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Romans 12:1-2; Mark 3:31-35; Genesis 22:1-14
January 16, 2011 • Portage First UMC
Never before had God asked someone to do this. And never would God ask someone to do this again. But the old man hiking up the mountain didn’t know that. All he knew was that God had spoken to him and asked him to do what was unthinkable: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love— Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you” (22:2). Though Abraham must have had a lot of questions, Genesis gives us no indication that he asks God any of them. Nor does he argue with God or try to discuss God’s command. The next morning, Abraham simply packs up what he needs, tells Isaac they are going on a trip, and heads out to do what God told him to do. I imagine very little conversation happened during that trip. In fact, the only conversation recorded between father and son is when Isaac asks where the animal is for the sacrifice, to which Abraham simply replies, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” (22:8). To the last, Abraham does what God told him to do, up until the moment when he is ready to sacrifice Isaac and the angel of the Lord stops him. It’s a difficult story about obedience when the command of God doesn’t make any sense. Isaac was the son of the promise; he was Abraham’s heir and the only hope that God’s promise of a nation descended from Abraham would come true. If Isaac were no longer alive, what would happen to the promise? Yet Abraham obeys. We’re told in Hebrews that Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the dead if necessary, and that the whole thing was a test to see if Abraham would be obedient or not to the will of God (cf. Hebrews 12:17-19).
Abraham and Isaac’s story confounds and confuses us, but one thing is clear from this story: the will of God is a strange, mysterious thing to get our minds around. Sometimes I hear people say that this or that event or happening was “God’s will” (some people even said that a year ago about the Haiti earthquake), and though I don’t often say it, I want to sometimes shout, “How do you know that? How do you know?” The fact of the matter is we don’t often know why some things happened and other things didn’t. Why did this person die? Why did that accident occur? Why did he get cancer? Why didn’t I get that job? The questions can go on and on, and often, as Christians, we call it “trusting the Lord” when we write it off as “God’s will.” But, in my experience, we use that phrase far too easily and rather flippantly. I’ve even heard people say it was God’s will that they got a particular parking place at the mall. Really? When the Bible talks about God’s will, it’s something far more serious and with far reaching implications. It’s much more dynamic than whether or not we get what we want. So when we set out to do a series of sermons on “why” questions, the ones that rose to the surface had to do with why things happen the way they do, many of which we’re gong to deal more specifically with in the next few weeks. But today, I want to talk more generally about the way we view God’s will. In other words: how can I know what God’s will is?
Unfortunately, if you came here this morning wanting a three-step plan for knowing the will of God, you’re going to be disappointed (though I do have three questions for you a bit later). If you go to the Bible looking for such a plan, you’re going to be even more disappointed. There are some places where the Bible clearly says, “This is God’s will,” and we will look at those briefly this morning. But more often than not, what Scripture teaches is that, as believers in Jesus, we rarely get God’s will written clearly across the sky or spoken in a loud, booming voice. Rather, knowing the will of God is something that takes time and lots of prayerful discernment.
We read only two verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans this morning, a letter which in many ways is sort of an overview of all of Paul’s teaching. It may have been a “letter of introduction” for Paul to the church at Rome, which he did not start. In the beginning part of the letter, Paul has been discussing the grace God gives us through Jesus, and he comes to a point where he just explodes in worship: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (Romans 11:33-36). God is great, beyond what we can imagine, Paul sings, and out of that burst of praise, he then tells the Romans that their lives should be lived as a response to this awesome God: “In view of God’s mercy,” or because of all God has done for you, “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship” (12:1). Now, most in Paul’s day, whether they had grown up Jewish or pagan, knew what a sacrifice was. Sacrifices weren’t unique to Israel; in the Roman world, you offered sacrifices to Zeus or Hercules or any number of other gods, depending on what you wanted. The main difference between Jewish and pagan worship was that, for Jews, sacrifices were to pay for sins, for our offenses against God. It was the act of offering up something precious, something valuable in order to say, “I’m sorry” to God. In the Roman world, sacrifices were done in order to manipulate or appease the gods so that you could get good rains for your crops or more children for your family or whatever you wanted. But either way, you offered something precious to the deity in exchange for something tangible. Paul’s view is that there is nothing more precious than our own lives. However, as he’s explained in the chapters before this, we no longer have to pay for our sins because Jesus took care of that on the cross. Jesus lived a perfect life and willingly offered himself as the payment for our sin. God the Son took our punishment and paid our debt. So sacrifices were and are no longer necessary. So why is Paul talking about sacrifice? What’s this idea of a “living sacrifice”?
The key, of course, is in the adjective: “living.” We’re not offering something dead to God; we’re offering our very lives, the life we live now and the life we will live the rest of our days on earth. We’re still offering that which is most precious to us—our lives—but God calls us to give our lives differently—in service to him. This is our “true worship.” The sacrificial system was about a list of rules—read through books in the Old Testament like Leviticus and Numbers to see what I mean. Do it this way, do it correctly, offer the right sacrifice… But giving ourselves as living sacrifices is about giving our whole selves to the God who has already given all of himself to us (Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part Two, pg. 70; Harrison, “Romans,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 10, pg. 127). It’s about a willing self-offering, which Paul says happens as we are “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2).
The word translated “renewing” actually might better be translated “renovating.” It means a complete transformation, not just changing a couple of ideas. Here’s the way I think about it: when I was growing up, my parents would routinely, every couple of months or so, move the furniture around in the rooms in our home. So my brother and I would come home from school and find the TV in a different corner, or the couch along a different wall. They just wanted things to look different, but what that amounted to was we ran into things while trying to get a midnight snack! The furniture may have been moved, a few things changed, but the room was still essentially the same—same contents, same size, same design. That’s redecorating. Renovation is something entirely different. For the first couple of years of my ministry here, we took a group out to Sun Valley Indian School in Arizona each February for a work and witness trip. The school largely relies on volunteers for their major projects because they simply can’t afford the staff to do all the work (much like Red Bird Mission, where we’ve sent teams the last two years). So the first year out there, Fred, the Work and Witness Coordinator, told us we were going to be gutting a dormitory, getting ready for it to be completely renovated. And so we spent that week tearing out dry wall, nails, screws, and walls. It was a dirty, ugly, hard job. But in some ways, it was refreshing, too. Nothing like tearing stuff out to work out your aggressions, right? So we spent a week doing that, and Fred said that next year the dorm would be done. A year later, we returned and guess what? The dorm looked pretty much like it did when we left the year before, and it became our job to build and put the new walls in place. It didn’t take much to do the math, and Glenn Yerby said he wasn’t going back until the dry wall was in place! (The group that went the next year? Dry wall was their project.) It wasn’t a quick project. True renovation takes a lot of work and very often a lot of time. It’s not about just rearranging the furniture; it’s about totally changing the configuration of whatever we’re renovating. If it’s a dorm, you make new space, better space for the kids to live in. If it’s our mind, we make room for God. We completely re-do it.
When Paul refers to a person’s “mind,” he’s not talking just about our thinking. We use the word “mind” to refer to our thought processes, or as the psychologists say, our “cognitive process.” But in the language of the New Testament, the word translated “mind” refers to that plus our ways of feeling, and the way we make decisions, and the way we determine good and evil, our emotions, and so on—in other words, Paul is not just calling us to think differently, or to believe a certain thing. Paul says the way we learn to discern and follow God’s will is by a complete change of the way we live. Everything we are—thoughts, feelings, decisions, emotions, actions—everything is renovated, made new, and given as an offering to God.
Now, if you’re thinking that’s impossible, or at least extremely difficult, you’re not alone. I mean, it’s one thing to renovate a dorm, but to renovate your mind, renovate your life? That takes a lot of willpower that we sometimes just don’t have. And that’s where we get into trouble when we’re trying to know and follow God’s will for our lives. It’s not about willpower. It has to begin in love, in a desire to please God. Without love, as psychologist Rollo May has pointed out, willpower is just a twisted, self-centered demonstration of our own character. Without love, willpower is just selfish because it’s about proving ourselves or getting our own way or making ourselves seem better than we are. Willpower, such as we might use toward a New Year’s Resolution, tends to be about “me.” But Paul’s talking about a change that is deeper and rooted in our love for God. We want to do God’s will because we love God, and loving someone changes us deep within. Pastor David Benner puts it this way: “We cannot will love. But we can be open to love. We cannot will forgiveness. But we can be open to receiving the gift of a heart that is willing to forgive. We cannot will intimacy with God. But we can be open to an experiential knowing of God that comes as a divine gift of soul-satisfying spiritual friendship” (Desiring God’s Will, pg. 50). Renewing our mind, renovating our life is about loving God so much that we open ourselves to whatever he wants, to whichever way he calls us to live.
That’s why Jesus says what he does in our Gospel lesson this morning. Jesus is teaching at someone’s home and a crowd has gathered around. The place is so crowded that when Mary and Jesus’ brothers show up, they can’t get in to talk to him. Actually, we’re told earlier in the chapter that Mary and the brothers have heard Jesus has been so busy he hasn’t been taking time to eat (3:20-21). So they’ve come to “take charge” of him, as Mark puts it, because, they’ve decided, “He’s out of his mind.” To a good mother, if her son doesn’t take time to eat, he must be out of his mind, right? But that’s why they’ve come, and they can’t even get in to see him, so they send word to Jesus, and he responds, “Who are my mother and my brothers?…Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (3:33-35). Now, let’s not focus on what sort of reaction Mary must have had when THAT word got back to her, because Jesus’ point here isn’t really about eating lunch. His point is that those who love will do what pleases the one they love. Those who love God will want to do what God wants them to do. Those who love God will live the way God wants them to.
So what is that? Well, as I said earlier, there are some things that are clearly spelled out in Scripture that are God’s will. One is found in 1 Thessalonians, where Paul writes: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified” (4:3). And since we may not know what “sanctified” means, he goes on: “You should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God” (4:3-5). Paul says God’s will is for us to live sexually pure lives, to keep, as the Bible says elsewhere, “the marriage bed pure” (Hebrews 13:4), to retain that part of our lives between husbands and wives. That’s not a word we want to or like to hear these days, because in our culture we’ve decided we get to set the standards of what is right and wrong in this area. We set the rules. We determine the boundaries. We claim not to know what God’s will is, but Paul has spelled it out fairly clearly, certainly in this area. In fact, he goes on in that same passage to say, “The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life” (4:6-7).
Peter gives us another glimpse into what God wants for us in this passage: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of the foolish” (1 Peter 2:13-15). Peter gives us a couple of things in those three verses: first, we’re to submit to authorities, to follow the laws of the land we live in as long as it doesn’t contradict what we believe as Christians. Peter himself demonstrated what that meant in Acts 5, when he was arrested for preaching the good news. He went along with the authorities until they told him he couldn’t talk about Jesus anymore. That’s when he says, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29). But up until that point, we submit to those who are in authority, which means showing due respect even when we disagree with someone’s politics. We can respectfully disagree and still submit to their authority. In fact, Peter says that in doing so, we’re doing “good” and we are showing an example that people won’t be able to argue with. And we “do good” beyond simply civic obedience and civic responsibility. As we “do good,” as we make a positive difference in the lives of those around us, we are doing God’s will and “silencing the foolish talk of the ignorant.” You can’t argue with Christians who, in Jesus’ name, seek to do good in our world. So last spring, when we stepped out against hunger and made a donation to the food pantry in the thousands of pounds, were we doing God’s will? Absolutely, and I love the image that, in taking that food to the pantry, we silenced ignorant talk as well.
So, the Bible is clear on God’s will on a few matters: remaining sexually pure, obeying those in authority and doing good. But the Bible is also quiet about a lot of other matters. How do we know God’s will in those areas? How do we know what God’s will is when we’re trying to make a decision? It’s not always crystal clear, is it? And that’s where we get stuck. We sometimes think that if we have this strong desire to do something, it must be from God, but not necessarily. That may be an indicator God is calling us toward a task, but it might just be because we’d like to do that for ourselves. It may not be an indicator of God’s will for us. For instance, while I was working on this sermon during the snow this week, I snacked on a cup of yogurt. I’m trying to use my willpower to snack better this year, and I noticed that as soon as I finished the yogurt, I had this strong desire for a cookie. I really wanted a cookie! Now, I could have said, “It’s obviously God’s will that I have a cookie because deep inside, that’s what I want,” but I also knew that would not be best for me at that time. Now, that’s a silly example, but we do the same thing in larger matters. If we fail to renovate our minds so that we can become living sacrifices, people devoted in service to God, we can convince ourselves that most anything is God’s will for us. We’ll convince ourselves, as we often do, that if it feels good, it must be what God wants. And yet we know that’s not true. How many atrocities have been committed just because someone feels like they wanted to do this or that? The Westboro Baptist Church, constant picketers that they are, believes it’s God’s will for them to picket military funerals and now the funeral of a 9-year-old girl who was shot in Tucson last week. Not everything we desire is God’s will.
So here are some questions we can use as we seek to renovate our minds, as we seek to find and live out God’s will in every aspect of our lives. The first question is if this (whatever “this” might be in your life) is consistent with what you know of the Scriptures. Is there anything in the Bible that speaks against this? Because God will not call us to do something that contradicts his word. Of course, if we’re not reading and studying the Scriptures on a regular basis, it will be difficult to answer this question. Sometimes we stay away from the Bible because we’re afraid it might call into question the way we want to live our lives. We say we don’t understand the Bible, when in reality we understand it all too well when we take the time to read it. Mark Twain once said, “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” Is this consistent with what I know of the Scriptures?
A second question: will I honor God in this or only myself? Remember, Paul says everything we do is an act of worship—and it should be worship directed toward God, but it’s often worship directed toward ourselves, our own glory, our own kingdom. One example of this is in the area of forgiveness. We’re told in the Bible (there’s that Bible again!) to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (Colossians 3:17). In another place, Paul says do everything in love (1 Corinthians 16:14). Everything. And yet, we will tightly hold onto bitterness and anger and hurt. My question is, and the question I have to ask myself at times like that is: can I really do that in the name of the Lord Jesus? Can I hate someone in Jesus’ name? Isn’t that contradictory to love? Can I refuse to forgive what that person did against me in the name of the Lord Jesus, in love? (Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not saying you put yourself back in a place to be hurt again, but we still have to work at forgiveness.) The question is: am I building my own kingdom, or am I going to be able to honor God in this?
Then, a third question: have I prayed about it and am I able to find peace with this? Paul reminds us that God gives us a peace that “transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). When we are in the middle of God’s will, that peace is what surrounds us, even if everything around us seems to be chaotic. That’s one of the ways I know we’re headed in the right direction with launching this new worship service. Even though it’s chaotic and messy and there are a lot of loose ends, I have had an incredible peace about the whole thing. I remember my friend and mentor, Mike Powers, who is now a District Superintendent in the Kentucky Conference of the United Methodist Church, but at the time he was my pastor in Harrodsburg, Kentucky while I was a seminary student. And one time, Mike and I were talking about how you know when you’re doing God’s will. Mike related it to a time when he had gotten a call from the Bishop about an appointment to a new church, and he asked for time to pray about moving, which the Bishop granted. So Mike prayed, and he prayed, and he prayed, and he said he didn’t seem to get an answer one way or the other. He finally said he just told God, “Why won’t you tell me what to do?” And he said it’s the only time he felt like God spoke directly to him. What do you suppose God said? As Mike tells it, God told him, “I don’t care. You can honor me wherever you are.” God’s will for our lives is like that. It’s not a static thing; it’s dynamic, and as long as we’re seeking to be living sacrifices, offering our lives in service to God, renovating our lives to be able to live in his kingdom, then we can move forward in confidence.
Now, the problem with living sacrifices is that they tend to get up and move, to hop off the altar and go their own way. A dead sacrifice, of course, can not do that, but God allows us that freedom, to choose his will or ours, to hop off or stay on the altar where we’ve offered our lives to him. This morning, what is it in your life that you’re struggling to commit to God? It may be a lifestyle choice that you know is not pleasing to him. Maybe it’s your finances, bringing them in line with good and responsible stewardship. It could be your sexuality and the choices you have made or are making in that area of your life. It could be your use of time, and how much you dedicate to the important areas of your life. Or it could be any number of things. Because we’re living sacrifices, there are usually various areas of our lives at different times where it’s difficult to surrender that part to God, to renovate that part of our lives. So this morning, in your bulletin, you have a quarter-sheet of paper, and what I want you to do this morning is to, in just a few moments, spend a brief time prayerfully considering the area of your life where you struggle with God’s will at this point in time. You can write a word or a sentence or draw a picture to represent that, and then during the closing song, I’m going to invite you to come forward and lay that on the altar or the communion rail as a symbol of giving yourself as a living sacrifice. No one’s going to read these; in fact, they will be destroyed after this morning as a symbol of all of us having begun to give that area of our lives over to God. So in what area of your life do you most need to know God’s will? What part of your mind needs renovation today? Let’s be in prayer as we seek God’s will.