he who has eyes...

Sermon given at the Near West Vineyard Church on May 24, 2009.
In-line audio of the sermon.

Instead of doing the usual approach of giving up front a story to set the context of what we’re going to discuss today, why don’t we just give the text we’ll be talking about right off the bat and apply that context to the stories. Because I feel like today will be more story-like that usual from me, so why not flip the whole thing. Sound good? So let’s get to the passage first, which is continuing the story of Abraham found in Genesis, and then go from there, shall we?

The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your maidservant. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”

Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down nearby, about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there nearby, she began to sob.

God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt. [Genesis 21:8-21]

Do you see anything strange here? Anything that strikes you as odd? If I had to just pick out one thing from this story that was maybe a bit strange, it’s that God is speaking. I mean, as Christians we often times think of this as just some normal sort of thing. “God said this to me…” or something. But seriously, this is a bit strange, is it not? Imagine yourself with an outsider’s perspective coming to church. “And God says…” It all sounds a bit weird doesn’t it? Like there’s some sort of imaginary person in our heads telling us what to do. Don’t be fooled, something like God speaking to people should never be considered “normal.” It’s not normal, and often we can gloss over this in the Bible when it happens.

But, that’s not to say that it doesn’t happen today. It should, in fact, happen all the time, I will make the claim.

But first, let me tell you a little story and some background from my own life. I came to Chicago five years ago to get my Ph.D. in physics. I wanted to be a professor, you see, and discover great things and win a Nobel Prize and so on. But, I quickly learned that I hated doing physics. I loved the ideas of physics, and I loved learning them and teaching them especially, but I hated doing it – the research side of things.

And then, along comes a few people in my church, the Hyde Park Vineyard, the church out of which this church was planted two years ago. The pastors there, Rand and Insoo, kind of start seeding this idea in my head, “Maybe I’m supposed to use my love and desire for teaching, but do it in a different setting. Maybe I’m supposed to pastor a church.” And eventually, this idea just kills me. This is it, I decide.

So an opportunity arises for me to take a job trading stock options downtown and leaving grad school behind, and I jump at it. I can quit grad school and make more money? Sold. Done. There’s no need for me to keep doing this thing I hate doing, to get this piece of paper that I’m never going to use. I’m out of here.

Of course, one year later, I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing and where I’m going. I just felt really uneasy for some reason about my place in life and what I was doing. So I decide that I need to take a road trip by myself to hear from God. If you don’t know me, this is how I operate. You don’t know what to do? Road trip! That will solve everything!

I don’t know why, but I get this strange idea that God wants to speak to me, and this would be a great opportunity to take a much-needed vacation, doing some camping and travel, and just spend some isolated time away from everything here in Chicago.

Next thing I know, I’m out driving along the Snake River along the border of Oregon and Idaho, going up towards Hells Canyon. And, I stop one night to camp along the river, at one of the most gorgeous (pun intended) places I’ve ever been. Just phenomenal views, rushing water, mountains, flowers, you name it. Beautiful. And night falls, and I just lay there on the ground staring up at the stars.

And, I’m not joking, as clear as day, I hear God speak. Now, this isn’t to say that I heard some sort of booming voice from the sky — some sort of audible thing. It wasn’t like that at all. It was just a very clear thought in my head that just simply wasn’t my own. Sometimes you can just tell these things — “That wasn’t from me.”

God said to me, “Do you see this? Do you see all these stars? Remember why you loved this in the first place? Remember why you wanted to get into physics in the first place? It was your awe at all of this above you. Remember that?”

Oh no. God did it. He started placing this thought in my head and continued to develop it that although I didn’t know why I was going to do it or what it was going to be used for, I was supposed to go back to school and finish up my Ph.D. I was still going to pursue a life of pastoring and church planting, that wasn’t different. I was just going to do so with a Ph.D. in physics. Makes sense…

So, anyone out there who wants to know why it is that I’m doing what I’m doing and pursuing this degree although I don’t enjoy the work, there you have it. That’s as clear as I can make it to you.

Okay, so I continue to serve here at Near West, and eventually I get a chance to start preaching some. And then comes an opportunity to preach today, which kind of materialized just last weekend, and I feel like, “Yeah. Let’s preach next weekend.” So I read the passage I’m going to preach on, which we read before, and I think, “Uh oh. I’ve got nothing. What am I going to say to these people?”

Now, let me take you on a bit of a sermon-writing journey, just to give you the behind-the-scenes look at what I went through to get to this place today. It’s totally “meta,” right?

I immediately think that what I need to share on is faith. What faith is, and how does one have the sort of faith needed to trust that just giving your son away like Abraham did here is going to work out for you? What does that faith look like, and how does it apply to us today?

Sounds good to me. I’ve got no clear sense that this makes any sense or is what I should share, but I’ve got nothing else. So, I start listening to sermons on faith that I’ve accumulated over the years, and I read some books and do some Bible study (like in Hebrews 11). And, I get the central thesis that I wanted to share with you. Now, I’m still going to share this idea, because it’ll affect where we go from here on our little sermon-writing journey, but this is not the final journey. Just a little side tangent.

So as I said, I’d been listening to sermons on the topic of faith and what it is and how it is often mis-interpreted, mis-taught, and misunderstood. Often, we hear stories of what other people have done in their lives and think to ourselves, “I wish I had faith like that,” as if faith were some object you had to believe in or for results. Think: “I pray for healing and I have faith, and then the guy is healed.” Now, suppose you hear that story from someone else, and you’ve maybe done the same thing before — prayed for someone that they’d be healed — but it didn’t work. There are a couple of ways you can go about thinking about that. The most common, I find, is that you say something along the lines of, “I wish I had faith like that.”

Now, what’s wrong with this idea is that faith is not just believing magically that something will happen, as though unctioning yourself into believing that what you’re praying for will come true can make something happen. Because, if we’re just believing for results, what happens if it doesn’t work? We get bitter, we argue, we justify, we shrink back, and we get angry. People get angry at God because they put their faith in a result and not in His will for their life. Religion develops these little systems where we can coerce God, where we can trick God or train Him to jump through our little hoops or make deals with Him – “If you just give me this one thing, then I’ll do this…” This is NOT faith.

In Mark 9, we see this story where Jesus comes and finds his disciples arguing with the Pharisees because some guy brought his demon-possessed son to the disciples for healing, and they couldn’t deliver, so to speak. And Jesus chastises everyone saying, “O unbelieving generation. How long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” He goes and he delivers the boy, and he says to the disciples when they ask why they couldn’t make this happen, “This kind can come out only by prayer.”

You see, what the disciples were doing was something weird, some sort of mantra. How do I know this? Because whatever it was they were doing, they were NOT praying! What were they doing!? Jesus has to take control of the situation and clean up the mess where everyone, everyone was filled with a lack of faith (the father himself says, “I believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” and the disciples are doing whatever it is that they’re doing without going to God with it).

The upshot of this sermon I wanted to preach was that this idea of just willing something to happen on our own power and trusting in a result or thinking of God like a product –- that doesn’t cut it. God is our Father. This is your Father you are dealing with. You don’t just rub a magic lamp when you want something from your earthly father do you? You don’t chant some sort of mantra or go through some sort of ritual or lay hands on someone and try to will an experience just in order to talk to your earthly father, do you? So, why would you do it with your heavenly Father!?

No, you go to him. You talk to him. You say, “This is what I am going through. This is what I want.” And what happens, if your father is worth being your father? He talks to you. He guides you through your stuff. He listens to what you want and he gives you things – not always what you ask for, but what you need.

The upshot of one of these sermons by Jay Pathak is that biblical faith is staring at God, believing He’s there and that He is good, and that He will meet us when we come to Him (see Hebrews 11:1,6). Or, in my own words, it’s believing in God enough to understand that He is our Father and He will listen to us and walk with us and speak to us. That’s faith.

I liked that sermon very much, but I wasn’t sold that this is what I should be preaching on. So, as any good Christian, I ask God about it: “Okay God, what do you want me to share?”

And He says, “Talk about this right here.”

“Right here? What do you mean?”

“What’s happening right now between you and Me. Talk about that.”

“Um… okay? Cool…”

What was that all about? And then it makes sense to me. As I said, faith is believing in God enough to understand that He is our Father and He will listen to us and walk with us and speak to us. That last part is what came crashing in to me on Monday night.

God speaks to us.

When we look at our passage, we see God doing just that. And, it’s easy to think, “Yeah, but that’s Abraham. He’s kind of a big deal to God. It’s expected for God to speak to him.”

Is it really? Because He also speaks to Hagar. Who is she? And then again, God speaks to countless other people in the Bible. It’s not that rare of an occurrence. Why should it be so rare today?

Now, there are many people who would say that God only spoke to the people of Israel, or after that to Jesus’ disciples so that Scripture could be written. Once it was set in stone, then God quit speaking. All we have to go on now is the Bible to hear God’s voice. This is a rather new trend, one that’s only really taken hold in the last 200 years or so in Christianity. Before that, you had amazing people like Patrick, some guy from England.

He gets kidnapped when he was young and shipped to Ireland as a slave. He works there for years until God speaks to him, telling him, “Go to the coast. There will be a boat there. Get on the boat and go home. You are free.” Now, he wasn’t free. Listening to this voice, what could go wrong? He could go to the sea and there would be no boat. It was a dangerous country and he could be killed en route. He would be killed by his master for trying to escape. A lot could go wrong here. But, what does he do? He goes to the coast. There is a boat. He gets on it, even though he has no money to pay for it — they just let him on — and goes home.

But, that’s not the end of the story.

Later in life, God speaks to him again in a dream where an Irishman tells him to come and return and live amongst them. Now, at the time, Ireland was an extremely pagan place, filled with human sacrifice and the like. Missionaries (which he apparently was) never survived going there. I mean, never. But, being the faithful person in listening to God’s voice, he goes. He later said that while in Ireland in the early days, there wasn’t a day that went by where he didn’t wake up thinking he’d be murdered that day.

Patrick goes to Ireland, does miraculous things and has miraculous encounters with the pagan druids in Ireland, and by the end of it all, the entire nation of Ireland are following Jesus. The entire nation — all because one man heard the voice of God and listened to it.

God speaks. He spoke to Abraham. He spoke to Jesus. He spoke to his disciples. He spoke to Patrick. And he continues to speak today. Heck, he spoke to me on Monday about what to preach on. This.

So, after getting this idea of what to preach on, I go to bed. I mean, what else do you do when you hear from God, right? Go to sleep. And, I’m out by 10:30.

Now, I’m a very rational person, so it’s a little weird sharing all of what’s coming because it’s all pretty irrational. But, I think it explains the context into which God spoke to me so that I can speak to you today.

A half hour after I fall asleep, I get an e-mail on my phone which makes its loud chirping when I receive a message, and it shocks me awake. Now, the strange thing is, the ringing from this in my ears just keeps getting louder and louder. I mean, the chime almost destroyed my ear. So, I’m laying on my back and I hear that rushing sound of silence that you hear in those brief moments where you hear nothing else. You know what I’m talking about, right? But, what is weird is that this rushing is sort of growing in intensity. There is this sort of whooshing beat pattern developing, and it’s sort of just coming into some sort of resonance.

So, I’m like, “Whoa.” Very Keanu Reeves. And I feel almost as audibly as I’ve ever heard anything God say, He says, “Preach this word.”

Of course, I say, “What word?” and there’s nothing. Just that awful, extraordinarily loud sound of silence.

So, as any good Vineyard-ite does, I pray for more of that — some sort of “Come, Holy Spirit” prayer. In fact, I said those very words out loud or something to that effect. And I’m not kidding, the words Holy Spirit when I said them actually popped my ears. Sort of like what a guitar cable sounds like when getting unplugged.

And then all of these thoughts come rushing to my mind. After thinking about them for a bit, I run and grab my computer, and this is what God’s got for you and for me. Us right now in this room. So, I apologize if any of this seems weird or unrelated or harsh or anything. If it’s not from God and I’m just crazy, let’s move on, right?

But, this is what I feel God is speaking to us today, at the Near West Vineyard Church specifically.

In many, many ways we’re spinning our wheels. We’re playing church. I’m sorry if that’s offensive to some, but it’s true. We are good Christian leaders, many of us, so we know how church should look. And that is what is happening. We make believe that what we’re doing matters because it is a church, and it’s 501c3 ordained or whatever, but when was the last time we did something that was simply because this is where God was leading us. Seriously, “This is God, so I’m all-in.” When was that last time you said that? Be honest with yourself?

Personally, I get thoughts in my head to preach or to lead worship or to pray, but it’s often times not out of obedience or wanting to seek God, it’s out of wanting to do church, to practice doing church because this is what I want to do for a living. And, you know what? As soon as I told Rick last weekend that I could cover and preach today, I regretted it. I had looked at the passage and had nothing to share. I didn’t want to do it. And, amazingly, it’s when I removed myself from the equation and just went to God and was like, “Okay. I’ve got nothing here. What am I supposed to say?” that I felt like I had anything of value to say.

But, here’s what I’m going to say, and I feel a very strong anointing over it, so please hear God out on this one.

Stop playing church. Stop it! It’s not impressive to God. How many times did Jesus drive this point home to the Pharisees? “I hate all your show” and so forth.

What we need to do, you and me –- all of us -– is to go to God very honestly and just lay it all out to Him. “Hey God. Here is who I am and this is who I think You are. What are You doing here and what can I do to help? I have all these problems, is there anything You can do?”

Seriously. We can go to God like this. As I said before – this is what faith is. Biblical faith is staring at God, believing He’s there and that He is good, and that He will meet us when we come to Him.

We, as a church, need our prayer lives back. Prayers not like how I’ve seen prayers done in public settings. But prayers of open, honest communication with God. Where you are talking to God and He is talking back.

He’s there speaking. Are you listening? Because if you’re not, then I’m afraid that we as a church body will be able to do nothing to partner with God in advancing His Kingdom in this neighborhood and out into the world. Nothing.

We’re supposed to, as our vision statement says, connect with Jesus, connect with people, and then connect with the world. There’s an order here. Connecting with Jesus is a way of communicating with God the Father. He is our conduit of communication through the Holy Spirit. Without that continual conversation with the Father, I’m afraid we will always, as a church body, be spinning our wheels. Always.

Talk to the Father. He is listening. He will, in a very real way, speak to you.

I mean, maybe He’s always speaking to us. It’s just whether or not we are listening. Let’s turn to James 1 and just look at a passage there to finish off.

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. [James 1:5-6]

If we need something, some wisdom, ask God. He’ll give. There’s your faith right there. Go to God in conversation. He will respond. Easy enough.

However, the difficulty is right there. The proof is in the pudding, as they said in olden times. James says, “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt.” Why does James say this? It’s as if he knows that when God answers, sometimes He says things that are completely out of left-field or are completely crazy or that will lead you into doing completely dangerous or embarrassing things.

Think of Patrick here. In fact, let’s think of our passage from Genesis.

Abraham’s wife Sarah freaks out because there is this other son and he’s making life hard on her son. So she tells Abraham to get rid of his son. Seriously. Think about that for a minute. “Get rid of your son.”

What do you do with that? I know what Abraham did. He prayed. Why do I know this? Well, I don’t, but look. Abraham was a man who knew God. He was distressed, it says it right there. And God speaks to him. Abraham puts himself into a position, let’s call it prayer, where he is able to hear the voice of God. And God says, “Don’t worry about it. Give him up. Let him go. I’ll take care of him.”

And, this is key here, Abraham listens to God. Not just like, “Okay God. I guess so…” No, look what it says. “Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy” [Genesis 21:14]. Early the next morning! He didn’t put this off for a minute! He heard the voice of God and he did it. Right away.

When you hear James say, “believe and not doubt,” you should think of Abraham right here. Abraham was seeking wisdom and God speaks and gives it. And Abraham believes and doesn’t doubt. And it works out just fine, as God said.

So, let’s do an exercise, shall we? As a ministry time, I don’t want to keep it to just these few minutes after the service is over. I want this ministry time to last the entire week or more. When you go out from here -– let’s make a promise, shall we? When you go out from here, let’s try being in conversation with God this week.

This can look totally different to different people. You have to figure out the way to put yourself into the best position to hear from God. I have been trying all week long, with varying degrees of success, and am still feeling out how God wants me to go about this in this season of my life. You see, I’m very extroverted and my mind is always racing, so going to a coffee shop and sitting and listening or even going for a walk only works on occasion. However, I’m also very sleepy very often. So, sitting and writing things out on a piece of paper and just writing what comes to my head and deciphering if any of that is God speaking is hard for me as well.

Maybe for you this means just praying in your head a lot and asking God for things and waiting for Him to answer. Maybe it means writing things out on paper or at your computer and writing out questions about things you lack wisdom in and just writing down whatever comes to mind. I don’t know. Try to find your system.

Sift through these things. Sometimes you’ll think things that are just your own sub-conscious thoughts. Sometimes it’s God. It’s hard to tell what is what. You’ll probably figure it out though. Just don’t write off what you hear as being crazy and obviously not God. Remember, “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt.”

And what is belief if it’s not put into action. When God speaks to you about something, do it. Just try that out and see where it gets you.

Remember, our God is a God who converses with us. He still speaks. Are you willing to listen and believe? Have faith, guys!

(Many thanks to Dave Schmelzer and his book Not the Religious Type. He guided a lot of my thought on prayer here.)