Sunday Sermon
Feeling Safe
Isaiah 47:10
You do evil things, but you feel safe and say, ‘No one sees what I do.’ Your wisdom and knowledge have fooled you. You say to yourself, ‘I am God, and no one is equal to me.’
Reading the Bible seems to always bring something new to me. I don’t know how many times I have read through First Corinthians but the last time I spent time in that book it impressed me of how much time the writer Paul spent on giving instruction about how to live as people of faith. What caught my attention was not the theological teaching that Paul did but the amount of instructions about everyday life that is found in this book. Most of the time we as people of faith are not concerned about the great theological questions about our faith but about how to live each day as followers of the living God. If our faith does not give us answers about how to get through the struggles of our day to day existence what good is our faith and what point is believing in the all-powerful God. This is what makes my faith such a great thing. God not only answers that great issues about who God is but God also gives us solutions to how to be people of faith as we live our lives each day. We should be so thankful that God gives us wisdom about life and how to live it because we as humans are terrible at living our lives. One of the reasons people point to Jesus as a great moral teacher is because Jesus spends a lot of time teaching people how to live their lives and shows us what it means to be good people in our everyday lives. A powerful part of the Ten Commandments in not the moral teaching that is there but the fact that it touches on our regular lives. How many people struggle with their parents and wonder how to deal with them each day and God in the Ten commandments give us not just a moral principle but some simple but some effective guide lines about how to make our lives work. What a blessing that we have a God who knows we not only need lessons on how to be good people but we also need lessons about how to be good people as we go through our daily life. The wisdom of God is proof of who God is and what God is all about and it helps us to better know God if we can have instruction about how to get through each day with grace and hope. Once we grasp how powerful what God has to teach us is, we can then begin to build a trust in all the things God has to say. When God speaks to us about our sin we will understand that it is to help us be the people that God longs for us to be and made us to be. Our faith in God is not disconnected from our daily lives but it brings great hope and serves to give us guidance about how to make it through each day. Seeking God brings us answers to so many questions about life and its meaning that it is foolish to not learn what God has to teach us. Rejecting God because what He tells us about life is inconvenient is such a mistake and we need to know it breaks God’s heart when we do that.
Our faith is built on the concept that God is the one who is really is in control and that if we will learn from Him we will become the people God longs for us to be. To say there is an urgency to in what God is telling us about who we are and how life should be lived is an understatement. God knows that our sin is destroying us and with every day we do not learn the ideas and principles that God wants us to know we step further into pain and suffering we do not need to have in our lives. Rejecting God’s ideas just brings confusion and conflict to us that God desperately wants us to avoid. If we don’t think that God is serious about dealing with the issues in our lives then we do not really appreciate who Jesus is. The coming of God into our reality in the body of Jesus is all about God wanting to fix the broken stuff in our lives. With the death of Jesus on the cross we see how totally committed God is to dealing with all the problems in our lives. There is a problem with all of this and that is that we have to accept that God is the one in control and His teachings are there to save us from ourselves. We have to learn and we have to apply what God tells us. There is no getting around this, either God is right and we should learn from Him or we are lost and broken people with not hope of being fixed. This is the place we come to and we have to decide what we are going to do with the teaching of God. The good thing is that what God teaches can be proven to be true and when tested always is shown to have positive results. We need to know that the wisdom of God does not save us but it does point to the God who does save us and that is what I want us to know. God’s teachings tell us who God is and helps us to trust in that God.
A world view that people hold is that humans are basically good and if given the chance they will do good. This concept is a wonderful idea and if it was true the world would be a better place but in fact humans are not even close to being good and they are fundamentally very evil. Dealing with this very simple truth is not easy because we want to believe we are good people and we hope that other people are good too. It is a sad thing that the truth is we as humans have evil hearts but God knows that we are evil and knows how bad we are and offers to change that evil into righteousness and love if we will only accept the authority of God. Our verse testifies to the reality of the human heart and what it leads to and it is an ugly and terrible place. We as humans get to that place by instead of seeking God’s guidance and righteousness we decide we are god. I love that the verse says we have been fooled by our own wisdom because it tells us what is really going on and we need to see how ugly our sin is. Let this be clear, God is not speaking about other people and talking about how evil they are God is talking to each of us and about how our hearts are evil. If we do not accept that we are broken people who need God to fix us we will descend into a terrible place that is dark and full of suffering. What I like best about this is God is not doing this to send us to hell but to wake us up to how bad we are so that we can seek God and His wisdom for the answers we need to be saved from the evil in our hearts. In this verse is talks about us feeling safe and God does not want us to feel safe because we are not in a safe place. When we reject the commands and principles that God lays down we are rejecting the things that make us safe and worst yet we are rejecting the one who makes us safe. If we make ourselves a god we have no one to save us from the disaster that our choices bring but if we are servants of the living God then we have someone who we can count on who will die to save us. All of this is based on the idea that we give up our evil hearts that are killing us and accept teaching of the God who loves us like He does. This verse condemns us but the good news is that it is only half the story and we have a God who longs to change things. Instead of being fooled we can have real wisdom and real knowledge that brings us the hope and joy we want and need in our lives.
The most powerful part of this verse is the phrase “No one sees what I do.” This goes to the idea that what we do when no one is looking is who we really are. Notice that we do evil when no one is looking. One of the reasons people reject God is because God is inconvenient and knows what we do at all times. If God knows what we are doing then we have to admit to the evil we do but if there is no God then the evil we do is not real because no one sees it. This whole line of thinking points us to the hope we have in God. We all will be accountable for what we have done and so it makes us want to be better people. The very existence of God helps keep us from doing evil and this means we become better people. When we do evil we hurt the people God loves but we also do damage to our souls and so God wants us to stop doing evil because it does harm to the creation He loves. I like the idea that God is paying attention to what we do, not because I fear God but because it tells me of a God who longs to make me into what I was meant to be. God calls out our sin because sin is killing us and God hates that because He is the giver of life. There is this God who is interested in our lives and wants to teach us how to live. It is a scary thought that God knows what we are doing but it also means we have access to God and that is an amazing thing. We need a God who is paying attention to what we are going because it means He can correct us and help us be people who are loving and righteous. God longs to be involved in our lives and that is a good thing because it means we are less likely to do evil and more likely to do good. This is a God we want in our lives and this is a God who is good for us but it also means we have to accept the authority of God in our lives.
This verse is so ugly and so terrible but it proves who our God is and what our God is all about. We do not come to this verse and find God confused or unsure of what is going on. God is clearly condemning us when we act like this but God does it not do it to wreck our lives but to tell us we are headed in a direction that will only lead to bad things. Our God is a redeeming God who wants to save us from ourselves. If God wanted us to end up in hell He would just let us be and not bother with us but that is not the God we have. Jesus came to save sinners but to do that Jesus had to talk about sin and show us that we are sinners. What we think and know only lead us into to trouble and we need to seek God and learn from Him about how to live our lives. We are foolish and evil people but we have a God who wants to change that and make us the healthy people we should be.
Comments
Post a Comment