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"Living the Life You Always Wanted"
March 28, 2004
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson
The basics. That's kind of what we've been doing the last few weeks. Inspired by this movie The Passion, we've embarked on this series of sermons and some evening meetings talking about the very basic things we believe in. A couple weeks ago we talked about love. And then we talked about forgiveness. Now, today, it is faith.
Of course, faith is all over the Scriptures. But it's not just any kind of faith. It means something, has certain elements to it that we need to know about. I could have chosen many passages for you, but I've chosen two--actually three (I'm adding one). First, from the Old Testament. I would just encourage you--every now and then I'll encourage you to memorize Scripture and this is a couple verses we all ought to know, from Proverbs 3:5 and 6. It goes like this:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and He will direct your paths.
And from the New Testament, from Matthew, a familiar story--one that has to do with faith, or perhaps, the lack thereof. It is, of course, the story of Jesus walking on the water and the disciples' reaction to Him.
Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but the boat was already a considerable distance from the land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It is a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid." "Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come out to you on the water." "Come," he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!" Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "why did you doubt?" And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God." When they had crossed over, they landed in Gennesaret. And when the men of that place recognized Jesus, they sent word out to all the surrounding country. People brought all their sick to him and begged him to let the sick just touch the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.
And from Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1:
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!
If you're like me (and I bet you are, because we're all human beings), you don't always do what you would like to do. You're not as good as you'd like to be. You don't fulfill the potential you think you might have. You aren't nice when you want to be. All kinds of things. And there is within us all a desire to lead a better life. Even as Christians, we fail, and we don't measure up. And often we want to find out how to do better. And there is within our own hearts and minds a desire, "Well, Lord, if you'll just tell me the ten thing I'm supposed to do, I'll do it" or "Get me a plan, some kind of path to walk." Sometimes that's why you'll hear a sermon, "Five Ways to Be a Better Father," "Three Ways to Be a Better Wife," "How to Be a Better Church Member," "How to Be Nicer."
And those sermons aren't bad, but, you know, something's wrong with it. Because our desire is often to get this plan, or this idea, and go off to do it, and we leave the Lord behind. We just think, "If we just do these things on our own, we'll be fine." And sometimes our lives are better, sometimes not. But the Lord gives us something else in addition to these things. If we want to live the lives we always wanted to live, we need one thing. It is faith. But not just any faith--a certain kind of faith.
What is faith? Well, it does begin with something in our heads. It begins with believing, for example, that something exists--like God. Or that Jesus actually walked the earth. You know, in our day, it's hard even to have that kind of faith. It's always under attack. People are always coming out and saying you shouldn't have faith, at least in the public square.
I've been interested in this Pledge of Allegiance thing. And, to some degree, I've found it scary. Not because people are coming to the Supreme Court to take "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance--that has some scariness to it, but if you're like me, you've kind of grown to expect that in our day and age. People are always trying to take God or faith out of everything. Christmas is no longer "Christmas," it's a "Winter Festival." Or, you shouldn't have any mention of God in the Pledge. There's a woman in Minnesota who thinks that's a "hate crime." (Probably not because she's from Minnesota, but she just happens to be from Minnesota.) But you know what's scary to me is, of all the people reacting to it, those who are in favor of it! I read an article in the New York Times that said this:
Don't imagine that the phrase ["under God"] suggests that God watches over the nation, blessing and judging it, or that the nation is accountable to God, if that God exists. Certainly the Pledge's wording doesn't imply that the nation's indivisibility and promise of "liberty and justice for all" is somehow tied up with that condition of being "under God."
No, nothing like that. At least not for the phrase's defenders at Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court. For them "under God" only means that once upon a time, the nation's leaders thought along those lines. Challenging last year's ruling by the United States Court of Appeals, that "under God" made recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance an unconstitutional religious exercise in public school classrooms, the Solicitor General said the phrase was not such a thing. It was just what people did.
You know, at least we ought to be honest if we're going to defend it. It does mean that we believe that we are "under God," who is in control of things, who is looking over our nation. But now even those who defend it are scared to say it!
And what about in academia? You know, it's interesting. It really started several hundred years ago. There was a line being drawn in the sand. On one side you had people who believed in science, who were reasonable, who were thinkers. On the other side were people who had faith. And it came to be that faith was looked at as sort of a brainless activity. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Faith is believing what you know isn't so."
But, you know, I think as Christians we should never check our brain at the door when we walk in here. Christians are thinkers. And there is no such thing as that dividing line as it is being portrayed. I think we ought to learn all we can. And you know--this is a pet peeve of mine and you'll hear it again--but how brainless is it to believe that things came about on their own by chance versus to believe that there is actually a Maker of everything? Who is the smarter of the two, or the thinking of the two? We have nothing to be ashamed of. We just start from a different point of view. We believe--we don't know all the answers about creation, but we believe that "in the beginning was God." Not "in the beginning was nothing that somehow created everything." Faith is a good thing.
But the kind of faith I'm talking about this morning is much more than simply the intellectual kind. To simply believe that God exists, or believe that Jesus existed, does not make us Christians. Or even coming to church. The great evangelist Billy Sunday said, "Being in a church building does not make you a Christian any more than being in a garage makes you a car." And he's right. Faith is much more than something in our head. It's much more than simply showing up at a particular place. It includes that, but it's much more than that.
Faith requires surrender and trust, in the Scriptures. When it says, "Believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior," it's talking about those two things. Soren Kierkegaard tells a story about a little boy in a pool. He's kind of bragging to his father. He's going, "Daddy! Daddy! I'm swimming! I'm swimming!" And he's paddling around, but he's not really swimming because, if you look down under the water, he has one little toe on the concrete. He's hasn't surrendered himself to the water. And so many people who claim the name "Christian" are just like that. They think they have faith, but they've never really surrendered to God and given their lives to Him.
There's another illustration used often that illustrates the other part of faith, and it's called trust. It's the chair illustration. Now, if we walk around this chair, we obviously believe that it exists. It's there. We can feel it. We can touch it. But until we sit in it, we don't really trust it. And the same is true with God. We can believe that God exists--"have faith"--but until we trust Him with our lives, we do not have biblical faith.
It's much more than the mind. It's of the heart and of the will. That's what faith is. And only when we begin having this kind of faith will we begin to live the life we always wanted. Now, faith brings with it several other kinds of things which help us in this. One is, as we talked about last week, forgiveness. What is the greatest need of human beings? I think the Bible says it's not food, or drink, or even love. It is forgiveness. It is the sense that we have had the slate wiped clean.
You know, in the Passion movie, I've read that people were so moved by the sight of Jesus on the cross and His suffering, that often filming would have to stop and people would just worship. I've heard of that in some of the other Jesus-kind of movies. I read about the Barabbas movie made in the sixties (you know, the one with Anthony Quinn). The director found out that during the filming of the movie there was going to be a total eclipse of the sun, and so he arranged to have the crucifixion filmed during the eclipse. And it was so powerful--of Jesus being on the cross with all that going on--that people and the crew just knelt down to worship. Why do people do that at the sight of an object of torture? That's what the cross is. It's simply because of what it means: It means forgiveness and reconciliation with God. God is not only loving; He's holy. And apart from Christ, we're apart from Him. But when we put our trust in Christ and what He's done for us, all the walls come down and we're forgiven.
Which leads to another gift, and it is freedom. It's freedom. There's a remarkable passage in Hebrews which says that because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we can approach the throne of God boldly. Not arrogantly, but boldly. It means that you and I can go to God and not worry about it because in Christ we're forgiven and made holy in Him. It's not that we're holy. We're in Him and we're holy. And we have freedom. We have freedom from the guilt that strangles our lives sometimes. We have freedom to act because of what Christ has done.
Now, you'll notice a pattern here. I'm working on the letter "F." And the next "F," and the benefit of faith, is the future. You know, last week I didn't lie to you, but I didn't tell you the whole story. I told you about the disciples, and I kind of challenged you. I said, "You know, you should never think that you can't be forgiven because if God forgave that crew in the Bible, He can forgive you." And all you have to do is start from the beginning, and go to the end, and start naming all the "heroes of the Bible" and you'll notice that all of them were liars, murderers, thieves, wimps--all kinds of things. Just like us. And if God can forgive them, He can forgive you and me.
But I didn't tell you the rest of the story. After--sometimes over time, sometimes very quickly--but after they learned some things, they actually did become rather powerful people. And why was that so? Part of the reason was they began to put their faith in God. They began to trust Him. They "got in the chair." They surrendered their lives to Him. Sometimes it took a while, sometimes it happened all at once. In the disciples' case, they go from being wimps, essentially--scattering to the wind. Just a few weeks later, they're standing before the Sanhedrin itself saying, "Here we are. What are you going to do to us?" Well, what changed? What changed was the death and resurrection of Christ. They saw Him in the flesh and they knew their future was assured, and in that is power.
I read about a pastor in Romania before the wall came down. He told about how for years he had been intimidated by the government and how the agents would come to his church and they would harass the members. They just lived in fear and cowered at the thought of the government coming to them and threatening them with all kinds of things. But one day he said to himself, "What in the world can they do to me? They can only kill me, and what is that?" And from that day, he didn't care! And through his powerful preaching--not caring what happened to him--he was one of the people that led up to the revolution that happened in that country.
Last, but not least, another one called "fixing." There's two parts to that. One is that we in our lives must continually and always "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author of our faith." That's why I love that story on the lake. Jesus walks on water. (I know sometimes in our scientific minds we have trouble with that idea, but, you know, if we start with God, and that God is all-powerful, what's a little walking on water? But be that as it may.) You could imagine yourself out on this lake. If you've been to the Lake of Galilee, it's not a big place, but it's about 500 feet below sea level. And the winds just swoop down off the mountain sometimes and create these huge storms. The water is not always very smooth.
Have you ever been in a small boat in the middle of the night (and I have) on a big lake? It can be kind of scary. So there you are, and suddenly you see what you would never expect to see: Somebody walking on water. (And even they knew that was impossible!) The first thought is, "It's a ghost!" And Jesus says, "It is I. It's me. It's Jesus. What are you afraid of?" And then I love Peter, of course. He says, "Well, can I come out?" And he walks on water himself for a couple of steps, and then he begins to get in his right mind, thinking, "This is not possible . . . What am I doing here?" And Jesus, of course, rescues him. He took his eye off the Lord.
But that has a wonderful message to you and me because, you know, our faith is not as strong as it ought to be, either. And God, in His mercy, takes us by the hand and pulls us up again. Time and time again--doesn't He?--in the storms of our life. We fail. We're not what we should be. And our faith is not as strong as it ought to be. But faith is a gift. And our relationship with God is a gift. And it is He who strengthens us. It is He who loves us and, because we're His children, brings us along.
You see, my friends, we are in the process of being "fixed," as well, as we fix our eyes on Jesus Christ. Tony Campolo tells a wonderful story. He tells the story about how someone kind of talked him into doing one of those healing services. He didn't want to do it kind of like the TV guys do it--you know, all the hitting on the forehead and that sort of thing. But he wanted to do one, and he wanted, when people came up to him, to talk with them and pray for them, and so he did. He had a healing service.
He did it one Sunday morning. He got a call a couple days later and a woman was on the phone and said, "Tony, you prayed for my husband on Sunday. He had cancer." And Tony said, "Had?" She said, "Well, yeah . . . he died." And of course Campolo said, "What good am I?" And she said, "But you don't understand. Before that Sunday, my husband was horrible to live with. He was so angry at God for him having this cancer. He wanted to see his grandchildren grow up. He wanted to do so much, and he knew he couldn't. He knew he would be dead in a few days. And the more angry he got, the meaner he got, the worse it was to live with him. You couldn't stay in the same room. But on that Sunday, something happened. As we went home that day, he was different. And for those next four days, those were the best days of our lives. We laughed, we cried, we talked. And he died in peace. You see, Tony, my husband wasn't cured, but he was healed."
So often in our lives, we're out for the cure. "Cure me of this disease, Lord." "Cure me of being a rotten husband (or poor wife, or Christian who doesn't have much faith)." But God is out to heal us. He's out for the long haul. He doesn't promise us that we're going to have an easy life. We all know that. But we continually seek it, don't we? We continually try to cover our own bases here. We spend a lot of time trying to live here, or doing what we can to heal ourselves or cure ourselves, and God is out to heal us so that we can indeed live the kind of lives that we always wanted, because He knows what we need. It is through the gift of faith that we have these things--faith in all its richness. It is in the head, but it's also in the heart and the will. And that's what He asks of us. It's also what He gives us: To give all of ourselves to Him. To surrender. To trust. And to believe.
Let us pray. Father, thank you for loving us even when we didn't love you. For dying for us, even while we were sinners. And for giving us the gift of faith in all its richness of the head, and the heart, and the will. We pray that you would help us grow in that faith, that we may also grow in our sense of forgiveness, our sense of freedom, and the future, and healing. Keep our eyes fixed on our Lord and Savior at all times. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson Senior Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. worship service on March 28, 2004.] |
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