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The Inheritance of the Saints

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(Psalm 96; Colossians 1:1-14)

One of the great temptations of the Christian life, from the very beginning, has been to add to it. C. S. Lewis talks about one aspect of this in The Screwtape Letters, dubbing it “Christianity And”; and while he focuses there on one particular form of this temptation, he sets out its essence very clearly: to add anything at all to the gospel is to nullify it altogether, to “substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.” We can be tempted into this error out of the desire to serve a particular cause—“Christianity and the Hot-Button Issue,” “Christianity and Your Chosen Political Party”—or the desire to please others, or spiritual pride, or the desire to have God on our own terms, or the fear that Christ really isn’t enough, or even a misunderstanding of what the gospel of Jesus Christ really is and means. There are a lot of reasons, but the mistake is the same: believing that Christ plus something else equals more than Christ alone. As Paul is at pains to tell the Colossians, that’s exactly wrong. To add anything to Christ is to lose Christ, but to have him alone is to have everything.

In the church in Colossae, the issue was accommodation to Judaism. This was a common problem in the churches of the first century; you had Jewish leaders working overtime to pull people back from the church to the synagogue, and others within the church, known as Judaizers, who wanted to stay in the church but bring the synagogue along with them. Their attitude may seem strange to a lot of us, but it’s really quite understandable when you think about it. For the early church, how they were supposed to relate to their Jewish roots was a real question—what should they keep, and what should they leave behind? And if there were those who wanted to throw out the entire Old Testament as outdated and irrelevant, it’s no surprise that there were also those who firmly believed that Christians had to keep on being fully observant Jews—circumcision, food laws, the whole nine yards. Tell truth, they had some reason for their position—after all, hadn’t Jesus said that he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it? What they missed was the way in which Jesus had fulfilled the Law, and its consequences for their position.

Now, in the church in Colossae, Paul wasn’t dealing with the usual sort of Jewish influence; rather than the Judaizers he’d fought in the Galatian churches and elsewhere, the Colossian church seems to have fallen under the sway of a mystical strain of Judaism that promised its followers a spiritual ascent into heaven, into the presence of the celestial throne of God. This, too, taught them that obedience to the Law was necessary for salvation in addition to Jesus, but it added another incentive: if you’ll just go farther, do more, obey even stricter rules, then you can have a special experience of God that ordinary folks don’t get to have. If you want to really know God, to experience his fullness and feel his presence, you can have that in your life, if you just jump through all these hoops that we tell you to jump through. Again, Jesus alone is not enough, this time to know God and have a relationship with him—legalism is the only way.

In response to this, Paul tells the Colossians that if they really want to draw close to God, they’re going the wrong direction. In starting to follow this teaching, they’re moving away from Christ—they’re assuming that Christ is not enough, that they have to add these other rituals and religious observances if they want to know God—and in so doing, they are trading in the freedom of God for slavery to worldly ideas. The root of the problem here is that they don’t really understand who Jesus is, or what he did for them, much less what that means for their lives; they don’t take him or his work seriously enough, because they haven’t gotten their minds around the staggering reality and significance of his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. They have not truly grasped that their extraordinary efforts are unnecessary, and even counterproductive, because everything they’re trying to earn, they’ve already been given. That’s why they’re going off the rails, and that’s why Paul sets out in this letter to make all this clear for them.

Now, from his thanksgiving, we can see that there’s still a lot to be said for the Colossian church. They’re not in the kind of shape the Galatian churches were in, where Paul skipped the thanksgiving in his letter altogether and just started yelling at them right off the bat; here, he gives thanks for their faith in Christ and their love for each other, which were bearing fruit in growth—both in numbers and in spiritual maturity. This is telling; for all that they’re starting to follow some false teachers, their hearts are still very much in the right place. They simply need to be taught to recognize error when they see it. Note, by the way, the reason and foundation for their faith and love: “the hope laid up for you in heaven.” As will become clear over the course of the letter, that hope is nothing and no one other than Jesus Christ himself.

As we typically see in Paul, and as we talked about last week with Philemon, his thanksgiving for the Colossians is joined to prayer for them, and indeed moves him to prayer for them. And notice what he prays—if you were here last week, this might sound pretty familiar. Paul tells Philemon that he’s praying for him so that the communion of his faith—the community, the body, of faith of which he is a part, which shaped him and which he has shaped—would be effective in the full knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ; in other words, that Philemon would be used by God to help bring about what Paul has been praying for the church in Colossae as a whole. As we saw last week, in the biblical mindset, knowledge isn’t just a head thing, it’s active and experiential: you can’t really claim to know something until you’ve integrated it into your life, until it’s reflected on a daily basis in the choices you make and the attitudes in which you make those choices.

The flip side to this is that it means that what you know, the content of your understanding, matters; if you get the head stuff wrong, you’re going to get the life stuff wrong, too. We can see, given that, why Paul was so concerned in his letter to Philemon, because the Colossians have started to buy into something that is very, very far from the truth—not knowledge, but anti-knowledge—and though for now, their hearts are still in the right place, that will change over time unless their false understanding of God is corrected. They’re seeking the right things, spiritual wisdom and understanding and the knowledge of God’s will, but they’re looking, and moving, in the wrong direction. Paul’s prayer, then, is that they would be turned around, that they would set aside their pursuit of false knowledge through false experience and allow the Spirit of God to fill them instead with the true knowledge of God and his will—so that they would then do God’s will, leading “lives worthy of the Lord,” lives that give honor to him by faithfully representing his character and his will in this world.

Of course, Paul recognizes that this requires strength beyond our own merely human capacity, and so he prays for the Colossians that they might be filled, not only with the knowledge of God, but with the power of God—power to do his will, power to stand firm in the face of opposition and difficult times, and power to remain joyful and grateful to God no matter what may come. The Christian life is not meant to be a life of grim endurance through the struggles and sorrows of this world, but a life of joy and peace—of victory, not necessarily over them, but in their midst. This is something the world cannot give—only God can; it’s only possible by his power. It’s only possible because we have been given something the world doesn’t have: a share in the inheritance prepared for the saints in the realm of light, the hope laid up for us in heaven. Christ has conquered the power of darkness—by his sacrifice on the cross, he has bought our freedom from the power of sin—and through the work of Christ, God has rescued us from that power and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

With this statement, Paul strikes the note that will ring through this entire letter—a note which indeed can be heard throughout all his letters: every aspect of our salvation, and indeed, every aspect of the life which God gives us, is contained in Christ. Nothing is lacking in his work—nothing more is needed; nor is there anything our own efforts can add to what he has done. There is no space for spiritual pride in the Christian life, because there is nothing to our own credit in our salvation, nothing we’ve earned and nothing of our own deserving; there is only room for gratitude and praise to Jesus, because he’s done it all. Yes, he calls us to live life in a new way, different from the way the world lives, but not in order to earn his favor or to repay the debt we owe him; both are beyond our power. Rather, he calls us to live in accordance with his will because that’s the logical working-out of the new life he has given us, and out of gratitude for that gift. We live differently, or should, because we know differently, think differently, believe differently, love differently—our motivations have been changed, and that changes the way in which we live our lives. But we do so not out of duty, but out of love and gratitude; and not in our own power, but in the power of the Spirit of Christ who is within us.

When the Slave Is Your Brother

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(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

As we talked about last week, Onesimus had a problem, and that gave Paul an opportunity. Or rather, Onesimus had two problems. The first was that he was a slave. Legally, though everyone agreed he was human, he didn’t exactly qualify as a person—he was instead a living, breathing, walking, talking, two-legged piece of property who belonged to a person named Philemon. Onesimus’ second problem was that he had dealt with the first problem by escaping from his master in the city of Colossae and running away to Rome. This obviously got him away from the day-to-day consequences of being enslaved, but it also left him in a dangerous position, because the Roman policy on fugitive slaves was simple and inflexible: if caught, they were returned to their master, who could do whatever he wanted to them. And I do mean whatever.

The good thing for Onesimus was that by the sovereign grace of God, he fell in with the apostle Paul and ended up part of Paul’s household as the apostle was under house arrest in Rome. This was good for him spiritually, as Paul led him to Christ during that time; it was also good for him physically, as Paul was the man who had led his master to Christ, and thus could be an advocate for him with Philemon. As we saw, this gave Paul the opportunity, when the time came to send a letter to the Colossian church, to send Onesimus back with it, with his own letter to Philemon to give him protection; it gave Paul the opportunity to rearrange Philemon’s thinking, and through him the thinking of his whole congregation, about Onesimus specifically, and about slaves in general. It gave him the chance to confront Philemon with the fact that this slave of his, this man whose body and blood he owned, was now also his brother in Christ, and as free in Jesus as Philemon himself; and in so doing, it allowed him to force Philemon to consider very carefully the consequences of that fact.

To what purpose? Well, to understand that, having looked last week at verses 15-16, let’s go back and start with the beginning of the letter. Paul opens it in typical fashion, with a greeting, a thanksgiving, and a prayer, but it’s worth noting a couple things here. First, it’s a personal letter, but not only a personal letter. It’s addressed to Philemon—clearly someone whom Paul holds in high regard—to a woman named Apphia and another man, named Archippos—beyond the fact that both are Christians, we don’t know who they were—and to “the church that meets in your home.” That’s very interesting, because it means that while this letter is to Philemon, with requests and persuasion for Philemon, the whole congregation is going to be reading it over his shoulder, if you will, as he reads it. Partly, that might be to encourage Philemon to do what Paul wants him to do, since if he doesn’t, he’ll look bad in front of everyone; but more than that, I think this tells us that Paul isn’t only concerned about Onesimus and Philemon here. He has some things he wants to teach the whole church in Colossae through this episode.

Sometimes in Paul’s letters, the thanksgiving and the prayer are pretty clearly separated; here, they’re interwoven. He starts off, “I always thank God as I pray for you,” and then he finishes that sentence one half at a time. First, in verse 5, he says why he thanks God for Philemon: because of his faith and his love. The way this is structured in the Greek makes it clear that his love is not just for the people of the church, but also for the Lord Jesus, and that his faith isn’t just for himself, but that in fact his faith is a source of strength for the church.

And then look at verse 6—what do you see? “So that.” The NIV isn’t very helpful here; they have it in the middle when it should be at the beginning. You see, the verb “to pray” isn’t in this verse; that verb is back in verse 4. The interesting thing about verse 6 is that it doesn’t actually give the content of Paul’s prayer, strictly speaking—it begins with “so that” and gives the purpose of Paul’s prayer. It’s a small difference, but it’s an important one for us in understanding this letter. You see, Paul isn’t just saying, “I’m praying this for you, I’m thankful for you, Amen, now let’s get down to business.” Instead, he’s saying, “This is why I’m praying for you, this is what I want to see happen in your life and through your life, and it’s for that reason that I’m going to say what I’m about to say to you.”

What we need to understand here is that when we see “so that” in the Scriptures, we need to pay attention, because this is going to answer the “why” question. I may have said this here before, but the preacher’s question is “so what?” As a preacher, whenever I tell you something, I have to consider that you have the right to say—not in a nasty or disrespectful way, but as an honest question—“so what?” So what’s the reason you’re telling me this? So what’s the reason I should care? So what difference does this make to me in my life? And when you ask “so what,” the answer should come back, “so that”—and so it does here. This is Paul’s purpose for Philemon, it’s what he wants to see happen in Philemon’s life, and so this is the other pole of this letter. I said last week that verses 15-16 are the keynote of this letter, the keystone of its argument, and so they are; but verse 6, the purpose of his prayers for Philemon, is also the purpose of this letter toward which that argument is focused.

That, I’m guessing, is why Paul layered this sentence six feet deep with theologically loaded, meaning-full words, as he’s clearly trying to express something powerful here. Unfortunately, one of the things he succeeded in doing is in making this verse all but impossible to render into English. I feel sorry for Bible translators here, because they can’t explain it, or turn it into a whole paragraph—they have to put just a line or two that makes at least minimal sense in English and captures, as best they can, what Paul is trying to say. That’s why the NIV takes the “so that” from the beginning of the verse and moves it to the middle—I think it’s a mistake, but they’re just trying to get all the pieces to fit into the box in a way that lets people see more or less the right picture. For preaching from, though, it’s not so great, so if you’ll look up at the screen, you’ll see my translation of verse 6. It’s not great English, but like I said, this is a tough verse.

He starts off with the phrase “the communion of your faith.” In the Greek, this is koinonia tou pisteos. Koinonia is the word we most often translate “fellowship”; it’s from the word koine, meaning “common,” and it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together and being involved in one another’s lives. It’s hard to translate in the simplest of cases because it’s a much richer word than just “fellowship,” with a much deeper meaning than we usually give that word; but here, when it’s combined with “faith”—and specifically, Philemon’s faith—what does that mean? There are, I think, two parts to that. The first is that Philemon’s faith isn’t just his own, but is a faith held in common with the whole Christian church, and indeed that it came to him through the Christian church; he is one who has received this blessing from the church, and thus is indebted to it. The second is that in living out his faith, and especially in serving as a leader in the church, he has expanded that communion, that circle of relationships—his faith has formed a community, and there is a koinonia which has resulted from his faith, including perhaps people whom he personally has led to Christ. The communion of his faith is the communion, the part of the body of Christ, which has shaped him and which he himself has shaped in his turn.

Paul’s hope is that that communion might become effective—this is the word from which we get our word “energy”; in fact, one commentator translates this, “might be a source of energy.” The idea is that the communion of Philemon’s faith, that this community of which he is a part and which he is responsible to lead, would be energized to produce results, to accomplish things. But to accomplish what? The aim here, Paul says, is “full knowledge of all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that sounds strange, in the first place because we’re used to thinking of knowledge as a head thing. You go to school, you read books, you listen to the teachers and the professors, and you learn things, and then you take tests and put those things down on paper to show that you know them. In the biblical mindset, though, knowledge isn’t a head thing, or at least not purely so. Sure, it has intellectual content, but it’s more than that. First, it’s active—you don’t actually know something until it’s reflected in how you live your life each day. Second, it’s relational—to know someone is not simply to be aware of facts about them, but to experience them and be in relationship with them.

Thus, when Paul talks about “full knowledge of all the good that is ours,” he’s not talking about possessing a set of facts about what’s good and what isn’t, he’s talking about experiencing in our own lives the good which Christ has given us—experiencing God’s work in our lives, and living accordingly, and so embodying that good in a way that the whole world can see. This is what Paul wants Philemon’s faith to produce, in his own life and also in the broader church, through his leadership of the communion of faith of which he is a part. This sort of witness is what he wants to see in Philemon’s life, and what he wants to see Philemon lead others to through his teaching and example. The desire to see this is the reason why Paul writes this letter.

Now, that doesn’t quite finish verse 6, of course, but don’t worry, I’m not leaving Jesus out of this sermon; I’ll come back to this verse in a minute. Before I do, however, I want to point you to perhaps the most interesting feature of this letter. Look at verse 8: “Therefore”—because this is what I want to see happen in your life—“although in Christ I have every right to tell you what to do here, I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do this out of love.” Out of love for whom? Well, partly for Paul, clearly; but this is also more general—out of love for Christ, out of Philemon’s love for the church, out of the love that is chief among “all the good” that he’s just been talking about in verse 6. He goes on to ask two things: first, that Philemon welcome Onesimus as he would welcome Paul himself; and second, that he would send Onesimus back to Paul—and perhaps even first set him free from slavery; I think that’s what Paul’s hinting at in verse 21—so that he could once again help Paul in his ministry in Rome. But where Paul could have simply ordered Philemon to do all these things and been certain of being obeyed, he doesn’t; instead, he just asks him. Why?

Paul doesn’t spell this out, of course, but I think we can see the answer to that in the letter. It’s all about love, and about the communion of Philemon’s faith becoming effective in the full knowledge of all that is theirs into Christ. For Paul, this isn’t just about Onesimus being protected, or getting Onesimus back; there’s something larger at stake here as well: the growth of the Colossian church, which now includes Onesimus. Paul doesn’t just want Philemon to do the right thing, he wants him to do the right thing for the right reason—because if you know the love of Christ in your life, this is what you do; this is what it means to live out that love, first toward Onesimus, and then toward Paul—and he wants him to do it in full view of the church (that’s the main reason this letter is supposed to be read to them as well) so that in doing it, he will set an example for them as they go out and live their own lives.

This, I think, points us back to the end of verse 6, where Paul talks about “all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that’s a literal translation, and it’s bad English, but I think it’s important for us to catch the meaning of that little preposition. You can just take it to mean “in,” as the NIV does, and just talk about the good that is ours in Christ; or you can translate it as “toward,” as other commentators do, and focus on the fact that the good that God does in us is supposed to focus our attention on Christ, and move us toward him. It seems to me that we need to hang on to both those aspects and remember that we’re still in process: we’re already in Christ, and in Christ we have all this good that’s beginning to be realized, but it’s only beginning; we still need to be closer to him, and we’re still being drawn closer to him. We need to remember, as Hannah sang earlier, that it truly is in Christ alone that our hope is found, not in anything else. We need to remember that we find our true life in Christ alone, for Christ alone, and that the hope and the goal toward which we live is Christ alone. Let’s pray.

The Runaway

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(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

This morning, we’re starting a sermon series on Colossians; we’ll be working our way through the letter to the Colossians over the course of the fall. Now, as I say that, some of you might be wondering what I’m talking about, since we didn’t read Colossians this morning; wasn’t I listening as Dr. Kavanaugh read Philemon? Well, yes, I was listening, and I didn’t make any mistake in what I asked him to read; we’re starting a series on Colossians by looking at the book of Philemon. I’ll grant, it’s not the usual way to do things, but I do have reasons for putting things together this way. Some are just reasons of scheduling, minor practical matters; of greater importance is the fact that this letter is part of Scripture, which means that while it’s usually ignored because of its size, we ought to stop and consider what God wants to say to us through it. If we’re going to do that, then, the logical time is to put it together with Colossians, because these two letters are related. In fact, they’re quite closely related, as you can see if you flip over to Colossians 4:9, where Onesimus is mentioned along with Tychicus as one of the people carrying that letter; you’ll note there that Paul explicitly says, “he’s one of you.”

We don’t know a lot of Onesimus’ story, but we do know that he was a slave. That’s a loaded word, and rightly so, but it’s important to realize that slavery in the Roman world was very different from American slavery; and while it could still be a terrible thing, on the whole it was far better. Yes, slaves were owned by another human being and under that person’s absolute authority, and yes, some masters were cruel and exploited their slaves; but most, it seems, treated them at least decently. There was certainly societal pressure to do so, partly on moral grounds (for they knew full well that slaves were human) but more on practical grounds: it was unwise to provoke slaves by ill-treating them, for one thing, and for another, it was uneconomical, because it reduced both their ability and their motivation to work. Indeed, unlike in America, it was quite common to teach slaves and train them so as to increase their productivity, and some slaves became quite important people in their own right. Slaves were allowed to work on their own, though their owners took much of the money they received, and to own property—some even owned other slaves. In a society which was rigidly structured by class (which was rigidly determined by money), slaves who belonged to an owner of social standing who took good care of them were better off than many who were free but poor. There were even people who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to improve their lives, usually because they were too deeply in debt to get themselves out of it.

Still, even given that Roman slavery was generally a far better thing than American slavery, especially in the context of unjust Roman society, the fact remains that it’s intrinsically a bad thing; people shouldn’t own other people. As such, Paul’s response to slavery is obviously a central concern for us as we read this letter; and to understand the response he offers here, we need to get the details straight, as far as we can. We know that Onesimus belonged to Philemon, a man of some importance in the city of Colossae who was one of the leaders of the church there. As we’ll talk about later on, the church in that time period met in the homes of members, and each house church was under the direction of overseers (we would call them elders). Philemon was rich enough to have a house big enough for the church to use—no surprise, since he was rich enough to own slaves—and as such was probably one of the overseers of that particular congregation.

We also know that at some point, Onesimus escaped from his master and fled the city. He was almost certainly still young enough to be unmarried, so he had no one but himself to worry about; that made escape easier. He may have taken some of his master’s money or valuables with him; that’s not clear, but it might well be part of the financial harm done by Onesimus which Paul has in view in verse 18. You can understand why Onesimus would have stolen as much as he could carry on his way out the door, since he had a long journey ahead of him. A slave who had run away could never feel completely safe as a fugitive; it wasn’t like in America, where there was a safe place to run to. The best chance of safety lay in fleeing to one of the great port cities of the empire; the nearest of those was Ephesus, down the Lycus valley a ways from Colossae, but that would be far too close for comfort. Instead, Onesimus made for the greatest city of all, and the one that offered the greatest hope for a better life: the capital city of Rome.

Now, we don’t know anything about his journey, or what might have happened along the way; but we know that somehow, he fell in with Paul, who was under house arrest in Rome at this time. He may well have known of Paul as one of his master’s friends and someone Philemon held in high honor—indeed, he may actually have known Paul already—or maybe not, we can’t really say; but however it happened, he became part of Paul’s unorthodox little household, and Paul led him to Christ. This was a critically important thing for Onesimus, not just for his spiritual destiny but for his daily life, because under Roman law there were only a couple ways for a fugitive slave to regain some sort of legal status. One was to go to a temple that could offer asylum to fugitives and appeal to the priests; they would then contact the owner and try to broker a safe return for the slave. The other was to go to a friend of the master, an amicus domini, and appeal to them for asylum and assistance. If that person was willing to intercede on the slave’s behalf, and if they were willing to write a letter to that effect in the slave’s defense, then under Roman law the slave was no longer a fugitive.

This gave Paul an opening. He gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He’s simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work. Instead, he does what he can to undermine slavery in and through the church, beginning with this letter.

You see, Paul writes this letter to Philemon as the amicus domini for Onesimus; and in it, he does several things. We’ll look at a few of them next week, but now, I want to focus your attention on the most important one. Look at verses 15-16. Paul writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what we call the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.

To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you and he’s your equal.

This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.

And everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work, everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Christ Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters. Everything else is just details. Everything else. We are God’s people—that’s the bottom line.

Without Ceasing

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(Deuteronomy 6:4-7; Ephesians 6:10-20, Philippians 4:4-7)

In 1949, on the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, the leaders of the local presbytery of the Free Kirk of Scotland grew so worried about the way things were going that they issued a proclamation to be read in all their congregations lamenting “the low state of vital religion . . . throughout the land,” declaring, “The Most High has a controversy with the nation,” and calling on everyone to pray that God would call the nation to repentance. In one parish on the island, the parish of Barvas, the message took root with a pair of sisters in their eighties. The sisters encouraged their pastor to pray together with the elders and deacons, and promised that they would pray twice a week from ten at night until three in the morning. So the minister and lay leaders prayed twice a week in a barn—no word on whether they stayed up until three AM—and the sisters prayed in their home; they did this faithfully for several months, in which nothing happened.

During this time, a request was sent to an evangelist named Duncan Campbell, asking him to come to Lewis; he declined, because he was scheduled to speak elsewhere. God had other ideas, however, and his commitments were cancelled, freeing him up to go to Lewis. The result was a spiritual explosion, as revival swept the island, transforming it by the power of the Holy Spirit. Where once the jail was full and the churches nearly empty, the situation reversed itself—the churches were full to overflowing, while the jail was shut up for lack of use, because there was no crime. It was a remarkable time, and over the years, many have praised Campbell for it; but as he himself said more than once, it wasn’t his preaching that brought revival. Indeed, many who came to Christ during that time never heard him or anyone preach; there were stories of people waking up out of a sound sleep under the conviction of God, dropping to their knees by the side of the bed and praying, and of farmers working out in the fields suddenly feeling their hearts moved by the Holy Spirit. No, this was no pre-planned preacher-driven event; rather, the roots of that revival were to be found in the faithful, persistent, believing prayer of those two sisters, and of those who prayed with them; they were certain God would answer them, and refused to stop until he did.

That is stubborn prayer. It’s the approach to prayer which Jesus tried to develop in his disciples, and it’s part of what Paul is talking about in our readings this morning. It’s the spirit we see in Jacob when he wrestled with God at Peniel—he was clearly out of his weight class, but he would not let go until God blessed him. He hung on for dear life, through his exhaustion, through the pain in his dislocated hip, through the screaming ache in his muscles . . . through it all, he hung on until he had nothing left but determination; and as the night was ending, God blessed him. We don’t often think of Jacob as a model for anything, but in this, he is; he’s a model for us in prayer.

That may seem strange to us, because we aren’t taught that way; and some might be wondering, “Isn’t that selfish? If God tells us ‘no,’ are we allowed to just badger him until he gives in and gives us what we want?” Certainly, that could be true, if we’re praying selfishly; but remember what we’ve been saying about kingdom-centered prayer. First, it’s focused on God, and arises out of a desire to advance the work of his kingdom on this earth; such prayer leads us out of selfishness, not into it. Second, it’s driven by a longing to stand in the presence of God; as we talked about last week, the fundamental request of kingdom-centered prayer is “God, let me see your face. Teach me to live my life in the full awareness of your presence.”

Now, let’s think about that for a minute. What does it mean to be in someone’s presence? Most particularly, what does it mean to be in the presence of someone you love? If you’re sitting with someone, stop and think about that for a minute. It means you know they’re with you; it means that it doesn’t take any effort to talk to them; it means you hear them when they talk to you; it means you’re open to them, available to them, and they’re open and available to you. It means that even when you’re not talking to them or specifically thinking about them, you know they’re with you, and so they’re involved in some way in what you’re doing; their presence connects them to you. Even if you aren’t having a conversation, conversation is always possible, and comes naturally; and even your silence can be its own form of communion.

That’s what our life with God is supposed to look like; that, I believe, is what it means to pray without ceasing, as Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5. That’s what it means to pray at all times in the Spirit, as he says here. It’s not a matter of talking all the time, by any means; the silence and the listening are as important for us as the times when we talk. The key, rather, is to be in what we might call a spirit of prayer, by the Spirit of God, such that we are aware of and attentive to God when he speaks, and that conversation with God flows naturally out of whatever we’re doing—that whenever we have something to say, whether something that’s bothering us or something that gives us joy or a question that’s puzzling us, it’s perfectly natural for us to turn and say it to God, just as we would to anyone else to whom we’re close.

As you can probably guess from this, I don’t agree with those who say that it’s un-spiritual to pray for your own wants and needs. In fact, I’m always kind of surprised to run into that attitude, though I shouldn’t be—it’s common enough. In my last church, I had an elder sit in my office and argue that position, angrily and at great length; he firmly believed that if you could do anything about a problem, you shouldn’t be praying about it, because it was your responsibility to get out there and fix it yourself. He then argued, further, that if you had created the problem, you had no right to ask God to help you fix it, because it was on your shoulders. I bit my tongue and didn’t point him to the numerous psalms in which David and other psalmists do exactly that. When he told me that God helps those who help themselves, though, I did remind him that that isn’t Bible, it’s Ben Franklin. (All I got in return was a blank look.) That elder was an extreme example (as he tended to be, actually), but there are a lot of people who think that way. I don’t, though, and for good reason: I don’t because Paul doesn’t.

Look at Ephesians 6:18: “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” Then in Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Notice: when? “on all occasions”; we might also say, “at all times.” About what? “Everything.” And then look at those words: “prayers . . . petitions . . . requests”; those are words about asking for things. They’re words about telling God what we need and what we want and expecting him to provide for us; they insist to us that God wants us to do that, and indeed that he expects us to do so.

Why isn’t that selfish? Well, in the first place, what’s the foundation for our requests? Our relationship with God. We don’t go to him just as someone who can give us stuff and demand that he do so; this is not just another consumer transaction. Rather, we talk to him as someone who loves us and whom we love in return, and we tell him what’s on our heart, including our needs and our desires, because he cares about us and he wants us to tell him. We don’t just ask in order to get what we want—we also ask in order to deepen our relationship with God. When we approach him in that way, it’s not a demand for services, it’s an expression of our dependence on him, and an act of trust. It’s an act of trust that he can in fact give us what we ask for, and that he does actually want to give us good things. That can be hard, because there are times when trusting him is hard, and times when we don’t want to admit we need him; but in all circumstances, whether good, bad, or whatever, we are called to do so, and asking God to meet our needs is an important discipline in learning to do so. I think for most people, refusing to ask isn’t really about being more spiritual—that’s just a cover; I think it’s really a matter of pride.

In the second place, people who ask of God selfishly do so in a spirit of entitlement; they believe they deserve to get what they want, and regard it as nothing more than their due. By contrast, Paul tells us to pray in a spirit of thanksgiving, which connects back to the command, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” This doesn’t mean simply to thank God in advance for the things he will do for us, or even to thank him for the things he has already done, though both are important; rather, this is to be our basic attitude in prayer, and in all of life. This too is a recognition that we are completely dependent on God, that everything comes to us as his gift; this is the truth that James captured when he said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Because of this, because of God’s goodness and generosity to us—yes, Paul assures us, even in the midst of our suffering—gratitude is to be our fundamental response to life.

Thus, whatever our circumstances, in a grateful spirit, we are to bring all our requests—our wants, our needs, our concerns, the deepest desires of our hearts—all the things which lie at the roots of our anxieties and fears, as well as those anxieties and fears themselves and everything to which they give rise—into the presence of God, trusting that he’ll take care of us. We don’t do this because he doesn’t know what we want, or need, or fear; we don’t pray for his sake, we pray for ours. We do this as a formal, deliberate acknowledgement of our dependence on him, and to give us the assurance that he knows what we want, what we need, because we have told him. Perhaps most importantly of all, we lay our requests at God’s feet because doing so draws us closer to him, and focuses our minds and our hearts on him; and so doing, it involves us in and connects us to the work he is doing in and around us.

Third, if our prayer is truly kingdom-centered, then it keeps us aware of the bigger picture, which we see in Ephesians 6; we understand that we don’t just pray that God would bless us, or that he would bless others, so that we and they would be happy and fulfilled and healed and free from pain and could go on to enjoy our lives. Rather, we pray for our needs and the needs of others in part because each of us is involved, individually and as part of the church, in the great struggle which is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God into this world. The kingdom is resisted, both openly and subtly, by the forces of the prince of the powers of this present darkness, and so Paul tells us that we need to be armored up and armed to deal with that resistance; and the foundation of that is prayer. We pray for our needs and wants, and for the needs and wants of others, so that we might be strengthened, and so that opportunities for the enemy to undermine us or weaken us would be closed off. And because the enemy is always looking for ways to do that, and the spiritual struggle we face is continuous, so too we must pray continuously. Ultimately, as we do so, we find that it trains us to depend on God, and to use the gifts that he’s given us not on our own initiative, but on his; and it prepares us, as the Rev. Tim Keller put it, “to have our hard hearts melted,” to have the barriers in our lives torn down, “to have the glory of God break through,” so that we may see his glory in our lives.

This isn’t something you can learn how to do by having someone tell you, or by reading a book; the most I can do, or anyone can do, is point you in that direction and invite you to do it. We can only really learn this by doing it—by asking God to teach us to live in the awareness of his presence, so that we learn to be in prayer throughout everything we do, and by setting aside time just to pray, for focused conversation with him. We can only learn to trust him with the things that are on our hearts by trusting him, by praying about them whenever they weigh on us; we can only learn to listen by listening. That’s why stubborn prayer is so important—it’s not about wearing God down, breaking down his resistance; it’s about wearing our egos down, breaking down our resistance. It’s not so much about storming the gates of heaven as it is about letting heaven storm us.

Coram Deo

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(Exodus 33, Psalm 27, Ephesians 1:15-23)

Exodus 33 begins immediately after the first great national sin in the history of the people of Israel, which is recorded in chapter 32. Moses had been up on Mount Sinai, meeting with God, receiving the Law; unfortunately, he was up there so long that the Israelites got restless. Restless people tend to do stupid things, and they were no exception; they talked Moses’ brother Aaron into making them an idol, a golden statue of a cow, that they could worship and pretend it was the Lord. That might seem odd, but golden cows are safe, and this God of theirs had already proven himself anything but. Their action, of course, infuriated God, who judged them harshly for their sin. (Aaron, who had allowed the whole thing, escaped judgment despite offering perhaps the dumbest excuse in recorded history; when Moses took him to task for his actions, Aaron’s response was twofold: one, “Don’t blame me, blame them, they’re wicked people,” which is bad enough, but then two, “They gave me the gold, I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” Honest, that’s a direct quote from Exodus 32:24. “I didn’t make the calf, it just happened!” Reminds me of some of the excuses I’ve gotten from my children.)

After this, God told Moses to tell his people, “Go on up to the land I promised Abraham I would give you, and I’ll send my angel before you, but I won’t go with you, or I would destroy you on the way; for you are a stiff-necked people.” At that, the people went into mourning, and Moses began to plead with God to reverse this decision, for the sake of his people, and for Moses’ sake. Notice the reason for their concern. It’s not that God won’t bless them—he’s still promising to give them the land, and victory over the people who currently live there, and all the good things he’d already said he’d give them; it’s that he’s refusing to go with them. He’s keeping his presence from them, promising only to send an angel with them to do all this rather than going with them to do it himself.

The NIV calls this statement “these distressing words,” but the English Standard Version is blunter: they’re “disastrous.” God’s blessings are nice, but having his presence with them means far more; that’s what sets them apart from the other nations as his people. Without that, without God going with them, they were no different from anyone else, either to themselves or to any other nation. Thus when God says in verse 14, “Don’t worry, Moses, I’ll still be with you and give you rest,” Moses responds, “That’s not good enough. Either go with all of your people, or don’t bother.” Nothing else will do—not for Moses and not for Israel, and ultimately, not for God, either. After all, what would it do for God’s reputation to lead his people out of Egypt and then leave them in the desert? In response, God says, “All right, Moses—for your sake, I’ll do as you ask.”

At this point, Moses does something extraordinary. You can understand why he does it—he’s probably giddy with relief, for one thing; but more than that, God had just made him a promise, and he wants confirmation, and so he asks, “Show me your glory.” This might not sound like a big request, until we remember that Moses had been spending considerable time with God on the mountain—he was up there for eleven chapters of Exodus before the Israelites decided they’d rather worship a golden cow; he’d seen quite a bit of God, in fact, and now he’s clearly asking for something more. He’s talked with God, he’s seen demonstrations of God’s power and glory; now he wants to see God.

And God says, “I can’t do that, because you wouldn’t survive it. No human being can see my face and live.” God is infinite, and we’re finite; he’s perfectly holy, and we’re sinful. The gap between us is great, and the attempt to cross it, to experience the full reality of the infinite God, is simply more than we can bear. And so God tells Moses, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name, Yahweh; I will put you in a crack in the rock and cover you with my hand while my glory passes by, then I will remove my hand, and you may see my back; but my face you shall not see.” Now, I don’t know what this looked like to Moses; I’m not sure what exactly God meant by his “back”; but what’s clear is that God told Moses, “I won’t show you my face, but I’ll show you who I am; I’ll reveal my character and my goodness to you.”

That would have to be enough for Moses, and for everyone else; but the desire for more, the desire to see God face to face, persisted. We see this in Psalm 27, which is a psalm of David—which is valuable to know with this psalm, because David, like Moses, was one of God’s special servants, someone who got as close to God as it was possible to get. The Lord truly was his light and salvation, his refuge and stronghold; he’d had armies encamped against him more than once, and evil men working overtime to kill him, and he’d learned that as long as he was on God’s side, he had nothing to worry about. He was unquestionably a man who could write a psalm like this and mean every word.

Out of David’s great confidence in God comes great loyalty and devotion, which we see in this extraordinary statement in verse 4: “One thing I have asked of the LORD, this one thing will I seek: to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life.” Psalm 84 makes a somewhat similar statement—“How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD Almighty! . . . Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere”—but this takes things to a whole new level. It’s not that this is the only thing David wants—this psalm is, after all, a prayer for victory over his enemies—but this is his one thing: it’s his focus, his primary concern, his primary desire. It’s what he wants to order his life and make sense of everything else; his prayer is that he would live his life as much in the presence of God as if he were always in the temple offering worship and sacrifice to God.

Now, trying to keep that focus is hard, and it was hard for David, too; but at the core, his great desire is to experience the presence of God. There are two reasons for this. The second one mentioned is “to inquire in his temple,” which is to say, to seek guidance from God for his decisions; he wants to live in God’s presence in order to come to know and do what God would have him to do. He understands that we can’t make godly decisions with any sort of regularity if the only time we spend with God is an hour a week on Sunday mornings. But as important as this second reason is, the first is more striking: “to behold the beauty of the LORD.” This is starting to get into the same territory as Moses—it isn’t quite the same, but David’s moving that way: he wants to see God.

That comes out in full force in verses 8 and 9: “‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’ Your face, O LORD, do I seek. Do not hide your face from me.” It’s a prayer that can’t be fully answered, but still, the longing is there. And it should be—it means a lot to be face to face with those we love. I discovered just how much during my last semester in college, when Sara went off to Scotland, to Aberdeen. (In that case, not only could I not see her, I couldn’t even hear her voice, since I couldn’t afford international long distance rates.) I learned then that there’s a degree of real intimacy and knowledge in talking with someone we love face to face, in the openness of their facial expressions and body language and the immediacy of reaction; we can know someone more fully face to face than at a distance. David wanted to know God in that way.

These texts are the backdrop against which Jesus tells his disciples, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip was probably studying to be a rabbi, so he knew all this stuff; but when Jesus said that, he couldn’t help himself, and he burst out, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” He knows they can’t—he knows how God answered Moses, and no doubt he expects much the same response— and so maybe we may hear in Philip’s plea an edge of disappointment, that ultimately Jesus can’t quite give them what he’s promising.

Jesus responds with gentle exasperation: “Philip, haven’t you been paying attention all these years? Have you been with me this long, and you still don’t know who I am?” And then this staggering, world-shaking statement: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” No one could see God and live; we could not leap across that chasm and even hope to survive the jump; so God crossed it from his side. The glory, grace and truth of God were too much for our eyes, until the coming of Jesus; when he came to earth, God took on a human face and allowed his people to look him in the eyes; and through those eyes, and through his words, and through his actions, his glory, grace and truth shone unveiled and undimmed. As John put this point earlier in his gospel, at the end of his prologue, in 1:18, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” We cannot see God and live—unless God makes it possible; and in Jesus, he has, and we have.

This is why we can pray as we do. We don’t have to approach God behind a veil of smoke, because Jesus made a way for us. We see God’s face in him and do not die because he took that death, and every other death, on himself; he came down to us, and through his death, resurrection and ascension he became the way to God. We in our sinfulness still could never survive the sort of revelation Moses wanted, but in the words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the gospels, and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, we can see God in ways that he never could; in worship, in study and in prayer, God invites us into his presence to seek his face, as David longed to do.

That’s why the church could adopt the motto Coram Deo, which means, “in the presence of God”—because that’s where we as the church are supposed to live. That’s the key to kingdom-centered prayer. It’s not the subject—I hope I didn’t give anyone the idea last week that praying for our needs or the needs of others can’t be kingdom-centered, because it can, if our overall approach to prayer is focused on God and centered on the work of his kingdom. That approach and that focus are the key, that though we pray for ourselves and others, our prayer is fundamentally about God and concerned with his will. The foundational prayer is that of Moses and David: God, let me see your face, let me live each day in your presence, consciously aware of your presence. It’s not about trying to make God do what we want, but about letting go of such efforts—letting God be God and ourselves just be his children—and seeking to know him as he is. This isn’t something that just happens; seeking means looking hard and earnestly, and it takes intention, concentration, and thought. It takes real effort and commitment, not because God’s trying to hide from us, but rather because there’s a part of us that’s always trying to hide from God; to seek God’s face, we need to fight that down and consciously bend ourselves to his will. So let’s concentrate on seeking God’s face this morning, the face of Jesus our Lord, in the presence of his Holy Spirit, in song, in the confession of our faith, and in prayer.

God-Focused

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(Nehemiah 1, Psalm 2; Acts 4:23-31)

When you take out your prayer list a little later on in the service, you’ll notice there’s some heavy stuff on there. There are a lot of people with a lot of hurt, of various sorts, and a lot of challenging things going on. We say, “It never rains but it pours”; Richard Adams, in the novel Watership Down, writes that the rabbit version of that proverb is “One cloud feels lonely”; but however you want to say it, we do seem to have a lot of spiritual clouds overhead, and a fair bit of rain coming down just at the moment, even if the day outside is bright. Throw in the fact that our income is currently well below our outgo, such that we’re burning through a lot of our savings just to stay afloat, and even though it’s summertime, the living ain’t easy. I’ve even had a few people apologize to me, as if I should have had the right to expect a church with no issues and no problems. I just keep telling them, there aren’t any of those, and I had no such expectations; but I won’t deny the stress, and I won’t pretend to be unaffected by the challenges we face.

I will, however, tell you this: if when you think about this congregation, and you consider its future, you look first at those challenges, you’re facing the wrong way. What is first relevant to this body and to where we’re going isn’t that we have some difficulties to overcome, it isn’t that we have some limitations holding us back, it isn’t that we’ve taken some hits lately; what’s relevant is that it’s God who’s leading us there, and God who’s going to get us there—not in our power, not in our strength, but in his. 

Now, I’m not saying that to minimize the challenges; they’re real, and we have to take them seriously. To take one example, I don’t think it’s news to anyone that one of the great strengths of this church is its musicians, or that one of the key people in that respect has been Chara Sonntag. I’ve been in a lot of churches in my life, and the odds that you’ll ever find another church pianist who contributes as much to the worship of the people of God as she does are really pretty low. You may find people who have an edge technically, or in experience, or in some other facet, but when it comes to making a real contribution to the worship of the church, you probably won’t. God led her here for a time to bless this church—and hopefully her, too, and her family—and now he’s leading her on into the next phase of ministry he has for her, and he’s leading us on as well. But here’s the key: God is still leading us. He knew Chara would move on in his time, he’s been planning for it, and he will work through that to accomplish his purposes in and for and through us, just as he works through everything else that happens.

All of which is to say, pick a challenge, any challenge: no matter what it is, the most important thing we can do in response is the same. Whatever concerns you most, stop and think about it for a minute. Got it fixed in your mind? Good. Now listen to me: God knows about it, and he has planned for it in his plan for us. There is nothing we face that has come as a surprise to God, and nothing that he isn’t big enough to overcome in and through us. The God who led the Israelites through the Red Sea and the children of Jacob out of exile is plenty big enough to lead us through whatever hardships we might face. All we have to do is follow where he leads, and we’ll get to the other side.

In other words, as we try to figure out how to lead this church, how to grow this church, how to deal with the rough times, and how to build on our strengths, our focus shouldn’t be on us and on what we can and can’t do—our focus needs to be on God, and what he intends to do, and wants us to do, because this isn’t our church, it’s his church. Which means we need to begin by adding another layer to our prayers as a church; on top of the praying we do that’s all about caring for and supporting one another, which is a critically important part of the life and work of the people of God, we also need to pray in ways that focus us on God and how we’re a part of his plan. As Tim Keller, the senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, puts it, “the one non-negotiable, universal ingredient in times of spiritual renewal is . . . kingdom-centered prayer.”

Which raises the question: what do we mean by kingdom-centered prayer? We’ll be talking about that over the next few weeks, looking at some of the specifics; at its core, though, kingdom-centered prayer is all about flipping our perspective. When we pray, we tend to ask God to get in on what we’re doing, to bless our plans and help us accomplish what we want to accomplish. As good as our ideas and intentions might be, that sort of prayer is, in a very real way, us-centered. Kingdom-centered prayer, by contrast, asks God how we can get in on what he’s doing, what our place and our part is in his plan, and how he wants us to contribute to what he’s going to accomplish. It’s about recognizing that our work is not redemptive, and that our work doesn’t build the church; only the work of God in Christ through his Holy Spirit does that. That’s why, without a kingdom focus, all our work is fruitless, because it’s only our work. With that, anything is possible, because in God, all things are possible.

You can see that in our passages this morning. Nehemiah—he’s risen to a position of great influence in the Persian empire (the cupbearer was a trusted senior aide to the emperor), so as an individual, he’s doing fine; but his people aren’t in such good shape. The exile is officially over, and some of the Jews have gone back to Jerusalem to re-establish their nation, but things aren’t going well, and the odds are heavily stacked against them; any outside observer would tell you the fragile new community re-rooting itself in Jerusalem is probably doomed, and sooner rather than later. Or how about the disciples in Acts 4—not such a small band anymore, since they’ve made lots of converts, but they’re still a tiny minority facing all the weight of the Establishment, which has already shown itself more than willing to do anything to crush them. New religions spring up all the time; most of them go nowhere, especially if the authorities are willing to bring the army down on their heads. Seen any Branch Davidians around lately?

The world looks at these sorts of situations and says, in the cynical old line, “the race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet”; but what Nehemiah and the early disciples show us is that when we pray boldly and God moves in power, all bets are off. This isn’t, however, just a matter of boldly asking for whatever we want; prayer is not magic, nor is it a means of manipulating God. Rather, the boldness of Nehemiah and the apostles was rooted in their knowledge of God, and in the fact that they were focused on him, not on themselves. Specifically, they were rooted in the fact of God’s presence—that God was with them in their circumstances, and that the God who was with them had the power to overcome those circumstances, and had faithfully promised to take care of his people—and they were focused on God’s kingdom, not their own, on accomplishing his purposes, not their own. If we pray that God will do what he wants to do, that’s a prayer to which he will always say “Yes”; and if we re-member that God is always at work for our good, it’s a prayer we can offer gladly. As such, these prayers can and should be models for our own.

In particular, I think there are three things worth noting here. The first is an awareness of the significance of our sin and of the holiness of God. It might seem strange to you that Nehemiah confesses the sins of the whole nation, since he was clearly a godly and righteous man; whatever other Jews might have done, it wasn’t his fault. It wouldn’t, however, have seemed strange to him at all; the blessings and sorrows of the people affected the whole people, and so the sins, and the faithfulness, of the people were everyone’s concern. We see this same concern in Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9, and for the same reason. Both men understood that the sins of the nation were getting in the way of God blessing his people, because those sins were opposed to the blessings and purposes God had for his people, as sin always is; they understood that in asking for his blessing, they needed to begin with confession. Our boldness in prayer doesn’t rest on our own worthiness, because we aren’t worthy, and we need to recognize that; rather, it rests on God’s character, on his faithfulness to his people whom he loves, and on the grace he has shown us in the past and continues to show us. Thus, prayer which is truly God-focused begins with humble confession of our sinfulness and our need for his grace.

Second, we can see in these prayers a deep desire that God should glorify himself in his people. Part of this is a great love for the people of God. Nehemiah doesn’t just pray “Bless me,” or even “Bless me and my family and friends,” as we so often do; he doesn’t even ask God to bless all the righteous folks and leave the rest alone. Instead, he prays that God would bless all his people, that he would forgive all of them for their sin and bless them all in the land of Israel which God had given them. He loves his people and he wants to see them prosper, and he wants to see God receive the glory for that. We see this same desire for God’s glory in Acts 4. Jesus’ disciples don’t pray that God would protect them, nor do they pray for vengeance on the people who killed Jesus and threatened them; instead, they pray, “Consider their threats and”—what?—“enable us to preach even more boldly.” In other words, “God, don’t let threats scare us into backing off even a little bit—give us even more boldness and even more power to preach the truth right into the face of these threats; and what’s more, do great miracles through us so that everyone can see we’re preaching what you want us to preach.”

Third, these prayers rest on an absolute confidence in the power of God. You can see this in Psalm 2, which the disciples reference in their prayer in Acts 4: the nations hatch their various schemes, and the peoples of the earth plot together to defeat God and his people—and God just laughs at them. Originally, this psalm was referring to the one God had anointed as king in Jerusalem; ultimately, it applied to Jesus and his enemies. In each case, the point is clear: no matter what anyone might come up with, God will not be defeated, and neither will his chosen ones. The apostles pray with complete confidence, not that God will keep them safe—that’s not what they’re after—but that if they ask him for power and boldness to proclaim his word, he’ll give it, and he’ll back it up. Individually, they didn’t all find the same degree of what the world considers success; some were greater than others, and some were killed young, while others lived long lives. As a group, however, God answered their prayer with power as they went out to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to all the world. Our existence testifies to that.

As Nehemiah prayed, as the apostles prayed, so God wants us to pray: fixing our eyes on him, focusing our attention on his kingdom, and trusting him for his faithfulness. If we look at our problems, it’s easy to start to wonder if we can overcome them. If we look at our abilities, we end up trying to solve our problems in our own way, in our own strength, for our own benefit. But if we look at God, if we seek his face and put our trust in his power and his faithfulness to us, then we put ourselves in position for him to work in us—and when God works in us and through us, anything is possible, far beyond what we could possibly imagine for ourselves. So I would encourage you again, as I have before, to be praying for this church, as Nehemiah prayed for Israel, as the apostles prayed for the early church, that God would glorify himself in us. If you signed up to pray for an hour a week, please continue to be faithful in doing that; if you haven’t, please find a time to do so each week; if you need a sheet to guide you in praying for the church, please let me know and I’ll get you one. Whatever you do, please pray for this church; it’s the only way we’ll ever be the church God wants us to be.

What’s a Sermon For?

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(Isaiah 55:6-11; Ephesians 4:11-16, 2 Timothy 3:16-17)

I wonder sometimes, as I stand up here, what it is that you think I think I’m trying to accomplish. Do you think I expect you to remember every point of every sermon? Do you imagine I’d like to test you on how much you remember? That would appeal to some pastors, I’m sure. I know one of my favorite professors in seminary, the brilliant New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, started out as a pastor; he told us he became a professor because “I got ‘em three days a week instead of one and I could give ‘em tests!” But then, that’s clearly where God wanted him, which no doubt had something to do with it. But can you see me giving tests?

Honestly, I don’t have any illusions as to how much you, or I, or anyone else, can consciously remember. Cleophus LaRue, who teaches preaching at Princeton, tells the story of going to preach one time in a church which sat right across the street from the state penitentiary. During his sermon, there was a prison break, and the alarms went off and the lights went on—the congregation, it appears, was used to this, but he wasn’t, and it quite unsettled him. As a result, he forgot to keep any record of what sermon he had preached. As it happened, he was back there a year or so later, and he began his message by noting that he might be repeating himself, because with all the commotion, he didn’t remember what he had preached about on his last visit. When he said that, someone in the congregation piped up, “That’s okay, preacher, neither do we!”

Now, some of my colleagues might be a little scandalized to hear me admit that; it’s the sort of story preachers tell other preachers, but not something I’ve often heard in church. Truth is, though, that while we might be so foolish as to consider this some sort of guild secret, I don’t think it’s anything of the sort. I’ve heard that a number of years ago, a man wrote the following letter to the British Weekly: “Dear Sir: It seems ministers feel their sermons are very important and spend a great deal of time preparing them. I have been attending church quite regularly for thirty years and I have probably heard 3,000 of them. To my consternation, I discovered I cannot remember a single sermon. I wonder if a minister’s time might be more profitably spent elsewhere?”

Now, this letter caused quite a storm, with more letters flurrying back and forth, until finally another one appeared which silenced the debate. That letter read, “Dear Sir: I have been married for thirty years. During that time I have eaten 32,850 meals—mostly my wife’s cooking. Suddenly I discovered I cannot remember the menu of a single meal. And yet, I received nourishment from every one of them. I have the distinct impression that without them, I would have starved to death long ago.”

That, surely, is the point of preaching. It’s not that you memorize what I say, or that you take notes and keep files. The primary purpose of preaching is to nourish your spirit, in the same way that food nourishes your body. I stand here to proclaim the word of God, to the best of my ability, in the confidence that when God’s word is spoken, it carries with it his purpose and the power of his Spirit. I may not always know what he intends to do—in fact, I can never fully know, because each sermon is going to affect everybody somewhat differently—but that’s really not what matters in the long run. What matters is that God accomplishes his purposes, and we may be sure that he will.

Of course, this requires a lively faith both in the value of the word of God and in the value of preaching, because it means preaching the word of God. Not every preacher has such faith any more, and so many don’t do that; some preach, but draw from things besides God’s word, while others stick to the Scriptures but have thrown out preaching. It seems to me, though, that the first approach substitutes human wisdom for God’s wisdom—and since human wisdom gave us the wars and tyrannies which marred the previous century, that doesn’t impress me much; while the second approach seeks to honor Scripture while ignoring its counsel. Paul tells Timothy, “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching” (that’s in 1 Timothy 4:13), and again, “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage, with great patience and careful instruction.” Why? Because “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”

In other words, the Spirit of God breathed into—in-spirited, you might say, inspired—the authors of Scripture, and he continues to speak through the words of Scripture to us, and to all the people of God, wherever we may be and whatever issues and circumstances we might face; and as such, by the power of the Spirit in its authors as they wrote, in our eyes as we read and in our ears as we listen, these words do us good. They show us what is true, and correct us when our beliefs about God and this world are false; they also correct our behavior, convicting us of the sins in our lives, and show us how God calls us to live. The Spirit speaking through the text does the work; my job is simply to help you open your ears to his voice, to help you better understand the word of God so that you may hear more clearly “what the Spirit is saying to the church.”

There are three parts to that. First, faithful and diligent interpretation. My job is to take whatever texts we’re using and draw the meaning out so that we can see it clearly. That may mean focusing on a single passage and digging deeply into it; sometimes, like this morning, it means fitting several texts together. Both approaches are necessary, because we need to understand Scripture deeply, and we need to understand it as a whole, as a web of interlocking texts. Either way, however, my call is only to teach what Scripture teaches me, to follow where it leads and nowhere else, because only Scripture is inspired by God, and only it is sure to be useful; for anything else, there are no guarantees.

The second part is application, because if truth stays in your head instead of going to your hands and feet, there isn’t much value to that. You’ll notice that 2 Timothy says that Scripture is useful for these things “so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” Similarly, Ephesians tells us that God gave the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” God doesn’t tell us things just so we’ll know them, he tells us so that they’ll change how we live. To learn truth and never put it into practice is like eating and eating and never exercising—all it does is make you fat. God doesn’t call us to spiritual obesity, he calls us to be spiritual athletes, as teaching feeds action; the truths we learn are to be truths we live.

The third part is time and persistence. Do I expect you to memorize everything I say? No, and no pastor with any sense would, though I do hope that at least one thing of importance sticks with you as you leave here each Sunday; but over time, as I am faithful in preaching and you are faithful in listening, by the grace of God, the steady exposure to his word will cause us to grow. As we speak his truth together in love, we will, slowly but surely, grow to maturity in Christ, who is our head. The more we spend time with the truth of God’s word, the more we spend time looking through his word at who he is and what he’s like, the more we will look like him.

The Year of the Lord’s Favor

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(Isaiah 61:1-4; Luke 4:16-21)

At various points in the second part of the book of Isaiah, we have the appearance of the Servant of the Lord; these passages are usually referred to as the Servant Songs. The Servant is the one who will bring about God’s justice on the earth, and carry his salvation not only to Israel, but beyond, to the whole world; and in Isaiah 53, we see that the Servant will accomplish this through his suffering. Now, here in Isaiah 61, we have I believe the last appearance of the Servant, promising the day when God will make everything right. The Servant speaks both as a prophet—that’s the meaning of “the Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me”—and as a king—that’s the significance of “the LORD has anointed me”—so he has power both from God and on earth to bring this about. He has been given, as God’s chosen prophet and king, the mission to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to set captives and prisoners free, to comfort those who mourn, and to raise up the oppressed so that they may restore all that has been lost and rebuild all that has been destroyed.

The keystone of this passage comes in verse 2: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” In our day and age, we think we can control time—we have atomic clocks, and we do business at all hours of the day and night, and we have computer calendars that keep our schedules months into the future—and so we use time words very precisely, because for us, time is about precision. For the ancient Hebrews, it wasn’t, and so we shouldn’t take this “year” and “day” language in that way; rather, this is typical Hebrew parallelism, pairing a time of God’s favor with a time of his vengeance. The significance of this is that they’re not two separate times—they’re the same time. The year of the LORD’s favor is the day of vengeance of our God. There are folks who think that’s strange, that there must be something wrong with that; but if you’ve ever been oppressed, if you’ve ever been done unjustly, you know better. To bring good news to the oppressed means bringing vengeance on their oppressors; healing the brokenhearted means judging those who broke their hearts; setting the captives free means breaking the power of those who hold them captive. These two things go together; the world cannot be put right until those who put it wrong have been judged.

Which is the interesting thing about Jesus’ reading of this passage: he gets as far as “proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,” and then he stops. He takes these two things that go together, and he splits them; and then he says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is an incredible thing, because it opens an incredible opportunity: in Jesus, you can miss out on the vengeance of God. We all need God’s vengeance on others, because we’ve all been done wrong; but we all have it coming on ourselves, because we’ve all done others wrong, too. We have been victims of injustice, but we’ve also done injustice, when we’ve gotten the chance. As much as we need the year of God’s favor, the day of his vengeance is a perilous time for us—and so Jesus came to create a space between them. In Jesus, the year of the LORD’s favor has already begun, but his vengeance is held off, to give us a chance to respond to his offer and escape judgment; this is God’s grace. That’s why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6, “Now is the favorable time; now is the day of salvation.”

Gotta Serve Somebody

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(Malachi 3:6-15; Luke 12:22-34, Luke 16:10-13)

I took the title of this sermon from Bob Dylan. “Gotta Serve Somebody” is the best song on a great album, Slow Train Coming, which unfortunately has been largely forgotten because of its explicitly Christian character; and while I think Dylan’s reputation as a poet and thinker is somewhat overinflated, his song makes a pretty important theological point: no matter who you are, how low or how high, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” That’s a truth we don’t often want to hear. In the Bible, those closest to God are described as his servants, but it’s easy to see that as a negative thing, in part because we see it as serving God versus being free, serving no one.

What Scripture understands, and Dylan saw, and we too often don’t is that this is a false picture, because everyone is serving somebody; it’s just that some know it and some don’t. Without God, we aren’t free—we’re slaves to sin. That might look like freedom, because the desires which enslave us are in some sense our own; but just try to break a habit, just try to rein in one of those desires, and most people discover just how free we aren’t. If we vaunt our independence and our freedom to do whatever we please, it just shows that we don’t realize that “whatever we please” is really running the show—which means we’re at the devil’s mercy, because we’ve given him lots of strings to pull.

This is just as true of money as it is of anything else—and maybe truer, since money is essential to the fulfillment of most of those desires. That’s part of the reason Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 6:10 that “the love of money is the root of all evil”—yes, that’s hyperbole, but still: between evil acts committed to gain money, and evil acts which require money, that’s a pretty high percentage of the evil that people do. And then you get into the rest of life, because there’s not much these days that doesn’t require money; I know they say “the best things in life are free,” but whether that’s true or not, the basic things sure aren’t. Food, clothing, shelter, gas, none of that is free. The result of all this is that most people’s lives are dominated by money; the great poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1807, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” and it’s at least as true now as it was then. Too often, it’s money that drives our decisions and sets our priorities.

Over against this, God calls us to serve him with our money, and with all the other gifts he’s given us. We talked about this two weeks ago, that everything we have, we hold in trust for God, and he has instructions for us as to how we’re to use it. I suspect that a lot of the time, we don’t take that very seriously, as the Israelites didn’t; but God did, and does, and we need to remember that. It’s easy to think that what we do with our money isn’t a spiritual issue, but it is, because of what Jesus says in Luke 16:13: “You can’t serve both God and money.” In the last analysis, either following God is going to be a higher priority than having, making, spending money, or money will be a higher priority than God; and for us as Christians, it had better be the former. 

Tithing is a way of making sure that that’s the case, disciplining ourselves to make sure that we put God first in the use of our money by setting aside part of it for his use before we do anything else with it. If we don’t do that, if we don’t give at all or we just give whatever is convenient—which is to say, whatever amount doesn’t affect all the other things we want to do with our money—then we’re really putting money, getting it and spending it, ahead of obeying and serving him; which means that in the last analysis, we’re serving money, not God.

The irony in all this is that God wants to take care of us and bless us, if we would just trust him to do so and be faithful to put him first; if we aren’t willing to take the “risk” of tithing because we don’t feel we can afford it, then we don’t give him that opportunity. It’s not easy to depend on God to provide; I spent long enough making little or no money, I know how hard it is. I confess, to my shame, that I didn’t tithe then, because I was afraid of not having enough. I still believed up here that God would provide for us if I did, but I didn’t believe it down here enough to act on that. I trusted him, but not that much, and I still regret that. God provides for the ravens, who were the most despised of all birds, and he provides for the grass, which is here today and gone tomorrow; why didn’t I trust him to provide for me? Why didn’t I have the faith God gives the flowers?—they don’t conserve themselves, they simply bloom, spending their beauty extrava-gantly on all who pass, and trust him to take care of them. That’s the sort of faith God wants us to have, that we will give beyond what’s convenient, even beyond what seems safe, and trust that he will provide for us—and that we will live richer lives as a result.

It should also be said that God will not reward unfaithfulness and disobedience; if we decide to use the things he’s given us to bless ourselves, rather than being faithful to use them as he calls us to use them, he’s not going to bless that. If we remember that everything we have is God’s and use it accordingly, if we’re faithful with worldly wealth, then he’ll give us the riches of the kingdom; but if we aren’t, he won’t. This doesn’t mean we won’t be saved, but it seems clearly to mean that our reward will be less than if we had used our gifts faithfully to serve God rather than ourselves.

Now, since God calls us to tithe for the sake of the work of the church, this all places a heavy responsibility on me, on our elders, and on all those whom God has chosen to lead his people. We are accountable, not just to you but to God, for how we use your gifts. We’re responsible to pray, to seek his will, so that we use the gifts you give in ways that honor his name and build up the church—which is to say, each of you, and all of you together; and if we were to spend the money you give unwisely, or in ways which were counterproductive or dishonoring to his name, then we would be guilty of sin and accountable to God for our actions. It’s a heavy responsibility indeed; and while we aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I’m proud of our elders for the way they carry it out. We want to do more than we’re doing, of course—there is always more to be done, and we could always do it better—and as we have more resources to work with, we will do more; but though like all people, we make mistakes, in general, to the best of our ability, I believe we’re faithful to the charge God has given us.

If that sounded like a commercial for this church, I suppose it was; but note well, if it’s a commercial for this church, it’s a commercial for each of you—and for good reason. I believe in you. I see what you’re already doing and how much more you have the potential to do; I see what you have the ability to accomplish in your lives and in the life of this community. And if I tell you I believe in this church, it’s for exactly that reason, that I believe in you; I’m calling you, as God is calling you, to open your hearts, to take risks, to trust him enough to give freely—of your money, of your time, of your gifts, of yourself—because I believe you’ll be amazed at what will happen. You’ll be amazed, and maybe you’ll even amaze me, at what you can accomplish for the kingdom of God, and what an absolute blessing that will be; but you know what? God won’t be amazed, because he already knows what you can do, and what he can do in and through you, if you’re only willing to let him.

Of course, to take that step, you have to believe that God is going to act; that’s where the Israelites of Malachi’s day fell short. They had already made up their minds that whether they kept his commands or not, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t do anything either way. They thought his commands were irrelevant and obeying them was useless. From that perspective, it’s no wonder they didn’t tithe—why would they, if they didn’t think it would make any difference? They didn’t even understand why they were offending God, because they weren’t talking about him at all; they failed to realize that that was precisely why he was offended. God said, “Test me—bring in your tithes, and watch me bless you,” but they had already concluded that he wouldn’t. I suspect that often, when we don’t give, it’s for something of the same reason: we really don’t believe that God will keep his promises if we do. To that, he simply says, “Try me. Try me and see what I will do”; and we need to step forward and do just that.

We need to do that, because the bottom line here is simple: are you serving God with your money, or are you serving your money? Jesus tells us there are only the two choices. Are you building up treasures for yourself in heaven, where they’re eternal and you’ll enjoy them for eternity, or are you storing them up here on earth, where a flood could wash them out and you’ll have to leave them behind when you die anyway? No, there’s nothing wrong with having things; God commanded the Israelites to give 10% of their income, not 100%; but is that where your treasure is? Because if it is, then that’s where your heart is, and that’s what you’re serving. Store up treasures for yourself in heaven, in the coming kingdom of God, for it is the Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom—the whole thing; store up an unfailing treasure in heaven, with him, by giving freely of all that you have and all that you are, by serving him freely with your earthly treasure, your time on this earth, and the talents you have been given; for where your treasure is, there is your heart.

Where Is Your Heart?

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(Malachi 3:6-15; Matthew 6:19-24, 2 Corinthians 9:6-12)

It’s funny, the things that stick in the back of your mind. I remember, for in-stance, going to a sleepover for the birthday of one of my classmates, Robert Gelinas; it was maybe sixth grade, and I have no idea why I was invited. We weren’t friends particularly, and I really don’t know why I was there. I enjoyed it, though. I remember we watched a couple of movies—Fletch, and a Richard Pryor movie called Brewster’s Millions—and that we went out at some point; I want to say it was to Pizza Hut, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I remember that particularly, though, because it was as we were getting ready to leave that Mr. Gelinas made a point of telling me (and maybe one other kid) that there are three things you don’t talk about in public: religion, sex, and politics. Now, I can assure you I wouldn’t have been talking about sex, but back then I was just a trifle opinionated, and I think maybe he didn’t trust me on the other two, because he made it very clear they were off limits.

These days, you’re probably more likely to get away with talking about sex in public; religion and politics, maybe, but if you pick the wrong time, the results are likely to be a lot worse. My dad lost one of his oldest and dearest friends a couple years back when he unwisely forwarded an e-mail that was political in nature. But even as conten-tious as political conversations can be these days, I don’t think they’re the biggest no-no out there—that would be one Mr. Gelinas didn’t even mention: money. I’m not sure there’s any bigger taboo in our culture than asking someone how much money they make, except under certain conditions. With a lot of people, you’ll get a better response asking nosy questions about their sex life than you will prying into their finances.

This affects how the church does business, too; there are exceptions, churches and preachers that talk about money all the time, largely so they can ask people to give them more of it, but they only make the rest of us even more hesitant to talk about it. After all, it feels personal, and pushy, and we’d all really rather believe that the Good Church Budget Fairy comes along and leaves the money we need under the nearest cabbage, since there are plenty of other things that we’d far rather talk about; but as much as we might like to avoid talking about money, we can’t do that. We can’t do it for two reasons. The first would be what Carolyn and Gene have told you recently; by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it costs over $3500 just to pay for this service we’re having here this morning, when you figure in my salary package, and the salaries of everyone else who contributes, and the cost of having this building, and the cost of the bulletins and all the other materials we use, and we don’t take in anywhere near that much per week. Indeed, when you factor in the preschool and the other missions we support, we’d need to double our giving and more just to get to the point where we’re no longer burning principal on our endowment; to get to the point where our giving covered everything and we could begin using the interest on the endowment for new ministries, we’d have to triple our giving. Obviously, this is more than just a stewardship issue, it’s a growth issue—we need to draw in a fair bit more people to reach that point; but still, as a practical matter, we can’t avoid talking about money. We’re living on borrowed time as it is.

That aspect of things is Carolyn and Gene’s job to worry about, at least primarily, and you’re lucky to have them. My main concern this morning is the second reason we can’t avoid talking about money, which is that the Bible spends a fair bit of time talking about it, and for good reason. We spent a while earlier this year considering what it means to be the church, and part of what it means to be the church is that we’re all in this together, committed to each other in God and to what God is doing in and through us. If that’s a real commitment, if we’re really on board with that, then it’s not enough to stand and say the creed together, it’s not enough to stand and sing the words of our great hymns—we need to live out what we say we believe, and the way we use our money (and for that matter, our time, our abilities, and everything else God has given us) needs to reflect that. It’s not enough to say that Jesus is Lord—our bankbook needs to show it, too.

Unfortunately, there are a couple factors which tend to work against that. The first is our false understanding of our money—a false understanding which is inherent in the fact that we call it our money to begin with. We look at the money in our accounts and think it belongs to us to use for our own purposes, and thus that whether or not we give to the church, and how much, is our own decision, to be made on the basis of whatever criteria seem appropriate to us. That view of money breeds a lack of trust in God, because if our money really does belong to us, then it’s entirely our responsibility to use it to provide for ourselves. We might talk about trusting God, and relying on God, but in the last analysis, in our bank balance we trust. If that’s so, then giving is a luxury, something we can choose to do once we’re sure we can afford it and know how much we’re going to spend on everything else; it’s simply one more option for our money, depending on what we want to do and how much we feel we can afford given the standard of living we want to maintain. It’s purely our choice, purely a matter of our own priorities.

To this idea, God says, “NO.” As we talked about three weeks ago, everything in this world belongs to him, even the clothes on our back—even our very bodies—because he made everything. It isn’t our money, it’s his—it isn’t our time, it’s his—they aren’t our abilities and talents, they’re his; indeed, everything we have isn’t ours, it’s God’s. Stop and think about that for a moment; let that sink in. Everything we have belongs to God. We aren’t owners, we’re stewards to whom God has entrusted his wealth, and in the end, we will have to give an account of what we’ve done with it. If we’re going to live lives pleasing to God, as individuals and as a people, we need to bear that fact in mind, and it needs to make a difference in what we do with our money.

Out of this truth flow three important points. First, giving isn’t optional. It isn’t up to us, it isn’t a matter of whether or not we want to, it isn’t something God would like us to do if we think we have a little room in the budget—God commands us to give. Indeed, the Old Testament law commanded the people of Israel to tithe, to give 10% of their income, to the temple—and that wasn’t supposed to be the limit of what they gave, but the minimum, which is why we have the phrase “tithes and offerings.” Again, this is based on the fact that all the world is God’s; he’s given his people everything they have, and he commands that they give back 10% of what he’s given them. To withhold some of that 10%, then, to give less than God had commanded, would be to refuse to give God what belongs to him—and that is nothing less than theft.

Now, does that mean that if we don’t tithe, we’re guilty of stealing from God? I don’t think so, since this commandment isn’t repeated in the New Testament, nor is Malachi’s language echoed anywhere. It’s hard to say for sure, since so many of the early Christians were either Jews or God-fearing Gentiles, and probably kept on tithing after converting to follow Christ; and we know from Acts that the first group of believers, in Jerusalem, gave far more than 10%, contributing great sums to the church for the sake of the poor and powerless among them. Still, if the early church had seen tithing as a requirement, I think we’d have something—perhaps in one of Paul’s letters—stressing the necessity of giving 10% of one’s income to the church; and that just isn’t there.

I wonder, though, if that isn’t the wrong question in a lot of ways. Saying, “Do we have to tithe, or can we get away with less?” isn’t the question of someone looking to honor God with their money—it’s the question of someone trying to justify giving as little as possible. It’s the question, we might say, of someone who doesn’t trust God enough to give freely and generously—who assumes that if they do, they’ll be poorer and worse off for it—and to that way of thinking, God says, “Try me.” Through Malachi, he tells his people, “Bring your full tithes, put me to the test; see if I don’t send rain to bless your crops, and keep back the bugs that destroy the fruit of your labors.” This isn’t an individual promise here, that if you, personally, tithe, God will make you rich; but if the nation as a whole will give God what he requires, he will bless the nation and everybody will have enough, without having to fight so hard to survive.

Then in 2 Corinthians, Paul takes this and develops it in a more individual direction. “You know how it works,” he says: “you reap what you sow. If you only sow a little seed, you only get a small harvest, but if you sow a great deal of seed, you reap a huge harvest.” Of course, with fruit, like olives, what you eat and what you plant are different parts of the fruit, but with grain, they’re one and the same; so there’s always the tension, especially in poor areas, between how much you eat and how much you sow back into the ground for next year. You can’t sow it all, obviously, or you’ll have nothing to eat this year; but if you eat too much of the harvest, then your harvest next year is guaranteed to be poor, because you can’t reap the benefits of seed you didn’t sow.

Giving, Paul says, is the same way. We need to remember, first, that God owns everything, including all that is ours to use, and thus that he is ultimately the one who gives us success in our labors, not we ourselves; and second, that not only is he able to bless us with all good things, he wants to do so. Thus Paul says in verse 8, “God is able to provide you with every kind of blessing in abundance, so that in every circumstance you may always have everything you need and still have ample resources for every kind of good work.” The word “blessing” here is the word kharis, the word “grace”; thus the blessings in view here aren’t only material but also spiritual. This isn’t a promise of material wealth, but it is a promise that those who give freely, generously and gladly to God will always have enough; and it’s a promise as well of all the spiritual blessings that make life good, and that empower us to do the good works God calls us to do.

Note again that “freely, generously and gladly” really does matter—how much we give matters, but so do why and how we give. Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, “If you really don’t want to give, or if you’re only giving under pressure or because you’re worried what others will think, then don’t; for it’s the cheerful and open-hearted giver that God loves.” The call is to give generously and gladly back to God from what he has given us, in gratitude for all the ways in which he has blessed us, believing that if we do so, he will continue to bless us and provide for all our needs. The key here is trust: are we willing to stake our lives on trust in God rather than trust in our own sweat and our own wits? That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is what God wants from us.

Finally, we need to understand our money the same way the farmer understands seed. Yes, we need to use some of it for food (and also clothing and shelter), but just as the basic purpose of seed is to be planted so that it can grow and produce a crop, so the basic purpose of money in this life is to be invested to produce treasure in the next, in the kingdom of God. This isn’t the investment plan the world recommends—the world, after all, wants things it can quantify, and the First National Bank of Heaven doesn’t send out bank statements, nor can one put a number and a label on the promises of God—but there are advantages; thus Jesus says, “Don’t store up your treasures on earth, where hurricanes, financial scandals, and stock market crashes can wipe them away, where floods can ruin them, or thieves can break in and steal them” (that’s a loose translation); “instead, store up your treasures in heaven, where they’re safe from all those things.” Our earthly investments might be quantifiable and might seem far more certain, but in truth, they are far more vulnerable to destruction; only God’s promises are truly secure.

Of course, giving to the church, in our community and around the world, is just a start; even if we tithe—as I believe we’re still called to do; Sara and I do—that doesn’t mean the other 90% of our income is ours to do with whatever we please, for it too belongs to God. Giving to the church is just the beginning of a biblical approach to money, one which involves making all our decisions—what we spend and where we spend it, what we invest and where we invest it, and so on—in light of the fact that it’s all God’s, and that in the end, we’ll have to turn all our books over to him for the audit of a lifetime.

So I would encourage you to start preparing for that audit: go home and take a look at your finances, and ask yourself if what you see there honors God. Does your giving honor God? Does it proclaim that you know that everything you have belongs to him, and that you trust him to provide for you—or does it say that you only give him the leftovers? How about your spending? Could you honestly say that the things you spend money on give honor to God and reflect his priorities, or would you have to admit that they don’t? If you have investments, are they investments which honor God and build up his kingdom, or is your money at work for other purposes? These are questions you need to ask seriously of yourselves, and which you need to answer honestly; and if the answers tell you that you need to make some changes, then I encourage you strongly to step out in faith, in trust, and make those changes, that you might be, that we all might be, faithful stewards of the great bounty God has given us.