Learn From God

We have been spending the weeks leading up to Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent looking at ways that we should be choosing to “Follow God.” We began with what it means to “Follow God”. We next looked at the importance of “Focusing on God”. Last week our scripture led us to choosing to “Love Like God.” You can find all of these sermons on our You Tube Channel.

This week we wrap up this series by looking at how we should “Learn from God”. Our scripture comes from Luke 6:37-42.

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

39 Healso told them this parable: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.

41 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Please pray with me…

We have a God that wants to be on a journey with each one of us. He doesn’t just want us to have him be a part of our lives when we need him. He wants us to trust him and follow him during the good and the bad times in our lives.

We have talked about this in the past through the lens of the way that we journey with Jesus at the Church of the Good Shepherd. How we should constantly be desiring to develop and discern the decisions God desires for us to make and how he desires for us to live.

We are able to develop our relationship with God and follow the path he desires for us to follow when we make the decision that we want to learn from God. We want to allow God to be at work within us to allow us to become who he desires for us to be.

This can sometimes be a painful process. I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes be hardheaded. I can believe that God desires for me to go in a specific direction. I can also do a very good job at ignoring what I know he wants me to do.

This can lead to us receiving our own painful lessons. We can end up being like Jonah and running so far away from God that we not only cause pain in our own lives, but we also can end up impacting the lives of those around us in a negative way.

The whole time God hasn’t moved. He is waiting for us to make the right choice and to head back in his direction. To start going where he desires for us to go. For us to be open to receiving the teaching he desires to give us in order to help us.

Our scripture for today is on making choices that focus on our relationship with God and choosing not to compare ourselves to those that are around us. We are called to humble ourselves before God. We are called to focus on our journey with Jesus.

We can find this lived out at the end of the Gospel of John. Jesus has risen from the grave and meets his disciples by the seashore. He pulls Peter aside and he explains to Peter what is the role that he is to play after Jesus ascends into Heaven.

The story continues and Peter sees John and he asks Jesus the plans that God has for him. How often do we find ourselves doing the same thing. We know what we are supposed to do but we are worried about what others are doing or what they are supposed to do.

Jesus’ answer to Peter is for him to mind his own business. He wants Peter to focus on what God has planned for him not what God has planned for John. Each one of us have our own unique journeys that we take with Jesus. We need to focus on ourselves and our relationship with God.

Our scripture begins with a reminder that we are not to judge others. We are not to be the ones that decide how the actions or lack of actions by someone else should be viewed. This is an important lesson for us to remember during these times we are living in.

Those around us may have different understandings of God and of scripture than we do. They may live their lives differently than we have chosen to live our lives because of how they view God.

We can often find ourselves desiring to be judge and jury for their lives. We end up making the decision that because they are not living their lives and making the decisions that we are making then they must not be following God correctly.

A judge and jury will not only judge a person, but they can also end up condemning them for their actions. Jesus wants to make sure that there is no misunderstanding. We are also not to condemn. This is not a decision for us to make.

Why is this such an important lesson for Jesus to lay out? Let us remember who the main audience is for this message. We spoke of this earlier in this series. The scripture tells us that Jesus “looked at his disciples and began speaking.”

We also learned that this is the first teaching or learning that Jesus is giving to his chosen twelve disciples. They are chosen. They walk down the mountain and shortly after Jesus begins what we call the “sermon on the plain.”

This is a message directed towards followers of Jesus. He wants us to choose not to follow the ways of the world. Jesus isn’t telling the world not to judge or condemn. He is saying that if you are going to become one of my followers than you should make the decision “not to judge or condemn.”

There is only one that is to be “the judge” and jury and that is God. God is the one that in the end will decide that a person is or isn’t living a life that is pleasing to him.  Scripture tells us that God is all knowing and all powerful.

God recognizes when a person is choosing to walk away from him and go down the wrong path. He will be the one who will attempt to lead that person towards him. He will be there waiting and hoping that person will decide they want to learn from Him again.

Our job is to believe that God can change the lives of those that may be working against him. We have to have enough faith in God to believe that God can and will remedy the situation if he sees the need to do so.

What we can do is pray and ask God to use us. Ask God to have us help him lead a person back towards the right path. We can listen to him and respond in the way that he desires for us to respond. We can put our trust in him and let God put his trust in us.

We may also have to admit that these individuals are following God the way that God wants them to follow him. There are many people in the world. There are many ways in which people find their way to Jesus.

We may have to be open to the possibility that God is having these individuals do what they do and say what they say in order to have others become followers of Jesus. This may be difficult for us to believe but what we have to remember is that God sometimes works in ways that we don’t quite understand.

(Transition)

The way that we commonly find Jesus following up a teaching is for him to use parables to reiterate his point. A parable is a story or an example of a moral or ethical decision that we are to choose to make. We find Jesus teaching many life lessons in this manner.

We have him answering the question “who is my neighbor?” through a parable we call “The Good Samaritan”. He has a Samaritan, someone many of the Jewish people hated, help a Jewish person who two of the Jewish religious authorities chose to ignore.

We have him offering up the story of who we call “The Prodigal Son” to show the love that God has for each of us. We have the son leave home with his inheritance. He blows through all of his money and return to his father expecting to become a servant. He instead is welcomed back by his father with open arms.

These are just a couple examples of the way that Jesus would teach those around him about God’s desires for them through parables. He would teach these parables to the crowd, but he would only give understanding of the parable to his twelve disciples.

He did this to give the disciples something additional to teach to those that came to them after Jesus was no longer living among them. Jesus was giving them the knowledge to allow for others to learn from them.

We find a couple of short examples in today’s scripture to show what he is trying to say through his message to them. He begins with “the blind leading the blind.” Jesus came down to earth in order to allow for the Jewish people to receive a different understanding of the way God desired for them to live.

He believed that the way the Pharisees, the religious leaders, were leading the people were leading them away from the way that God desired for them to live. Their focus was on the law and not breaking the law.

It wasn’t that this was bad but what it was causing to happen is that it was moving them toward an individual faith instead of a communal faith. The way the Pharisees were leading the people was putting the individual above the community.

It was causing people to compete. They were trying to become betterer than their family member, friend, or neighbor. Jesus viewed this way of living as “the blind leading the blind.” He wanted to change the focus to a priority on “love your neighbor as yourself.”

We can fall into the same trap. We can also end up focusing so much on pleasing God that we forget that we are to show God’s love to those around us. We have to be careful ourselves not to become so law based that we end up comparing and judging those around us.

We are to live our lives as equals. This would mean that we can look towards those around us that we believe act more like Jesus but in the end, we are all on our own faith journeys. Each one of us has received our own gifts. We have each lived through our own struggles.

Our gifts, background, and struggles lead to each one of us discovering the way that God desires for us to live out his expectations. Each one of us are to discover how we can use our gifts in order for us to serve our neighbor as God desires.

Jesus’ second parable or example involves him comparing sawdust to a plank of wood. He points out that we can end up spending so much time looking at the faults of others that we can end up ignoring the bigger problems that are occurring in our own lives.

This is a form of what psychologists call cognitive bias. It is us deciding subconsciously that our faults are inconsequential compared to the faults of those around us. Jesus is saying that each one of us have our own behaviors that impact our journey with God, and we need to focus on our own negative behaviors before we worry about trying to fix the behaviors of those around us.

(Transition)

Our first reading speaks of the absurdity of focusing on others instead of our own journey. Romans 2:3 says it this way “3 So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?”

We can allow our cognitive bias to move us away from God. The scripture goes on to say that we are ignoring or not focusing on God’s “kindness” and “patience” when we ignore what he is trying to teach us.

God is attempting to help those around us become closer to God while at the same time helping us on our faith journey. His kindness is attempting to lead each one of us towards an understanding of how we should choose to live our lives. We should trust that he is working on the person next to us while he is also challenging us to become the person that he desires for us to be.

(Transition)

So, what should this mean to us? It means that we need to be in contact with God so that we can discover our own choices that are impacting our relationship with him. We need to be focusing on our own journey with Jesus instead of the ways that we believe people are failing around us.

How do we do this? We are able to live this out through praying to God and listening to him. We can ask God to let us know where he wants us to improve. We can ask him what behaviors he would like for us to work on.

It is when we get the answer that we have another decision to make. Are we going to do what we are feeling led to do? God can give us the path, but we have to decide if we want to take that path. We get to decide if we want to become more like Jesus or remain the follower that we currently are.

It is easy to keep our relationship with Jesus the same. The difficult choice to allow God to speak into our hearts and challenge us to become more like the person that he desires for us to be. Let us decide today that we are going to make the difficult choice.

Let us pray…