Trouble and Good Times
In 586 BC, a terrible thing happened to Jerusalem. Almost 600 years before the birth of Jesus, the Babylonian Empire, led by King Nebuchadnezzar II surrounded and then destroyed Jerusalem and the glorious Temple of Solomon. Most of the nobles of Jerusalem were either killed or we taken captive and marched to Babylon. The great kingdom that King David built was no more. The golden temple that Solomon built was destroyed and the treasures taken and melted down. Everything that made Jerusalem the home of the Jewish people was gone, destroyed, and burnt. It was a great disaster.
The prophet Jeremiah had to watch and it tore him emotionally. He had warned the leaders of the trouble coming, the power of the Babylonians. He and other prophets had warned the leaders and were either killed or threatened with death by their king for their troubles. Jeremiah had told them that God was not pleased with them. God had told Jeremiah that time was running out. But his warnings did not work. And so he watched the Babylonian army break through the walls and destroy the town and march away the young men and women of the nobility. His heart broke.
But Jeremiah still listened to God, and he wrote down what God told him. And so, after the destruction, Jeremiah’s tone changed. It changed from warning to hope.
First of all, he heard from God that the exile in Babylon was not permanent. It would only last seventy years. And so he sent a letter to those who had been exiled in Babylon and told them that good news.
He then had a wonderful dream. The people were returning to Jerusalem in peace!
And then God gave him the words of today’s reading.
There would be a change in the relationship of God and His people. Instead of a law carved into stone tablets, God said that he would put His “law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” They would not need to teach each other about God, because everyone would know God, from the least to the greatest. And most importantly, God would forgive them of their wickedness and “remember their sins no more.”
In my Ethics class that I teach at WVU-Parkersburg, I have a range of students. There are several who are very young – one is still in high school and taking the course. Others are in their first or second year of college. Some are returning to college and are a bit older. I have a couple of guys who are in their forties, married, and have children.
And to all of them, I keep reminding them that determining good and evil actions is not a black-and-white thing. Black-and-white rules are for children. Adults need to learn to live in a world of gray choices, for life is rarely simple enough for black-and-white rules to work. As adults, we need to learn to balance the various ethical laws against each other and come up with a good answer in our gray world.
In ancient Israel, Moses brought down the Law from God engraved in stone tablets. But over the centuries, men and women discovered that real life rarely was so simple as doing good or doing evil. Instead, the decisions that adults make – particularly adults in positions of responsibility – those are choosing between two mostly good courses of action or between two mostly bad courses of action.
The question is rarely as simple as “should we kill or not?” No, the question becomes “a man is holding a family hostage and the only way to stop him from killing them is to kill him.” Someone will be killed. Who will be killed? Who will do the killing?
We want to help an unemployed friend by giving her money. And, of course, we help her. But how many times and how much money should we give her before she begins to depend upon our gifts? That is the difficult question. That is the adult question, balancing doing good in the short-term with harming her in the long-term by creating a dependency.
Engraved laws on stone tablets can’t handle these situations. The situations are too complex. Instead, we must be able to know what God wants us to do, we must be able to get advice from God, we must listen to God speaking to us.
That is why God sent the message through Jeremiah that one day, He would put His law in the minds of people and write His law on their hearts. And the way He did this was to send the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the Holy Spirit that most people receive at baptism.
For the Holy Spirit speaks to us in our minds and helps our hearts know what is right and what is wrong – even in the gray areas of life. And the Spirit is present in all baptized Christians, “from the least to the greatest.”
This is what is forgotten by many people. They don’t realize the power of having the Holy Spirit within them.
People come up to my wife Saundra and me and ask us to pray for them or their loved ones, which we are happy to do. The sad thing about this, though, is that many of these people believe that we have a special line to God that most people don’t have. It is almost like hiring a lawyer to go before God and make our case and we are the lawyers with special knowledge and a special privilege of speaking with God that ordinary people don’t have.
That is true that we have a special line to God – but in that thought lies a terrible misconception which keeps people dependent and needy and away from God.
We do have a special line to God. God the Holy Spirit lives within us and this means that we can speak directly with God.
But the same Holy Spirit lives within you if you are a baptized Christian. The Spirit arrived in you by the laying on of hands, which normally happens after the water is applied through sprinkling, pouring, or immersion. And so, you also have that special line to God. You can also speak directly to God.
So what is the difference between our prayers and your prayers?
There doesn’t need to be any difference. The only reason you see a difference is that we believe that God listens to our prayers. You may not really believe that God listens to your prayers – yet you should believe this very important fact.
Instead, your faith falters, you may not really believe that God listens to you – and so, God is waiting on you to truly believe that He is real and loves you and will keep His promise to do good for you.
So how do we grow into that faith?
Start small. Pray for a friend. Pray for a friend to see the actions of God in this world and speak to you about it. Don’t start off by praying for a Mercedes or to win the lottery, for that requires God to make a judgement about whether that Mercedes or lottery money is good for you - and it probably isn’t good for you.
No, our goal at this point is to strengthen our faith that God listens to us. So start by praying for something good to happen to a friend and for God to have them speak to you about that granted prayer. Do this repeatedly, and get more specific each time you pray so God can show you He is listening.
I’ll tell you when it all became real to me.
In the spring of 2001, I was overwhelmed by the need for people to come to Jesus. So I prayed for church attendance to double. And then, almost as an afterthought, I thought – I’d better give God a deadline so I’ll be able to tell if it happened. So I prayed, “If you could double church attendance by September, I’d really appreciate it.”
And in September, 2001, the planes brought down the Twin Towers in New York, the third plane hit the Pentagon, and our churches were filled for several weeks. The hair on the back of my neck rose when I remembered my prayer from the spring.
Was it a coincidence? I don’t really know. Was God planning this all along and the Holy Spirit chose to have me make that prayer at that time and remember it to change me? Very likely. But it was at that time I began to really believe that God listens to my prayers.
Which brings me to our reading from Luke 18.
Jesus told his disciples a parable. A parable is a story that illustrates a point. It may have a basis in fact, but it doesn’t have to have a basis in fact. It could be totally made up, but it has a teaching point.
This day, Luke even tells us the point of the parable before he tells us Jesus’ parable. The point is that the disciples “should always pray and not give up.”
Jesus said, “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought.”
Notice that this judge was apparently a man who was in it totally for himself. He didn’t care what people thought. He didn’t even care what God thought. He just decided cases based on his own ideas of right and wrong – maybe even on the basis of who paid him the largest bribe. He was not a good judge because he didn’t care what God thought. Jesus goes on:
3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
We don’t know what the issue was. Maybe someone had scammed her. Maybe her adversary was arguing with her over some property boundary or over who owned a donkey. We don’t know. But we do know that the judge kept putting off deciding the case. Jesus continued:
4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says.”
Her persistence in asking him, in pestering him, in bothering him had him give her the decision she wanted, simply to get her off his back, even though he was an “unjust judge”, probably corrupt, selfish, and he didn’t care what people thought or what God thought. He finally caved in because of her constant, repeated requests for justice.
And now Jesus contrasts this with God, who is good and gives justice to those who ask for it.
7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. “
Jesus is telling us that God, who is good and just, will take care of the situations where we have been mistreated. God cares about His people. He won’t keep putting them off. Instead, he will see they get justice quickly.
Of course, we must remember that God’s decisions are what determine what justice is, for God knows the truth of the situations. God knows all the truth of the situations when we often only know one side, so sometimes His justice is more balanced that we’d like.
Our human nature asks for justice. But sometimes what we really want is revenge. That is not justice. A good judge tries to understand all sides of an issue and determines the right answer. An unjust judge might listen more to one side than another, or try to please the crowd and give revenge to one side. But God will give both sides of a dispute true justice, which will be what each side deserves and needs - but which is rarely the complete victory over the adversary that most people want.
And Jesus closes this parable with this question to us:
“However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Jesus is the “Son of Man” - He is referring to himself.
Faith. Will Jesus find faith in God’s justice on the earth? Will He find even the simple faith that our prayers will be answered?
This matter of believing that God only listens to special people’s prayers, or listens more closely to those people is a red flag to us. It should draw our attention to something even more important. It should be a warning to us that we have missed something very important and critical in our understanding of our place in the Universe. We are able to do much more than we think because of the power of God in our lives. As baptized Christians, we are already special people.
Let me see if I can explain this to you by contrasting Paul and Timothy.
There is no doubt that the Apostle Paul was a special man with a special role to play in the development of the Bible. Most of the books of the New Testament were written by Paul.
Paul was originally known as Saul. He was extremely well-educated by the standards of the time, having studied under one of the leading rabbi’s, Rabbi Gamaliel, whose writings are still quoted in Jewish circles. Paul had attended the ancient equivalent of Harvard University.
Paul had persecuted Christians because he thought they were blasphemous. Jesus got his attention when Paul traveled to Damascus with the mission of destroying the church in Damascus. On his way there, he was struck blind and heard Jesus speaking to him. At that point, Paul realized that he had been mistaken and so he went into the desert for three years to study scripture. Later, he met with the leading disciples and began a mission to plant churches throughout the lands we call Turkey and Greece and even to Rome.
Paul organized churches, taught the members, and pulled together a large group of people to spread the Gospel. (One day, read the last chapter of the Book of Romans and research who these people were that he is saying “hi” to. Most are found as minor players in the Book of Acts. They were part of a large evangelistic team that Paul had organized.)
One of his key students was Timothy, whom he trained and then sent to lead a group of churches in Ephesus, a city in what is now southwestern modern Turkey. He wrote Timothy two letters – what we call the Books of Timothy in the New Testament. In particular, our reading today from the third chapter of the second letter has important information for us.
Paul begins this passage speaking to Timothy – and to us:
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Paul is telling anyone who wants to read this how to become “equipped for every good work” : Read your Scripture and study it! Paul tells us that “the Holy Scriptures…are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
Read your Scriptures. There is no magic. Read your scriptures and study them! That is really the only difference between a good pastor and any of you – we pastors have read and studied our scripture over and over again.
We find out through other points in Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts, that Timothy had a believing grandmother and a believing mother, but Timothy’s father was probably not a believer. Timothy joined Paul in his travels for a while when the boy was in his late teens. And so he listened carefully to Paul’s teaching – repeatedly, and then Paul sent him out to teach other people. There was nothing particularly unusual about Timothy, no special encounter with Jesus like Paul had. But look at what Paul asked Timothy to do:
4 In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: 2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.
We are all called to teach people about Jesus in good times and in troubled times. We shouldn’t let the worries of the world distract us from what is truly important - those worries about politics, about money, about the condition of your car or your home or your job. You may not be ready to preach to a crowd; but you can teach a friend, a child, a neighbor. Listen carefully and study your scripture so you get it right. Why? Paul wrote:
3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
We all have a ministry. Some ministries are worldwide. Others are focused upon a town or a small group of people. Still others are focused upon a handful of friends or family. But to have a ministry doesn’t take a Damascus road experience like Paul did. While Paul may have had a special encounter with Jesus, Timothy just learned from Paul, from his mother and grandmother – and from his reading of the Scriptures.
It is the same with each person here today. You were brought to Christ through the work of another Christian. You probably remember those people with fondness. But many of those people who led you to Jesus are now with Jesus. The old generation of Christian leaders is passing away.
But each one of you is today or will soon become capable of teaching other people about Jesus. You will be the next generation. Each one of you could become a leader in this church or even found or grow a new church – if you decide to put in the effort. You may lead people to Christ at your workplace or in your social clubs or in your neighborhood. You have a ministry - if you choose to work it.
There is no magic here. It is simply the desire and the grit to learn about God and what God wants and then do it. Like the widow who kept bugging the judge until he gave her what she wanted, God will not turn down someone who truly wants to serve God.
He might say, “Not yet. You need to understand more. But someday.”
That happened to my wife. As a four-and-five year old child, after church she went home and she preached to her younger brothers. Her Mom told her that women can’t preach.
Then, at a meeting in her twenties, she felt the call of God to preach, but the call also said, “Not yet.” But she began to lead individual people to Jesus, including the pastor who married us.
And then, after we were married, she led me to Jesus. Later, when I began to officially preach, she began doing hospital visits while I was working as a teacher during the day. When I went full-time preaching and we moved to Clarksburg, she also began preaching part-time, first at a single small church, then four small churches, then later full-time. It was now time for her. And even after she “retired”, she has been called to lead a church, speak to groups of people, and explains Christ to many individuals.
For just like the question of whether your prayers are being listened to, God wants willing, strong servants who will do what He asks. If you are a believer – and if you have been baptized, the Holy Spirit dwells within you and gives you that special line to God. And that connection works both ways. You can ask God for help - and God can gently point you to people you can help. Will you listen and respond?
It is a matter of the priorities of your life. What is important in your life?
Your priorities right now may be earning money and/or raising a family. But God is waiting for you. Take this time to learn and study Scripture. Join us at the Word and Fellowship Social Group dinner, 6 pm on Monday October 28th at Lower Salem Methodist, Lower Salem, Ohio. Women and men.
At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives instructions to all his followers:
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
God is too important to leave to Hollywood to define for a generation. God is too important to leave to the random false teachers who say what people want to hear. As a believer, learn the truth – and spread the truth. As Paul told Timothy, I now tell you:
“But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”
Do you have the guts to learn enough to teach your family and others about God? Our world needs people who will spread the truth to family, friends, and neighbors – even to strangers.
Become part of the next generation of Christian leaders.
Amen