Hindsight

Proverbs are conclusions, that’s what I love about them!  You have to take the conclusion and extrapolate all the information and ideas that go into the conclusion.  That’s why it’s called wisdom literature.  It takes a wise person to distill down to a conclusion, different experiences in different settings with different people under different circumstances.  

If I were to make this proverbial statement, “Blue is a beautiful color,” and then ask you to extrapolate out why I would make that conclusive statement.  You might say, “Ed loves the color blue because some of the most beautiful things he has ever seen are blue.  The sky the morning after a rain storm is bright blue, the Pacific Ocean on a clear day from a cliff, his wife’s eyes!”  Those would be correct extrapolations from my conclusive proverb, “Blue is a beautiful color.”

Extrapolation is a very subjective process that can be filled with error.  “Ed loves blue because it is the color of the police car that pulled him over, the baby blue color of the checks his wife ordered for him with puppies, the color of his face when he is choking.”  All of those extrapolations would be incorrect and untrue (except the puppies thing that my wife did to me years ago! I refused to use them.)

How do you ensure that your extrapolations from Proverbs are reasonable so that you don’t drift off into a subjective mess?

#1.  Realize that Proverbs are meant to draw us to God and understand HIM in a deeper way.  If you’re going to read Proverbs you need to refrain from totally reading it as a self-help book.  It certainly is meant to give us practical wisdom in living life but not divorced from God.  It is meant to help us understand how to live life with God’s influence and presence.

#2.  Realize that Proverbs are meant to build godliness in our lives.  If your goal is godliness there may be a price to pay.  Godliness doesn’t always bring about prosperity or popularity.  You don’t always win short-term impulsive decision friends by making long-term godly decisions.

Proverbs 14:7 states, “Stay away from a fool for you will not find knowledge on his lips.”  This does not mean Christians should avoid friendships with people who did not finish a certain level of education or are mentally handicapped or mentally ill.  Fool Biblically means non-believer’s in God who are selfish and indulgent and don’t believe they’ll ever give an account before a Holy God about how they’ve lived.  Be influenced by godly people not those who deny He exists.

#3.  Realize that the Bible interprets the Bible.  If you’re going to read Proverbs you have to examine the rest of scripture when it deals with a particular subject.

James 1:5 tells us, “God gives wisdom to those who ask for it.”  So in conjunction with reading Proverbs we have to pray for God to use those Proverbs in our lives so we can gain wisdom.

#4.  Realize most Proverbs follow common sense interpretation.  If I were to say, “Look before you leap.”  You would immediately realize that this statement/Proverb applies to more than jumping.  It’s a metaphor for being cautious before you commit to anything long-term. 

The same is true in Proverbs 6:27-29, 

“Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?

Can a man walk on hot coals without his feet being scorched?

So is he who sleeps with another man’s wife; no one who touches her will go unpunished.” 

The last sentence interprets the first two sentences.  The first two sentences are metaphoric and the last is very literal.  Except the word sleep is also metaphorical and should be interpreted as???  

See!  I knew you’d understand it. 

Hindsight

Jesus commands us to be second mile people.  Roman soldiers could order any male citizen of Israel to carry his 70-85 lb. backpack one mile.  Yet in addition, Jesus says go a second mile as a volunteer, out of love, serve God by loving your neighbor and contributing a second mile. What a tough character challenge!  Thinking of Roman Soldiers as the neighbors Jesus had in mind.

I know I have a difficult time going a second mile with certain people situations:

When I feel someone has been irresponsible, I think to myself: they’ve made their bed now they can sleep in it!  They brought this upon themselves.  They’re just reaping what they’ve sown!  Do you think that way?

Do you think there were Roman citizens who got drunk and irresponsibly joined the Roman army?  Shouldn’t he have had to carry his own backpack?  People who were forced to carry the backpacks for soldiers could have said, “They’ve made their bed now…?”

When I feel someone has been rude.  For example, I’m in a department store spending my money and this clerk is rude or slow or apathetic or moody or just not very helpful.  I just can’t help thinking, “Why should I go the extra mile and be kind and polite to them?”

Do you think there was ever a rude Roman soldier?  Rome didn’t have a foreign service Miss Manners program to prepare their soldiers so they wouldn’t insult the Barbarians over which they ruled! 

When I feel someone has been unwilling to go a second mile for me I’m not motivated to go a second mile for them.  This is just the generic human performance response. You do something good for me and I’ll do something good for you.  But Jesus says to go to the heavenly performance level.  So even if someone does something evil to you do something good for them.  Sometimes Jesus really bugs me! 

Many years ago our Board gave me the directive to hire an architect to do all the plans to renovate our offices.  The firm that I hired called me a few weeks into the project and asked if I could forward them a payment because business was slow and they had to make payroll.  So the church advanced a payment of $2,000.00 based partly on work that was already done and work that was to be done.  It allowed that firm to make payroll.  They finished all the work and completely earned the advance. 

A couple of months later I asked this same person if they’d drop by for 10 minutes and give another area a quick look to let me know if they’d be interested in more work.  They charged me for a consultation!  That was 22 years ago and I can still tell the story like it was yesterday.  I’m not a very good poster child for the 2^nd Mile Program. 

I want to be a second Mile Person!  I want to be a member of the rare breed who commits to serving Jesus above their own “being taken advantage of” feelings.  A commitment to serve Jesus is a commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves.  The Great Commission of Jesus is a commission to wed works with words and walk a second mile while talking about Jesus the Savior.  Ironically, the more we go the second mile the better we get at it.  So be prepared for opportunities to go a second mile!

Further your search:

http://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Excellence-The-Ted-Engstrom/dp/031024241X

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_23?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+difference+a+father+makes&sprefix=the+difference+a+father%2Cstripbooks%2C318

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Forgiveness

Hindsight

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of Jesus' most popular but there is a major problem with it.  It seems, to those who want to make this parable a child rearing self-help book, that Jesus is saying you don’t have to face the results of bad decisions.  That children don’t have to face the consequences for their irresponsible behavior!  If the father forgives everything then why should a daughter try to act in a responsible way?

Let me address that in two different ways.

#1.  The Prodigal Son is not a parable about how to be a great father!  Jesus wasn’t holding a parenting seminar on the side of a hill.  Luke 15:1-3 says that not only were the Pharisees and Scribes there but also the tax-gatherers and sinners.  They were all gathered around Jesus to hear what he had to teach that day.  As you can imagine, Jesus is addressing two fundamentally different groups: the super self-disciplined/self-righteous religious Marines called Pharisees and the super self-indulgent/Woodstock hippies called sinners.  Jesus is explaining why both groups are in desperate need of God’s grace. 

We are all so in need of grace but we have this self-examination blindness.  I never see my sin in as negative a way as I see your sin.  Your sin is blatant, repulsive, and frankly, you should be more intelligent than that.  I find it unbelievable that you’d say what you said, or act the way that you act!  I evaluate you with brutal self-righteousness.  It’s like the four blind men encountering an elephant.  One man grabs the trunk and says the elephant is like a snake.  Another grabs his leg and says the elephant is like a tree trunk.  On and on it goes because the elephant is so enormous that sight challenged people can’t picture all the elements that comprise one elephant.   They can’t get the full picture!  Neither can we.

The Prodigal Son is a parable about how great is the grace of the Father!

The grace of God is composed of His Infinite Acceptance eternally welded to His Unconditional Love. 

 

#2. There is one important parenting lesson we can learn from Jesus parable:  Sometimes your kids need to learn real life lessons that only the school of hard knocks can teach them.

This is a very important point.  Mainly because I have had in my life some situations of sin that I would simply categorize under the heading of, Tangible Examples of Ed’s Stupidity.  Are you with me?  Can you identify?  So, here we go:

“Tangible Examples of Ed’s Stupidity.”

·      When I was 12 a friend of mine and I made gasoline trails in the garage with a paint brush and then set them on fire.  It fits the category.

·      When I was 13 we put .22 caliber bullets in a vise and hit them with a hammer and shot them into the wall of the garage.  This is a category poster child.

·      When I was 15 I dove into the river without checking to see how deep the water was.  Should start a whole new category.

·      When I was 16 I jumped out onto a small rock 6 feet from shore at the edge of a large waterfall because I THOUGHT looking down would be a great angle for a picture with my camera.  Added to my category.

·      When I was 23 I replaced the alternator in my car without disconnecting the battery, which sparked the casing with the cable and blew out a diode.  Now when I turned on the car the alternator was putting out a hyper amount of amps.  In turn, when I turned on my headlights and blew up (not blew out, literally blew up) all the lightbulbs in my car including the dash lights! 

Notice all the examples are from long ago and far away?  I’m vainly trying to protect any kind of negative impression you might have of my 55 year old intelligence.  Believe me, I could give you some current examples--but please don’t send me your examples of my stupidity!  I know they are legion!

I’m so thankful for Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son.  It tells me that through the grace of God I can recover not only from my stupidity but from my sin and self-righteous stupidity. 

The grace of God is composed of His Infinite Acceptance eternally welded to His Unconditional Love!

Jewish children were highly educated in comparison to the rest of the ancient world.  They started with Bet Safar (Elementary School) from five to ten years of age.  They then moved to Bet Mishnah (Jr. High School) from ten to fourteen years of age. From fourteen to eighteen the very best and the very brightest would go on to be apprenticed to a Rabbi in what was called Bet Talmud (High School/College.)
At fourteen young men and women had finished their 9 years of formal education in the Jewish system.  So, young men would begin using whatever trade they had been taught and young women would often get married and begin a family (I’ve encouraged my daughters to wait a little longer!) But the very best and the very, very brightest would solicit, even beg to be selected as an apprentice to a Rabbi.  If chosen by a Rabbi they became a Talmede and continued their education.  The vast majority were rejected and went to work.   Very, very few were chosen or continued on in Bet Talmud to become a Rabbi.  
Potential Talmedes chose Rabbi’s they respected.  Rabbis whom they felt knew God well and had a deep commitment to follow Him.  The people of Israel were looking for the arrival of their Messiah and they looked to their Rabbis, “Maybe one of them could grow into being the Messiah.  Rabbis were viewed then as famous athletes, musicians, actors and celebrities are today.  When these young men chose a Rabbi they inwardly felt they might be choosing a leader who could deliver their nation from the oppression of the Romans and set up the eternal kingdom of God!  They were in awe of their chosen Rabbi.  They wanted to be selected like an American athlete wants to win a gold medal in the Olympics.
When Rabbi Jesus started his public ministry He chose His own disciples! He did not chose the best and the brightest.  He did not chose the wealthiest or the most socially connected.  He did not chose those with the most resources or the nicest homes.  He did not chose those who were at the top of their Bet Mishnah class.  He chose ordinary people.  People who had not been selected as Talmedes.  Fishermen, tax-collectors, zealots and one who’s career will always be remembered as, “betrayer.”  Ordinary people apprenticed to an extraordinary Rabbi.
Jesus said to them, “Come, be like me.”  By selecting them he was encouraging them, “I think YOU could be like ME!”  Those were remarkable statements in an Israeli culture where only the best and brightest were chosen.  Jesus said, “I chose you to be a Talmede of the Messiah!”  At least some of these had been told by a Rabbi, “Really you should go ahead and be a fisherman, being a Rabbi is too intellectually strenuous for you.”  And then, Jesus says, “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.  I know who I am and I know who you are and I think YOU can be like ME!”
God uses everyone.  Everyone is called.  Everyone has an equal opportunity to be known and to know Rabbi Jesus.  Think of the fire in the hearts of the disciples when they were called, “He BELIEVES in ME!!!”
So it’s our turn.  Are you thankful to be called by Rabbi Jesus?  Does it create a fire in your heart that motivates you to know Him in a deeper and more personal way?  Will you commit to apply His teaching?  Will you follow the leading of His Spirit?  Will you obey Him when you hear His voice? Gateway Church provides opportunities for you to listen, learn, respond and apply His word to your life, join us in being Talmede’s of Rabbi Jesus.

Hindsight
…and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.  
I Corinthians 15:14

Do you ever have doubt?  My interest in doubt has grown since I read John Ortberg’s book, “Faith and Doubt: What if the most important word is the one in the middle?” Pastor Ortberg believes that the very nature of faith demands that uncertainty or doubt be present or faith is not faith!  Faith AND Doubt.  I find that idea very helpful. 

Hebrews 11:6 says, “And without faith it is impossible to please Him (God)…”  I find that verse very helpful!  It tells me that God will give me enough evidence to believe but never enough evidence to eliminate faith.  For some mysterious reason faith is a very important thing to God. 

My problem is facts are more important to me than faith.  I have to admit I am uncomfortable with the fact that God won’t resolve my doubts and make my faith into concrete reality right now.  I really wish He’d write scripture verses in the sky with clouds in Helvetica font so that I and all the unbelievers of the world would be absolutely convinced!  But He won’t or at least hasn’t done that yet.  Everyone I mention that to thinks it’s an awesome idea and are going to submit it to Him in prayer.  I have searched and searched for Biblical scripture that would explain God’s reasons for why faith is so important but I really haven’t come up with any that truly satisfy my soul.

Another interesting thing to me is how this difficulty of “Faith AND Doubt” is dealt with by different people.  Dr. Bart Ehrman, who has written a couple of New York Times Best Sellers concerning Christianity, is the professor of New Testament at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an agnostic.  How does an agnostic become a New Testament professor of anything, anywhere?  I don’t know.  But Dr. Ehrman says when he was a Christian he experienced some pain and suffering and it caused him to go down the unbelief road of agnosticism.  He gave up on the resurrection and called it vain.  His “Doubt overwhelmed his Faith.”  For him it’s no longer faith AND doubt, it’s just doubt.

I believe the resurrection happened, I’m a card carrying unionized follower of Jesus.  But I think when I die I’ll go through that long tunnel of bright colorful lights, like the one you see in movies, get beamed into the presence of St. Peter like Scottie on a segment of Star Trek and say, “Wow, this stuff is really true!”  I think I’ll be surprised.  I truly do believe, but I still think I’ll be shocked.  The wonder and bewilderment might be because of the majesty of heaven but I think it’ll mostly be because something in which I placed as much faith as I could muster up, actually happened.  My face will have that startled, stunned, astounded look, like when I asked my wife to marry me and she said, “Yes,” and I’ll be totally thrown off my guard with the abrupt sudden new reality.

I hope you have doubts too.  Without doubts the shock and awe of arriving in heaven’s reality would seem somehow, to me, to be diminished. 

The key is to let God know about your doubts.  I think He sits up in heaven and says to the angels, “Boy is that guy going to be surprised!”  I think it makes Him smile.

I don’t know why faith is so important to Him but I know the resurrection is true and I know my faith is not in vain, because of fulfilled prophecy, eyewitness accounts, it’s impact on the Christian church, day and book,  and especially because of changed lives.  (see sermon 4/22/2012 on the GateWay web site if you want to delve into that more)  Agnosticism and atheism have never changed someone so profoundly that an they went out and started a church, hospital, orphanage, crisis pregnancy center, mission, food pantry, or giveaway center.  Yet, thousands of believers in Jesus have started hundreds of thousands of those places.  To serve others while they waited for heaven.

I’ll go with faith.  I’ll keep my “Faith AND my Doubt!”  

Hindsight

The authors of scripture picked their words carefully!  When they record a location, a time, a road, or a person, there is always a reason for it.  They aren’t giving a travel log like some of us do when we want to communicate a story.  Some of us say things like, “Last Tuesday at 7:40, no, no, it was 7:20, because I remember Jeopardy was still on.”  That’s how we tend to tell stories. 

Not the authors of the Old and New Testaments.  There are no throw away lines or travel log details that aren’t important to the story.  The details are important. 

As we talked about Matthew 22:41-45 in last Sunday’s sermon, I hope you remember the very first line of that story.

“While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them…”(vs. 41) 

That line is very important.  Matthew 21:23 says that the whole religious leadership of Israel came to Jesus and asked, “By what authority are you doing these things?”  Jesus answered only in parables. 

They didn’t like that, especially when He was telling parables critical of their leadership. 

Matthew 22:15 says, “Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words…”  Matthew 22:23 says, “That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question…”  Matthew 22:34 says, “Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him…”  Soooooooo…

“While they were gathered together, Jesus asked them, ‘What do you think…”

Why is this so important to the development of Matthew's story?  The religious leaders are constantly coming at Jesus with aggressive, combative, debate style Rabbinic questions and in perfect Rabbinic form He is deflecting their questions with His own far more insightful questions. 

Jesus cuts to the core of their beliefs and confronts them with their legalistic rituals.  He challenges them to accept a relationship with God through Himself as the Messiah of Israel--and they’ll have none of it.  They continue to regroup, rethink, and strategize, “How do we trap Him?”  The fact that they might be wrong never enters their minds!

What is your faith in?  There’s nothing wrong with a certain amount of action, production and trust in your family, career, investments, and building the life that the book of Proverbs describes.  “Look to the ant, how he toils in summer… that he might enjoy the winter.” (Proverbs 6:1-11) Nothing’s wrong with hard work, industriousness and planning for a rainy day.  In fact, those things are very commendable. 

But the religious leaders refused to break out of their plans and get on the same page with the plans of God.  This is evidenced in Matthew by the way they continually try to trap Jesus in His own words, and their refusal to admit He must be the Messiah.  It is evident that they are frustrated because they can’t confound Him. 

These men are the best and the brightest of Israel.  Isn’t it interesting that they never say, “This guy is smarter than we are!  And we’re brilliant!  Maybe He is the Messiah!”  But instead of that conclusion, they simply beat their heads against the wall arguing with God!

Have you ever argued with God?  I have.  I lost. 

I wanted to be a college diving coach.  I dove for Ronnie O’Brien the US Olympic coach for years and years.  All my diving partners are now coaching at major universities all across the country.  I had to give that dream up.

When I went through the major crisis of my wife being in ICU for nine weeks, I was teaching at Sierra Jr. College part-time. I went back to school to complete a master degree in Exercise Physiology at Sacramento State so I could teach full time at Sierra Jr. College.  I felt burnt out and emotionally crippled because of the intense psychological stress of my wife’s illness.  So I wanted to get out of church ministry for a awhile and try to recoup. But Jesus got me on the phone with two different churches asking me to, either go to Honolulu and take over a church with a small Bible College or, go to San Jose and plant a church.  I went to San Jose and planted a church. I pastored that church for eight years and that church now runs over 2,000 per Sunday.

“While they were together, Jesus asked them a question…” 

What question is Jesus asking you?  Think about this seriously; there are no throw away lines in the Bible.  Is Jesus asking you to make a decision?  Be baptized?  Read scripture every day?  Pray?  Tithe?  Teach Sunday School?  Drive the golf cart?  Love your wife as Christ loves the church?  Consider weaknesses in your parenting?

Jesus asked them a question that would have changed their whole mindset.  They would have accepted Jesus as their Savior and believed in Him as the Messiah of Israel.  Instead they squandered and wasted their lives clinging to their plans.  In 70 A.D. their plans became a smoldering trash heap of a city that was once Jerusalem.

The Apostles were allowed to set in motion an organization that is still conquering the world!  Whose plan would you really rather follow?

3-09-12

Hindsight

It’s Easter Monday morning and the staff is DESERVEDLY taking today off.  The offices are empty and I’m sitting at my desk writing.  My wife is at work so I thought I’d take some time to catch up!  I’m reflecting back over what a great day GateWay enjoyed yesterday, Easter.  It’s really not about the number of people that came.  It’s not about the number of decisions that were made. It’s not about the new people with whom we connected.  Those things are important but they’re not vital.  What is vital is honoring the name of Jesus and celebrating his resurrection and victory over the grave.

An old story that I cut from my sermon yesterday goes like this:

A father was driving his pickup slowly down a country road on a warm spring morning with his young son buckled into the seat beside him. Because of the heavy rain the thin two-lane road was overgrown by the tall wild flowers.  Since the road had no shoulder the flowers grew right to the edge and even brushed against the side of the truck.  The boy could reach out and touch them if he so chose.  He didn’t because he’d had a severe allergic reaction to a bee sting last year so he kept his hands safely inside the pickup.

But as fate would have it, a bee flew in the driver’s window.  The boy was on the verge of panic when the quick-handed father nabbed the bee in mid flight.  The boy had just started to relax when the father then opened his hand and released the bee in the truck.  “Don’t worry!” Dad said, “Look at my hand, the stinger is right here.”  For the boy the bee was now just a harmless insect like all the others.

What changed the disciples as they gathered locked and barricaded in that room on Easter morning?  The appearance of Jesus, they were OVERJOYED!  What gave them courage to speak to multitudes in his name?  Fear of death no longer held them in it’s grip.  Jesus had been there and successfully returned. 

Paul writes, “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?” I Corinthians 15:54-55

I hope Easter impresses on your heart what it impressed on the heart of the Apostle Paul.  We mortals will, as Jesus did, take on immortality one day.  We need not fear death.

I hope it wasn’t the music, the preaching, the fun or the people who impressed you yesterday.  I hope you were impressed by the fact that Jesus Christ conquered the grave and he deserves every ounce of honor and adoration that our feeble hearts and souls can pour out to him.  He really, really IS risen…He really, really IS risen indeed!

God bless you all,