What If Mom and Dad Were Right?

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 4

WHAT IF MOM AND DAD WERE RIGHT?
Sunday, November 24, 2019
2 Kings 22:1-10 (14-20), 23:1-3

Go and ask the Lord on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all Judah concerning the contents of this scroll that has been found. The Lord must be furious with us because our ancestors failed to obey the words of this scroll and do everything written in it about us…

…Because your heart was broken and you submitted before the Lord when you heard what I said about this place and its citizens—that they will become a horror and a curse—and because you ripped your clothes and cried before me, I have listened to you, declares the Lord. That’s why I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will go to your grave in peace. You won’t experience the disaster I am about to bring on this place.

2 Kings 22:13, 19-20

Sometimes you can’t outrun consequences. Sometimes we look at all the things we’ve done in life to try to make up for our mistakes, to repent, to seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt, to make amends, and none of it seems to matter. We still have regrets. Some relationships are never fully reconciled. The things we have lost by our own poor choices may never be regained. We may let go and move forward having learned many valuable lessons, but the consequences stay with us no matter what.

By the time we get to King Josiah, the consequences of Israel’s sin were certain. Nothing could stop the coming disaster of exile they would face. The wheels were already in motion. Yet in 2 Kings 22:20 we read that Josiah will not experience the disaster that is coming. Somehow the consequences will be delayed and he will be spared. Why?

If we go back to verse 13 we see that Josiah’s priest came across a scroll in the process of renovating and cleaning out the temple. Some have said this is the scroll of Deuteronomy while others say it only includes a partial list of the God’s instructions, but either way, this scroll clearly contained the Word of the Lord. What’s more, Josiah quickly realizes that the people have not obeyed these particular instructions for quite some time. “The Lord must be furious with us,” he says, “because our ancestors failed to obey.”

Josiah’s reforms do not ultimately prevent the exile, but his faithfulness to this re-discovered law spared him and potentially his entire generation from suffering the worst of those consequences. At least for a short time, Josiah broke the cycle of sin and idolatry that previous generations had perpetuated.

Most of us have had moments in our adult lives when we look back and realize our parents were right about more than we care to admit. That doesn’t mean they were always right, and sometimes like Josiah, we may have to go back a few generations to find a faithful role model for our spiritual lives. We may even have to look to other families. Regardless of the source, Josiah reminds us that we are not the first generation trying to figure out how the Scriptures apply to our everyday lives. There are many lessons to be learned from the past, both in how to live and how not to live. For Josiah, the first lesson was how not to live. We cannot continue in the idolatry of our ancestors. And yet in the scroll he discovered the promises of God that dated back generations and he came to understand that those promises were just as real in his day as they ever had been. God is faithful in every generation.

We may not be able to stop the decline of a denomination or even a congregation. We may not be able to prevent the exile that is already in process. But we can choose how we will live in the face of these consequences. For ourselves, our families, our communities and our generation, we can choose life, so that our descendants might live faithfully in the place God has for them. No matter what consequences haunt us from our past, we can choose this day to serve the Lord.

I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life—so that you and your descendants will live — by loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him. That’s how you will survive and live long on the fertile land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors: to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

So now, revere the Lord. Serve him honestly and faithfully. Put aside the gods that your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt and serve the Lord. But if it seems wrong in your opinion to serve the Lord, then choose today whom you will serve. Choose the gods whom your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But my family and I will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:14-15

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

Starting Over

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 3

STARTING OVER
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Isaiah 5:1-7, 11:1-5; Mark 12:1-3

What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it? When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?

Isaiah 5:4

Let’s start this week with a reality check. We have all produced rotten grapes.

Now that that is out of the way, we can deal with the real issues around this beautiful and yet painful song of God’s vineyard. The question in verse 4 is the crux. The owner of the vineyard asks, “What more could I have done?”

There is no answer.

If we don’t begin with the confession that we have produced rotten grapes, it becomes very easy to look out all of those “other people” outside of the church and pose this question to them. To the atheist we may ask, “What more could God do to make you believe?” To the criminal we can ask, “What more could God do to make you repent?” To the younger generation who appears to have bailed on church and who we love to use as a scapegoat for all the problems of the world, we might ask, “What more could God do to get you to appreciate how good you have it and come back to church?”

If we want to use the Bible as a weapon, this is a great question to start with. It can be framed in so many different ways but no matter what we end up with the same conclusion. In summary, it goes something like this.

1. In Christ, God did everything possible to show us how much we are loved.

2. We, the good “Christian” people, responded appropriately to that love by “believing in the name of Jesus” and “getting saved.”

3. All of those “unsaved” people have rejected God’s love and there is no excuse. They deserve whatever they get.

We probably would not say it so bluntly, but think about the implications of the way we live our lives. Do we spend more time showing love to those outside the church or complaining about the way we think they live? After we “got saved,” how have we actually taken up our crosses and followed Christ as his disciples? How are we making disciples of others and fulfilling the Great Commission?

The songwriter in Isaiah does not explicitly say that the owner of the vineyard is God. The first explicit hint we get comes at the end of verse 6 when the owner commands the clouds not to rain on the vineyard. Only God has authority over the rain. Until this point, it would be easy to accuse anybody else of bearing rotten grapes and offending such an incredible caretaker.

But by verse 7 we see that this vineyard which fails to bear good fruit is not the “other.” It is the house of Israel and the people of Judah in whom God delighted. Let us not become so overconfident in our own privileged position as “God’s children” that we forget to take responsibility for our own failures before God.

Perhaps we as a church should spend less time criticizing everyone else’s vineyard and start realizing that God has allowed the thorns and thistles to grow up and choke out our own branches.

What more could God do indeed?

What more can God do to convince us that we are the ones failing to produce the good fruit he has for us to bear for the sake of the world?

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

When All Seems Lost

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 2

WHEN ALL SEEMS LOST
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Hosea 11:1-9, Mark 10:3-14

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart winces within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.

Hosea 11:8

Can I be honest?

I have a love/hate relationship with the prophets in scripture.

On one hand I love that they cut straight the heart. They don’t mix words. They tell it like it is and they declare God’s truth without concern for what anybody else thinks of them. Their courage and faithfulness is the stuff of legend.

This is all fine and good, so long as they are just shouting down those idolatrous people in ancient Israel. Those people knew better. How many miracles did God do for their ancestors in Egypt? How many times did God bail them out of a tight spot in battle? How could they forget the one who brought them out of slavery and made them into a great nation at the center of the world, a city on a hill that would shine the light of God’s glory as far as the eye could see and live as a blessing to all the nations? To these people, the harsh words of the prophets seem perfectly reasonable.

Like the older brother watching the young prodigal come home, we want dad to really lay into him. “Give him what he deserves for abandoning you and our family and squandering all of your gifts for his own selfish pleasure.”

Only dad doesn’t respond the way we might want him to. This is where the prophets become difficult. Sometimes those harsh words are directed at me, or at us. Sometimes we, who think we have been so good staying faithful to God and living in his household all this time, are really the ones who need a wake up call. The prophets remind us how much we have taken for granted and how much we have missed the point of what God has called us to do and who God has called us to be for the sake of others.

Then we come to Hosea. Of all the prophets Hosea is arguably one of the most gut-wrenching and emotional prophets of the bunch. He stops at nothing to pull our heart strings until we can’t help but weep not only for the people of Israel, but for ourselves as we see how far God will go to bring us back home, even when we have “played the whore” as Hosea’s wife does more than once.

In the beginning of Hosea we cannot grasp the extent of God’s grace modeled by the prophet as he literally buys his wife back from slave auction after her own unfaithfulness put her there in the first place. By the time we get to chapter 11, the image shifts from a broken and painful marriage to a parent who is crushed by his or her child’s outright and continual rejection.

If this scene were played out on the silver screen, there would not be a dry eye in the house. But Hosea isn’t simply trying to make us cry so he can win an Oscar. He’s reminding us who we are and who God is and he is helping us understand why the prophet’s words to Israel and to us seem so harsh.

The prophet’s anger is not the anger of wrath or vengeance, but the anger, the frustration, and the desperation of the broken and agonizing heart of a mother or father overflowing with love for their wayward son or daughter.

This is the cry of our heavenly Father / Mother:

“How can I give you up?”

How can I make you understand the depth of my compassion and love?

What will it take for you to come home?

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

All Fired Up

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 1

ALL FIRED UP
Sunday, November 3, 2019
1 Kings 18:20-39; Mark 9:2-4; Ephesians 6:12

Call on the name of your god, but don’t add fire.

1 Kings 18:25

In an “age of outrage,” as author Mark Manson calls it, everybody is quick to get “all fired up.” We stoke fires of opinion and anger everywhere we turn. We love heaping hot coals upon our enemies’ heads, not seeking their repentance as the scripture intends but rather for the purpose of revenge and seeking satisfaction in proving them wrong or even in watching them suffer (Proverbs 25:22, Romans 12:20). We antagonize others so they will turn against us and then claim we are only acting in self defense when we feel we are being persecuted. Never-mind that it was our own passive aggressive behavior that instigated the attacks in the first place.

A man once said that everyone hated him because he was a Christian, to which his wife responded, “Are you sure it’s because you’re a Christian, or could it be because you act like a jerk?”

Elijah was a lone prophet of the Lord in a world filled with idolatry. It didn’t matter how “right” he may have been, nobody was listening. But in the face of impossible odds, Elijah shows us a better way. He reminds us that the battle does not belong to us, but to the Lord.

When the prophets of Baal come against him, he calls them together not to argue but to lay down their arguments, their opinions, and their swords. They built an altar and Elijah says to them, “call on the name of your god, but don’t add fire” (1 Kings 18:25). In other words, let your gods speak for themselves. If you are right, let your gods rain down fire and consume the sacrifice.

As Elijah expected, nothing happened. “Maybe your god’s are asleep,” Elijah suggests.

Finally he repairs the altar and then has the wood and the sacrifice drenched with water so that nothing will burn. He has a trench dug around the altar and filled with water. Elijah takes things one step further. He not only refuses to “add fire” to the argument, but he soaks his own with water so it will be that much harder to light. Nothing he can do or say will win this debate with the prophets of Baal. It is all up to God.

And we know the rest of the story. Elijah prays to the Lord and the altar is consumed with fire from heaven. The sacrifice turns to ash and the fire even licks up all of the water in the trench. The Lord has spoken, where the gods of Elijah’s enemies remained silent.

This is not to say there would be no more bloodshed between the people. Elijah would find himself on the run and his life would continue to be threatened. Nevertheless, he models for us great wisdom in how we approach the battles and arguments we face in life.

As Paul writes to the Ephesians, “we aren’t fighting against human enemies but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens.” (Ephesians 6:12). Elijah, like Paul, understood that the battle belonged to the Lord. It was not his place to wage war against the people. It was his place to step back and let God speak. God does not need our defense.

How might God be calling us to build altars in the world while at the same time refusing to add the fire? Our task is to create spaces for God’s fire to burn but lighting the fire is not our place.

God alone will send for the Holy Spirit and get the world all fired up.

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

Too Cool for School

THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE - PART 3

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL
Sunday, October 27, 2019
1 Kings 12:1-17, 25-29; Mark 10:42-45

“If you will be a servant to this people by answering them and speaking good words today,” they replied, “then they will be your servants forever.”

1 Kings 12:7

We know Saul and David and Solomon. We know how God used these kings to establish a great City on a Hill at the center of the known world. We know the greatness of this united kingdom that stretches from Dan to Beersheba. But what of Solomon’s sons? What of this great kingdom they inherited?

Rehoboam went to Shechem where all Israel had come to make him king.

1 Kings 12:1

And so the dynasty of David and Solomon is passed on to the next generation. But Rehoboam did not grow up in the days of tribal chaos or of the endless wars with the Philistines. He did not witness the great cost of the spiritual failures of Saul and David. He only knew the seemingly unlimited power and wealth of his father, Solomon, whom even the Queen of Sheba came to honor. God had clearly blessed his father’s kingdom so it only makes sense to continue doing what his father had done.

Blinded by the glory, power and riches of success, it was easy to ignore the few naysayers who questioned some of Solomon’s political policies. “Your dad may have been a great King,” Jeroboam said, “but he was pretty hard on all of us who live up north. We’ll follow you as we followed him, but you might want to make a few changes.”

Even the elders who had served at Solomon’s side advised Rehoboam to reconsider his treatment of the northern tribes. “Become a servant to these people and speak good words to them today, and they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:7).

But as a young king trying to prove himself in an adolescent kingdom, the word “serve” is not in his vocabulary. “Lead with strength,” his friends declared. “Show them who is in charge here” (1 Kings 12:10-14).

As great as Israel became under David and Solomon, it just as quickly fell into ruins. Not even 150 years had passed before the great nation God had built out of nothing turned to dust. Why? Because Rehoboam could not understand the true definition of greatness.

Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.”

Mark 10:42-45

Our world says “serve or be served,” with the assumption that it is better to “be served.” God’s politics simply says, “Serve.” There is no other way.

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE”

Homecoming King

THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE - PART 2

HOMECOMING KING
Sunday, October 20, 2019
2 Samuel 6:1-23

David and all the troops who were with him set out for Baalah, which is Kiriathjearim of Judah, to bring God’s chest up from there - the chest that is called by the name of the Lord of heavenly forces, who sits enthroned on the winged creatures.

2 Samuel 6:2

Life couldn’t get much better for David. His days of hiding from Saul had come to an end and he was on the throne. He claimed victory after victory over the Philistines and now we find him establishing a new capital city in Israel, Jerusalem, “David’s City.” This Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant, the very footstool of God who reigned above the Ark on the mercy seat between the cherubim.

David would establish Jerusalem once and for all by bringing this Ark, and with it, God’s very presence, to dwell in his city.

In 2 Samuel 7 we find David taking yet another step as he seeks to build a temple for God in his city, only God has other plans. “You are not the one to build the temple for me to live in,” God says (2 Samuel 7:5). Later in verse 11 we see that it is God who will build David a house, or a dynasty, not the other way around.

David may indeed be living large as the Homecoming King, but like any popular teenager, David and Israel with him may be letting their heads get just a little too big. Nothing can stop them, or so they think. They are doing great and wonderful things for God, but how much glory are they taking for themselves in the process?

Pride comes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall.

Proverbs 16:18 (CEB)

There is nothing wrong with doing great and wonderful things for God, but we must be careful that the things we do are actually the things which God desires and not the things which will merely inflate our own pride.

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE”

Finding Our Place

THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE - PART 1

FINDING OUR PLACE
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Ruth 1:1-17, Mark 3:33-35

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to abandon you, to turn back from following after you. Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

Ruth 1:16

“During the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land” (Ruth 1:1). The days when the judges ruled are days repeatedly characterized by the common refrain, “In those days there was no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”

This season in Israel’s life is what I am identifying as a shift into adolescence. They have learned the basics of what it means to be God’s people. They have been set free from slavery in Egypt. They received the law at Mt. Sinai. They struggled through the wilderness and eventually settled in the land God promised to them. Like a 5th grader who has navigated all of elementary school and feels like they are the king of the mountain, so Israel has now become a big fish in a small pond. They have conquered. They are in control. But for all they think they know, they are not very good at using their power and privilege responsibly. The book of Judges shows us time and time again how far Israel strays from the lessons they learned in their childhood. As they shift into adolescence, they are not yet a fully developed nation. There is no king and they struggle to fully recognize the authority of God as their king. Just like children at this age think they have outgrown their parents, so Israel thinks they are ready to handle things on their own. By the time we get to the end of Judges, it is clear, they haven’t learned much at all.

During this time, we read, there was a great famine in the land. The crisis had gotten so bad that families some families had to leave their inherited land behind and move to Moab, a pagan land that had often been at war with Israel. And yet it is here among foreigners that we find one woman who shows us what it truly means to live as a child in God’s household. She, her sister-in-law, and her mother-in-law are all left as widows. She has nothing left. Her sister-in-law Orpah makes the sensible decision to go back to her mother’s household but Ruth refuses to return home. In one of the greatest statements of family solidarity in scripture, Ruth declares to her mother-in-law Naomi that she will stay with her no matter what. “Your people will be my people,” she says, “and your God will be my God.”

There was no obligation on her part to make such a commitment and no guarantees that they would even survive, let alone thrive as a family of widows in the wilderness. Through this act of faith and loyalty, God not only redeems Naomi and Ruth, but through her, God raises up a son named Jesse and a grandson named David. The rest is history. When God’s children had gotten so low they were forced to abandon their land and find refuge among the foreigners, God raised up a foreigner to show them once again what it meant to be part of God’s family, and through her and the line of her grandson David, the doors of our Father’s household were opened to every tribe, tongue and nation for all time. We were all foreigners and strangers, gleaning and struggling to survive on the margins of God’s household, but God sent his firstborn son out into the fields like Boaz to invite us into a home we never knew.

Credit for the excerpt on Ruth goes to Dr. Sandra Richter. You can watch her extended video on Redemption here:

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: ADOLESCENCE”

First Things First

THIS MESSY LIFE: CHILDHOOD - PART 4

First Things First
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Deuteronomy 4:1-40, 5:1-21, 6:4-9, Mark 12:28-31

The Lord said: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

Deuteronomy 5:6

It never ceases to amaze me how much attention the Ten Commandments get in the media today, particularly from Christians who are determined to have them posted in every public space they can, as if the mere presence of these ancient laws will somehow inspire to world to repent of their sins and live good moral lives. It is ironic that many who make such arguments about the importance of the Ten Commandments are also the same people who resist the passage of laws on issues like gun control because “criminals don’t obey the laws anyway.” I’m not making any political arguments here. Rather, I simply want to draw our attention to the inconsistency when on one hand we claim “laws don’t work because the problem is in the hearts of the people” but on the other hand we demand laws to be posted which enforce our particular religious and moral code.

It is true that the Ten Commandments form the basis for many of our nation’s laws and indeed many law codes around the world. Restrictions against murder, adultery, stealing, false witness and coveting are valuable in any society as a means of keeping order and minimizing violence and harm toward one another.

The first few commandments, however, are not quite so broad. They are specific to those who have been set free from slavery by God. Look at the prologue in Deuteronomy 5:6 (or Exodus 20:1).

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Apart from this act of unmerited grace on God’s part, the laws which follow have no weight. We cannot expect those who have not entered into a covenant with God to obey such commands anymore than we as American citizens could be expected to obey a British law about driving on the left hand side of the road. It just doesn’t make sense in our context. For someone who does not know God and has not been set free from the slavery of sin, laws against idolatry, using God’s name in vain, or even keeping the Sabbath make no sense.

These first several commands are primarily about establishing our identity as God’s chosen people. We get into trouble with this language when we view our “chosen status” or our “salvation” as a mark of privilege that somehow makes us better than those who do not follow God or those who may not even know God. God’s choosing of Israel and of the church does not elevate us above the world or make us judges of the world, but rather God called out a particular people in order to bless all nations by demonstrating the joy, peace and freedom of living in the ways God has modeled for us, not only in the commandments, but through the earthly life of Christ.

The next time we get angry about the challenge to some public display of ancient laws on a plaque, perhaps we should first ask ourselves if these laws actually make a difference in our lives.

• Do we live as people who God has set free from the house of slavery?

• Do we put God ahead of everything and everyone else in our lives?

• Have we bowed down to the idols or even created idols of our own… money, politics, success, comfort, security, maybe even the Bible itself as the words on the page become more important than the living God whom the words point us to?

• Do we honor the Sabbath, recognizing that God is enough and that we do not depend on our own efforts to provide manna for our families 7 days a week?

Let’s keep first things first. God brought us out of slavery and we didn’t do a think to deserve it.

How then shall we live in response to such amazing grace?

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: CHILDHOOD”

In Over Our Heads

THIS MESSY LIFE: CHILDHOOD - PART 3

In Over Our Heads
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Exodus 1:8-14

Now a new king came to power in Egypt who didn’t know Joseph

Exodus 1:8

It’s easy to look at Israel’s slavery in Egypt and see ourselves through the eyes of their eyes as victims of oppression. We too are “God’s people” and so we have a long history of seeing ourselves as the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Societies and governments do not typically bend toward a “Christian worldview” and in most places throughout history, God’s people have found themselves in the minority.

Over the last century in America, however, we have been living in what Gil Rendle calls “an aberrant time” (Rendle, Quietly Courageous). This period of Christian prosperity was not typical in light of the overall history of God’s people. Though that time is rapidly ending, most people over the age of 30 at least have a strong memory of a time when what we considered “Christian moral values” ruled the day. God’s people were thriving, until they were not.

And so it was with the people of God in Joseph’s day. Joseph held the second highest office in the land and as a result, his brothers flourished under Pharaoh and increased in number as the twelve tribes of Israel expanded. By the time we get to Exodus, however, we find a new King in power who did not know Joseph.

“The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are. Come on, let’s be smart and deal with them. Otherwise, they will only grow in number. And if ware breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and then escape from the land.”

- Exodus 1:8-10

It seems from this introduction that the enslaved Israelites are not the only ones “in over their heads.” In fact, the only reason they were enslaved to begin with is because the Egyptians felt threatened by the presence of so many foreigners in their land. The new Pharaoh inherited what he considered to be a serious immigration problem. His solution, put them in slavery for Egypt’s benefit and discard (i.e. kill) those who are no longer useful to us. What empires may view as a sign of political strength, scripture interprets as Pharaoh’s weakness and eventual downfall. Egypt was in over their heads in how to deal with the Israelites, not because God’s people posed a genuine threat, but because they were overwhelmed by fear of “the other.”

Yes, we must always empathize with those who like Israel, find themselves oppressed and enslaved. We must always stand with Moses who, by God’s guidance and strength, leads the people out of slavery to a land of promise.

Yet we must also be very careful, for history has a way not only of repeating itself, but also turning things on their heads. The oppressed, if not careful, may themselves become the oppressors. Later in Israel’s history we will see how they build armies of chariots, marry for the sake of political alliances, worship idols, and even enslave others. They would become the very people they once despised, and the consequences would be detrimental.

No matter how much we may want to see ourselves as the victim in need of God’s salvation through a religious and political hero like Moses, perhaps we must first consider why we feel that we are in over our heads. Are we truly being oppressed, or are we perhaps more like Pharaoh, overwhelmed by how much everything is changing around us and afraid of those who are different? If this is the case, perhaps our call is not to vengeance and war, but to humility and peace, lest we too inflict harm against the “sheep of other flocks” (John 10:16) whom God loves and ourselves become enemies of the very God we claim to love.

May we not become so arrogant in identifying ourselves among God’s chosen that we forget God’s promise to Israel’s enemies… to Egypt and to Assyria:

On that Day, there will be a place of worship to God in the center of Egypt and a monument to God at its border. It will show how the God-of-the-Angel-Armies has helped the Egyptians. When they cry out in prayer to God because of oppressors, he’ll send them help, a savior who will keep them safe and take care of them. God will openly show himself to the Egyptians and they’ll get to know him on that Day. They’ll worship him seriously with sacrifices and burnt offerings. They’ll make vows and keep them. God will wound Egypt, first hit and then heal. Egypt will come back to God, and God will listen to their prayers and heal them, heal them from head to toe.

On that Day, there will be a highway all the way from Egypt to Assyria: Assyrians will have free range in Egypt and Egyptians in Assyria. No longer rivals, they’ll worship together, Egyptians and Assyrians!

On that Day, Israel will take its place alongside Egypt and Assyria, sharing the blessing from the center. God-of-the-Angel-Armies, who blessed Israel, will generously bless them all: “Blessed be Egypt, my people! . . . Blessed be Assyria, work of my hands! . . . Blessed be Israel, my heritage!”

Isaiah 19:19-25 (The Message)

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: CHILDHOOD”

When God Let's Us Win

THIS MESSY LIFE: CHILDHOOD - PART 2

When God Let’s Us Win
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Genesis 32:22-30

Then he said, “Your name won’t be Jacob any longer, but Israel, because you struggled with God and with men and won.”

Genesis 32:28

“You win some, you lose some.” That’s just the reality of life. Every one of us needs to learn how to be both a good loser and a good winner. Our ability to enjoy the game regardless of the outcome without crying or gloating all boils down to good sportsmanship.

Parents generally let their kids win at just about everything when they are young. It builds confidence and minimizes discouragement for children who do not yet have the emotional capacity to process failure. At a certain age, we start allowing them to lose. While building confidence is important, they must also learn to deal with the reality of defeat which will come far more often in life than any of us would like.

The same is true when it comes to behavior. When a child is simply learning what is right and wrong, mercy, understanding, and teaching should outweigh the consequences. At some point, however, they will “know better,” at which point consequences become more serious. We cannot and should not always protect them from the outcomes of their own poor decisions.

As God’s children, I believe we have a heavenly parent who trains us in much the same way. Jacob’s life is clearly filled with mistakes and poor choices, some out of immaturity and some out of blatant defiance. At some point Jacob’s struggle against the world and against his own nature turns into what seems like a physical wrestling match with God.

At this point we might think Jacob should know better. It’s time for Dad to put this spoiled kid in his place. He needs to learn that he can’t always manipulate others to get what he wants. For once in his life, Jacob needs to learn how to lose.

“Your name won’t be Jacob any longer, but Israel, because you struggled with God and with men and won.”

- Genesis 32:28

What? After all Jacob has done, God let’s him win. Granted, not without a limp from his torn thigh, not to mention a severely bruised ego. Nevertheless, Jacob wrestles with God and his life is spared. God’s blessing is greater than God’s punishment.

Maybe Jacob needed a different lesson that day. What if it wasn’t about winning or losing at all? What if it was simply a reminder that God’s love toward him had nothing to do with winning or losing? Jacob didn’t have to manipulate or control others in order to gain favor. He didn’t have to “win” in life in order to receive God’s blessing.

Maybe the lesson we all need right now is more than simply how to win and lose, but to learn to see ourselves as truly loved and blessed by God regardless of how much we win or lose in life. God’s blessing does not depend on our actions or accomplishments, only on grace, undeserved.

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