Pastor Leith Anderson shares that “As a boy he grew up outside
of
“Years later
he was engrossed in a conversation with a man who was a walking sports
almanac.
The reverse of Jesus’ famous words,
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” is true as
well. Where our heart is, there will our treasure be. What we want matters! What we allow ourselves to see matters!
This is what I hear from God through today’s texts. Just prior
to our text in Luke, Luke records Jesus entertaining and pleasing
folks with physical cures and emotional healings. Jesus appears
anything but needy. He is all-powerful in every way that unredeemed
people value. He is popular, at least with the crowds. He gives them what they want!
But Jesus told the disciples that such
popularity would not last. Followers rich in things of this
world, followers full and laughing now and followers being well spoken
of now, will experience woe rather than blessing, later!
But exactly
these things they wanted! These things their hearts wanted. Jesus warned these things blinded them to the real, permanent and
lasting things going on around them. Just as
The Beatitudes or “blessed” conditions of the order of God must
be wanted with all our heart if we are to sustain Christian discipleship
and be available to God. Anything but the Beatitudes will not
allow indestructible, abundant life.
As crazy as it sounds, Jesus
warned the better and more permanent life is experienced knowing need,
your need of God, rather than by being rich.
Why? Because being
rich is an almost omnipotent temptation to make you think of yourself
as God. It’s the Garden of Eden temptation! Eat
of the forbidden tree and you will know everything! Wow! Remember the “Rich Man” about whom Jesus told, whose crop was so large
that he built bigger barns, so that he could sit back and take it
easy, feeling invulnerable? That night his life ended, making
all his riches poor and powerless to him.
We jokingly say, if the
choice is between being rich or poor, we’ll take being rich. But that is because our culture tells us rich is where our heart should
be. It is because we trust our culture’s wants more than we
do Jesus’ kingdom wants. Material riches are our Dodger’s victory!
We may be born again in the sense that our broken and hostile relationship
with God has been reconciled by God’s action in Jesus, and by our
faith in Jesus’ resurrection message of forgiveness. We may trust
that when we die we will go to heaven, not to hell. But when
we joke about preferring riches we are not yet “dancing” with God
so that God can benefit us with relationships that cause us to experience
intimacy with God and Mankind through the blessings of that “dance.”
I warn us, we are often allowing this world's dreams to keep us from
remembering that Jesus spoke of the danger of “head” rather than “heart”
Christianity. He spoke of people whose head was with him but
whose heart was far away, to whom he would have to say at the final
judgment, “I never knew you.” Yes, as with
Consequently
we experience life more like the “loss” of the Dodgers with which
As crazy as it sounds, Jesus warned
the better and most permanent life is experienced in being dissatisfied
with natural wants—not in contentment with natural wants—in being
hungry for God’s wants rather than being full of our wants.
Contentment,
satisfaction and being full of our natural wants have a way of insulating
our spirit from God’s Spirit. While hunger is a call for being
filled, being stuffed is numbing, especially when it comes to being
filled with a spirit of generosity toward others. Satisfaction
tends to make one think, “If I can get enough things, surely everybody
can.” Taint necessarily so! The well fed are susceptible
to forgetting those who contributed to their being well fed.
It is
when we are empty of food or of energy that we are most prone to cry
out for help. It is not accidental that an age-old form of Christian
discipline is the fast. Fasting or being empty clears the mind
to receive either the Spirit of God or the spirit of the devil. This alternative is exactly what Jesus experienced when he went into
the desert to do the spiritual work of deciding which path of ministry
he would follow. He struggled with God and with the devil during
deprivation of food. In that deprivation he was freed to deal
with the struggle for the permanent and lasting life. Deprivation
has a way of clearing the mind and making it more susceptible to being
filled with the eternal.
Being hungry for whatever-it-is that will
satisfy your particular hunger drive whether it is knowledge, food,
companionship, whatever, motivates finding it. Indeed, the key
to advances in science is the drive, yea the passion to have the hunger
or thirst for how things work, satisfied. Indeed the key to
becoming a believer is a hunger for God that the devil seeks to anesthetize
by filling you with temporary satisfactions. With relationships,
“absence does make the heart grow fonder” for the absent beloved,
in ways that familiarity with a beloved causes one to lose interest.
Hunger rather than fullness contributes to a more permanent and deeper
relationship. As crazy as it sounds, the better and most permanent
in life is experienced in being dissatisfied with temporary things,
not in satisfaction with them.
Moreover, and as crazy as it sounds,
Jesus warned weeping now and laughing later positions one to experience
the most permanent life.
Loss is part of life. The beginning
of the life nearest to God involves loss. Jesus said, “He or
she who would find his or her life must lose his or her life.” We must lose the selves we want in order to let God reconcile us back
to God and then for us to let God shape our relationships God’s way.
I sometimes think the reason people sign on with God, but then do
not discipline their lives by the order of God, are that they have
not cried over or mourned their former wants. These people tend
to not count the cost of signing on with God. Some people repent
and accept Jesus as their Savior in response to a preacher’s proclamation
that unless they do so they will go to hell. The reason they
become Christian is to avoid some bad thing in the future.
They have
their so-called “ticket” to heaven. But they have not mourned
what they must give up to follow Jesus today. Being Christian
means experiencing considerable loss of that which formerly gave them
pleasure, and that which formerly motivated them. Consequently,
their wants stay the same and they hope that Jesus will help them
get their wants. But their wants are not those of God’s life
order.
Unless your wants are converted, which means mourning and grieving
them, you are not ready to become attached to new wants. Unless
your heart or wants are transformed, you will tend to attach yourself
to God in hopes that God will help you get what you want, not what
God wants. Could that be why we are often more Christian in
name than in behavior? Indeed, “blessed are those who mourn
now.” Because it does matter what you want! It determines
what you see, as it did
Moreover, Jesus reminded his disciples
in our text that it matters what you want or where your heart is when
it comes to compliments.
Who likes to be hated, excluded or insulted? Yet Jesus said these are indicators of the blessed life! Desiring
inclusion is native to us. God so ordered or created us to want,
yea to need, to connect with some, more than with others. But,
we are so “wired” to relate with others rather than to live by ourselves.
And because of this basic need to relate, we are in need of being
included and we dislike being hated or insulted. No wonder we
find it easier to keep quiet rather than to stand in opposition to
those whom we know advocate destructive behaviors or ideas. The life to which we are reconciled with God is a life of quite different
priorities than the priorities of the natural flow of human wants.
Unless we want, yea hunger for that very different life, we will not
experience it. Indeed, Jesus told a parable of a man who found
a great prize in a field who wanted it so much that he was willing
to sell everything he had to buy the field so that he might possess
the prize. Indeed, Jesus himself was willing to die on the cross
only because he wanted that which his death would bring him, namely
your soul (your heart and will), more than he wanted his own physical
existence.
Unless we are willing to empty ourselves of our world’s
wants; unless we are willing to be poor with this world’s priorities;
unless we grieve the loss of this world’s motivations, we will not
be willing to be hated, insulted or excluded. And if Christian,
we will not be who we claim to be.
Mary Marty tells of a holy man
who was engaged in his morning meditation under a tree whose roots
stretched out over the riverbank. During his meditation he noticed
that the river was rising and a scorpion was caught in the roots about
to drown. He crawled out on the roots and reached down to free
the scorpion. But, every time he did so, the scorpion struck
back at him.
An observer came along and said to the holy man, “don’t
you know that’s a scorpion, and it’s in the nature of a scorpion to
want to sting?” To which the holy man replied, “That may well
be, but it is my nature to save. Must I change my nature because
the scorpion does not change its nature?” (“Eye of the Needle” newsletter)
It does indeed matter what you want, or what your nature is, when
it comes to what you do. Is it your nature to save the threatened,
as it is God’s, or is it your nature to protect yourself? Jesus
said, “they who would save their lives will lose them, but they who
would lose their lives for my sake and for the Gospel, will find their
lives.” That sounds high, lofty and admirable, doesn’t it? But in the “crunch times” of life, when we meet our scorpions, unless
we have surrendered our natural self protective nature and asked God
for God’s saving nature, we will not respond as does God. Our
nature is what we want most. Our nature is where our heart is.
Yes, indeed, in our text Jesus was telling his disciples that if they
wanted to experience the life that endured and was permanent, they
would have to be needy and not satisfied. They would have to
weep and grieve instead of rejoice over what they thought they wanted
to make them feel secure. They would have to be willing to endure
the emotional pain of rejection by those whose approval they most
desired.
None of these would the disciples be able to do without a
change of nature, a change of “wants,” from what was natural to what
was Godly. From what was temporary to what was permanent and
lasting. Unless they asked and let God change what they wanted,
the disciples would experience the temporary life as did Leith Anderson.
I urge you to surrender your wants and ask God
to give you God’s wants, through relishing your need rather than your
abundance; through mourning the things you most want in order to desire
what God wants; and through expecting exclusion and hatred for wanting
exactly the opposite of that which makes you popular. I urge
you!
Well?