Sunday, February 17, 2019
One of the more famous collections of Jesus’ teaching is
in Matthew chapters 5-7, a sermon Jesus gave to an enormous crowd gathered on a
mountainside, the Sermon on the Mount. Toward the end he presents Life as
a choice. Each one of us does this, or
we do that. Every person must do one or
the other and there’s no getting around the choosing. He says, “Everyone who hears these words of
mine and acts on them will be like a wise man” (Mt. 7:24). And, “everyone
who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will” be a fool (v.26).
That’s life beginning from when we are young enough to
have a sense of right and wrong. Before we are taught anything, our
conscience guides us. When we’re old enough to understand the Bible and the
ways of God, then it’s a matter of the will. Am I going to submit to
Jesus’ authority and conform to the ways taught in the Bible? We do that and we are like the wise man he
describes. On the other hand, am I going to live life on my own terms? We
choose that path, and we are fools bound for destruction.
Note Psalm 1. “Happy are those who do not follow
the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the
seat of scoffers. [Instead] their delight is in the law of the Lord, and
on his law they meditate day and night” (v.1-2). These who live committed to God’s ways, which
the Psalmist ties to the law of the Lord, the word, are fruitful and blessed.
The wicked, those who willfully disobey and disregard the law of the Lord
and ignore the word, are blown away in the wind. They have no anchor, nothing to keep them
grounded.
And hear the the prophetic words of Jeremiah, chapter 17,
verses 5-8. “Cursed are those who trust in mortals and make mere flesh
their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” He equates
reliance upon human brilliance and human ability with a disregard of God. When we only trust in ourselves and other
people, Jeremiah says we are cursed. However in verse 7 he says, “Blessed
are those who trust in the Lord.” And
then he refers back to the Psalm we’ve already mentioned, Psalm 1. The one who trusts in the Lord will be
refreshed and healthy and growing even in troubled times.
God’s way vs. the way of men and women: this tension runs
through scripture. Who do we trust for a happy life? God or our culture’s definition of what a
happy life is? Who do we obey? God
or societal and personal influences around us?
Who is the object of our thinking and our deepest dreams, desires, and
meditations? The Lord, or our carnal desires? As Psalm 1 puts it, in whom or in what do we
delight? Or in Jesus’ terms, where do we
turn for hope in the face of certain trouble when storms arise?
The importance of these questions must not be
underestimated. How we answer reveals who we truly are. For example, I
think of a friend from years ago. His
name is Cong. He knew God wanted him to
witness to his siblings, cousins, and parents. His family was not
Christian. They were Buddhist. He knew he was called into Chrisitan
ministry. He also knew, before answering
that call, God called him to witness to his family. In the church, people
who didn’t come from a situation like his and did not understand it demanded
that he be baptized. He knew that if he
did, his parents would no longer permit him to bring his younger family members
to church with him.
He had pressure on him
from authority figures he respected, olders adults in the church, to live out
his faith a certain way. He had just as much pressure on him from adults
he respected even more, his parents, to not get baptized. When I met with him to discuss all this, he
told me he lay in bed awake at night, praying to God through tears. What
should he do? First and foremost, he had
to obey God.
The adults at the church
could take away his position of leadership in youth ministry. His parents
could prevent him from bringing his young family members to church. They would
not hear the gospel any more. He prayed.
God showed him the way forward.
Year after year, he exposed his siblings and cousins to the Gospel
through Vacation Bible School, youth mission trips and weekly Sunday School.
He convinced me to let him lead in youth ministry even though he had not
baptized. Thus his parents allowed him
to keep coming with his cousins and his brother and sister.
By the time they were
all out of high school, I had moved here. He invited me to come back and
a gave me the privilege of baptizing all five of them. He didn’t bow to
the pressure to get baptized immediately.
Nor, did he bow to the pressure to stop coming to church. He knew
what God wanted him to do and stuck with it.
We all face choices in
which we might make we people love unhappy. Someone we respect is going
to be frustrated when we discern God’s leading and follow it and they see
things differently. Each of the Biblical examples, Jesus in the Sermon on
the Mount, Psalm 1, and Jeremiah 17, shows what is at stake.
In Matthew, Jesus likens
the choice to standing or falling. Those who act on the words of Jesus
and in their life do things God’s way, as Jesus describes God’s way, are, he
says, “like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rains fell,
the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; but it did not fall
because it had been founded on rock” (7:25).
Those who disregard Jesus’ words live in houses built on sand. The
storm blows those houses away. The
storms of life devastate those not tethered to the Lord through faith in
Christ.
Jesus does not promise
that when we live God’s way, no storm will come. Just the opposite. He guarantees life will bring the rains, the
floods, and the hurricane winds. Unemployment. Rejection.
Failed relationships. Cancer. Accidents and catastrophes. Nobody cruises through life without major
struggles. But when we are connected to God in Christ, He is with us and
we thrive even in the midst of the storm.
In Psalm 1, the wicked,
those who disregard God’s law, which Jesus illuminates in his Sermon on the
Mount, are like the flakey part of the grain. When the threshing happens,
the weighty grain is collected, but the flighty chaff hangs in the air
anchorless. When we struggle in life and
try to face without God, what is our source of help? What is our moral
foundation? On what ground do we
stand? Who defines us? We are lost to the whims of the wind which
does not care for us and will not guides to safe ground.
Psalm 1 likens the one
who delights in the Lord to a well-watered streamside tree that is always
producing good fruit. Jeremiah takes this image of the healthy, vibrant
tree from the Psalms and develops it further.
The person of faith, the Christian focused on Christ at all times, has
that fruit-producing vibrancy about her.
Curiously, whereas Jesus
begins with the one who obeys his word and the Psalm begins the comparison with
the one who delights in the Lord, Jeremiah reverses the order. He begins
by talking about the one whose trust is in mere mortals. That one, the prophet says, is cursed. Why?
Human beings fail us, and when they do, we have to look for someone else
to believe in and rely upon. Then that someone else fails us. It’s a constant struggle to gain our
grounding. Jeremiah says it is like a
desert shrub. That’s the endgame for the
life of a person who relies exclusively on other people. Prickly. Dry. Gasping for water. Always taking and never giving. That’s the life of the person who refuses to
trust solely in God.
But the one who trusts
in God is blessed. That person’s life, like the streamside tree with deep
roots, is refreshed. Even in the scorching heat of the pressures of life:
bills piling up; betrayals by loved ones; losses; even in hard times, that
person is refreshed by God. As the tree’s leaves stay green, the one
trusting God remains vibrant and strong, fully alive, fully engaged in life,
and optimistic that life will turn for good because God intends good for us.
As the streamside tree continues to bear fruit, the one whose trust is in
God produces good things in his or her life.
As Jesus says in Matthew 7:20, he or she is a disciple known for the
good fruit he or she produces. And we know that fruit is love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and
self-control. That’s what we see in the
life of the one who trusts God.
We have to choose.
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says, Hear what I say and do it.
Psalm 1, delight in the law of the Lord.
Jeremiah 17, trust in the Lord over the influences of critics, cultural
movements, and other human voices. Trust God over all these. Obey, delight, trust.
Begin by deciding to
believe that the Bible promises are true. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you
trust God. Then, pick out the places
where you know you have trusted in human wisdom and neglected God. This
week, turn to the Sermon on the Mount, Jeremiah 17, and Psalm 1. Pray these scriptures. Pray that the Holy Spirit would free your
spirit and enable you to fully trust in the Lord with all the things of your
life.
AMEN
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