he who has eyes...

“Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage.” [Matthew 6:6 MSG]

This is going to be the easiest post I ever write. I’m basically going to just post a summarized transcript of something taken from a Donald Miller sermon given at Mars Hill in April of 2006 entitled “God is Fathering Us.” It may be my favorite of all the sermons that I’ve ever heard. I’ve listened to it over ten times, to be sure. I’ve always wanted to share it with others because I think its message is of profound importance. I hope it’s okay that I post this…

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I think the paradigm needs to shift a little bit about the way we interact with God. Because I would say in our culture, the way we interact with God is very similar to the way we interact with a product. We’re just so consumer oriented. There’s this wonderful passage where Jesus, in the book of Matthew, comes and he changes the people he’s talking to — he changes their paradigm about the way they relate to God. There were essential two kinds of people that Jesus was talking to, and we may find ourselves in one of these groups.

One of these groups was the Pharisees, and you know about these guys, they’re very, very educated in a religious sense, but what they’ve done is they’ve taken all this education, all this knowledge about God, they memorized these things and then they lord their knowledge over the simple. They make them feel very insecure and out of place, and they make them feel that they’re not right. Of course, they’re right with God and they have all the power because you know God is the ace card in every argument. These sorts of people.

And then there’s another sort of person — Jesus kind of paints with a wide brush here — and he talks about the Gentiles. So he’s saying here are the Jews and the Pharisees and the Saducees, and they’re lording the knowledge of God over the simple in a way that’s entirely inappropriate, and then there are the Gentiles. Now here’s what the Gentiles are doing: they’re doing all sorts of voodoo kind of prayers, you know. They’re just kind of thinking if they pray in this certain way that God like a dolphin will jump through their hoops. And they ramble endlessly, and they have all these formulas on how to get God to do all sorts of things.

This is really more like us, isn’t it? I mean, we have Pharisees and Saducees among us, there’s no question — and those people are completely annoying — but then there’s also a lot of us who just sort of think that if I pray this sort of prayer for this many days or if I pray in this way then God will do this. You couldn’t get a more unbiblical idea. Jesus is healing so many different ways. I mean, he’ll spit in the dirt and make mud and put it on someone’s eyes, and then someone else is touching his hem, and then the next person he just says go and they’re already healed. I mean, he never heals anyone the same way; and it’s as if he’s trying absolutely as hard as he can not to give you a formula, because if he gives you a formula you’re not going to trust him, you’re going to trust the formula.

And so we get all these books in our bookstores and we look and it’s all this stuff — don’t trust God, trust a formula. “If you do this for this many…” As though the Old Testament were these little hidden jewels of riddles; that it took 2000 years — that God in fact is very unclear, but He likes to hide things in puzzles. 2000 years go by, and “Ah, this is the magic formula…”

It’s voodoo. That’s voodoo.

This is very little to do with reality at all. It’s just a magic pitch translated to a free-market mind that hears pitches all the time, and it’s convinced that it’s unfulfilled and that nothing is every going to go…

What if you’re pretty much experiencing God now? How do you relate to God if you don’t relate to Him like a product? So Jesus comes on the scene and he addresses these two crowds — he addresses the voodoo crowd, which is very much like our culture, and he addresses the sort of Pharisees and Saducees, so if you have a Ph.D. in theology, that one’s for you. So Jesus comes down and he says this, and I’m going to read from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message because I think it’s a really delightful interpretation of this. Jesus says here’s how to relate to God [Matthew 6:5-13 quoted throughout]:

And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat? Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God.

We’re sort of role-players in a lot of ways, those of us especially if we grew up Christian. Some of you are at a great advantage if you’ve just become Christian not very long ago because you haven’t learned all the goofy vocabulary and these sorts of things yet. And really, we’re very comfortable if we’re surrounded by other Christians when we do this sort of role-playing, but as soon as there’s someone who’s not a Christian or is not like us is around, we all of a sudden realize how we’re role-playing and how goofy we sound and so that makes us more uncomfortable. And so we just surround ourselves with other Christians who agree with us all the time.

(He then goes into an entertaining story about tennis and grown men playing Dungeons and Dragons [or is that Raven Quest, which is vastly superior...] in the park — this is Donald Miller: delightfully entertaining.)

We can get like this in Christian culture, where we just sort of fall into this vocabulary and these mantras and these self-help formulas. But pretty soon we get weird and we can’t interact with people who are normal anymore.

It’s this sort of thing that Jesus says, “I want you to stop doing that. I want you to stop role-playing because it isn’t very impressive to me at all. What I want is honesty. I want to know who you really are.” And, apparently this is going to be really very difficult for us, because Jesus goes on and says this:

Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage.

Just be as honest as you can manage. Know, we’ll assume that being honest is very difficult. That we’re, in fact, fooling ourselves a lot of the time. We go into this secluded place where there’s nobody watching us, there’s no one to impress, and we say, “Hey God, here’s who I am. Here’s who I think you are. This is the best I can manage at the moment.” And then what does Jesus say will happen? Jesus says:

The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace. The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God.

Jesus is essentially saying, “These five step, three step formulas, that turn God into a dolphin — I don’t want you to talk to God that way anymore. I don’t want you to relate to God in this way anymore at all.” He says:

Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with.

This is your Father. Not a product, not a genie in a lamp. This is your Father. And, a relationship with our Father is very different, isn’t it? I mean, when we wanted our dads to take us fishing, we didn’t go into the kitchen and rub a bowl three times. We related to a being who had his own will, he had his own desires, he had what he wanted, he had the ability to get angry, he the ability to love, he had the ability to be happy. We don’t like that about God, do we? Because we can’t control it. “I want control over God. If I do these things, God has to give me this in return.” It’s very economic, isn’t it? It’s a very free-market translation. “If I invest this, I get this return.” And God says, “No no no… I’m not a product on the shelf. I’m your Father. Relate to me like a Father.” Jesus says:

This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply.

And then Jesus goes into what we think of as the Lord’s Prayer.

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He goes on to talk about things like asking your Father for what you want, and that even though God knows best, you’ll often throw a tantrum. I do this all the time — and it reminds me of my favorite Nooma, called Kickball (are we sensing a theme to my favorites yet?). You want this thing, and you fail to see that God’s non-acquiescence is simply because He knows better than you do what you need. Remember, this is your Father you are dealing with. He’s going to provide for you what you need because He’s trying to bring you to maturity, not make you into a spoiled child who gets everything he wants by rubbing a magical bowl and getting his genie to grant him his three wishes.

God has all eternity to wait for you to realize that what He’s doing in your life is best. He has all eternity.