Examination time, a one question test. How many Biblical people can you name who
went on spiritual quests to find God?
Don’t think about too long or too hard, and don’t doubt yourself if you
think you don’t have enough biblical knowledge.
The answer is easy – zero.
In our scriptures no one ever goes on
a quest to find God. It is always the
other way around. God seeks people and
finds them. Sometimes they run away,
like Jonah. But God hounds them until he
gets them.
It is important for us to remember
that it is God who seeks us, and it is God who chooses us, not the other way
around. It is God who creates faith in
us, and it is God who maintains that faith within us. You cannot come to God by the power of your intellect
or your righteousness.
This all seems good until you think
about it a bit. What then about people
who reject God? What about people who
are evil? What about people who do not
know God at all. What about them? And in all of this with God seeking us and
creating faith in us and maintaining that faith within us, where does that
leave free will? Do we have a
choice? These are not new
questions. We know they’ve been around
for as long as there has been Christianity because St. Paul writes about
it. We find one of the times he writes
about it in our second reading. There to
the Romans he says, “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God
who shows mercy… God has mercy on
whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses. You will then say to me then, ‘Why then does
he still find fault? For who can resist
his will?’ But who indeed are you, a
human being, to argue with God? Will
what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” And Paul goes on.
This can leave us unsettled. Again, we like to think we have free
will. And it leaves us wondering about
the many people who do not know God and who do not seem to have faith. We probably even care deeply about any number
of people who do not live in faith. Has
God rejected them? Has God made them as
objects of his wrath, as Paul says?
I don’t have any answers to these
questions. I wish I did, but I think we
just have to let God be God and realize that there are lots of things we simply
cannot understand. I do think it is good
that we have questions like this. It
shows that we care. We are concerned
about the people around us and we do not want God to withhold grace and mercy
from them.
But it is also important for us to
move on. Martin Luther understood that
the way God does things with faith held great comfort for him. In his essay, The Bondage of the Will, Luther
writes:
(Copyright regulations do not allow for the text to be printed here. See Luther's Works, Volume 33, Pg. 288-289)
Can you feel the comfort and certainty
Luther writes about? It is as if he has
relaxed from the greatest worry and burden of his life, which indeed he has. In early life he was constantly plagued by
worry. Was he good enough for God? Did he do enough? How could he be sure God liked him and would
save him? Realizing how securely God
held him brought him real joy. And it’s
ironic that when he realized he didn’t have freedom in determining his
salvation actually gave him freedom in life.
Instead of constantly asking himself
if God approved or disapproved of something that whole way of thinking was
thrown away. He was God’s! He was saved!
Now he wanted to share that reality and invite others to know it
too. That is the root of true evangelism
– having something good you want to share.
I’m sure you’ve all had a task or a
problem that worried you. You may have
even lost sleep over it. And then when
the task is over, assuming you succeeded, you feel light hearted and
joyful. You want to share your success
with someone.
If you’ve helped with the garden
project at Wymans you know there’s a little equipment shed at the top of the
hill. It’s a simple structure but
creating it was tricky because zoning won’t allow for a building to be put
there. All of the equipment we use for
the garden could be just left outside in the weather but I’m obsessive about
keeping things inside. I came up with
the design for a structure to store the equipment but would be moveable, so it
technically wouldn’t count as a building – at least as far as zoning
regulations were concerned. The question
is, would it work? Now that building
isn’t complicated or expensive or heavy.
I shouldn’t have worried about it at all. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But I have to confess I lost more than one
night’s sleep over the thing. What if my
design was flawed? What if it couldn’t
be moved once it was all put together? What
if it twisted and distorted into a pile of broken wood and bent metal?
Mark helped me when we loaded it onto
the church’s wagon to move it to its final place. My heart thudded every time the structure
creaked and groaned while being loaded.
The wooden structure of the wagon bent under the load, but in short
order it was loaded. It moved, and moved
well. And when it came to tweaking it
into the exact spot where we wanted it Mark and I discovered we could roll this
12ft. by 24ft. structure around by hand.
The idea had worked! And when it
was solidly on the ground I relaxed for the first time in days; the joy of
seeing an idea succeed!
Perhaps this is too trite an example
when compared to salvation, but the relief is the same. You don’t want to have to figure out your own
salvation. You don’t want to have to
build your value based on your own skill and brains and then just hope it will
be good enough for God when you die.
That’s not salvation. That’s
torment. No, you want to live in
confidence. You want to have the
confidence that you can make mistakes and know that you’re still God’s. You quit worrying about building and are able
to just start enjoying. Again, that is
the root of real evangelism.
You’ve heard me say this before but it
bears repeating. God made you. And God likes the work he did in your
creation. God delights to have you and
is glad to save you. Your relationship
with God is not one where God just puts up with you the way you put up with
annoying relatives at the Thanksgiving table.
No, God sees you as a guest he is excited to have.
Salvation is God’s work through and
through, beginning to end. How it works
is beyond what our minds can comprehend.
But it is God’s mind that counts here, not ours. And God will hold and keep us always.
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