| This is a sermon I preached this last Sunday at our church...
I've been transformed over the past couple of years. I'm really a very, very
different person than I was four years ago. That transformation is due mostly
to two things - first, my introduction to the Holy Spirit, beginning four
years ago when Dolores Wind er was here. I've been transformed from a good
American binatarian into a true trinitarian. What's a binatarian? Well,
most churches and Christians know a lot about God the Father and Creator, and
they all know about Jesus, but we usually don't talk much about that third
member of the Trinity. That has changed radically for me over the past four
years. The Holy Spirit has gotten hold of me in a big way. That alone has
been completely life transforming, but that's another sermon. Largely
because of that introduction to the Holy Spirit, I came to want to know Jesus
better and follow Him more closely. So I started to examine Him and His
life, as described in the Bible, more closely. And a subtle yet
not-so-subtle change began to take place.
I began to realize that I'd never really let Jesus be Jesus. Oh, I said I
followed Jesus, of course, but I didn't really. Have you ever seen those
comedy acts where the comedian has a dummy on either side of them, with the
arms and legs of the dummy attached to the arms and legs of the comedian by
poles? The dummies then do everything the comedian does - they follow every
move. It looks like they are moving on their own volition, but they aren't,
they're just attached to the comedian. Well, my Jesus was like that. My
Jesus was like a dummy that I had dressed up and set out in front of me,
attached to my hands and feet by poles. Then I walked along, with my Jesus
going out ahead of me, me controlling his every move, and said "Look how I'm
following Jesus!"
What do I mean by that? I mean that I took my own personal view of how the
world worked and what was true and what was real, and then I took Jesus and
sort of squeezed him into that view, lopping off the pieces of Him that
didn't fit. When I read things that He said or did that didn't fit into my
idea of who He should be, I either ignored them or reinterpreted them to mean
something else.
Imagine this, if you will. I mean, really think about what is happening
here. We say that we believe that Jesus Christ is actually God incarnate. We
say that we believe that the very creator of all that is, from stars to
starfish, became a human being and walked among us to teach us the truth.
Now I said I believed that, but I didn't act like I believed it. Consider.
If I get into a disagreement about the nature of reality with the creator of
the universe, who do you think is right? I'm never going to be the one that
is right. But really, that is what I was doing. I was talking to God, as He
revealed Himself through Jesus, and saying "No, that can't be right. You
must be mistaken about that." Just pause for a moment and consider the sheer
ludicrousness of that spectacle - sitting down and arguing with the creator
about the nature of reality! And I didn't even really realize that I was
doing it!
In Jesus day, this was much more difficult to do without realizing that you
were doing it. Jesus said many things that were very shocking, then and now,
and people had and still have a hard time accepting them. But when He was
right there in the flesh, there really wasn't much of an option about how to
deal with it. You either accepted Him and therefore accepted what He said,
or you rejected what He said and rejected Him along with it. There are
several places where such confrontations are recorded in Scripture, among the
most telling is in John 6:
Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the
Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my
flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the
last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever
eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the
living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who
feeds on me will live because of me. This,BArial,> is the bread that came
down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feed s on
this bread will live forever." He said this while teaching in the synagogue
in Capernaum.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who
can accept it?"
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them,
"Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he
was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words
I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of
you who do not believe." For Jesus had known from the beginning which of
them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, "This is
why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled
him."
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed
him.
Jn 6:53-66
There it was, right in their faces. A teaching that was incredibly difficult
for them to accept. And for those who would not accept it, there was little
option of how to deal with it. Their only real option was to turn back and
no longer follow Him. He was right there, and they couldn't deny what He had
said. They didn't have the luxury we have today. Today Jesus is no longer
here in the flesh to defend His words, so we can interprett hem to mean
something else that doesn't threaten us so much. Now I know that some things
are allegorical and some things are to be considered in the context of the
culture, but whenever I hear the word 'interpretation' my antennae now go up
to see whether I'm turning the plain truth of what Jesus said into something
else so I can feel more comfortable with it.
As I realized that I was not accepting parts of who Jesus claimed Himself to
be, I began to have the determination to not force Jesus into my mold any
more, to let Jesus be Jesus, to let Jesus define Jesus. And things started
to change. I'm not going to tell you this morning how you should let Jesus
be Jesus. What I'm going to do is tell you just a couple of the things that
changed for me. I'll choose the ones that were hardest for me. A big one
was Jesus' exclusiveness and intolerance. "What?" you ask, "Jesus, exclusive
and intolerant?" Our culture is very into inclusiveness and tolerance, and
so was I. The Jesus I wanted to believe in - my puppet Jesus - was
wonderfully inclusive and tolerant too. And of course Jesus *was* inclusive
of all sorts of people who were outcasts in His day, and tolerant of the
sinful results of life's woundings, as he reached out to love and heal
people. I focused on those passages, and made my Jesus tolerant of everything.
But I started to listen to the real Jesus has He defined Himself, and
unfortunately He wasn't quite like that. There's a side to Jesus that brooks
no disagreement. He said hard things like the passage I just read, "unless
you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in
you," and "No one comes to the Father but by me." Very definitively
*EX*clusive. It doesn't match at all with the Jesus that our culture would
like, our culture wants a Jesus who accepts all paths to God as good paths.
And while Jesus was incredibly tolerant of sin as a result of woundedness,
until such time as He could love that person to health and wholeness, He was
incredibly *intolerant* of willful sinfulness or refusal to face the truth.
He had no problem calling the Pharisees who stood on their own external
righteousness and rejected Him "vipers" and "unclean tombs, full of dead
men's bones." So He wasn't exactly very tolerant either. Jesus presented
truth like a sword, and you either accepted it or rejected it. It's not the
Jesus I would have made up. It's not the Jesus I would have wanted Him to
be. But it's the Jesus who IS.
Another big one for me was scripture. I had always had a pretty loose
opinion of the authority of scripture. But as I came to know more of who
Jesus was, I came smack up against the fact that Jesus very much affirmed the
eternal truth and value of scripture. He claimed that He came to fulfill the
law, and that not a stroke of the pen in the Law would pass away. He
answered every temptation of Satan in the wilderness with Scripture. So I
had to reexamine my view of Scripture too. If Jesus said that Scripture was
that valuable, I had to allow my own thinking to be transformed to come into
alignment with the thinking of Jesus.
And once I started to let Jesus be Jesus, I found that I had to let God be
God. Jesus came in the context of the Messiah promised by YHWH, so I had to
back up and let YHWH be YHWH. This was even scarier, because the God of the
Old Testament is much less the God I'd make up than Jesus is. As I started
to let God be God, I came across something that really startled me. It's in
the Ten Commandments.
The first two commandments had always puzzled me, and I'd always lumped them
together, as most people do. But recently I've come to think that maybe we
shouldn't lump them together, that maybe they are saying two very different
things. Lets look at them. The first commandment is clear:
"You shall have no other gods beside me. EX 20:3
No other gods, pure and simple. In the days when these words were first
spoken, there were lots of other gods. Molech, Asherah, Dagon, Baal; gods
were a dime a dozen. Everyone worshipped gods, lots of them. It was
generally considered a good idea to hedge your bets by worshipping every god
available. No sense offending any of them by failing to worship them. But
YHWH said something different - "Worship me, and me alone. No other gods -
period." There's that exclusiveness again. YHWH was offended if you
worshipped any other god.
In our day, we don't have the same kind of gods, but we have plenty of 'gods'
that we put before the Lord. Money, career, prestige, ... football. Even
good things like marriage and family. If they come before the Lord they are
other gods, and are forbidden by Him.
But I always lumped the second commandment in with the first:
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven
above or on the earth beneath or. EX 20:4
It says "no idols," and I always thought of idols as physical representations
of other gods. So I just sort of thought of this as "commandment 1, part 2,"
elaborating on not having other gods. And since little statues (my idea of
an idol) aren't a big thing any more, I didn't really pay this much more
thought. I figured this commandment was no longer an issue.
But I noticed that no other commandments have an elaboration. It doesn't say
in one commandment "Don't murder each other," and then another commandment
"Don't murder each other out of anger." The second would be redundant. If
we can't murder, then whether the reason is anger or any other reason is
irrelevant - all murder has already been eliminated. The same applies then
to the commandment to have no idols. If we already have a commandment that
says we can't have any other gods, then it is redundant to tell us that we
can't have any idols of those other gods. We can't have anything to do with
other gods at all, let alone make statues of them. So the second commandment
must mean something else.
I looked at the second commandment more closely. In the Hebrew, what it says
is, "You shall make no image or likeness of anything ... and worship that
image." I believe what this commandment prohibits is not idols or images of
other gods, but idols or images made to represent YHWH, the one true God.
God is saying, in no uncertain terms: "I will define myself. You do not
define me. Not who I am. Not what I am like. I am that I am, and you are
to accept me as I define myself. I am very jealous of the right to define
who I am, you shall not compete with me in defining me." A very illuminating
story that portrays exactly this occurs immediately afterward, in Exodus 32:
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the
mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us a god who
will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt,
we don't know w Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your
wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me." So
all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took
what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf,
fashioning it with a tool. Then they said "These are your gods, Israel, who
brought you up out of Egypt."
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced,
"Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD." So the next day the
people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship
offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge
in revelry.
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go down, because your people, whom you
brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn
away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in
the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and
have said, `These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of
Egypt.'
Exodus 32:1-10
Now I always took this story to be a story of the people worshipping another
god, and that's why YHWH was angry. But that's not what they are doing.
Look at the story carefully. When they make the calf, they don't say "We
don't know where Moses is, so forget about the god that brought us out of
Egypt, we will make a new god and worship it." Not at all. They think they
are still worshipping the god that brought them out of Egypt. Look in verse
4, when Aaron is presenting the calf to the people: "This is your god, who
brought you up out of Egypt." And in verse 5, Aaron announces that with the
altar in front of the calf, "tomorrow will be a festival to YHWH." They use
the name the Lord gave himself, and they claim they are still following the
same god who brought them out of Egypt. But what they have done is crafted
their own image of what YHWH is like - and are worshipping that image as YHWH.
And what is God's response to this worship? Does He recognize that they are
still turning to Him, YHWH , and lovingly accept their worship? Or does He
accept their worship with hesitation, with the intent to correct their
mistake when He has a chance? Far from it. This is the Lord's reaction:
I have seen these people," the LORD said to Moses, "and they are a
stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against
them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.
Ex 32:9-10
That is YHWH, folks. That is who He is. That is who He defines himself to
be. It's not the god I would make up. The god I would make up would
recognize that they still called the calf they had created YHWH and
identified it as the god who brought them out of Egypt, and tolerantly accept
their faulty worship. But YHWH isn't subject to what I'd make up. He is who
He is. And He's made it quite clear that He's not into our tampering with His
definition of who He is.
In our day we don't make physical statues and call them god. But we very
much make 'images' of god and worship those images. We make up our own image
of what we think God is like and call that image God. How many times have
you heard someone say something like "The god I believe in would never do
something like that." Is that "The god I believe in" or "The god I've made
up?" If Judaism and Christianity are to be believed, God the creator of the
entire universe went out of His way to clearly reveal Himself and define
Himself, first to the Jews and then ultimately through Jesus. If we really
take this seriously, then this is the God who IS, not just the God we want to
be. And we, as His followers, need to understand God as He IS, not as we
want Him to be.
This was the issue at stake with the ReImagining conference that was held two
years ago. Some people were upset at some of the specific excesses at that
conference, but the fundamental problem runs much deeper than any specifics.
The entire premise of the conference, as revealed by the title, is that the
image of God - what God is like and how He is to be worshipped - was
'imagined' in the first place, and that it was high time to re-imagine a new
image for God. This flies directly in the face of the second commandment,
and of who God proclaims Himself to be.
So how does this apply to each of you? If I haven't already, I could
probably offend nearly everyone here, including myself, by listing some of
the ways that Jesus and YHWH describe themselves that we don't want to hear.
Pretty much all of us have ways in which we confine God to our own concepts
and understanding of how the world works, and rely on that instead of how God
describes Himself. But I'm not going to go about listing ways in which you
should let Jesus define Himself. What is more important is for you to do
that. Read the Bible, see who Jesus is, and let Jesus be Jesus.
And this is not just about our intellectual ideas or doctrines, either. It's
about becoming disciples. When Jesus gave the great commission to His
disciples, He did not say "Go into all the world, making converts and
believers." Salvation does come by faith alone in Christ's sacrifice for us,
I am not claming that there is more to be done to be saved, but salvation is
only the first step in our Christian walk. Jesus said "Go into all the world
and make disciples." A disciple is not just someone who believes certain
things. A disciple is someone who is committed to becoming like their
master. Jesus does not want to just transform what we think, He is
interested in the much more complete process of transforming what we are.
Francis Frangipane says "Victory begins with the name of Jesus on our lips,
and is consummated with the nature of Jesus in our hearts."
So begin, or deepen, the process of becoming a disciple. Determine in your
own heart that you will adapt yourself to Jesus, instead of adapting Jesus to
you. A great way to do this is to study closely the life of Christ.
But however you do it, LET JESUS BE JESUS, and your lives will never be the
same. And that is the good news of the Gospel.
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