As part of North Street's 40 Days of Lent, every Saturday, Pastor Jeremy is sending out a "preparing for worship" reading.How often do you sit there trying to "figure God out"? When I was younger, I would often get frustrated with life when I couldn't understand something about God. Or I would fall into the trap of the questions of friends at school who knew of my faith in Christ and just wanted to get me going, questions like, "How do you really know that Jesus Christ was the Messiah?" (Yes! Believe it or not, we talked about such things in high school.) And I'd go home and write out the biblical proof for Christ's messiahship.
Or worse yet, sometimes I was wary of the work of the Holy Spirit in my own life, or in what I was seeing in the life experiences of others. I was a skeptical kid. I was affected by the modern forms of intellectual pursuit, particularly that everything has a reason and can be figured out if we just think about it long enough, have the right experimental procedures, and can logically think things through.
Even though they are pre-modern figures, we can see some of this in the religious leaders of John 9. A link to the passage is down below, but briefly, it's the story of the man born blind whom Jesus heals. Once the man has been healed, everyone began questioning. His neighbors wanted to know if he was really the same man. The religious leaders questioned both his identity and his testimony, and then they began questioning him about who Jesus was and how it was that he could heal. Questions and more questions...And it's the response of the man born blind that jumps out the most at us today. Made famous today in hymns and songs (such as John Newton's Amazing Grace), the blind man's response seems to come out of exasperation. After all their questions about Jesus, theology, and the "hows", the man born blind finally just tells the religious leaders: "Listen guys, I don't know about all that stuff. All I know is that I was blind, but now I'm not."
My brother, Jeff, teaches Sunday School for his church. He told me this story this week:
I usually prepare for Sunday School on Saturday. I have a 9 hour shift at work (as a security guard at Harvard School of Public Health) where I pretty much just sit there. So I usually use this time to prepare for Sunday School. I just didn't happen this week. No focus, no insight, nothin'. So, when I got up in front of my class, I told them the truth. Not so much about my week, but that I had little prepared for class. I think my exact words were "I have nothing to offer you this morning." I'm pretty honest. But then I explained that over my years of teaching Sunday School, this had happened many times and that the Holy Spirit always filled in the gaps. So I set them to work on a little project. I won't get into what the project was; it wasn't anything elaborate.
About 5 minutes later a gentleman named Joe - a new Christian - came into class along with a friend. I didn't think I recognized his friend. Honestly, we've had so many new visitors and Christians in church lately I can't remember who I've met and who I haven't- let alone their names! (It's really amazing how the Lord is working in our church.) As it turns out his name was Brian. This was his first time to our church and we'd never met before.
Since Joe and Brian missed the instructions for the little class project I went over to explain it to them. As I did, Joe left for his baptism class and poor Brian was there alone. I sat down with him to introduce myself a bit more and find out why he was with us that day. It didn't take long and he was straight to the point.
I asked what he knew about our church and he said "Nothing, is it like a Catholic church or something?" I asked if he was raised Catholic and he told me, "Yes." I replied that while there are some similarities in a lot of our foundational beliefs, we were a bit different than the Roman Catholic church.
I'll never forget what he said next. It was something like this: "I don't know what this church believes. But my friend Joe here had a life that was real messed up. A lot more messed up than mine, and that says a lot! I can't believe the change in his life and I want it! That's why I'm here today.
We can think and think and think all we want about how God does what he does. And there is certainly time and space for systematic theology and to wonder about the ins and outs of God. But the essence of faith in Christ is not to figure it all out before we accept it, but to accept the invitation to "come and see".
We can apologeticasize all we want to - and try and show people who don't yet know Christ a "logical" explanation of God, how he created the world, or why Jesus is the Messiah. But until they see true change in us, and experience his love through us, I'm not sure how great our "witness" will be.
Our passages for this week are I Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41. Click here to read them.
I look forward to worshiping with you tomorrow,
For & Through Christ,
Jeremy
