Ruthie's Kitchen on November 6

Something else to look forward to on election day: Church of the Good Shepherd will be the host of Ruthie's Kitchen on Tuesday, November 6th. This takes place every Tuesday evening at His Dream Center (205 Baltic Street, Nags Head). All churches on the OBX participate to feed the homeless, poor, and hungry. Setup will begin at 4pm and dinner will be served at 5pm. I have written about how Christians desire to remove themselves from the world in order to not be stained by the culture's brush. The Apostle James says that this is only one half of what religion is all about. The other half is to visit the poor and needy in their affliction. The Christian cannot have one half of the equation without the other, and both are needed to practice true hospitality. Ruthie's kitchen will give us the opportunity to practice both outreach and upholding the truth in Christ. We hope you will want to join us in this expression of true Christian love.

Asking the Question

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.” ’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. (Mark 10:17-22)

What must I do to inherit eternal life?  Is this a valid question?  It sounds like it on the surface.  In fact, it sounds like the most valid question possible--the most important question possible.  Eternal life is the most important thing a person can inherit, so this sounds like it would be a good question to ask our Lord.  Jesus answers, essentially, "Keep the commandments."  Now, here is where the young questioner gets arrogant, gets obstinate.  He suddenly holds his head up high and says, I've been there, done that.  I've kept all those commandments since my birth.

What does Jesus respond?  If we were he, we'd all be shouting LIAR!  But Jesus is not so crass.  He looks on him and loves him.  He knows what is in the man's heart.  The man is not lying.  He honestly believes he has kept the commandments.  Once I led someone through the Confession of Sin and when we got to the line, "We have not loved you with our whole heart," she stopped.  "I can't say that," she told me, "because I HAVE loved God with my whole heart."  What do you say to that?

Well, did you have breakfast this morning?  Yes.  Did you pray over your breakfast before eating?  Yes.  Did you think about God while you ate?  Well, no.  I had a issue of the Coastland Times in front of me.  I was thinking about a ratchet that I was going to buy at Ace Hardware.  You see, we CANNOT love God with our whole heart.  It is impossible to love God with our whole hearts, because it means constantly thinking about him and loving him.  We have too many distractions.

But it wouldn't matter if you got rid of all those distractions.  Get rid of the World and you have the Flesh and the Devil to contend with.  Somewhere, there is a monk in a cell kneeling for prayers.  He is trying to love God with his whole heart, but suddenly this song from childhood pops into his head, and he is distracted from God.

Jesus responds in an interesting way.  This is a very misunderstood response, because it seems that the young man has stumped Jesus with his answer, "I HAVE kept all the commandments," and Jesus now has to think of another challenge for the man.  "Drat!" Jesus thinks, "Now I have to think of something... Aha!  Now, what I want you to do is to sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor!"  There!  Try that one on for size.  Sure enough the young man walks away.

Is that what is happening?  No!  Jesus is not turning the tables.  He's not adding a layer of challenge on the already righteous young man to weigh him down.  Jesus is merely pointing out the "untruth" in the young man's response.  Jesus is merely saying that IF one is REALLY keeping the commandments, then he has ALREADY sold all of his possessions and given the money to the poor.  IF you have NOT done such a thing then you are not really keeping the commandments.  Did I mention that the commandments are impossible to keep?

What does it look like when you keep the commandments?  Well, it looks like selling your stuff and giving the money to the poor.  Have any of us in this room done that fully?  I know we are charitable, but have we given up everything? No.  Because we can't keep the commandments.  We are unworthy for eternal life.  Now, here is something interesting that Jesus tacks onto the end of his command.  He adds this, "THEN, follow me!"  Those two words, "follow me," are actually the ANSWER to the young man's original question. "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"  "Follow me."

So why the other stuff in the middle?  Why does Jesus go through the Q & A with the young man when the answer is really just "follow me?"  It seems like Jesus is setting up a sequence.  FIRST, obey the commandments, okay?  Done that?  Now SECOND, give everything to the poor.  And then, once you've done that, THIRD, follow me.  Shouldn't we be following Jesus first?

Exactly, and that is why the young man's original question is NOT A VALID QUESTION TO ASK GOD! We thought it was.  It sounded great.  It's a question that we all want to know the answer to, but the question should never have been asked.  The young man should merely have dropped everything and followed Jesus.  That is why Jesus went through all this Q & A.  Because he already knew that the young man was NOT CALLED to follow him.  The young man is trying to achieve salvation through human means: WHAT MUST I DO, and Jesus has called him out.

Did Jesus come up to the twelve and say to them, "have you kept the commandments?  Have you given all your stuff to the poor?  Then follow me!"  No, he said to them, "follow me," and they followed.  It's only AFTER we are following God's call that we are able to keep the commandments and begin to release ourselves from all the garbage that we have gathered unto ourselves that distract us from God.  I have a massive DVD collection that has been sitting in the cabinet for years without being watched.  Following Jesus comes first.

Jesus knows that the young man will not follow him.  Jesus knew that when the first question was asked.  You are hearing these words, reading this far, because God's voice is calling your heart to follow him.  What must we do to inherit eternal life?  Follow Jesus.  Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things--keeping the commandments and giving to the poor--will be added unto you.  Following Jesus is the answer to the question.

Petitioning the King

Although, the Old Testament events are actual history, they are also parables, and since the central character is God, we can look at Old Testament events as parables about God and the Kingdom of God.  Our reading from Esther this morning is a great example (Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22).

Characters: the king represents God, Queen Esther represents us, and Haman represents who?  The devil?  Ungodly man?  Let's say the World, the Flesh, and the Devil: the temptations that we face every day.  We won't really get into Haman's role here.

The first thing we learn from this passage is that God is the initiator.  Esther 7:2: the king again said to Esther, "What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled."  The king spoke first.  God speaks first.  As we talked about last week: God is always previous.  We tend to think of us asking for God first, but God has put the idea into our heads.  We look at Jesus walking on water, and we think that Peter telling Jesus to command him onto the water, too, means that the whole relationship process with God is up to us to initiate: “Jesus, command me onto the water with you!”  But the idea wouldn't have occurred to Peter had he not seen Jesus walking toward him first.  Likewise, we don't think of a relationship with God until we see God coming toward us, asking us, as he asks Esther, “What is your petition?”

Some may say that Esther invited the King to her dinner, which puts the initiation back in Esther's, and subsequently our, hands.  However, we must always remember that the King picked Esther to be his queen.  We could say that he “elected” her.  Likewise, the King elects us to be part of his kingdom.  Once again, the initiation falls into the king's hands.

The second thing we learn is something we usually consider a throwaway statement: even up to half of my kingdom.  Dude!  God just offered us half of his kingdom!  Why would we not take that?  In fact, that is EXACTLY what we, in our fallen states, would choose. Our sin-depraved selves would always choose the material possessions and power that this world offers over anything else—even our own lives. That is the predicament we are in!

But Queen Esther does not respond that way.  She passes the test.  We, too, must pass the test, if we are to enter God's kingdom, and choose something other than worldly things.  Esther chooses life.  Verse 3: Then Queen Esther answered, "If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me.”  She is pleading for her life.  We, too, when asked by God what our petition is, must respond with “everlasting life.”

Let's look at some other examples.  Here is first Kings 3:5: “At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, “Ask what I should give you.”  See the similarity?  One, God initiates.  Two, the sky is the limit on what we can ask for!  What does Solomon ask for? “Give to your servant an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil.”  Wisdom.  And from scripture we know that Wisdom is Christ; 1 Corinthians 1:24 says, “Christ is the power of God and the Wisdom of God.  Knowledge of Christ is also everlasting life.  As it says in John 17: “This is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”  Wisdom and knowledge of God are everlasting life.  Essentially Solomon asked for life.

In 2 Kings 2:9 Elisha asks for a double helping of God's spirit.  Here is another who passes the test, and instead of asking for wealth and riches and power, Elisha is asking for God's spirit.  The Holy Spirit, Wisdom, and Everlasting Life are all bound and wrapped up in each other.

So, Esther asks for life.  She describes her situation thus: “For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated.”  This is the human condition she is describing.  We have sold ourselves into the enemy's hands and our destination is destruction, annihilation.  Everlasting death.  Esther says that if we had merely sold ourselves into slavery, we would still have peace.  We are slaves to sin.  We are slaves to unrighteousness, but that's not the problem.  The wages of sin is death.  If we were merely slaves on this earth and then continued on to everlasting life, that would be okay.  But, as we stand, our paths lead to everlasting death.  And in the meantime, we are slaves.  We think we have liberty when we are not following God, and that following God then restricts us.  We instinctively reject following God.  But the truth is that we are slaves NOW.  We have no liberty NOW, and when we follow God, he liberates us.  We are freed from slavery.  It's as if we were purchased by someone we thought was a slave master, but when we fall into his hands, he immediately frees us.  However, we are too scared to choose God, because he appears to be a slave master.

So, take your pick.  The way out of this slavery that leads to everlasting death is one of three things: either Wisdom or Spirit or Everlasting Life.  All of those things are wrapped up in Jesus Christ.  So take your pick: Jesus or slavery.  It sounds like a reasonable choice, doesn't it, and yet we will choose slavery all of the time.  God is the one who walks to us on the water and asks us the question, “what is your petition?”  Otherwise we would never desire to choose life, and we would remain slaves to death forever.

Turn to Christ, and as it says in that final verse in our Esther reading, we will gain relief from our enemies—the world, the flesh, and the devil—and our days will turn for us from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday; and we should make them days of feasting and gladness, days for sending gifts of food to one another and presents to the poor.

Rejoice the Lord is King; Again I Say Rejoice.

God Is Always Previous

Our Sunday morning discipleship group has been reading A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, and in the very first chapter, Tozer writes that God is always previous.  Our desire to pursue God ONLY comes from God himself.  He plants that desire in us.  Without God planting that desire, we would pursue something else, like punk rock or action movies at best, sex and drugs and pain at worst.

The idea that God is always previous helps take us out of the “helpful gospel” realm.  That is the realm in which we believe that we are really working out our own salvation, and God is on the sideline, like a football coach, cheering us on as we run the ball across the goal line.  Woohoo!  God shouts.  You did it!  You remembered all the things I told you.  When we realize that God instills the desire in us, we move away from the idea that we are saving ourselves.

Then there's the other extreme: that we are merely robots without free will.  If God is first, then he must be controlling our actions, and there's really nothing we can do, so why talk about God to anyone?  Why live a Christian life?  God is just going to save us anyway.  Turn up the punk rock!

But Tozer writes that God may be previous, he may have instilled the desire to pursue him, but we still RESPOND, with our free will, and actively pursue him.  Even though God gives us the grace to pursue him, we must positively build on that grace.  God is the foundation, but we are building on the solid rock of Christ.  And as we build, he supplies us with even more grace, and our Christian structure grows more and more.  It's a collaboration.

But that previous grace is always there—that foundation.  Without it, we are building a structure on sand—pretty much like every building here on the Outer Banks—and that will not last forever.  God being previous should always be in our minds when we read Paul saying, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”  This doesn't mean we're doing it all alone.  God provides the foundation, the hammer and nails, the concrete, the drywall, and, most importantly, the DESIRE for us to build, and the more we build, the more desire he gives us.

The letter of James is such an important book of the Bible, because when it is read on a foundation of God being previous, we can see where that teamwork between us and God is taking place. The last verse in our James reading, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you,” sounds like we are acting first, but keeping in mind that God is always previous, we see that God gives us that desire to draw near to him.

Working backwards: we can resist the devil because God gives us the power to resist the devil.  The verse before that one is key: Submit Yourselves to God.  God gives us the desire for submission, of course, but it is that submission that is truly our work in this partnership.  Even after all this talk of teamwork, we still can't shake the image of us crossing the finish line with Coach God on the sidelines, jumping up and down and cheering.

But when we get the image that our part of the teamwork is really SUBMISSION, everything changes.  We suddenly get a glimpse of the big picture, because submission is exactly what we have the most trouble doing in all circumstances.  Our pride keeps us from submitting, but submission IS the work that we do.  Suddenly we stop being the quarterback with God being the coach, and God starts being the quarterback and we're the BALL.  Our job is to stop trying to play the game by ourselves, realize we are just a ball, and stay in the quarterback's deft hands.

It takes great amounts of free will to subvert our free will.  Without God's guidance, our free will goes crazy and we start choosing between all of these horrible paths for our life.  God gives us that initial push for us to actually crucify our free will and submit and cling to God's will.  Then we're like a surfer, riding God's wave.  Our job is to stay on the board, and God takes us in to shore.  There's my first surfing metaphor in almost two years of living here.

Models of submission are throughout the scriptures, and when you realize that its not just our submission, but it's God's electing us and drawing us and influencing us and the world around us, we suddenly understand how blessed we are.  Remember, in Genesis, Joseph had the dreams first.  God knew where he was going to go, and how he was going to get there, and what the end result was going to be.

Moses resisted his calling with every effort, but God called him to submit, and submit he did.  David was a small man but his victories in battle were enormous.  His life was blessed by God.  He submitted to God and everything went his way.  It was when he refused to submit to God's will and began to run his own destiny, that's when his kingdom began to crumble.  Not because God was punishing him, but when we take the reins, we drive the stagecoach off a cliff, each and every time.

The ultimate submission was Jesus Christ.  What is most incredible was that Jesus is God in the flesh, and still he perfectly submitted his will to the will of the Father.  Jesus had to let go of his own will when it came to suffering under the authorities, being tortured and killed.  None of us would be able to submit like that.  Thank God that Jesus was able to subvert his will and submit perfectly on our behalf, because that was our place that he took on the cross.  We were supposed to submit, but we cannot.  We fail.  Jesus does it for us.  Perfect submission.

Before I wrote this message, God laid the foundation for it.  Before you heard this message, God drew you to this place first.  If you find it easier to submit to God after today, thank God.  He has laid the foundation for your submission and has given you the tools to do it.  God is always previous.

Do Not Tell Anyone

This passage of Mark 8 is a popular one.  We have the disciples confirming Jesus' identity as the messiah.  Peter is actually the one who gets it right on the nose.  We have Jesus' teaching about how he was going to die, and then we have Peter immediately pulling a one-eighty and rebuking Christ for his prophecy.  Then we've got the whole taking up our cross deal, if we are to follow Jesus.  We save our lives by losing it.  Gaining the whole world will lose our lives, etc.  This is a very quoted passage of scripture.

There are two very small things I want to talk about today.  The first is something that occurs often in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus orders his disciples and others who witness his miracles to not tell anyone about him.  We see that after miracles, and we see that after Peter correctly identifies him.  Verse 30: “And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.”  There are numerous times in this gospel that Jesus does this, and each time we ask ourselves, “Why?  Don't you want to let the world know that God is in our midst?  How are you going to save the world unless people know about you?”

But there's a second little thing that is just as important as the first one.  In fact it is more important, and it is more important because it comes DIRECTLY after the first one.  In fact, we need both of these verses taken TOGETHER in order to make sense out of them, and so that the second verse carries the impact of the first plus its own impact.

After verse 30, we have verse 31: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

Now the crucial verse with the crucial word, verse 32: “He said all this quite OPENLY.”  Do you see it?  Jesus performs a miracle or reveals his identity as the messiah, and he immediately tells everyone to keep silent about it.  THEN, he reveals the manner in which he is to die, and his resurrection, and he is quite OPEN about it.  He WANTS everyone to know these things.  He wants everyone to pass this information on.  Peter tries to silence him, and he rebukes Peter sternly.  This is information that CANNOT be silenced.  This is information that must be spread!

Why?  Because it is the gospel.  The gospel is not that Jesus is the messiah.  That may be part of the gospel, it may be PROOF of the gospel, but it is not THE gospel.  Jesus performed miracles.  He healed many.  Is that the gospel?  No.  It's an aspect of the gospel, it is the PROOF of the gospel, but it is not the full gospel.  There is only one part of the gospel that can stand alone as the full gospel.  There is only one part of Jesus' life that can be called the “saving part.”  Knowing that Jesus was the messiah does not save us.  Knowing that Jesus could physically heal people and cast out demons does not save us.

Jesus' death and resurrection saves us.  Jesus' death: not just that he died, but the manner in which he died.  The torture, the rejection, and both of these by the most important people: this is what his death was.  His was a death of rejection by the important people of the world, by the fallen world.  Jesus' resurrection: after three days he would rise again.  He would be alive again.  All the significance of this: death being defeated, our sins being destroyed, the world being saved—all of these things are compressed in that one small idea.

Jesus' death and resurrection are the gospel.  They are the big idea that has changed the entire world.  Of course Jesus would want this idea preached openly from the beginning, even during his ministry.  Everyone getting the word out that Jesus heals people doesn't save people.  It burdens our Lord down as everyone rushes over and tries to get Jesus to heal them.  Getting the word out about Jesus being the messiah doesn't save people.  It floods our Lord with disgruntled Jews who want to overthrow the government with Jesus in the lead chariot.  Healing and fulfilling prophecy were the ways that Jesus PROVED that he was who he said he was.  Those cannot be our target.  If we are seeking after the proofs—the healings, the prophecies—in the Bible, then we are only seeking after the benefits of God.  We are not seeking God.

This is why Jesus wanted everyone to clam up about the proofs.  Without the cross, the reason Jesus came to earth, the SAVING aspect of the incarnation, the proofs become false idols.  If we are coming here for the wonders of Jesus—what he can do for us, how we can be successful, where we can get God's help in our lives—then we seeking after the wrong thing.  We are engaged in idolatry.

Seek GOD.  The only way to seek God is to seek his salvation, and that is not through his miracles NOR through his fulfillment of prophecy.  Jesus' salvation is through his DEATH and RESURRECTION.  Jesus without the crucifixion and the resurrection is not a God that we need.  Without those two things, Jesus is not a savior.

Understand the death and resurrection of our Lord.  Study every aspect of it.  Learn the meaning and significance of it.  By this knowledge of God are we saved.