Isaiah
11:1-6; Jeremiah 31:3, 13b
One summer early in my high school years, when I attended church
camp, one of our counselors gave us a challenge to read four chapters of the
Bible every day. He said if we
would read four chapters a day it would help us greatly in our faith and in how
we lived our daily lives. But we
had to be sure to read at least four chapters a day; in that, he was very
adamant.
I went home and tried to live up to that challenge. I did okay for the first few days, but
it didn’t take long before my good intentions started going south. I started reading it as quickly as I
could, not worrying about getting anything out of what I was reading; I was
simply trying to complete the reading.
I soon was skimming those chapters so quickly that I didn’t
comprehending much of anything.
And then I started missing some days. When you miss a couple of days in a row those four chapters a
day multiply really quickly. When
you have to read twelve or sixteen chapters a day to catch up it’s easy to
become discouraged. I don’t
remember when I gave up on the four chapters a day, but it was probably before
the summer was over.
As I’ve moved through the years, I’ve found that someone is always
anxious to tell you what you must do to be a faithful follower of Christ. Here
is the prayer you should pray every day; here is the book you must read; here
is the Bible study you use; here is the conference you must attend. And
while those may be helpful tools, to be honest, it always seemed to be more of
a burden that a joy, because their methods involved a lot of work and
expectations and regulations.
Faith can become like a job, full of duty and devotion, which steal away
the sense of excitement and joy.
People also want to tell you what kind of music you should – or
shouldn’t – listen to. I received
a lot of the you shouldn’t listen to that
kind of music. I am a child of
the rock and roll era, and I like to listen to, and play, rock and roll. When I was younger there were plenty of
people who scolded me for listening to and playing that kind of music. They also criticized me for the movies
I watched and other any manner of other things.
I’ve noticed over the years that ministers sometimes specialize in
imposing those types of burdens upon people. Ministers sometimes add any number of rules and regulations
to people’s lives. I attended one
minister’s group where they were constantly seeking to impose regulations upon
people. One time the group made a
proposal that none of us would perform a wedding ceremony unless people would
agree to specific rules and expectations.
I’m all for strengthening marriages, but most of the proposals were
unrealistic and burdensome. Then
they had the idea that before any of us would agree to baptize someone, the
candidate must agree to all manner of theological tests, where their beliefs
would be examined and judged whether or not they were acceptable. Then they decided we should agree that
before someone could become a member of a church, they would have to agree to
more regulations and rules and expectations. Their logic was this – if
you raise the bar high enough in terms of expectations and duties, people will
become more serious about their faith and more committed to both their faith
and the church.
You know what I think?
That kind of approach just wears people out. Who wants to be loaded down and bludgeoned with rules and
regulations and expectations? I
sure don’t. In my experience, most
people are simply trying to get through daily life, and they want their faith
and their church to be a source of strength that will help them get through
each day, not to be an additional burden.
I think this is one of the reasons why so many people today will
claim they are spiritual but not
religious. I believe they are
certainly not reacting against God, but are most likely reacting to the stale,
cold religion they see practiced and encouraged by far too many people, and
they have decided they want no part of it.
As we continue through Advent, this morning I want us to consider Christmas Grace. Jesus was born into a time when much of
the religion was stale and cold and dead.
It was stale and cold and dead because the religious establishment had
turned it into a burden. Instead
of being a source of freedom, encouragement, and joy, faith was turned into
lifeless, unappealing religion.
They turned much of faith into a lifeless, unappealing religion because
they forgot about grace.
Jesus was about grace, not burdens. He came to give life, and to give a more abundant life. He offered a burden that was light and
easy in comparison to the heavy burden of regulations and duties offered by the
religious leaders.
William Graham Tullian Tchividjian is the
author of the book One Way Love:
Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World. While you may struggle to
pronounce his last name, as do I, you will recognize his first two names. Tchividjian is the grandson of Billy
Graham. His also a pretty good
theologian. Listen to what he
writes in his book –
While attacks
on morality will always come from outside the church, attacks on grace will
always come from inside the church because somewhere along the way we’ve come
to believe that this whole thing is about behavioral modification and personal
moral improvement. We’ve concluded that grace just doesn’t possess the teeth to
scare us into changing. As a result we get a steady diet of “do more, try
harder” sermons; we get a “to do list” version of Christianity that causes us
to believe the focus of the Christian
faith is the life of the Christian. So we end up hearing more about “Christian
living” than the Christ.
We
think this will be what gets people to clean up their act, to fix themselves,
to volunteer in the nursery, to obey, to read their Bibles, to change the
world–but it actually has the opposite effect. A steady diet of “do more,
try harder” sermons doesn’t cause people to do more or try harder…it makes them
give up. Legalism produces lawlessness 10 times out of 10.
http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/10/02/tulliantchividjian/?ref=leaderboard#sthash.G47rHN4M.dpuf
Isn’t that an interesting statement – legalism produces lawlessness 10 times out of 10. Loading people down with rules and
regulations, giving them stale, cold religion rather than a living, vital faith
that connects them with God will indeed fail to produce love and faithfulness.
It will instead produce discouragement and the tendency to give up rather than
live a life of faith.
I’m not big on theological language. Seminary burned me out on a lot of theology, because it
didn’t always make a lot of sense to me.
Some theology is just badly written. There are, I think, two kinds of theologians – those who
write with an impenetrable prose that really doesn’t say anything, but sounds
so profound that people treat it as such.
I didn’t then, and I still don’t like reading that kind of theology,
which specializes in statements such as God
is the ground of our being, as our being is found in his being, as he is the
being of all being, and we are called to find our being in his ultimate being,
so we are ultimately placing within his being, our being. I just made that up, but that’s how a
lot of theology sounds to me. It
just goes in a circle without really saying anything. The other kind of theologian is the one who can take
difficult and profound theological concepts and put them in a simple and easy
to understand form, using language that will speak to our hearts as much as to
our heads. The great theologian Karl Barth, for instance, in very simple, yet
profound, theological language said God
is reached by the shortest ladder, not by the longest ladder (Why Does the World Exist? Jim Holt, pp
251-242). There’s a lot of people
attempting to make us climb an incredibly long ladder to get to God, adding so
many requirements and so many regulations, but the goal isn’t to make faith
more difficult; it is to remind people that faith is based on love, which is so
wonderful and so life-giving that we are joyfully compelled to respond to God.
Grace desires that we respond to God out of love and gratitude, not
obligation and responsibility.
Grace, unlike obligation and duty, calls out of us joy and life. In fact, when we respond out of grace,
we are more likely to be the kinds of people God desires us to be, because we
actually do better when responding out of love and grace. Charles Spurgeon, the
famed 19th century British minister, nailed it when he said, When I thought God was hard, I found it easy
to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion,
I beat my breast to think I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me
so and sought my good.
In the same way, I was far more likely to do what my parents wanted
me to do, not because I feared them or because they loaded me down with rules,
but because I knew they loved me and I wanted to respond to that love by
becoming the person they desired me to be. I was the type of kid that, when given a rule, had the
tendency to want to break the rule.
I don’t know why I wanted to do that; it’s just the way I responded to
rules. My parents didn’t load me
down with a lot of rules, thankfully, and I wanted to live up to their
expectations of me because I was well aware of their love for me.
In this morning’s Scripture passage Jeremiah
says that God has loved you with an
everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness (Jeremiah
31:3). The intent of God is not to
load us down with so many rules, but to draw us to him through his love. Rules and regulations are not attractive
to anyone, but love certainly is.
Sometimes, faith and Christmas suffer the same difficulty – people
load so much upon them both.
People add so many obligations and rules to faith, just as people
sometimes add so many things to Christmas, making it far more complicated than
it was ever meant to be.
On Friday evening, almost at the end of the cantata, came one of
those interesting moments that sometimes occur, moments that provide a flash of
insight into something important.
We were singing the final song,
which is just a piece of Silent Night –
Silent
night, Holy night
Son
of God, love's pure light
Radiant
beams from thy holy face
With
the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus,
Lord at thy birth,
Jesus,
Lord at thy birth.
At the
moment we sang the line radiant beams
from thy holy face, I heard the cry of a young child. It was a moment that seemed destined to
serve as a reminder of the cry of the infant Jesus. In the midst of a world so full of struggle and chaos, the
humble birth of Jesus was overlooked by almost everyone. In the hustle and bustle of our modern
Christmas, though we sing the songs and enjoy the activities of the season, we
can still miss the cry of the Christ child.
May
our hearts and minds hear his cry, and allow his grace – Christmas grace – to draw us to him.
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