When the man of God doubts...

As a believer, I find the stories of the Bible more real than I am many times. For instance, I carried for many years an irrational fear that my lack of faith caused God to punish my brother who suffered from cancer - and the rest of my family - by not healing him of the tumor and instead causing him to undergo a surgery that removed his knee and replaced it with a straight metal rod. This twisted belief had a perilous logic to it that afflicts me to this day - my lack of confidence in Gods power, demonstrated by the tiny kernel of doubt that asked "What if God doesn't heal", caused my brother pain. I suspect that I'm not the only one to ever feel this kind of guilt, and find it a relief to discover that even biblical Giants of faith had their moments of doubt - and were not punished for it, and neither were those they cared for.

Case in point, Elijah; in I Kings 17, the prophet is in hiding from Israels King, who wants to kill him. Elijah is first fed by ravens by a stream, and then sent to Lebanon, to shelter in the home of a widow with one young boy (7-16). All is well for the prophet, the widow and her son - the little they have is miraculously stretched by God each new day - until the boy gets sick. He dies, and the widow in her grief accuses Elijah of being sent by God to punish her for her sins by killing her son (18).

Outwardly, the prophet seems unshaken: he simply asks for the child's body, carries it to an upper room, and lays it on the bed very calmly. But I wonder what was going on in his mind during that long climb to that upper room? For he then cries out, "O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?" (20) There in that upper room, so unlike the one that served Jesus' disciples as a crucible, and yet so much alike, Elijah faced the crisis of whether God could be trusted or not to do good, and a crisis of faith doesn't get much more desperate than that. It's at that moment of wavering - does God plan evil, and not good? - that if God were to "smite", smithing should start.

But that is not the God of the Bible. It is the God of my deepest fears, doubts, failures, mistrust and let downs - but it is not God in reality. This God is big enough to be doubted by those he loves, to be rejected by His own - and refuses to become the kind of God we expect. He waits for us to find the bottom of our faith, as He did with Elijah, who cries out to God for the life of the boy; God answers, the child lives, and the widow finds faith (21-24). But as you read the rest of 1 Kings, you find the prophet continues to doubt, continues to question God, even as he stands up to the world for Gods cause.

So the real believer is not always answered with fire and resurrection, as Elijah was, but the real believer honestly faces the hard reality of life, and the unpredictable nature of Gods sovereignty in it, may lose heart, may even question Gods basic goodness - and yet obeys. I may never know the whys of unanswered prayer and unexplainable tragedy - but I can trust this God, big enough to not be threatened by my desperate doubts, close enough to see past them to the child he called out of darkness into light. And if you will try, you too can find this God...even if you never feel Him near until you stand in his presence by faith in Christ.

Absolutely...

"...note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute." Francis Schaeffer wrote these words nearly 50 years ago from a mountain in Switzerland, and what he saw then has become only more clearly part of our lives as believers now in the early 21st century. How this works in my own life is this: will I let the pressure to not offend anyone (which seems to be the only "crime" left that our majority culture considers to actually be offensive) keep me from living the reality of what I say I believe: that Jesus really is "the way, the truth, and the life"? That "No one comes to the Father" except through him? (John 14:6) After all, saying such a thing so categorically could really anger someone, and maybe cause them to unfriend me on FB...they might even say some snarky things about me on social media that might hurt my feelings. For fear of being thought of badly, I could choose to let slide the absolute claims of Jesus. And yet it is those very absolutes that have changed the world for good. If I say I absolutely believe these things to be true, I am I willing to accept the way they will mark me out from the rest if the culture? And if I say, "absolutely", I am I being flippant or consciously choosing to stand with the God I say I will follow to death, even if it's on social media?

Walking With God II

So last Wednesday I asked, "What does it really mean to 'walk humbly' with God?" It could become a rather trite thing to say, guaranteed to make images of us walking rather chummily with Jesus as our ideal of what it means. But Micah gives us the clue to getting it right, when he says "what does God require of you?" That one word, require, means that God is looking for these things in us - acting justly, loving mercy, walking humbly with him. He is looking to see if, as believers, we are actually cultivating these things that are on His heart.

If that's true, then walking humbly with Him means I actively choose to go where He is going, do what He is doing, and pay attention to what He is paying attention to. It's surrendering control of my life to His perfect wisdom. James 4: 4-10 records some very strong words, not to pagans or unbelievers or atheists, but to Christians, to us who have a tendency to choose the world over God's kingdom (even though we have been saved and reoriented heavenward). James quotes Proverbs 3: 34 - "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." His point is not that God gets so angry at us that he lashes out in frustration to stop us - that's what we would do. But He loves us enough to put stumbling-blocks and obstacles in our selfish, self-centered path, pain strategically placed to force us to look up and out, away from our own reflection in the mirror of our own soul. His grace draws us to walk with Him in a way that says, "Not my will, but yours be done." Oddly enough, that ends up making our life actually more what we would want it to be, and not less - but then, that is the point of surrendering to a God who came to give His life so we could gain our own.

Walking with God

Spring has arrived in Minnesota, and with it we have turned at the Chapel to thinking about God's priorities, as shown in Micah 6:8, where God says that what He looks for in His followers is a passion for justice, a love of mercy, and a willingness to walk humbly with Him. But what does that last one really mean - walk humbly with God?

Sermon: December 7, 2014

The Priests' Story

Sample December Sermon Series

November 30, 2014: The King's Story

Sermon: November 9, 2014

Easy to Say, Hard to Believe