Sample of God's Prescription for Life
Services will be sent on diskette or CD or as email attachments for your editing as desired and your printing -- formatted to your Word Processor and to fit on the four sides of a folded 8.5x14 sheet of paper.
Sample of God's Prescription for Life
Services will be sent on diskette or CD or as email attachments for your editing as desired and your printing -- formatted to your Word Processor and to fit on the four sides of a folded 8.5x14 sheet of paper.
God’s Prescription for Life
Sermons
for Midweek Lenten Devotions and Easter Sunday by Rev. Ken Behnken
6.
Suffering. 1 John 2:15-17
Do not love the world or anything in the
world. If anyone loves the world, the
love of the Father is not in him. For
everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and
the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the
world. The world and its desires pass
away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
A
church member boasted to evangelist Charles Templeton that God had given him a
Cadillac. Templeton answered him, “It’s
interesting that God gave you a Cadillac; he gave his only Son a cross.”
Some
affluent Christians may indeed be given Cadillacs to drive – but that we enjoy
financial success and the things it affords is not the validating mark
of God’s blessing. We look through the
Bible in vain to find material wealth among the components that make up God’s Prescription for Life. Instead, we hear Jesus say, “A man’s life does not consist in the
abundance of his possessions.” And
we hear Paul warn, “People who want to
get rich fall into temptation and a trap.
Some, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced
themselves with many griefs.”
God may indeed bless some
Christians with wealth. Our
affluence as American Christians is surely his way of equipping us to do
some significant things for him in our church, in our support of the
proclamation of the Gospel around the world, and in our helping the world's
needy. Unfortunately, however, the way
we, as sinful human beings, react to wealth often keeps it from being an
unmixed blessing in our lives.
That’s
why, when you analyze God’s Prescription
for LIFE, you don’t find wealth as one of the indispensable
components. But – surprise! – you do
find suffering there. The symbol
of Christianity is not a Cadillac, but a cross. The writer of Proverbs called suffering the Lord’s “discipline”
and tells us, “The Lord disciplines those
he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son or a daughter.”
This
text from First John helps us see that God’s disciplining us is not because he
enjoys seeing us suffer, but because he wants us to keep our lives properly
focused. When our lives get to be aimed
primarily at temporary, material things, he acts to redirect us. And it is vitally important that he
does. You get a feel for the importance
of this as you hear John’s
“If anyone
loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. The world and its desires pass away, but the
one who does the will of God lives forever.”
Notice
the strong either/or quality of this concern.
A weather-vane cannot point into two directions at the same time. Similarly, God’s children cannot continue to
focus on him and at the same time willfully give the temporary things of this
world our primary attention. Jesus said
it bluntly: “You cannot serve both God and Money.” The remedy for this?
Sometimes it is the suffering that God prescribes – to turn us from
loving the world to seeking first his
Kingdom again.
The
most wondrous thing about the love of God that calls us away from the futility
of loving the world is that it was expressed in suffering, the suffering
of his Son. God could have sent his Son
into the world in a Cadillac – or better yet, in a chariot of fire. He could have come in power to judge and
condemn – but instead he came in love to save.
And that required a cross, on which the Son of God suffered the
consequences of our sins on our behalf.
And having suffered in accordance with the saving will of God, he said
simply, “It is finished.” In the Greek text this is one word, tetelestai, the word that merchants
wrote on a bill of sale to state that it had been PAID IN FULL. That's exactly what Jesus did for us! At the beginning of this chapter John wrote,
“Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our
sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”
As
a result of all of this, what is there for us – glory? Yes!
We have the assurance of eternal glory in the presence of our
Savior. And we enjoy also the present
glory of walking through life with Jesus at our side. But along the way, as part of our discipleship, there will be
suffering – sometimes as a direct result of our identification with
Jesus and our loving and serving him who loved and served us first. Jesus called that kind of suffering a
“cross” – and said there’s a cross for each of us to carry. He even made it a condition of discipleship: “If
anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross (the
cross of representing him and the cause of his Kingdom) and follow me. For whoever
wants to save his life (just for himself) will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”
In
our pluralistic society, in which almost anything goes – also in regard to
religious beliefs – we seldom experience outright persecution for Christ. But if we are willing to stand up and be
counted for Jesus; if we are willing to witness to him as the Spirit gives us
opportunity; if we are willing to make our lifestyles consistent with the
ideals of Christian discipleship – then we may indeed experience the world's
displeasure, even its animosity.
It is not the Cadillac of comfort and ease
but the cross of self-denial and service that is the mark of Christian
discipleship. But at the same time it
is always our comfort and joy that we never carry that cross alone – nor just
by our own power. Charles Spurgeon, the
great English preacher of the 1800’s said out of his own experience, “If Christ
bids us carry a burden, he carries it with us – and the heaviest end of the
cross lies always on Christ’s shoulders.”
God’s
use of suffering as discipline is not always directly related to our being
disciples of Jesus. Sometimes he uses
the suffering that is common to mankind, the suffering that is a result of our
living in a world that is “out of sync” because of humanity's sin. We Christians know that we are not immune to the sickness or
accidents or natural calamities or social upheavals that touch everyone. Well, when our heavenly Father allows that
kind of suffering to press into our experience it is usually to direct us away
from what John called “boasting of what a
person has or does.” As Americans
we easily think that life depends on our own effort and ingenuity and
determination – as if we can succeed on our own. Not true! As American Christians
we know that our lives and all they involve depend on the gracious blessing of
our heavenly Father.
A
very dramatic part in the coronation of a new pope in the Roman Catholic Church
is a little ceremony that takes place during his procession to the high altar
of St. Peter’s Basilica. Three times he
is halted by the Master of Ceremonies, who approaches him with a small brazier
of glowing coals on which he throws a handful of flax, saying, as the flax
flares up and is gone in a puff of smoke, “Pater sancte, sic transit gloria
mundi” – “Holy Father, so passes the glory of the world.” That, in effect, is what our heavenly Father
is saying to us when he allows our well-laid plans to fail, when troubles come
and we are helpless to deal with them, when illness or accidents strike us or
our loved ones. God is reminding us
that we live in a temporary, imperfect world, a world that is passing
away. How foolish, then, it is for us
to build our lives boastfully on what we have and on what we can
do! So, in his love, God redirects us
to depend on him, on what Christ has done for us, on what he continues
to do for us through the Holy Spirit.
When I visited him in the hospital, one Christian put it into that
perspective when he said, “You never look up so much as when you are
flat on your back.”
Sometimes our suffering is a direct result of
our own foolishness or our willfully following what John called “the cravings of sinful man and the lust of
his eyes.” Look around and you
readily see the pursuit of these cravings and this lust on every side. Look inside yourself and you readily see
that you too may be easily caught up in the same cravings and lust. But we always need to remember that there
are built-in consequences that devastate the lives of those who give free reign
to their sinful inclinations. Sometimes
the consequences are physical:
destructive addictions, debauchery, disease. Even worse are the spiritual consequences: loss of self-control and personal integrity,
destruction of relationships, deep dissatisfaction.
The
classic description of this in the Bible is Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son.
You remember: the younger
brother wanted an exciting life on his own.
He asked his father to give him his inheritance in advance and his
father gave it to him. He then left
home and spent everything in wild living – until finally, his money gone and
his friends gone with it, he was reduced to feeding pigs, and was even ready to
eat what they ate. Disillusioned, the
young man came to himself – and made up his mind to go home. There he found his father waiting for him
with open arms.
When you and I foolishly
believe the world’s deceitful promises of lasting satisfaction in its pleasures
and things, but end up with just a burnt taste in our mouths, we need to know
that our heavenly Father is waiting for us.
And we can rejoice that he uses disappointment and disillusion to bring
us to ourselves – and back to him.
The
sufferings that God allows to come into our lives are not there to punish us
but to redirect us. They are part of
God’s discipline – learning experiences for us as Jesus’ disciples. “A smooth sea,” it has been said, “never
made a skillful mariner." In the
same way, it is not uninterrupted prosperity and success that prepare us for
usefulness and service. More often, it
is the storms of suffering that God allows that prepare us for usefulness in the
Kingdom -- storms that require us to exercise
and strengthen our faith. St. Paul described the process: “Suffering
produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces
hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”
William
Cowper, the English poet, was so depressed one night that he asked a London cab
driver to take him to the river – where he planned to end his life. It was a foggy night, and the fog became so
thick that the driver got lost.
Finally, in a rage, Cowper ordered the driver to stop and he got out –
only to find himself back at his own doorstep.
Touched to the heart, he went to his room and wrote the Christian hymn
that begins: “God moves in a mysterious
way his wonders to perform.”
There’s
suffering aplenty for non-Christian and Christian alike. Much depends, however, on how you look at
it. When as a child of God through
faith in Jesus, you see it as part of God’s prescription for Life, you will
look beyond the suffering to see God’s hand moving mysteriously to perform his
wonders in your life. It’s a
choice that Jesus sets before you today.
Corrie ten Boom put it this way:
“You can look around and be distressed, or you can look inside and be
depressed – or your can look to Jesus and be at rest.”
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