment that his wife must bear for the rest of her life.

Remember that the forbidden fruit makes us stupid about love. Don’t be the lord of your house and lord of your wife unless you want to be stupid about love. You have a choice.

Paul says that men owe their wives love and women owe their husbands obedience. I think this is because men need to learn to express tenderness and love, and women need to learn to respectfully listen to people, like men, who aren’t quite as perceptive as they are. Both of these are humility things.

In one church I served, I lost one of our families because I refused to do a wedding when I found out that the woman was abusing her man. Someone else did their wedding and they were divorced in a month. The woman was lording it over her fiancee in a terrible way. She knew nothing about love, and she had nothing worthy of that name to give. Hopefully she’s better now. Lording it is never good.

I think that is why the glorious archangel Lucifer became the Devil in a snakeskin. The legends tell us that he decided that it was better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The kingdom of God is where Jesus is King. and he is a servant who died for the sins of his people. He died for us. We serve a King who has served us to death.

We need to train and develop our skills and strength if we are going to take our place in the part of life called spiritual warfare. We see how it started in the beginning, in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden.

There can be a lot of participants in the spiritual warfare: a lot of voices sharing the battle. Even at the start, there was the snakes voice, the woman’s voice, the man’s voice, and God’s voice.

Adam and Eve lost the battle. So did the Satan Snake. The war would go on; who knew how long? God knew, and God won, and God will win, and so will we. We will win if we die to our bad knowledge from the forbidden tree, and live by the faith that has love for its foundation.

We see what spiritual warfare looks like from the start. It’s not possession, per se. It’s a conversation and it’s a process of discernment, or the lack of it, in faith and love.

In the end, God is in command and God promises victory. God gets the victory by humbling himself to do what only God could do by becoming human, and using our human gifts, including the ability to die. God, in Christ, became a human servant to the human race, so that he could send and receive love on our frequency and on our level. Jesus, the eternal Word that is God who became flesh, became human and died for our rescue and our rebirth, and to be our captain in the fight.

Jesus fought the battle that Adam and Eve lost. Jesus won the battle of the temptation. The reason why the Lord Jesus did not fail is because he refused the easy way, the compromise. The forbidden fruit was presented to Adam and Eve as the easy way to be wise and independent.

Jesus took the hard way. Jesus was hungry but would not eat. Jesus had a great ambition to save us, but it was an ambition based on love. It was a love that couldn’t take the easy way of winning hearts by putting on a display: leaping from tall buildings and getting rescued by angels. Jesus’ ambition was based on love and so his work could not be built on gaining the world (such as it is) by the easy way of kneeling to evil. Because of love, Jesus’ work could only be built on gaining the world (such as it will be) the hard way. Instead of taking a bow Jesus took on himself the cross. The power of his cross, and his sacrificial death for us, and his resurrection defeated the old world and made it new.

The Devil’s temptation of Jesus had the attraction of easy self-fulfillment, which is clearly what our present world tries to sell us. Jesus tells us that self-fulfillment isn’t the way. The way is servanthood in love. That wins the victory.

When we fight the dragon, in our own spiritual warfare, the victory comes from letting Jesus return us to our original design. We are made for love and to be loved. Living marked by the blood of the lamb named Jesus returns us to God’s design for us to know that we are made to be loved. The testimony we give is one half of that love, and the other half of that love is what we give back to Jesus, and to Jesus through others. Our lives and our words bear the testimony and the evidence of this victory.

The blood of Jesus sets us free by making us like Jesus. Jesus didn’t shrink from, or let himself be held back by, the worst this world could do to him and neither do we. Living like Jesus (to love and be loved through faith) gives us the victory. That is the spiritual warfare.

Good News - The Story of a New Beginning

Preached on Sunday, July 15, 2018. This is the first of two messages about the work of the gospel (which means good news).

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; John 1:9-14

The Bible tells us about the kind of world and the sort of life that we were designed for: that we were created for. It also shows us a picture of what has gone wrong.

The Next Leg of our Cruise to Santa Catalina Island
June 2018

The part of the story we read from Genesis tells us how things went wrong. If we kept on reading we would see how things got much worse.

But this is no news to anyone. TV, and the radio, and the internet all tell us that too many things are getting worse all the time. We wonder when the next terrorist attack will come, and when the next jet will plow into the next skyscraper. The big world around us shows us that things have gone wrong.

But we see it on the small scale of our own lives. Even in our own homes (or even if we live alone) there can be angers, and stresses, and betrayals, and griefs that eat at our minds. At work, and even on vacation, the things that go wrong can break our hearts, or embitter us, or isolate us.

The Bible tells us that we were designed and created to live in a garden, a paradise, a place of harmony, a place of good relationships. And we lost it. We blew it. The world and human life became broken and dysfunctional things. This happened long before we were born, but it’s a fact of life now.

Long ago the first humans tried to put themselves in a state of independence from God. They thought they could get away with this, even though God is the source of life for all things. God responded to their raid on the forbidden fruit by graciously giving them exactly what they were really asking for. If you want freedom from dependence upon God, then what you really want is a life lived outside the source of life.

They had wanted an independence that was beyond the ability of any creature living in a world made by God. It was as if beings with lungs wanted to live independent of the air, or a fish wanted to live out of water. What hope could there be for a life like that?

And yet God, at their request, did the best he could do in order to give them this unnatural way of life: to be living lungs without air and living fish flopping around on dry land. That first pair of humans found out the hard way that getting exactly what you want can be more a punishment than a gift.

Before the portion of the story that we have read, you can read how God brought all the animals to the man, and the man named them according to their nature. The man was able to clearly read and assess each one of them. But the man did not find among them a companion truly suited to his needs. And since none of the other creatures were capable of giving him the help and the depth of relationship that he needed, God gave him a wife. And the man immediately knew who this person was and how good for him she was.

If we were in harmony with God, we would be like those first humans in the beginning. We would be able to size up anything (and anyone) that came our way. We would know what to do. We would know what was good for us, and what wasn’t. We would know what we needed and what we didn’t need. Any person who came into our life, we would understand, and we would be able to see how that person was a gift from God, and we would know how to deal with that person. We would know what to say to that person, and how to live together.

Our human nature is out of harmony with God. If God brought the very best person, the greatest source of human love to us, we would fail to praise that person properly and give God the proper thanks.

In the temptation, where Adam should have accepted responsibility for his own actions, he blamed his wife instead. And Adam blamed God for giving her to him. And so, in the story, half the human race was divided from the other half, as it has been ever since.

The fall of the human race and the breaking up of human nature shows us who we are. When we do not live in harmony with God, we don’t know how to live in this world. We don’t know what anything is. We don’t know how to relate to our opportunities. We blame others instead of facing ourselves. We allow our pride to divide us from others. It becomes our nature to fight, and hurt, and get hurt.

Before the first humans divided the human race from God, the garden life was a place where you could work and know what you were working for.

With the help of God work can be a blessing but, living in a world that does not work God’s way, you can do all the right things and have nothing to show for it. Farmers know this. You can invest the work of your life in a job, in a marriage, in a way of seeing the world, and end up with nothing.

You can even work so hard, so intensely, that you make the work go bad. The sweat in your eyes makes you fail to see how you are toiling for what you think you want in all the wrong ways. This is what it means to work for thorns and thistles.

Even though we often live broken lives in a broken world, it is not completely natural to us. We see that something is wrong. If we were really designed for the world as it is, and for life as it is, we wouldn’t know any better. We would feel perfectly at home.

But we don’t feel at home. The fact is that most of us know there is something wrong, and sometimes we can imagine the way things should be.

We are not like blind people living in a world where everyone was blind. In such a world there would be no one who would know that there was such a thing as light.

We live in a spiritually and morally hungry and thirsty world. Most of us know that we are missing something. Hunger and thirst tell us that we are made to eat and be filled; to drink and be quenched. At least some of us know that we hunger and thirst for goodness, and for fairness, and justice, and forgiveness, and love, and truth.

This shows us that we were made for a better world than we see around us, and that we were made for better lives than we have the power to live on our own. This tells us that, either the world was once such a place for finding fullness, and harmony, and fulfillment, and satisfaction; or else it tells us that we are made for a better world that is ahead, a better world that is coming.

The Bible and the good news of Jesus tell us about such a world and such a life. It tells us about a paradise that has been lost, and a human nature that has been broken, and about relationships that have been divided. It tells us that we were made for peace with God, and that such a peace would make us able to grow in peace, and in healing relationships with others, and we would have something to give to the world that would make a difference.

The Bible tells us that there will be an end to the world as it is; that Satan and all the powers of evil will be crushed as one might crush the head of a rattle snake when you’ve killed it. The Bible tells us that God has a plan to make each one of us a new person fit for a new creation that is coming.

The Lord told the serpent, the devil, in the garden, that one of the woman’s children would crush the serpent’s head and the serpent would strike the child’s heel. That is the first picture, or prophecy, in the Bible that shows us the healing and the salvation of the human race and the whole world. Everything else is built on this promise.

The serpent is Satan, the Devil, and all his minions, and all the forces of darkness, and all the sin rooted in human hearts, and all the rebellion in human beings that poison nations, and families, and each one of our individual lives.

We are all children of the man and the woman in the garden. We are all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We cannot crush the serpent because the serpent is a part of us. At least we are allies of it. It is our very nature to be allies of the serpent, even though we have been made in the image of God and made for life with God. We are divided against ourselves, and so we cannot defeat, for good, the evil in the world and in ourselves.

So God became human to fight the battle that must be fought. God entered the world as Jesus, the son of Mary.

His coming into the world was his own doing. It was his free, and gracious, and miraculous act of love.

There is something in the love of God that is parental, which we call the Father. There is something in the love of God that submits and serves, which we call the Son. The Bible also calls this submitting and serving Son, the Word of God, and the light that enlightens everyone and everything.

The Son, the Word, the Light, says everything about God and everything about us. When he comes to us we see true glory, and holiness, and love, and worth; and we see ourselves just as we are. And this Son, this Word, this light in the nature of God is what led God to become human, to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

God became human as Jesus to invade us and establish a beachhead in us. In Jesus God built a perfect human life; the kind of life of faith, and compassion, and wisdom that we were created to live.

In Jesus God suffered the injustices, and the griefs, and the pains, and the death that human sin made a part of our life. He suffered the experiences that sin in our nature deserved. He who was without sin died the death our sins deserved.

He was beaten and whipped bloody by those who arrested him and prepared him for death on the cross, but our sins were in those fists that beat him, and in the lashes that tore his flesh. Nails were driven through his hands and feet. His whole body’s weight hung upon those nails, but all the sins and injustices and evils of this world hung upon him. The pain and blood of the cross are the pictures of the extreme and infinite love of God for you. They are his power to reach into you, and claim you, and make you whole.

He bore our punishment on the cross. He went through the gate of death because he was human, and because he was God he broke the power of death, and he broke the power of sin that brought death into the world.

On the cross it was as if all the evil and sin of this world, and of our own hearts, struck the Jesus’ heel and killed him, but Jesus lived again and crushed the serpent’s head.

If we will receive Jesus we receive everything that he is, everything that he has. We receive his grace and his forgiveness.

Everything we have, from then on, and every step forward, is the result of that forgiveness. We never receive the victory of Jesus in order to brag, or to be better than anyone else, or to look down on others. Apart from Jesus we don’t have anything to call our own, but Jesus makes us his own. He makes us children of God.

Even when we first meet God, in Christ, we may be afraid of him because we can see that he wants to take away the hard-won gift that Adam and Eve and the human race have struggled so hard to hold onto. Jesus looks snakey and suspicious because we are used to hiding from the true light of God. That light hurts our eyes and we can’t see what’s good for us.

We don’t want to see ourselves just as we are. We don’t want to know too much about our responsibility. We don’t want to completely escape from the crippling and destructive desires within us, because these desires may give us the only pleasure that we have known; even though they are hurting us and those around us.

We may think we that want God and what God has to give us, but we don’t want it all. We want to pick and choose what God will deal with in us and what we can keep for ourselves.

And, so, the light shows us that the old sin of Adam and Eve is at work in us, wanting to be independent from our very source of life. It is as if we want to be sober and drunk at the same time. It is as if we want to be sick and well at the same time. In that sense we want to live a lie, even when we see all the goodness of God waiting for us in Jesus.

But God is full of grace and truth and he shows us this through his Son. There is no grace or truth outside of him.

We have to die with Jesus and rise with Jesus by receiving him. We have to die to our stubborn independence in order to rise in a life of grace alone: the beautiful and freely given mercy of God alone.

And we have to die and rise with Christ so that we die to our version of the truth and listen only to him. We have to die to the lies we have told ourselves, about our lives, and about our real priorities, and about our true responsibility. We have to die to ourselves, and rise in God’s truth about us and about the new life he sets before us.

Receiving Jesus, the word and light of God, means the deepest surrender. It feels like the greatest risk in the world. It’s like floating on your back when you are afraid of water. It is like sky diving and jumping out of that plane when you are afraid of heights. We have to lose ourselves and give up ourselves in order to put to an end to a life that needs to stop, and to receive a life that comes from God.

The life God gives is a life that we cannot manufacture for ourselves. The life we receive from God has its beginning before the creation and it will never end, and there is no shadow and no fear in it.

This new life will enable us to go forward in harmony with God. It will make us into givers of grace and truth to others, and to the whole world. This new life is the end of something old that we know too well, but this life is only the beginning of something else. To receive Jesus, you have to be ready to begin what only God knows.