Flying In Circles
Heavenly father, we thank you for a building that allows us to have space to do ministry like we're doing now. We don't hold onto it tightly, Lord. We know that tomorrow this building could go away. And, Father, we wanna say that we're okay with that as our desire is to, grow in our capacity to love one another and to love you. And so, Lord, with a building or without a building, that is our intent, that is our goal, that is our aim.
Cameron:We do appreciate, Lord, this building and what you've given to us in it. Lord, we appreciate that there are rooms all over the building right now that are filled with kids eager to hear about the love of the gospel, the love of Jesus through the gospel. Father, maybe they've never heard it, or maybe they don't even know they need to hear it, Father. And so I pray that you would open their hearts, Lord, to the seed of faith, that it would be planted deep within their soul today, tomorrow, the next, every time, Lord, they come into this building. Lord, we pray for their spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health and safety.
Cameron:Lord, we pray for those who are giving of their time week after week after week to love these kids, to encourage them in their walk with Jesus, to teach them the word, to lead them in worship. Father, we pray that you would continue to grow, a passion to serve children in our hearts, that you would raise up, Lord, more and more and more leaders with a deep seated passion to say, I see a need. I love Jesus. I want these kids to love Jesus too. Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to be in relationship and ministry to all these kids.
Cameron:Lord, we pray that you would give us both vision and capacity to expand that ministry to them. Father, I pray for our brother, pastor Luke. We thank you for his calling. We thank you for his calling to this place, Lord. We ask, father, that as he opens the word this morning and proclaims it to us, Lord, that the authority of your word would go forth and find root in our hearts and that we would be transformed by believing it and being obedient to it.
Cameron:In Jesus' name. Amen.
Luke:Amen. Thanks, Cameron. Morning, everybody. I'm Luke. And today we're kind of in in between space as far as what we're going to be talking about today.
Luke:We just wrapped up a very long series on Exodus. That was a really fun book to study. It was really great to be able to just have the privilege to go through that with you. And then next week, we're going to be starting one Timothy. But in between doing those two things, today we've kind of got just a standalone sort of topic.
Luke:And today, I'm going to talk about this idea of kind of like flying in circles, of going around and around and kind of being stuck, kind of this kind of orbiting, going around, never being able to land or to arrive. Because it's actually kind of it's my conviction or it's my belief that a significant amount of believers, people who've been following Jesus for a while, are stuck. I think that a lot of people who are trying to follow Jesus faithfully, I think a lot of Christians eventually get stuck after a certain while. I actually had a conversation this past week with somebody and was just reminded of this, of, yeah, we don't have a lot of language. The way that we talk about and emphasize our spirituality doesn't have a lot of room for this place where we can kind of sometimes find ourselves.
Luke:And you're like, Well, Luke, what does it what does it mean to be a stuck Christian? What does that feel like? What does that look like? And I think the best way to kind of articulate this is to kind of think about some of the common experiences that happen. When I first kind of noticed this dynamic, I was with a lot of believers who were all kind of entering into the same season, and they were all saying something like, I just just wish I could just feel on fire again.
Luke:Just like, I just feel like I've lost, like, that spark for my faith. Oh, I'm just not I'm just not on fire for the Lord like I used to be. And I noticed that there was a lot of kind of searching. There's a lot of, like, cycling and looking for the same thing over and over again. So it might be, Oh, well, I got to go to that conference because the conference is going to charge me back up again.
Luke:I'm going to feel like I should, like I used to feel in my walk. Or, No, I need to find this new Bible teacher that I've just discovered, this new YouTube channel or podcast that I've been listening to. You should listen to him too, because it's reignited my faith. Or maybe it's you know, like, this was this was a really good ministry. This was a really good church.
Luke:But, you know, I need to go somewhere else because I'm just not getting fed here. And what I noticed is that there was this sort of cycle that started to happen with people who were following Jesus for a while, where things would have to be shaken up in their own faith or in their, like, personal life or something in order to kind of create this sort of sense of renewal or revival. And I was just like, I don't know what that really is. What's going on there? In my own life, I know that this took its manifestation in myself listening to sermons in order to try and elicit a sense of guilt or shame for myself.
Luke:I didn't feel like I was growing in my walk. I didn't feel very close to the Lord. And so I had, at the time, gotten to a point where I was listening to a lot of sermons that were very heavy on the law, that were very legalistic and were very shame inducing. And so I would listen to multiple sermons and I would just, Oh, I'm such a terrible sinner. I'm a wretch.
Luke:I'm awful. And I didn't feel like I had really heard a good sermon until I cried. And what I eventually came to realize was that I'm chasing shame. Wasn't what I wasn't feeling when I finally got to a point where I was just like, I'm such a terrible, awful stinner. I'm a wretch.
Luke:That I wasn't experiencing God's grace or God's closeness. I was actually just rehearsing shame, and I was rehearsing guilt in order to try and make myself feel spiritual. And I don't know exactly what being stuck might look like for you. It might be a sense of restlessness. It might be a sense of kind of looking for this thing to reignite what you maybe felt feel like you once had.
Luke:But one of the key things that no matter how that kind of cycle ends up playing out for you is this idea of our love not increasing. Because when we talk about growth as a disciple, growth as a Christian in following Jesus, there's a lot of things that happen as we try and follow Jesus. You know, we maybe learn more about the Bible. We maybe learn more theology. We learn more about God.
Luke:Maybe we grow in our service. Maybe we serve the Lord more for our time and our gifts. There's a bunch of things we can grow in, but there's one thing that matters, and that's love. If we don't grow in our love for other people and for God, we are not growing as a disciple. Jesus said that the whole law, everything hinged upon the singular command, love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.
Luke:You ought to be doing those two things. It doesn't matter how how Bible knowledgeable somebody is if they don't love the person in front of them. Amen. That's the that's the place when as a young believer, I I fell into that trap. I was I was like I was chasing as much theology knowledge.
Luke:I was the person who loved to get into an argument with someone about something. I loved all of that. Why? Because I thought the person who knew more theology was more spiritual. And that's not true, actually.
Luke:I don't I don't care if you know what the word theophany means if you don't love Jesus. It doesn't matter if you can read ancient Greek and Hebrew. But if you don't love Jesus, that doesn't do anything for you. This is what Paul says in Corinthians. If I speak in tongues of angels, but I have not love, I am just a sounding gong.
Luke:If I prophesy, if I heal, if I'm just a fantastic church person, it doesn't matter if I don't love God and I don't love people. And so what I find is that we get into this place where we are constantly circling. Have you ever been on an airplane flight and you're like kind of watching, paying attention? Okay, we're getting there. We're like, we're there.
Luke:We're above the airport. We're kind of descending. And then all of a sudden, like the airplane just starts banking. And then it just keeps banking. And then you're like straightens out, and then it banks some more.
Luke:And you just realize you're like, we're not going down. We're like in a holding pattern. So you remember anybody been stuck in the airplane that's in a holding pattern? Right? That sucks, especially for those of us who are a little motion sensitive.
Luke:You know, because you're just like, how how long am I gonna be at a 45 degree angle? Like, no, I don't need more saltines. I need us to be on the ground. But we can't ever we're like so close. And every time we think we're coming around, oh, this time we're going to land.
Luke:Nope. And it gets exhausting. And I think that's what this experience is in the Christian life. When we get to a place where we were following Jesus, everything seemed to be going great, we were growing as a disciple, and suddenly we've kind of hit a bit of a wall. We've stagnated.
Luke:We've gotten to a place where we're like, I feel like I'm in a spiritual holding pattern. And the question that I want us to kind of answer, or at least the thing that I want to answer today is one of the things. One of the things that I think can put us in a spiritual holding pattern is this dynamic that we're going to talk about in our sermon today. The passage that we're going to talk about, I think, has a spiritual truth that we've largely forgotten inside of the American church. It's something that we don't talk about because it makes us uncomfortable.
Luke:It's not culturally It's not very culturally popular. And so I think today our passage is going to is going to give us some insight and hopefully some help in this place. And if you're like, Well, Luke, I don't feel that way. Well, that's awesome, and I'm happy for you, but I hope that this sermon will serve as a reminder when you do get to a place where you are stuck in a spiritual holding pattern. Or maybe you're kind of still figuring out Jesus and you're like, I don't know that if I'm following Jesus yet, I'm not sure I would call myself a Christian.
Luke:And I would say, That's okay. I think today this message has something for you as well. And so the text we're going to be talking about today is one that I've actually never heard a sermon on it. I was just like, we've been teaching through all of the parables of Jesus in our Wednesday night classes. We've been talking about those.
Luke:We're getting close to wrapping that up here in the next couple of weeks. But when we came to this parable, I was just like, I've never heard a sermon on this one. Like, I've never heard anybody teach about it. Never heard anybody, like, make a nice, sweet devotional about it. You know, it doesn't end up in like Instagram posts or pretty pictures on people's wall.
Luke:Nobody makes this passage their life verse for some reason. And you'll all see why in just a few minutes. But it's an important text for us to look at. So we're going to turn with me to Luke chapter 17, and we're going to look at this parable of Jesus's. Now I'll say a couple of things as we're turning to Luke chapter 17.
Luke:And first is to simply say that when you study the parables, if you're like, Luke, how do I get better at understanding the parables of Jesus? Because they are hard to understand. If I would give you one tip, one thing to take away that I would say you need to integrate into how you studied your parables is read what comes before the parable and after the parable. Read the context around the parable. Who's Jesus talking to when He's saying the parable?
Luke:And then how did that parable, if you were that person and you were hearing it, if you were a Pharisee, if you were a Jew, if you were a Gentile, if you were a sinner, if the situation that Jesus was in that He's telling the parable, I would say 99% of the time is the primary key to understanding what the parable is about. Now I say that, and this is one of the very few exceptions where the context does not add much to the parable. The couple, the verses, the six verses that come before this, some people kind of argue and go back and forth of like, Oh, no, like there's kind of a sequence. And there is a little bit of a sequence in this chapter. You can kind of connect the themes that Jesus says together.
Luke:But I don't think that you have to have heard the ones before in order to understand the message of what comes before. So today, we're just going to be reading this little slice of parable in verses seven through 10. So let's read this parable and let's see why it's so often not talked about. 17 verse seven says, will any of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come from the field, come at once and recline at the table? Will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me and dress properly and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterwards you will eat and drink?
Luke:Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty.' So that's Jesus' words. It's a parable. It's a story that he was telling to make an illustration.
Luke:And I bet you can begin to see some of the reasons why it's kind of a hard one to wrestle with. The it's kind of a you know, what does Jesus mean when he says that we're unworthy, or your translation might have the word useless there? What does it mean when it says that? And what's that got to do with it? It doesn't sound like a very encouraging sermon.
Luke:It doesn't sound like a very encouraging parable. Or maybe it's just kind of confusing because it's so different from what we are kind of used to hearing. And then I think it has like some cultural things that are different, kind of rubs us the wrong way. We're not used to and we're kind of we kind of bristle against the idea of servants. You might have a translation that uses the word slave or bond servant there.
Luke:And and those all are reasons that kind of make us go, Did Jesus really mean that? What what does Jesus mean when he says that we should call ourselves unworthy or useless servants? That doesn't sound right. And, you know, ran across this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he gives this kind of reflection. He's like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, if you don't know, was a theologian in Europe pre World War II and during World War II, stood up against the Nazi regime and was ultimately killed for it.
Luke:But he was in general, he was a theologian who was bristling against and advocating for a return to orthodoxy, return to correct belief, and kind of fighting against this kind of liberalism that was in the theology of that time. And he has this whole reflection on how people tend to preach Jesus and his words, how they tend to approach his parables. So he says this in his book Discipleship. He says, Everywhere it is the same. The deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience.
Luke:How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game that it is so vulnerable to the scorn of the world? Anywhere else in the world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his child, go to bed. The child knows exactly what to do.
Luke:But a child drilled in pseudotheology would have to argue thus, father says, go to bed. He means you are tired. So he does not want me to be tired, but I can also overcome my tiredness by going to play. So also so although my father says go to bed, what he really means is go to play. And if I lost you in there, what Bonhoeffer's getting at, he's like, Preachers are teaching and treating Jesus' words like a little kid who says, Dad told me to go to bed, and what he really means is, I get to go play because it'll end up in the same place.
Luke:Coming up with these roundabout ways of making justifications or ways of understanding the word of God or Jesus' teachings as to say, well, Jesus couldn't have meant that. Right? And and so then we we kind of find a way to kind of juggle around that, and that's sort of what Bonhoeffer was calling against. Now I am and my my belief is is that we absolutely always must aim for understanding the Bible both clearly while also avoiding wooden interpretations as well as the temptation to make the text disappear. So what I mean is that we have to hold intention.
Luke:We don't want to just come to the text and just kind of always take its immediate understanding because sometimes we might be led astray. But I also so I want us to do big digging. I want us to think critically. Background. I want us to do all of those things.
Luke:But at the end of the day, we shouldn't be striving or coming to a way as to make the text disappear in some way or to go away. And so it's this kind of tension that kind of comes here as we're like, why is Jesus teaching a parable that involves servants or slaves? And why would Jesus say that we're to consider ourselves unworthy or useless servants? That does not seem like the God I've been taught about. So let's lean into that.
Luke:Let's see if we can understand this passage correctly and understand it with some nuance, but also not to a place where we make the text disappear and not mean what it means. So first is to say this language of kind of a servant or bondservant or maybe even a slave in your translation. We live in a culture that is so vastly removed from the context of early ancient Israel and Judaism and the ancient world and Rome. Right? Like, you and I, like, other than the movie Gladiator, we don't know what it's like to live in the world of Rome.
Luke:We it's very hard for us to get our minds wrapped around that. Now, I think in when we teach through the book of one Timothy, we will have a sermon and an opportunity to talk more in-depth about the Bible and its relationship to slavery. So I can't so I won't go all the way through all of the details there. But I want to, first, I want us to really understand this parable, make sure we get it. So verse seven, it says, Will any of you who has a servant who is plowing and keeping sheep say to him, 'When he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at my table.' So what he's describing here, what Jesus is talking about is there's this servant.
Luke:He's been out in the field all day. He's been chasing sheep around. He's been out in the sun. He's been doing all of his hard work. He comes to the house.
Luke:He comes home. And then is the Master going to say, Hey, you've worked really hard today. You know what? Sit at my table and I'm going to give you food that I've made for you. And you can just take a load off.
Luke:Put your feet up on the chair. Just relax. Take a relaxing thing. And so Jesus is saying, Would any of you do that? Is that the normal thing to do?
Luke:He's asking a rhetorical question. Verse eight, he answers the rhetorical question by saying, will not rather will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me and dress properly and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterwards you will eat and drink? Jesus is saying the normal thing that would happen is that when the servant comes home, the master's not going to say, Sit down. I'm going to serve you. He says, Welcome home.
Luke:Please change out of your smelly sheep clothes, put on some fresh clothes, and then serve me dinner. And then when I'm finished eating and I've gotten everything I need done for the day and you've finished serving me, all your duties are done. You can sit down, you can eat and drink and rest and relax for the rest of the day. That's kind of the ordinary or expected thing that is expected to happen. Jesus goes on and he says, Does the servant does he thank the servant because he did all that was commanded?
Luke:Says, Is the master of the servant supposed to make him feel better? Oh, you did such a good job today. Like, he's like, Gold Star. Like, is that what he's supposed to do? And Jesus is like, No, because this is just what the servant is supposed to do.
Luke:And then he says, Rather, the servant would say something like, I am just an unworthy servant. So what does that all mean? Because I know that we live in a world where if any of you were to I've seen like a lot of advertisements for like cleaning services for your home recently, you know, and it's kind of a it's a growing business of people coming in like, Oh, I'll do some cleaning and dusting and cleaning your home and stuff like that. And that's all great. The thing is, is that I know that most of you, if you were to hire a cleaning lady for some reason, you would spend more time cleaning your house before that lady got there, that there would be almost nothing for you for her to do when she got there.
Luke:Right? Like, that's the kind of culture that we live in, is that we would be so like, nah, like we would feel so uncomfortable with having somebody to come in and do something like that for us that we would almost just rather do it ourselves. And that's our culture. That's where we're at. But that's not where the Bible was written at.
Luke:I've been I've actually you get a glimpse into into my life and what I've been doing in my evenings. I've as of late, I've been watching Downton Abbey. Yes. And I like it. It it is it is well written.
Luke:But anyways, no, I've been watching Downton Abbey, which if you don't know, is like kind of like a classic masterpiece drama theater thing in in England. Right? It's set before and during World War I and goes tracks through the legacy of this very rich family. And a lot of the drama has to do with the servants who worked and lived underneath, and they were working for this very wealthy family with this very rich estate, and then the wealthy, family having their own dramas and how they intersect and intertwine. And it's really interesting to watch because you get to see kind of this culture where we're just so far removed from the idea of having servants and butlers and maids and seeing that some of these characters, not all of them were happy, but some of them took honor and respect in their trade and what they were doing.
Luke:And so the question you might ask is like, Well, Luke, is Jesus saying here because he's teaching this parable on slavery or using an example of a slave or a servant, does that mean that Jesus endorses slavery? That's kind of the crux of the question that we kind of get asked. And my answer to that is no. The reason being is that simply to say, the Bible does and will use worldly examples in order to teach truth while not approving of them. It often will use examples of things, giving kind of an illustrative point in order to make a truth.
Luke:And that and but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's endorsing it. You wouldn't kind of do this at least I would hope you wouldn't do this to me, is to take any of my personal examples, anything I say, and say, Oh, well, Luke mentioned this in an illustration or a sermon example. Therefore, he must be endorsing this. You wouldn't understand it that way. And this is one of the things that kind of tricks us up when we read the parables.
Luke:One of the other parables I thought about teaching today happens just in chapter 16. In chapter 16, there's this parable that at least the Internet and Google thinks is the most confusing parable in the entire Bible. And the reason being is that it's about this dishonest manager, this guy who's in charge of his master's money. And the guy goes around and he hears that he's going to get fired. And so what he decides to do is to sell off his master's debt at a lower price.
Luke:So essentially, he's cheating his master out of money. And Jesus says, You should be like that dishonest manager. Everyone's like, What? Why would we want to be like someone who's dishonest and trickery and all of that? And unfortunately, I don't have time to explain that to you.
Luke:But no, you should read it. You should read it. But it does just in essence, as he's trying to get to the point, he's like, You should not You should use your own wealth and money in a way not to support your day to day needs, but you should be using it for the Kingdom and for the future. And so He's not endorsing that we would be untruthful, that we would lie or deceitful. He's just trying to get us ideas to think more long term like this person was.
Luke:Or we might say, Oh, well, there's this other, even shorter and simpler parable of the persistent widow. This widow comes to a judge. She has a case in front of the judge and the judge is like, Go away. I don't want to listen to you. And the parable says that she keeps coming back over and over and over again.
Luke:And eventually the judge listens to her, not because he's a good judge, but just because he wants her to go away and not come back. And then Jesus says, Therefore, we should pray to God. And you might be like, Wait, is God like an unjust judge who doesn't want to listen to us? And no, that's not the point of the parable. The point of the parable is the persistence.
Luke:And so here, the point of the parable is not that Jesus is endorsing servanthood or slavery. He's endorsing the attitude or the humility or the relationship that is being manifested there. I think, too, also, it's important for us to wrestle with and understand that Jesus took the form of a servant. This word that is used for servant or bondservant or slave in this parable is used to describe Jesus in Philippians chapter two. It says that Jesus, though he was God, decided to take the form of a servant or a slave.
Luke:He humbled himself so that he might serve us. And we too ought to have this in our own mind. We ought to do the same. Jesus got down and he washed the feet of his disciples. He ended up washing the feet of the man who would betray him.
Luke:He washed the feet of the man who would deny Him three times. He washed the feet of the men who would fall asleep while He was crying out to God and who would flee and run away and not be there at His crucifixion at His most vulnerable and dire hour. Jesus was a servant to all. Paul describes himself often in his writing as a servant or a slave to Jesus. He talks in Romans.
Luke:He says, We ought to be slaves to righteousness. We ought to be slaves to God. And the harshness of that language is, yes, it grates with us because of our history, of our culture. But the idea there still remains true, that we are servants to God. God is not our servant.
Luke:And to get that flit is is really the wrong way. That's that's ultimately why I think that this passage rubs us the wrong way, why it's it's not something that we would talk about all of the time, is because I think we've gotten into a place where we are in a place of we have a culture of self, a culture of really a place where we've kind of turned Jesus and we've turned God into sort of this, like, self actualization guru. Right? We turned God into sort of a cosmic therapist. Prayer is kind of us laying on the therapist's couch and us kind of seeking God to make us feel better and for us to kind of go about in our lives.
Luke:And I think that that ultimately is going to lead us into a very disparaging and very painful place to be. And so as we're kind of in that place, when we make God the center or no, when we make ourselves the center of the world and that God orients around us, it leaves us with a God that we create and that ultimately we receive nothing from Him that we can't give ourselves. When we are the center of our own world, and what that does is that creates a sense where, well, I don't have a God that I can actually get anything from. I have a God that just gives me what I want. We end up in a place where we're not receiving our identity, where there's nothing that God can tell me, or if He does tell me something that I don't want to hear, then I'm not going to hear it.
Luke:I'm going to I'm going to remove myself from it. And that's a really difficult place to be in. I think we live in a world where we we kind of have bought into this myth or this understanding that while we can just go out and find ourselves, go out and live our own truths. That's kind of the way, like if I had to kind of put the moral of the current world into perspective, into like a sentence, it would be just to simply say that, Well, just do what makes you happy. Right?
Luke:Don't bug anybody. Don't harm anybody. And do what makes you happy. And as long as you do that, you're fine. And you can do that.
Luke:And you can go out into the world and say, Well, I'm just going to go travel and I'm going to go, you know, just try and discover and find myself and discover and make my own identity and figure out who I am. And that's a really heavy burden to carry, to be honest. If it's up to me to define who I am, to figure out all of the things that are my inner working, if there's nothing I receive from God, there's no God who has created me and designed me to be a certain way, that's a heavy weight to carry. So I don't think that we want to live in a world where we're actually the center, where God is just a God that we've created to prop up our own sense of self. That leads us into a place where we're ultimately just playing a game with ourselves.
Luke:And then the last thing I want to point out about this parable before we get to the actual point of the parable, the thing that makes it hard for us to understand, is that the parable does not communicate God's character. Rather, it conveys the attitude of the disciple. So you might look at this and you're just like, Well, does God just treat us as like, I thought you just said, Luke, Jesus treats us. He serves and He's kind and He's humble. And yeah, there's even a parable in the chapter before this where there's similarly servants waiting for the master to come home.
Luke:They're waiting diligently. And when they're faithful, the master comes home and serves the servants. And so you might be like, Well, Luke, it does seem like like God does treat us better than that. And I say, Absolutely. The parable here is not trying to convey or tell us what God is like.
Luke:It's just trying to tell us what our attitude should be, what our expectations should be. And when we get that kind of conflated, when we make this passage about, well, God's an angry God and like, that's not what this passage is saying. It's simply trying to give us ourselves a heart check. It's trying to let us know that God is God and we are not. And so we need to have that deeper understanding.
Luke:So what then is the point of this parable? And I think the point kind of becomes illuminated with this question. Do we follow and obey God for ulterior motives? Am I a Christian? Do I follow God?
Luke:Am I obedient to what Jesus says for reasons other than the fact that he is God? Am I coming to him with a desire into relationship in order to receive something? I was thinking about this, and I remember when I was a young kid, we had in our backyard a thing that everybody wants to have. A trampoline. Right?
Luke:I had a trampoline. We, my brothers and I, we maybe wrestled a little bit more on it than we were supposed to. Don't ask my one brother how his arm got broken. But we we had a trampoline. It was a lot of fun to jump up on and play.
Luke:And I remember I had some friends over. I was really excited. Some friends of mine were coming over, and they came, and they just ran onto the trampoline, and then they had zero interest in actually interacting with me. They're they're like, oh, it's so fun that you have a trampoline. And I'm like, yeah.
Luke:Do you guys wanna do something else? No. You know? I was just like, oh, I get it. You're not here for me.
Luke:You're here for the trampoline. Right? I even, like, even very honestly, with some remembrance in my younger self, there was a friend I had. I had the Super Nintendo, which was super cool. I love the Super Nintendo, playing Mario and all that.
Luke:But I had a friend who had a PlayStation one. Right? No one's here as a gamer. No one is identifying with this. No.
Luke:The PlayStation one, like, it was three d graphics and Spyro the dragon. You could fly around. I was like, oh. And, like, I'll be honest, when I came to his house, that was all I wanted to do. You know?
Luke:Like, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. That's cool. Can we just play, like, some PlayStation? You know? I had an ulterior motive.
Luke:My relationship with him was tainted because I wanted something else out of it than just friendship with him. I wanted to play the cool video game. And that is a terrible place to feel. That's not a good place to be. No.
Luke:And hopefully you've never experienced that because that's not any fun to find out that somebody is really just your friend or is in relationship with you for ulterior motives. And the question is is or the point here is is that we're to love God not just for the benefits of God. We're not supposed to be in relationship with God because of what he does for us, what he gives us, how he makes us feel. And I fear that sometimes we do get into a place where we love God with strings attached. And love with strings attached is the worst.
Luke:Right? It's the worst. When it's like, I'm going to I'm going to scratch your back so you can scratch mine. Right? I'm being nice and generous and kind right now so that later you will do something similar for me.
Luke:And we all eventually, we kind of get a bit of a kind of a gut that senses this when somebody's like, Uh-huh, you're being really nice and kind right now because you want something from me. Right? You know, I'm sure that none of you parents have had kids who have figured that out yet either. We we all kind of get into this place where we're we're doing acts of kindness and maybe even being loving to somebody. But what's underneath is this kind of like invisible string.
Luke:I kind of imagine fishing line, very thin, clear, translucent fishing line that's attached to this act. And the person enjoys the favor, enjoys the kindness and the love. They take the compliment. They receive the flowers. They receive the gift.
Luke:And then later they find, Oh, this thing that I was given has a string attached to it. And now I'm stuck. Now I'm obligated. Now I'm this. Now I'm that.
Luke:And that does not feel good, loving, or kind. And I think that this was definitely a thing that was in the disciples' minds. You might think of another example where the disciples came up to Jesus. Actually, there's multiples where they got into arguments of saying, Who's going to sit next to Jesus in the kingdom of heaven? And then there was even two of the disciples got their mom.
Luke:Mom showed up and said, Hey, Jesus, could you let my son sit one on your right and one on your left at the kingdom of heaven? Why? Why was that such a big deal? Because in their minds and in the religion of the time, there was such a big concept of being obedient and doing things for God in expectation of receiving rewards. And I fear and I wonder if we don't get into a place where we think that we can perhaps manipulate or own or control God's temperament or His actions or His gifts because of how we behave or how we control ourselves or how we are obedient.
Luke:We think that, Oh, well, I've been going to church. I've been reading my Bible. I've been doing all the right things. I was kind to that person when I didn't want to be. Maybe God will give me a Mercedes today.
Luke:Right? Whatever it is. Right? Like, what? Like, that's somewhat of a laughable excuse.
Luke:But we do that. We do think that like, Well, I've been such a good Christian. I bet you Jesus likes me more than other people. I mean, laugh. I think we're chuckling because that made us uncomfortable.
Luke:That's that's one of the things about humor is that often humor comes out when something is uncomfortable. I think that makes us uncomfortable is because if some of us were honest, we think that. We think that we're a better Christian than someone else. We think we're a better follower of Jesus. We think that, well, Jesus likes me more than them, obviously.
Luke:And that's portraying something in our heart that is sick, that is wrong, that is bringing a totally wrong attitude to this. The question that I have for us is, can we say Who's familiar with the story of Job? Right? Job was this man, he followed God, he did all of the right things, and then he had one very terrible, awful day where his children died, he lost his estate, his farm burned down, his animals were destroyed, his servants left him. He was covered in boils.
Luke:His wife came up to him and said, Job, you should curse God and die. And then walked away from him and he was left completely alone. But Job had this to say in Job one twenty one. Which there we go. He said, Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall return.
Luke:The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. I have a question for us. If we had that very terrible, awful day, would we say, Blessed is the name of the Lord? Would we have an understanding that we came into this world with nothing?
Luke:We came naked and afraid and nothing to give. Nothing was ours. And that all that I have received in life, all that I have that is good, have been things that the Lord has given to me. And I have no ownership over it. And that if it gets taken away, that is okay.
Luke:Blessed be the name of the Lord. I'm not saying that that would be an easy thing to say. But would our understanding in our relationship with God, would it just absolutely break apart if something more like that were to happen in our lives? And I think that's where we get stuck. I think we get into this place where we have these strings attached to our understanding and to our relationship with God.
Luke:And that's where we get into this place where we're in a spiritual holding pattern as it was. Cause I know that I want I wanted my life to go at a straight line. I wanted it to go from point A to point B, from success to success, from good thing to good thing, without anything negative or bad happening. That's that's how I wanted my life to play out. I didn't want unexpected pain.
Luke:I didn't want loss. I didn't want to take a detour. I didn't want to fail at my thing at my objectives. I didn't want to be imperfect. I wanted things to play out the way I wanted them to play out.
Luke:And when they don't, what happens? Do we get angry? Do we get into a place where we're like, No, God, I'm pulling on this invisible string. You have to do what I say. I think that that is when we get into a place where we fly in spiritual circles because we want God to conform to our flight plan rather than release control and follow obediently.
Luke:I think we get into a place where we're constantly in this place where I said, where we started about being stuck in the spiritual life, stuck as believers, stuck not growing in love for God, not growing in love for other people, is because we're attached to something. We've got some sort of string that we've attached to God and we're like, God, you got I'll follow you if you bless me. I will follow you if you make my kids perfect. I will follow you if I get the relationship I want. I will follow you if I get success.
Luke:I will follow you if I'm never called to do anything that's uncomfortable. I will follow you if I get to live the lifestyle I want to live. I will follow you as long as you just make me happy. And the thing is, is that when we don't get one of those, I will follow you if onlys If I don't get that, we get into a place where we're refusing to go where God is leading us, and then we just fly around in circles. We find some sort of way of making kind of a cycle happen over and over again in our lives because we refuse to love God for God's sake.
Luke:We're trying to hold on to, we're trying to earn God's love, we're trying to earn favor from him. And this leads us into a place where we love and serve God, not because he's God. We love and serve him because of the things that he does for us. And that's a really shaky place to base your faith on. Because the moment that things don't go the way that you want them to, you're going to experience this frustration.
Luke:You're going to experience this angst because God's not living up to this contract that you tried to make him sign, but he never agreed to. We can chase a thousand good things. Ecclesiastes chapter two verses 10 through 11 says this. It says, Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure.
Luke:My heart found pleasure in all my toil. And this was my reward for all of my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and all the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, all was vanity and striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. Ecclesiastes is a reflection on life and its futility.
Luke:I know it's a very encouraging book. But the idea here is like, I said yes to everything. All the things that I wanted. I got all of it. I tried every good food that there was.
Luke:I tried every positive experience. I tried working for all of these different things. And I got it all. But at the end of the day, I found that all of it was vanity. All of it was chaff.
Luke:All of it was waste in the wind. And it left me with no satisfaction. We are in this place where we want things from God, perhaps. We want the perfect life. We want things to play out.
Luke:But we're so busy chasing those things that we've missed understanding our true relationship with God, that following God isn't about receiving blessings, it isn't about getting things the way I want them to, it isn't about me even earning some sort of spiritual respect or prestige from others or from God. It's about following God because He is God. So what do we do? How do we break out of the spiritual holding pattern? If we find we're in this stuck place, we're unable to move forward, we're unable to grow, how do we let go?
Luke:How do we get rid of these attachments? It was Augustine. He was a theologian and church father. He talked about this illustration. He said, God is constantly trying to pour grace and good gifts into your hands.
Luke:The problem is, is that your hands are full. They're full of other things. You're constantly grasping and holding on to things that are not of God, things that you are demanding or wanting or desiring. And so I believe that when we release God from our demands and bargains that we gain something. When we decide, God, I'm going to follow you not with strings attached.
Luke:Not because you make me feel a certain way. Not because I want something from expecting to get something from other people. I'm going to follow you because you're God. Because you are worthy, because you are glorious, that you are wonderful and loving. When we finally get to that place where we love God because He is God, we get into a place where we receive and we gain peace.
Luke:I think there's an immense amount of peace we gain when we release God from our demands and bargains. Because all of a sudden, when things don't go our way, when things are difficult or uncertain, we're no longer left holding this bargain or this deal or this expectation we thought we had. All of a sudden, I can experience peace in the middle of where I find myself because I wasn't trying to get this thing from God. And when I didn't get it, it's okay. We experience a sense of peace.
Luke:We know that God holds things all in his hands, and we know that he's good. We gain peace because we have surrendered our expectations and can accept things truly as they are. If you're someone who's familiar with the serenity prayer, that is the heart of that prayer. Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the the ability to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. It is this inner desire to accept God's peace and to know that I cannot control all things, but God does.
Luke:Secondly, I think when we let go of our strings, when we follow God, is that we come to a place of clarity in God's will. I think so often we're like, God, this is what I want my life to work out. I want you to work this way. I want you to make this happen. This is where I want God's will look like for me.
Luke:But I'll just tell you from my own experience, that's not how it works. We're not the God is not the ghostwriter to our lives. Right? We're not writing the story and saying, God, make it happen. It's not how it happens.
Luke:And so I think when we get to a place and we're like, when God's will doesn't play out the way that we expect it's going to or wanted it to, we're not in a place where we're like, Ah, I can't seem to follow God or I don't know what to do because things didn't play out the way I wanted them to. Rather, we can say, Woah, God's put me in this place I didn't maybe expect. How is God working? There's a book called, I think, Experiencing God by Blackaby. And he was one of his key takeaways from that book, the thing, like, worth price of buying that book is the idea of not praying for God to move necessarily, but rather looking and seeing where is God moving?
Luke:Where is God already at work? Where is an invitation for him, for you to step into his will? When we let go of our bargains or expectations from God, we let go of these strings, we're suddenly free to look around and say, Oh, I didn't realize God was working over here. I didn't realize that maybe God had put this person in my life for a reason. I didn't realize that maybe this difficult circumstance I'm in is so that I can minister to someone else.
Luke:We suddenly find clarity in God's will. And then finally is that when we let go of our bargains and expectations of God, we experience and receive a love that we cannot measure. Because here's the thing. If you think that you earn God's love and you earn God's approval from being a good person or from being a religious person, if you think you get that, then when God loves you, you're like, Yeah, of course you do. Right?
Luke:I'm a good person. Of course God loves me. But when we actually sit with the truth, with the reality that I've done nothing to contribute to my salvation except the sin that made it necessary, then we realize that all goodness, all love, all support, all kindness of the Lord is goodness and gifts beyond, and it is grace upon grace. When we have a recognition that I am a sinner saved by grace so that I cannot boast, so that God might be glorified in me through my weaknesses. That this that me that I'm an unworthy servant.
Luke:It doesn't matter that I'm up here on the stage today or that I have a microphone. At the end of the day, I'm an unworthy servant. Everything that I have is because God has been good to me. And and that that is that is the attitude that we have. And when we have that attitude, God becomes all that more good because we've rightly understood ourselves.
Luke:Understand, I'm not advocating for some sort of self abasement. Not wanting you to go out and beat yourself. I've done that. What I'm saying here is that we need to rightly understand ourselves, to say that I am a creature. God is God.
Luke:I did not make Him. I do not control Him. He is who He is, regardless of what I think or how I feel about it. And I'm going to follow God not because I want or can control or get something from him, but because he's God. Because he's good.
Luke:And he's so good that even though I am an unworthy servant, he sent his son Jesus Christ to die for me, that he has called me a son, he has called me a daughter. He has said, come and sit at my right hand. He has given us grace and goodness upon grace and goodness. And so my encouragement for you in this from this sermon is to walk away and is to say, What are the things that you are attaching to God? What are those little invisible strings that have got you in a holding pattern?
Luke:Those things that you're like, not willing to let go of this, not willing to face this, not willing to deal with this. And what would it look like to move from a place of following God because He makes me feel good or He gives me what I want, but I follow God because He is God. And understanding ourselves as people who long to be a door servant in the temple, in the house of God. That was David's cry, David's prayer. He says, Lord, I long to be a servant in your house just so that I could be there.
Luke:Let that be our heart and our prayer. Conduit, as you go from this place, it is my prayer that as you understand yourself as a servant to the Lord, that you would see just how awesome, how deep, how wide, how great His grace, His mercy is and love for you. As you go from this place, I pray that the Lord would be with you. Go in peace and know that you're loved.
