Life Under God

God has always desired something different to be with us.

Good morning friends. As Craig said, we're just a few days away from Thanksgiving and I am grateful that you are here with us today. I love to worship together to start every week and I'm excited as we kick off this new series that you're here right from the get go. I hope you'll be with us for all of the subsequent weeks of this series. I'm thankful for everything Jesus has done for us.

Amen.

And I am grateful for the love and the encouragement and the generosity of this church. And today especially many of you been asking about my wife. Today my wife is here in person for the first time since surgery. So.

Excited and grateful for that. And I pray that the days ahead of us will be a restful and grateful time for all of us. On November 28th of 2010, the Buffalo Bills and the Pittsburgh Steelers went head to head and the game went into overtime where The Bills lost 1619 after wide receiver Stevie Johnson dropped a pass in the end zone. And after the game, Bill Johnson hopped on Twitter and he blamed God for the loss. This is what his tweet read.

This was all caps. I praise you 247 and this how you do me. You expect me to learn from this? How? I'll never forget this ever.

Translation God, I've done a lot for you, so now you owe me. Have you ever felt that way? Like you're doing your part but God just isn't coming through for you? Well, in his book that's called With Sky, Gitani provides a thought provoking breakdown of several common ways in which people try to relate to God. So as we prepare for Christmas, when we celebrate that God put on flesh and he came to earth to be with us, I want to use some ideas from this book, which I would encourage you to read, to help us examine some of our own assumptions about God.

G.K. chesterton wrote, The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. In other words, it's possible to miss out on knowing God simply because of our own laziness, our own apathy. But sometimes people avoid God not because they're slackers, not because they're not willing to invest some effort in seeking him, but because all they've ever seen are unhealthy and inaccurate pictures of Him. Negative experiences sometimes jade our thinking about God.

But it's a tragedy to miss out on a relationship with God simply because we misunderstand what that means. Imagine for a second that all of us boarded a plane together. It's a large plane, okay? We all board a plane together, headed for a tropical island 2,000 miles away. But at takeoff, the pilot miscalculates our course by 5 degrees.

We would never get to our island. We would miss it by 174 miles. And in the same way, if we look for God in the wrong places, by making inaccurate assumptions about him, we can miss him entirely. So the backdrop for this entire series is this reality that we are created, you and I, in God's image. We are spiritual beings.

We are wired for a relationship with him, but we are also finite, and we live in a messy and distracting world. So there are times when we're only able to see bits and pieces of our infinite God sky. Giottani writes, our hearts seek God and the goodness, beauty, justice and peace we've been told he provides. But he often remains hidden behind the shadow cast by an evil world. So we sometimes get only partial glimpses of God and we mistakenly assume that we're seeing the whole picture.

Now, the first of several incomplete pictures of God that we're going to explore in this series is one we might call Life Under God. Life under God is a cause and effect way of thinking about God that for today's purposes, I want to define. Like this. Life under God is the idea that if we follow God's laws, He is obligated to bless our lives, our homes and our country. It's a quid pro quo arrangement.

Through our obedient behavior, we score points that compel God to give us what we want. We scratch God's back, He scratches ours. And that idea is influenced by the mythologies of ancient pre scientific cultures who believed, for example, that sunrises and sunsets are not the result of the Earth's rotation. They're the result of a God who drives a flaming chariot across the sky each day. Maybe you've read that before.

Where seasons change not because the Earth's distance from the sun varies on its own elliptical path around the sun, but because the God of the underworld kidnaps the daughter of the harvest goddess and her grief turns the earth barren and cold for winter. Mythological gods were moody gods. They were temperamental gods. Their attitude could easily shift. So to remain in their favor, people practiced rituals and they offered sacrifices and they obeyed rules.

They tried to manage the universe. They tried to ensure their own survival by participating in these superstitions. So if one culture produced a bigger harvest than another, it wasn't because they had better farming techniques or more favorable weather conditions or more fertile soil, it was because their sacrifices and their rituals were more pleasing to the gods. Many of us have a deep seated fear of not being in control. Anybody else ever feel that way?

We want to be in control. So if we can find a way to explain unpredictable forces, that has a way of making us feel a little bit less afraid. And I'm convinced that this contributes not just to mythology but to conspiracy theories. Because when scary things happen and someone steps up and offers a simple but confident explanation as to why, people are drawn to that appearance of clarity, whether it's true or not. So this life under God perspective has been present throughout history.

For example, we see life under God thinking in the way we sometimes interpret scripture. For example, this statement from the Old Testament book of proverbs, Start children off on the way they should go, or train up a child in the way he should go. And even when they're old, they will not turn from it or they will not depart from it. A proverb is a wise statement, but it's not an ironclad guarantee. You know, many Christians that I respect came from homes where the Bible was taught and prayer was practiced and church involvement was prioritized.

But we have free will. So people who grow up very far from God in a very different way can still choose to follow him. And those of us raised in the church can still decide later to walk away. If we do our best as parents to raise our kids to know and love the Lord and they decide as adults to reject him, it's not necessarily because God has breached his contractual obligation to us. We see life under God thinking in the way people often blend faith and politics.

Assuming that if we can just elect the right leaders or appoint the right judges, or get the right party in control of congress, or pass the right laws or display the ten commandments in public buildings, the then God will surely bless our country more. Life under God thinking has produced many of history's conflicts as people trying to live under God as they understood him sought to impose their beliefs and their values on others. You know, today there are Muslim majority countries in our world that follow Sharia law and they demand conformity to Islamic teachings. Now, we in the west frown on that. But during the Spanish Inquisition, it was professing Christians who used torture and terror to force religious uniformity.

Correct biblical doctrine matters very much, but cruelly coercing people into professing things they don't really believe, that's not the way of Jesus. In the early 20th century, Christian people were a part of the lobby that led to the 18th Amendment and Prohibition of the sale and transportation of alcohol. Now, I've seen alcohol do a lot of damage in people's lives, which is why I personally choose not to drink. But total condemnation of all things containing alcohol goes way beyond what the Bible actually teaches. When I was a kid, a group of concerned citizens in my hometown pressured the city to ban the sale of pornographic magazines in convenience stores.

Now, I know that porn is harmful and destructive, and I believe that less of it would be a good thing. But Jesus established his church to make disciples and not just campaign against certain sins. This all reminds me of a day in the third grade when my mom had been after me for a while to clean up the closet in my bedroom, and I kept putting it off. So finally, my mom reached a point of exasperation where she said something along the lines of, young man, you get in there and don't come out until it's straightened up. That place is a mess.

So I stomped into my room and I started flinging toys around in my closet. And as I did, I muttered under my breath, who cares? And evidently I muttered louder than I thought I did because my mom heard me from the next room. And suddenly I was in even more trouble. So let me ask you, at the end of the day, did I obey my mom?

Yeah, I cleaned my closet. But did I honor my mom? Not really. I mean, I did what I was told, but I did it with a resentful and disrespectful attitude. See, we can pressure people to behave in certain ways, but God is not honored by obedience.

That isn't willing, that isn't genuine. It just so happens that Jesus had a number of encounters with life under God style thinking. In John chapter 9, for example, Jesus and his disciples met a man who had been blind his entire life. He'd been born that way. And this encounter actually shed light on several faulty life under God assumptions.

For starters, the disciples automatically assumed that this man's blindness was the result of sin, that someone had failed to live properly under God, and blindness was the punishment. But Jesus explained that this man's blindness was not a curse. It was actually an opportunity for God's power to be displayed in him. And then Jesus restored the man's sight. Now all of this took place, the text tells us, on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest.

And the Jewish belief. The Jewish leaders believed that anyone who was truly on God's side would never attempt to do God's work on the Sabbath. So they concluded right then and there that there was no way that Jesus could have been sent from God. But it just so happens that Jesus was God in flesh. So their assumptions could not have been more wrong.

And as the Jewish leaders tried to get to the bottom of what was going on and tried to find some fault with Jesus and what he had done, they interrogated the man that he had healed. And the man made this statement to them. He said, we know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. See, this man was convinced that unless we live under God, God wants nothing to do with us.

But in reality, the opposite is true. Because Jesus himself said in Luke chapter 19 that he came to seek and save lost people. He came to seek out those who are spiritually sick and restore them to wholeness.

In Matthew chapter 19, a man asked Jesus what he needed to do to receive eternal life. And Jesus told him to keep God's commands. And the man said that he had all of them. But Jesus knew that this man's money was the most important thing in the world to him. And so Jesus answered, well, if you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, which we've talked about the last couple of weeks, then come.

Jesus said, follow me. And the text tells us that when the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth. See, from a life under God perspective, this man's wealth looked on the surface like a sign of God's favorite and his blessing. But Jesus turned that entire worldview upside down by revealing that our attachment to wealth can actually be a barrier to God's presence. It can actually get in the way of what God wants to do in our lives.

In Luke chapter 18, Jesus told a story that the text tells us was aimed specifically at some who were confident of their own righteousness and consequently looked down on everyone else. So Jesus told a story about two men. One of them was a Pharisee, a Jewish religious leader, and the other one was a tax collector. This would have been a Jewish man whose occupation was to help the Roman government fund their occupation of Israel by taxing other Jews. So both of these men in Jesus story went to the same temple to pray.

And the Pharisees prayer was a textbook example of self promotion. He said, God, I thank you that I'm not like other people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. God, you're so lucky to have me on your team.

But the tax collector's prayer was very different. The text says he was ashamed to even look up. He beat his breast and he simply said, God have mercy on me, a sinner. And I wish I could have been there to see the reaction when Jesus wrapped up this story by saying about the tax collector, I tell you that this man rather than the other went home justified before or went home right with God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The Pharisee assumed that he was in good standing with God because of the laws he kept. Because by all appearances, he lived under God. But In Matthew chapter 23, Jesus blasted these very same leaders for their corrupt system that burdened people with endless man made rules. These leaders conformed outwardly to religious regulations, but their hearts were full of hatred and greed and pride and lust and deception. Jesus made the unflattering comparison of them to whitewashed tombs.

Clean and presentable on the outside, but full of death and decay on the inside. In Matthew chapter 15, a group of life under God minded religious leaders ask Jesus why his disciples didn't follow their tradition of ceremonially washing their hands before they ate. And instead of answering their question, Jesus called them out about something else entirely. See, to get around the Old Testament command, I mean, this is a part of the ten commandments. To honor their parents, the Pharisees had invented a tradition of declaring their wealth devoted to God so that when their parents needed help, they could simply say, sorry mom and pop, wish I could, but I've dedicated all my money to God.

Good luck. And Jesus said to them, you nullify the word of God. You take the actual word of God and you set it aside for the sake of your man made tradition, you hypocrites. Isaiah the prophet was right when he prophesied about you. These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. Life under God appeals to our desire for clear boundaries and a sense of control. If we just follow the rules, God will bless us and protect us from harm. But as we look through scripture, there are multiple difficulties with that way of looking at life.

For starters, number one, life under God reflects a misunderstanding of who's actually in charge. See, if our purpose in going to church or praying or singing worship songs or giving is to score points in hopes of getting what we want, we're not really submitting to God. We're Trying to use God. We're trying to control him. We're treating him like a genie or a vending machine, which is a whole lot more about a transaction than it is about a relationship.

A second problem with life under God thinking is that it ignores the clear teaching of Jesus. You know, every time there's a natural disaster, whether we're talking a hurricane or an earthquake or a wildfire or a tsunami, someone typically steps up to suggest that that is God's specific judgment. And it's always on somebody else. Have you noticed that? But Jesus stressed repeatedly that painful experiences are normal in our sin broken world.

In fact, just before Jesus was arrested and crucified, he predicted to his disciples that they would soon be scattered, that they would flee for their lives. And then he said this. I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world.

See, doing the right things doesn't necessarily guarantee that everything always goes the way we want it to, Even if you study really hard and you get good grades, which is a good idea, by the way. But even if you do all of that, you might not get into that Ivy League school. Saving sex for marriage is wise for a host of reasons, but that alone doesn't guarantee a healthy or lasting marriage. The people that we pray for have free will. So despite our prayers, they can still make ungodly and harmful choices.

You know, right now in India and in Nigeria, faithful Jesus followers are being persecuted and killed by Hindu and Muslim extremists precisely because they are faithful Jesus followers. When we believe that our religious behavior obligates God to bless us, it becomes really easy to grow cynical and disillusioned when things don't work out exactly as we'd hoped as followers of Jesus. Jesus himself said that we have peace not because everything always goes the way we want it to, but because Jesus conquered death for us and we know how the story ends. That's where our hope and our peace come from.

Number three, Life under God tends to care more about controlling people than loving them. When we believe that obeying God's rules is about winning his favor and avoiding harm, we tend to create these very strict moral codes. And we carefully enforce them for fear that if anybody gets out of line, God's wrath is just going to pour out on all of us. And in various pockets of fundamentalist Christianity, that fear has led to rules against everything from playing cards, to dancing, to going to movies, to using drums and guitars in worship. Morality is important.

But when we invent rules and we make those invented rules our main priority, it becomes really easy for us to justify doing some very immoral things in our attempts to enforce those rules, whether we're talking about burning people at the stake for teaching bad theology or hanging those suspected of witchcraft, or assassinating a political speaker that we disagree with. And this door, by the way, swings both ways. In 1998, the leaders of the radical Islamic terror group Al Qaeda issued a formal declaration that American military presence in Saudi Arabia was a defilement of holy ground, and they urged all Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Three years later, that decree motivated the 911 attacks on the US and it was just as easy in the wake of those attacks for certain Christian leaders to blame those attacks on others. It was all about God's judgment on doctors who performed abortions, or radical feminism, or the LGBTQ community or the aclu, always claiming that some other persons or some other group of people's sin had caused God to withdraw his hand of protection from our country.

See, as a culture, we delight in simplistic broad brush explanations for complex and multi layered issues and being confident that we're right. I'm sure you've seen this often becomes an excuse for treating others really poorly. I see this all the time. I'll bet you do too, in online debates about just about anything, especially politics and theology. When I visit Facebook and I see professing Christians calling each other names or publicly insulting each other's intelligence, I resonate with this statement from Jutani's book where he says there is an eerie correlation between meanness and how absolutely certain a person is about their beliefs.

Humility is in short supply among those seeking to perfectly be demarcate truth and error, righteousness and wickedness as they pursue a life under God. Those who pride themselves on their reverent submission to God's truth are strangely reluctant to submit to anyone else. The resulting conflict and animosity within Christian communities is difficult to reconcile with Jesus, who declared that the world would know we are his people by our love.

It's hard to love people when we're busy trying to manipulate or control or silence them.

Number four Life under God loads us down with burdens we were never intended to carry, like the burden of a distorted view of God as a harsh taskmaster. There are people whose primary view of God is as an UN parent who knows only how to react to anything that we do or say with disapproval. Meanwhile, Jesus said, come to me all you who are weary and burdened Beaten down and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

There's the burden of striving to earn our salvation through perfect performance.

I have some of that in my wiring. That's called legalism. The Apostle Paul had a lot to say about that. But in Ephesians chapter two in particular, he wrote, it is by grace, by the undeserved, unwarranted kindness of God, that you've been saved. Through faith, through our trust in what Jesus has done for us.

And this is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God. Not by works, not by anything we do so that no one can boast, so that no one can brag that we deserve this. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. Our obedience to God matters very much, but we obey out of gratitude for everything God does for us.

We don't obey to try to earn God's love. That legalistic spirit carries with it the burden of anxiety about constantly falling short. You know, if access to God's holy presence is something that we have to achieve, none of us will ever measure up. But the gospel message, the good news of Jesus, is all about God's grace. It is not about our goodness.

The Apostle John wrote, this is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment. In this world, we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. When we love God and we trust through Jesus that God loves us, we can rest in his love.

We can rest in the accomplished work of Jesus at the cross and not our own goodness. See, a purely life under God perspective misses the mark because at the end of the day, God wants to be with us, not just do things for us.

God wants to be with us. He wants to receive our love and our worship, not just our orders, not just our requests. The Bible is the story of God's desire to be with us. God created us as humanity, unique among everything else. He created to enjoy a relationship with him and to a person.

We have abused that freedom that God gave us. And we have in a variety of different ways, chosen rebellion and sin instead. And we have put ourselves at a distance from God for that very reason. And yet God still loves us. So rather than kick us to the curb, rather than say, well, you made your bed so you're going to lay in it now, he put on flesh in the person of Jesus and he came after us.

And in that flesh, Jesus Christ lived among us. And with his life he showed us what life with God looks like. And then he offered that perfect, sinless life in our place for our sins at the cross. And as proof that Jesus once and for all removed that sin barrier that otherwise would separate us from God, he rose from the grave to offer forgiveness, restoration and never ending life to everyone who trusts and follows him. Jesus came so that we can know God personally, so we can live with Him.

That's why we celebrate Christmas. That's why we want you to know Jesus. More than traditions, more than Bible facts, more than more than rules, more than maintaining outward appearances, we are about life with Jesus. He loves us and he died and he rose and he now lives forever to welcome us into God's family. So as a church, we're here to help you find and follow and live with him.

And we would love at any time to help you take your next step with him, whatever that step would happen to be. I'm excited about this series. I'm grateful for a number of different ways we'll have the opportunity over the next few weeks to examine what it means to truly live life with God. And I hope you'll be here with us for all of them. Would you pray with me now?

Heavenly Father, we thank you for being a relational God, for loving us, for pursuing us, for refusing to give up on us, for putting on flesh and coming here to live with us so that we can live with you. We're grateful God, for your goodness to us. We have so many things to be thankful for, but God, chief among those is your love and your grace, demonstrated to us in the life and the death of Jesus. And we ask God that you would use these next few weeks, that you would use this season just to refresh our awareness and to deepen our appreciation for who you are.