THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MICK JAGGER
Forty years ago, I wanted a mini-bike more than anything else in the world. I made it very clear to my parents that that’s what I wanted as my birthday was fast approaching. I remember talking about it with my friend Vince Landeck as we were riding bicycles. I said to him, “I’ve been begging my parents for a mini-bike. I’ve even been praying to God about it.” Vince, ten-year-old theologian that he was, said, “You’ve been praying for a mini-bike? Well then, you’ll get one for sure!” I arose bright and early on the morning of August 4th, 1970, expecting to see a mini-bike parked in the driveway. Instead, I found a note. It said, “Brian, we love you very much. We just don’t feel you’re ready for a mini-bike right now. Love, Mom and Dad.” I don’t remember what I got for my birthday that year, but it wasn’t a mini-bike. It was a real trial for my faith at the time. I had prayed to God for a mini-bike, but somehow, God had come up short.
Here we come to the contrast between faith and experience. On the one hand, we’re led to believe that all things are possible with God, but on the other hand, we’re left disappointed when God comes up short. On the one hand, we’re led to believe that God wants what’s best for us, but on the other hand, we’ve got Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones singing to us, “You can’t always get what you want.” We have a contrast here between faith and experience.
The question is, “Does God really want what’s best for us?” When I was asking for a mini-bike and didn’t get one, I wasn’t so sure. But listen to this. Just the other day, I was sitting at the intersection at one of Meadville’s new four-way stops. There was a car heading north, and I was the second car in line heading west. As the car in front of me started to turn left, a boy came flying down the sidewalk on one of those motorized scooters. He shot right out into the street. Fortunately, the driver turning left saw him in time. As I think about it, that’s probably exactly what I would have done on a mini-bike. God’s preventing me from getting a mini-bike probably saved my life. Perhaps in retrospect, I can indeed say that God truly wants what’s best for us.
Have you ever prayed to God about a job? Seven years ago, I was absolutely certain that I was going to a church in Hastings, Nebraska. A friend of mine named Hal Shafer was a minister in Erie. He was in this church for a presbytery meeting. He called me and said, “I was just in your next church.” I said, “Hal, their minister just left. They won’t be ready to hire someone for at least a year.” Well, the committee moved faster than I expected. In fact, the day I left Salem to interview in Hastings was the day I sent my application here. So I interviewed in Hastings and I was just sure they were going to offer me the job. Then at the end of the interview they said, “Well, we promised this other guy that we’d interview him. But he can’t meet with us for six more weeks.” I was devastated. I was just sure I was going to Hastings.
In the meantime, I met with a very impressive group of people from the First Presbyterian Church of Meadville. As an aside, during the interview, I remember saying to them, “I hear it snows a little bit in Meadville.” The committee members quickly said, “Oh, Edinboro is where it really snows. We don’t get near the snow they get in Edinboro.” I said, “No, no, I like the snow.” They said, “Oh, well then you’ll love it here!” I accepted the call to Meadville, even though I was certain we were headed to Nebraska. I think of an old adage that says, “If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans!”
The move was particularly hard on my kids. Salem was home to them and they really didn’t want to move. Yet shortly after we left, the school system there collapsed. A levy failed to pass and the state actually had to come in and take over. There were no longer any advanced placement classes and sports were offered on a pay-to-play basis. My kids have gotten twice the education they would have gotten in Salem. I have to say that God really does have our best interests at heart.
But does God have our best interests at heart when it comes to human suffering? Butch and Nancy Brown were a farming couple in my first church. They had four girls and a nine-year-old boy named Kent. One day Butch and Nancy were out mending fences. Butch told Kent to hop in the truck and go back to the barn to get some nails. So Kent hopped in the truck and threw it into gear. As he went over a little hill, he didn’t see his mother kneeling there. He ran right over top of her.
She was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit at University Hospital in Iowa City. We prayed and we prayed and we prayed for Nancy to get better. I, for one, couldn’t make any sense of the accident. It wasn’t fair for Butch to have to raise those kids by himself, it wasn’t fair for those kids to grow up without a mother, and it wasn’t fair that Nancy wouldn’t get to see her kids grow up. In the end, Nancy died.
I heard Chuck Colson address this kind of thing some time later. He said, “Is it possible that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential?” Again, “Is it possible that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential?” Chuck Colson said, “I believe there is.” And that’s the point of the resurrection.
God does have our best interests at heart. One day, we shall see our loved ones again.
This is exactly the kind of thing the Apostle Paul is dealing with in the passage we read from the book of Hebrews. They’re wrestling with this contrast between faith and experience. Paul reminds them of the faith of Abraham and how God made of him a great nation. Paul reminds them of the faith of Moses’ mother and how she put him in a basket in the Nile and he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. Paul reminds them of how the Hebrew people followed Moses out of Egypt and how the Red Sea parted and they walked across on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried to cross it, the waters collapsed on them. He tells them of God’s faithfulness to faithful people in the past.
Yet these very same people were seeing Christians persecuted unto death. They were being faithful to God and they were losing their lives. So Paul reminds them of the resurrection. He says in essence that there is an afterlife so great as to render our present human suffering inconsequential. God does have our best interests at heart. So he urges them to keep the faith. He tells them to run the race that is set before them. They are called to remain faithful to God by being obedient to God.
I suspect the Apostle Paul would say the very same thing to us. When you encounter a contrast between faith and experience, trust that God does have your best interests at heart. Perhaps God sees an outcome that we don’t see. So run the race that is set before you. Keep the faith by being obedient to God.
The problem is that sin gets in our way. Sin is defined as separation from God. The way I see it is like this. Our obedience draws us closer and closer to God. Sin is simply turning our gaze in the wrong direction. All it does is distance us from God. The problem is that we don’t know what sin is any more.
Author Timothy Keller puts it this way. He says that we don’t live in a moral society. Nor do we live in an immoral society. We live in what he calls an amoral society. A moral society has a clear understanding of right and wrong. To be immoral is to consciously choose to do the wrong thing. Yet we don’t have a clear understanding of right and wrong any more. We do what we feel in our hearts we should do. That’s what constitutes an amoral society. For example, I’ll bet 90% of the couples I marry are living together before they are married. We used to call that “living in sin.” The Bible clearly says that that is wrong, but most folks don’t seem to have a problem with that any more. That’s what constitutes an a-moral society. We do what we feel in our hearts is right. We let our conscience be our guide. Yet how can we be obedient to God if we don’t know what God wants from us anymore? We need to recover a sense of the Holy. We need to learn what it says in the Bible again.
God really does have our best interests at heart. Perhaps at times when we don’t get what we want, God sees something up ahead that he wants us to avoid. Or, perhaps at times when we fail to get what we want more than anything else in the world, God resolves it through the resurrection. So run the race that is set before you. Keep the faith by way of obedience. For it may be as Mick Jagger says, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find…you get what you need.” Amen.
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