Selling God Short
John 20:10-18 (NIV)
10 Then the disciples went back to their homes, 11 but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 “Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. [1]
The disciples came and saw and returned to their homes. Mary was unable to leaves so quickly with all her questions. It’s almost as though she sensed that there was something more to the story. So she lingers, in her pain and confusion, weeping outside of the empty tomb. She didn’t know what to do or where to go and her only conceivable answer was a human one – it was the only possible explanation. The body had been stolen.
So Mary waited and she wept.
1. She was looking for answers.
We always look for answers at times of loss or discouragement – when things don’t go the way that we think they should – when God doesn’t come through for us they way that we think he should come through.
The problem is that we look for answers that make sense to us rather than answers that make sense to God. We ask God to explain himself within the confines of human understanding. That is an incredible shame because there are more often than not no answers from the human perspective.
We had some discussion at conference sessions on the possibility of ministers surrendering their licenses to perform marriages as a protest to same sex marriage legislation. The young minister who introduced this discussion was courageous and his intentions were most noble. He is a forward thinker and a true man of God.
In his introduction, he mentioned that he was mad at God and that they were working things out. He was upset that God had allowed this to happen to our country. My inner reaction was that God is not highly concerned for the state of our country. We stand for nothing in particular as a nation and and have openly declared ourselves no longer to be a Christian country.
Before we arrived at this point relative to same sex marriage we have chosen to fund abortion and have given financial rights to people who choose to live together outside of marital commitment. There are a host of other things that would greatly offend God that we accept with little trouble. We recognize the right of politicians to routinely lie to their constituents as long as they will tell us lies that we like. Consequently we have elected people who lack character and integrity. As a society we would have to ask if this is any more than what we deserve. I would say that we are truly represented.
Hopefully not within the Christian church, but I do know of Christian people who believe that their faith does not apply to their work. Somehow these are two unrelated arenas and they feel no inhibition to compromise their faith in favor of their livelihood. I would rather be a pauper. You see God was not committed to preserve the nation of Israel without a refining process. The nation that he built upon the faith of Abraham was overtaken, conquered, dismantled and scattered because his commitment was to a people not a set of geographical boundaries.
Does God have any particular commitment to our nation – I think not. But he does have a commitment to his people within this nation and to any who will come to Him. Only God can heal this nation and He will do it if we look to find His answers rather than our own. We have an answer – it is a challenge to our people. Personally I think we need to accept it as a personal challenge as though we were the only ones in this country who could hear His challenge.
11 When Solomon had finished the temple of the Lord and the royal palace, and had succeeded in carrying out all he had in mind to do in the temple of the Lord and in his own palace, 12 the Lord appeared to him at night and said: “I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a temple for sacrifices. 13 “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, 14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 15 Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. 16 I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there. [2] 2 Chronicles 7:11-16 (NIV)
Now you can put your faith in good legislation, the next promising candidate and better days for the church from the hands of people who really don’t care – these would be solutions that would make sense from a human perspective, man’s answers - or you can say,
“I will do my part as a member of this congregation and I will repent of the spiritual ease that I have taken in better days and I will now undertake the work of prayer on behalf of my country.”
As simplistic as it may sound, I would like to remind you as a people of faith that our hope is still in the Lord – it has never moved. Favorable times make us less aware of our need for God – we relax, we fail to keep pace and we drift.
Let’s not aspire to become another political power bloc or to pin our hopes on some promise or promising party or candidate. He is the Lord of heaven and earth whether or not we acknowledge Him as such. Let’s pursue the release of God’s power in and through our churches and our lives, to transform individuals until our government and our nation is a transformed reflection of our people.
It all begins with you and I, on our knees, not complaining about the government or our leaders but repenting and turning from wickedness, and looking to God. When we can get this right, then we will see a difference.
Mary waited and she wept because there are times when there is nothing else that expresses our hearts quite like tears.
2. She was looking for a body.
And no wonder, she had stayed through the very last breath of Christ – most likely had seen the soldiers lance run through His side. Perhaps she saw the lifeless beaten body removed from the cross and carried to the tomb that now stood before her empty. And somehow, the empty tomb seemed to increase her sorrow, more so than if she had found the stone in place. And so Mary wept over the greatest miracle that the world has ever known. God’s answer for a lost world.
While in Mary’s case it is understandable, it is also true of human nature today that we most often find what it is that we are looking for. The Pharisees looked “for a reason to accuse” when they observed the life of Christ. They found it and because they convinced themselves that their cause was just and that they were responsible for maintaining the religious status quo, they crucified the Son of God.
Jesus a.k.a. “The Gardener” asked Mary the same question asked her by the angels in the tomb and then added one,
15 “Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Look at Mary’s response.
” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
She just wanted to retrieve a corpse. There was no upper level to her awareness, understanding or expectations. We sell God short so routinely when we come to him for what we want. We can never imagine or conceive His riches, His blessing and His love. The scripture only tells us that He has more to give than what we could ask or imagine.
Believe it or not, in our own spiritual experience, we become conditioned to a very reasonable, understandable approach to spiritual things.
We define our future by our past. What we have not yet experienced, we rule out. And we come to God’s Word with this lack of faith – we come to church with this lack of faith.
I was talking to Rob Guptill this past week at Beulah Camp. One day, when the Day of Pentecost was fully come, the book of Acts records, the Holy Spirit visited the church in power and forever changed those present. Three thousand souls were added to the kingdom by the Church Builder in that one day. He could do that again, any Sunday, any day. It only takes one Sunday – one day – to make a forever difference.
Mary’s low-level expectation was defined by what she had seen. I want to ask you today if you consider yourself to be a person of faith. As a child of God are you living by faith. Are you looking for the things that you can define and understand or are your eyes open to a new understanding of God – nothing new from the scriptures, but something new and fresh to be added to the hum drum, joyless experience that shows in your tired eyes and the stress lines of faithless frowns. You may never win a beauty contest but I believe that there should be some visible sign of the joy of Christ in our lives, on our faces in our hearts.
We believe that we have an Enemy in the spiritual realm as much as we believe that we have a Savior. He is the antithesis of everything that we know of God. If there is one thing that he can do to minimize the effectiveness of our lives as individual believers and as a church, it is to create a blindness to who we are in Christ to the fact that we are spirituals sons and daughters of God. As such there is position and privilege that will help us navigate the physical world in which we live. We are never guaranteed pain free lives, trouble free lives. Jesus in fact told us the opposite. We face everything that others face and there are times when we face greater trouble than those who do not know Christ. But we have a hope that they do not possess and whatever we face is momentary, temporary. When we lose that vital connection and awareness, we become like the eaglet raised in the chicken coop, accepting the fact that he was nothing more than an earth bound creature, doomed to peck in the dirt.
And with little expectation she stood confused talking to Christ and not even realizing who he was, her eyes still filled with tears and her thoughts shrouded in confusion, in the presence of Christ, thinking that he was the Gardener, perhaps a grave-robber.
3. She came consumed with her pain.
In our sorrow, our natural pain is magnified and prolonged by a self-centered sense of loss rather than the healing that comes through the presence of Christ. We all know that grief and loss run a natural course – everyone experiences it differently. There are stages of anger, questioning . . . For the child of God the words of scripture are so relevant – we are not to grieve like rest of men who have no hope.
I want to challenge you today to give your pain to God. I want to ask you to consider that the pain that you have in your life causes you to see the world and faith in an inaccurate manner. It doesn’t matter what kind of pain that it is.
I had a chance to reconnect with one of my youth in Jamestown. He was a spiritual leader years ago, attended Bethany, graduated to serve as small staid church in rural New York state. In two years they sliced and diced this young man on the altars to traditionalism.
He quit. Worked at secular college in the Carolinas and then moved with a newly earned accounting degree to Missouri. He travels as a supervisor for a tax preparing company. It as whispered to me while I was at the reunion that he was now professing to be an atheist. Un-surrendered pain. I had coffee with him at a certain coffee shop in Jamestown last Monday morning. I told Doug, my 42 year old teenager, that I was aware of his status and wasn’t there to argue him out of his conclusions. I told him that I loved him regardless of whatever he did or di not believe and that I wanted to re-open a dialogue with him. He began to tear up an then to re-trace the painful experiences of his life. I needed to see that soft spot. I knew it was there. True atheists ignore faith. Those who want to argue it are merely trying to convince themselves. Doug’s problem was that his pain had been a lens that had created self-absorption and removed an awareness of God. Every bit of pain in our lives, tragedy, loss, offense must be laid at the foot of Calvary’s cross. When we refuse to lay it down and we pick it up frequently and handle eit and tell ourselves that we didn’t deserve this or that then we cut ourselves off from God’s presence, His resource.
People who suffer depression find tremendous fault with many other things in this life. They level criticisms at this or that and inwardly believe that if circumstances change then this will change the way that they feel. The problem is not the thing that they point at – the external circumstance or the unfriendly associate – the problem is within and no change will ever bring relief.
I don’t believe that God ever passes a hurting soul. Between the cross and his unfinished mission, he stops to offer His presence to this dear lady. He is here today to touch your heart and soul.
Illustration – Dixie Langley. It is His presence that brings healing and comfort and relief. (Drugstore, Bank
Much of our coming to God is to get what we want rather than to receive what He has to give us.
Ill. Patti M. - garden center.
We come to Him in the blindness of our own expectations. “What did you expect to see, a reed tossed by the wind?”
----
[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
[2] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
