‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
1.19.2014
“First”
Tonight
is going to be a little different than what we’re normally used to for college
group. Normally we do a few songs and then introductions and then we get into a
full on study of the gospel of Luke. But we recently had the pleasure, Blythe,
Vanessa and myself, to attend the annual Youth Worker’s Conference down at
Calvary Chapel Bible College in Murrieta. It’s always a huge breath of fresh
air attending and it helps to revitalize me, at least, and bring new vision for
the New Year.
That being said, you maybe noticed the
official title for tonight’s study from the Facebook page, which if you haven’t
been there yet, you should go there right now and join the group ‘Behold the
Lamb of God’ College Study. The title of our meeting tonight is: “CCAV BTLOG CS
YWC RECAP”, which of course stands for Calvary Chapel Antelope Valley Behold
The Lamb of God College Study Youth Worker’s Conference Recap.
Basically, we wanted to share some of
the experience of the Youth Worker’s Conference with you guys. After all,
you’re one of the reasons why we went down there, to better understand how to
serve this group of young adults. So, I asked my leaders if they’d share a bit
about what went on and specifically what God told them while we were down
there. After they’re done, I’ll share what I learned down there and then we’ll
get into the Word of God for a little bit.
As for myself, I love going to this
conference. I think I would try to go even if I wasn’t involved in any kind of
youth or young adults ministry. I’d still try to sneak that. It’s always been
an encouraging experience hearing some really, really great teachings from some
excellent teachers. It’s always as if the messages they bring seem absolutely
pointed to my own current experience in the ministry, the things I’m struggling
with, praying about, or even things that I wasn’t even aware of.
This time, one of the things that God
spoke to me was just such a thing that I really wasn’t aware of at all. It
didn’t come until the final speaker on the last day. And understand, too, that
I was waiting all week to really hear from God very clearly on something I was
wrestling with in my heart. What I wanted from God was this big epiphany, this
big huge sky-rending revelation of angelic voices telling me what I should do
about this thing I was wrestling with.
I didn’t get that. It wasn’t what God
wanted to say to me. That right there is something important to note: You ask
God to speak and He may indeed speak, but realize that it may not be the words
you wanted to hear from Him, it may not even be remotely related to what you
wanted to hear about.
But what God showed me was something
that prompts me to tell you this: I am sorry. I’m sorry that in many ways I
have wasted a lot of your time over these past couple of years of teaching. I’m
sorry, but I confess that I haven’t really loved you. I haven’t really served
you.
See, I haven’t been doing this
ministry for you. I’ve done it all this time for me. I haven’t really done this
ministry even for God, but for myself. The word ministry means service.
But I haven’t been doing this college group to serve you first, or God, not
really at all. I’ve been doing it to serve myself, to make myself feel better
about myself, to make myself believe better about myself because now I can tell
myself “Moses, you’re not as bad as all that, after all, look at how faithfully
you’ve been teaching this group of young adults about the Bible!”
Shockingly, I realized that I wasn’t
ministering here because I wanted to help you. I was doing this ministry to
help myself and to get from you rather than give to you, to get from you your
respect, your attention, your praise, your friendship, your time, your praise, all
of that. And it’s been so tremendously easy to abuse all of you in this way,
and for that I deeply, sincerely apologize. I need your grace and your
forgiveness.
Even last night I was reading Matthew 6:1 and I was reminded again of
this point, I guess I didn’t get it enough the first time! There, Jesus says “Take heed that you do not do your charitable
deeds before men, to be seen by them.” Those final five words of that
sentence are me. There are few things as disgusting to me now as the way I’ve
ministered primarily to myself, to make myself feel good, to be seen and heard,
for two years time! And it’s something that I don’t want to do anymore.
Paul said “The love of Christ compels us” (II Corinthians 5:14). I think that God only recently, at this
conference, showed me what that means. It means the difference between
ministering to you because I want something out of you and ministering to you
because of the irresistible love that Jesus Christ has for you. It isn’t even
necessarily that I’m going to continue doing this college group because I love
you since Christ loves you, since there will be several times this year, I’m
anticipating, when I won’t very much love you at all, and that brings it full
circle back to me anyway. But rather, I’m going to keep doing this, now with a
fresh philosophy, because I know that Jesus loves you. How could I not be
motivated to serve you, the ones for whom Christ died?
The final question I jotted down in my
notes to myself at the end of the conference was this: “What motivates me to do
ministry?” I realized the wrong thing had been motivating me all this time. No
more. It is the love of Christ that compels us. Not my love like Christ’s, because my love will
fail, whether because of emotional frailty, physical weakness, time constraints
or even because I may just wake up one Monday and want to give up. Rather, Jesus
Christ’s unfailing, unfaltering love compels me, because as Paul said “we judge thus, that if One died for all,
then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer
for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.”
I don’t know if this is somehow
analogous to whatever experiences you might have, but that at least is what I
saw and came face to face with, my own terrible ministry-philosophy. God’s love
is selfless, self-sacrificial and it seeks the good of others, and that is my
new philosophy behind this group.
Now to change gears, let’s look again
at Matthew 6. (Stand to read)
Tonight we find ourselves at the first
college group of the New Year, 2015, at the perfect vantage point to reflect
back upon 2014 with all of its challenges, events, meetings, people, blessings
and perhaps failures, the times that we learned, the times that we refused to
learn, and the times that made us want to start over or simply try harder next
time.
Well, here is 2015, a whole new year
starting over again. Looking on into the future, what are some things you want
to accomplish? What are some changes you want to see happen in your life? What
are some things you’d maybe want to do for the Lord this year? What would you
like to see happen in this group this year?
Then besides the aspirational
questions with which we challenge ourselves in looking ahead into the year,
there are the practical, pragmatic questions that assault us, perhaps resulting
in worry and anxiety: such as where am I going to work this year, or go to
school or find that right guy or that right girl, or how am I going to pay for
this thing or that thing, or what kind of decisions is my family going to make,
or where am I going to live, shall I stay here or relocate myself?
And in looking at the vast picture we
call LIFE, we can find ourselves overwhelmed. I remember as a child one of the
first times I was confronted with a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t remember exactly
what it was a picture of, probably some pretty looking trees or a cozy cottage
in a forest or something trite like that, and I don’t remember how many pieces
it was (could’ve been 500, could’ve been a couple thousand) but what I do
remember is the sheer impossibility it seemed to present to my young,
burgeoning intellect.
Why so? Because I was looking at the
whole picture—I think it was a snowy landscape?—and in looking at the whole picture
I was getting overwhelmed, anxious, daunted by the insurmountable task of
assembling that picture from the hundreds if not thousands of tiny jigsawy
pieces. But what someone told me help me finish the puzzle, they told me to
look for the most important pieces of the puzzle: the corner pieces. They told
me that once I got the corner pieces, I would be able to then build the frame
of the puzzle-picture, looking for the edge pieces, and everything would go
much easier from then on.
Ever notice how many analogies there
are to real life? Life is precisely like that experience with that jigsaw
puzzle. Things pile up: paying rent, paying bills, paying for a car, paying for
school, paying off loans… one piece, another piece, and another piece… it’s all
adding up… finding a job, finding an apartment, finding a spouse… another
piece, another piece… stressing out about work, stressing out about church,
about friends, about hobbies, about dreams and aspirations that aren’t coming
to fruition… another piece, another piece… battling sin, fighting addictions,
staying pure, physically or mentally… another piece, and another… planning for
school, planning for marriage, planning for a family, planning for your
livelihood, planning for your taxes… another and another and another… until you
have a whole table full of pieces, too many pieces to count, too many pieces to
sort through, too many pieces to try to fit together and make sense of.
And if some of the pieces stay where
they are for too long, never seeming to fit with the other pieces, you start to
worry about it, you start to wonder if someone didn’t muck it up by mixing
together some of your puzzle pieces with somebody else’s puzzle, so that you’ve
got a random piece to some stupid little kid’s puppy-puzzle, when you’re just
trying to make this one picture of this lighthouse by the sea.
And in worrying over those unused
pieces and trying to make it all fit, you begin to wonder who even had the
cruelty to design a puzzle this complex and force you to sit down and solve it,
and you pick up the box and turn it over expecting to see that it was published
by Hasbro or Parker Brothers, and you find that the maker of the puzzle was
somebody called God Almighty, and that, surprise, surprise, He not only made
the puzzle but He made you, seemingly to solve this specific and unique puzzle
that’s been designed just for you, with just the right pieces to make just the
right picture.
But we’re not going to be able to make
sense of it all until we find the right pieces, the most important pieces, the
pieces that begin to help to frame the picture and help us make sense of the
whole thing. The first steps toward solving the puzzle of life, and avoiding
becoming overwhelmed by it, is to find the most important pieces. And I believe
one of them is right here in Matthew 6.
We read it.
“Therefore
do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What
shall we wear?’”
In our modern society where we’re far
better off than they were in those ancient times among the poor and oppressed
that Christ preached to, we may not be worrying about where we’re going to find
our next meal. We certainly aren’t worrying about what you’re going to wear,
unless you’re simply an indecisive person standing in front of their rows of clothes
in your closet.
But there are comparable worries. We
mentioned some of them already. And I don’t presume to know what you’re worried
about. I don’t presume to know what you pray hardest for, what keeps you up at
night, what haunts you at every moment at the back of your mind. But I know
this: you’re a worrier. It is a part of the human experience. We worry.
The Bible anticipates that. Jesus
anticipates that. He didn’t need to take a survey or see a show of hands to
know which members of His audience worried. They all did. Thus He said to them,
and His words float eternally down the ages to you and I, saying: “…after all these things the Gentiles seek.
For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first
the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added
to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow…”
Point being this: It is the start of a
new year. It is time for firsts. Let
this be a first: that you would seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness
above anything else, that you would make Him a priority above anything else,
place seeking Him above worrying over your problems.
Seek what? Seek the kingdom of God.
What is that? It is God’s authority and rule over yourself and others around
you. It is, in context, what Jesus mentions there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on
earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of God is not some crazy, spiritual,
nebulous thing. The concept has many facets, but at face value it is simply
that: God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven. Seek that, seek God’s will.
Seek what God wants done.
What else? Seek His righteousness.
Again, a profound subject with many facets, but I’ll just leave you with this
thought to chew on. The apostle writing in I
Corinthians 1:30 calls Christ our righteousness. We are saved and in Christ, and being in Christ means we
have been imputed His righteousness by faith. Literally, we are counted
righteous in God’s eyes because we are in His Son. His perfect righteousness
has become our righteousness.
So what does seeking His righteousness
mean? Probably a lot of things. Far more capable teachers than I could expound
on that for months, but consider this: Seeking His righteousness means seeking
Jesus. Are you seeking Jesus? Are you searching for His will? Are you getting
to know Him more and more as life goes on? Are you searching for Him in His
Word? Are you becoming more like Him as you learn more about Him? Does He
become more and more real and living to you as you grow older?
The solution to your problems, to your
anxiety, your stress, your dispassionateness, your indifference, your
addiction, your faithlessness, your secret sin, your alienation, your every
care and trouble is Jesus, not that *poof* He will magically whisk all of your
troubles away, but that seeing Jesus will, as the old hymn says, make the
things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. So seek
Jesus. Perhaps I would even dare say the level of anxiety and stress and
worrying in your life may be direct evidence of how much more you need to seek
the Son of God! And I say that to my own embarrassment, ladies and gentlemen.
So we know what to seek. Two things:
the kingdom of God (His will on earth as it is in heaven) and His righteousness
(that is, Jesus). But how do we seek?
How do you go about seeking God’s will and God’s Son? Both are invisible.
Don’t envy them, but the false
religions of the world overcame this apparent problem. They’ve each made
religion far easier by making the things they need to seek tangible,
quantitative things: whether it’s getting in a real plane and going to a real
place like Mecca and saying a real prayer and marching a real march, or whether
its getting in a car and going to a real temple and going through a real
ritual. These things guarantee the cultist by their mere tangibility the
assurance that they are indeed doing all they think they can to seek God.
But real biblical Christianity is not
like that. Note how little liturgy and ritual there is in the New Testament.
You’ve got things like baptism and communion, but does the New Testament tell
you where to get baptized, or how cold or warm the water has to be, or how
deep, or exactly what the baptizer needs to say or precisely what the baptizee
needs to pray? Or with communion, can you find in the New Testament an exact
ritual-tradition of exactly what needs to be said and in what order? Nope. All
of these things are religious things. Biblical Christianity, meanwhile, is free
from all that.
It tells you to seek God’s will and
righteousness, but it doesn’t explicitly tell you exactly how. It doesn’t lay
out an exact ritual, an exact prayer or pilgrimage or performance to complete
in order to seek God. But the Bible does not leave us without some structure
for the Christian life and it is apparent that when the Bible reminds us to
seek God, it reminds us of three things.
Here are three ways to seek God:
1) The Church
2) Prayer
3) The Word
Church.
Too many young adults today who identify as Christians are content to live
their lives as distanced as they can be from other Christians. Most often that
reveals itself in the form of a lack of church attendance. And we might blame
that on the church being boring or out of date or full of people we don’t
particularly like, but in the end it really just boils down to us not wanting
to seek God’s will but us wanting to seek our own will.
The Church of God is a unique place.
Nothing else in the world is like it. Social clubs pale in comparison. Cults
have tried to emulate it. Schools echo only a fraction of it. In reality the
Church is a place where Christians can grow and encourage each other to seek
God. Let me encourage you to not slip into the temptation of thinking you can
be a fine Christian without going to church. You can’t. Nowhere in Scripture
will you find that excusable. You might be a fine moral-person without going to
church, but you can’t be a Christian without being a part of the Body of
Christ.
The Church is a place you can take
advantage of, where you can meet others who are seeking God and come alongside
each other, and encourage each other. If you have questions and concerns,
worries and cares, why not talk about them with another Christian in church so
we can help each other. There’s no place on earth quite like it. Church is more
than just a sermon and a few songs.
Utilize this group here to your
advantage. Pour into someone else’s life, be a part of someone else’s life and
allow them through your own transparency to speak into yours. We can help each
other to seek the Lord.
Secondly, Prayer. Let’s make no mistake, we are praying people. We all pray
every day. Heck, I pray every morning. I got up and prayed very early this
morning when my alarm went off I said “Oh, God, no, no, no, no!”
But seriously, we need to develop a
consistent prayer-life, a prayer-routine, a prayer-habit if you want to go that
far. We can’t settle for our prayer life being a few frustrated utterances of
“God help me”, a handful of quick religious words spoken over our meals and
maybe one half-prayer before dozing off in bed. If we’re to seek God, really
seek God, then we need to make time for seeking God and His will in prayer.
Martin Luther said “Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying
hold of His willingness.” It is laying hold of His will. It is saying that you
care enough about getting God’s will done that you would surrender one of the
most precious and irreplaceable resources of life to it, Time in prayer.
I was challenged again at the Youth
Worker’s Conference when one of the speakers was talking in a workshop about
what he does to deal with kids in his youth group who are being distracting to
others. He said afterward he’ll pull the kid aside and talk with them and
confront them with this question: “Jesus gave you 6 hours on the cross and 33
years of life, can you just give him one hour to study His Word?”
That was meant for a high schooler but
it sure cut me to the quick. Jesus gave you 6 hours on the cross, could you
give him 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of dedicated, purposeful, intentional
prayer? There are people that desperately need it. Your family, your friends,
your church, your pastor, your teachers, your neighbors, your country, heck
I’ll take your prayers if no one else wants ‘em!
This is one of the most important
pieces of the puzzle. You get this right and you’ll find that maybe everything
else will come into focus, or at least your attitude will change toward all
those unfitting pieces.
Someone once said: “You can do more
than pray after you’ve prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have
prayed.”
Thirdly, finally, in closing, the Word. Again, Jesus gave you 6 hours
on the cross. Can you give Him one hour of disciplined study and devotion in
His Word? An hour? That’s so long!
Is it? In retrospect, is it? Just skip
on hour-long tv show slot and rather spend the time in His Word. Skip that
extra hour of sleep and rather spend the time in His Word. Cut out just one
hour of games or social networking or hanging out or heck that one hour of
daily worrying and rather spend the time in His Word, privately, prayerfully,
devotedly and intimately and just see what God would do through your life! What
is an hour, really, in comparison to the incredible value of hearing the voice
of God speak?
You want a silent, cold and distant
God. You want a God that seems upset with you, that seems uncaring of your
circumstances, that seems to ignore you, then close His mouth by keeping closed
His Word. I read this little snippet this past week: “Complaining about the
silence of God while your Bible is closed is like complaining about not getting
any text messages while your phone is turned off”.
Snippets. That happens to be a good
one, but snippets are rarely helpful beyond the little jangle of truth. If you
want a Christian life that characterized by catchy slogans and truth-snippets,
then survive merely off one or two weekly sermons, a few inspirational pictures
on the internet and whatever you happen to think about God during your week.
But if you really want to grow and be used by God and come to know Him more and
really truly seek Him, then seek His will and His righteous Son in His Word.
There are many, many good
Bible-reading plans to take advantage of. Usually you’ll see them circulating
at the start of the year, plans like reading the Bible in a year and some such.
Maybe you realize you’re not doing this. Maybe you need to get a hold of one of
these plans. I’ve never personally been a fan of Bible-reading plans, but I do
recognize that they work for a lot of people. This is something I’ve always
struggled with, personal devotions in the Word, and I need you just as much as
you need me to hold up your arms and help you fight the temptations to stay
away from the voice of God. I’m trying to read through the whole New Testament,
Matthew to Revelation.
I invite you, I plead with you, I
beseech you, I’ll do everything short of shaming you into getting in the game
and seeking God through His Word. Remember the changes you want to make this
year? Make this one of those changes. In fact, make it the first of one of
those changes. Seek first the kingdom
of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be taken care of,
all the worries, all the pieces will fall into place. Get the vertical concern
of your relationship with God in check and all the horizontal concerns will
take care of themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment