CHRISTIANITY 101: WHAT DOES GOD WANT FROM US?
My wife’s niece, Kim, and her husband, Brock, are raising their family in a little town called Morning Sun, Iowa. I believe their daughter Kassidy is a seventh grader this year. Their daughter Kylie is a fourth grader, and their son Blake is in kindergarten. Blake is a little towhead blonde and let me tell you…he is a handful. At night, Blake will lie in bed until he thinks everyone else is asleep. Then he’ll sneak out of his room and play video games until all hours of the morning. His mother finally caught on to him when she found him asleep on the couch one morning with the television still blaring. Now she has to hide the remote controls before she goes to bed.
Just the other day, Blake managed to lose his coat. His sister Kylie – trying to be helpful – said, “Maybe you left your coat in your locker.” Blake snorted and said, “We don’t have lockers. We have hookers!” I think he meant to say hooks. At least, I hope he meant to say hooks.
Late last summer, Blake was out riding his bicycle. Morning Sun is the kind of town where it’s still safe for a child to ride a bicycle around the neighborhood. In any case, it was suppertime and his mother called for him. No answer. She called for him a few minutes later, and still got no answer. So she began driving around Morning Sun, frantically looking for her son. She finally found him at the home of a boy Blake deemed to be his new friend. Kim immediately lit into him. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” she cried. “I was just about ready to call the police!” To which Blake replied, “Mommy, if I had a cell phone...the police could just text me!”
Where does a six-year-old get the idea that he needs a cell phone? I’m guessing that he has six-year-old friends who have cell phones. That’s what our consumer-oriented culture does to us. It convinces us that we’ve got to have what everyone else has.
Call it what you will – culture, peer pressure, or keeping up with the Joneses – this phenomenon is undoubtedly one of the biggest problems we have in society today. We’ve got to have what everyone else has; we’ve got to do what everyone else does; we’ve got to be what everyone else is. This is why young men drink like fish, because that’s what their buddies are doing. This is why young women dress so seductively, because that’s what the girls in the magazine ads are doing. This is why we’ve got to have the most up-to-date cell phone, or the fastest computer, or the biggest house, or the fanciest car. Culture seems to dictate both who we are and what we think we need to be…and regardless of who or what we are, it’s never quite good enough. We tend to want to do things simply because everyone else is doing them.
Let me tell you a little story about what happens when one creature does what everyone else is doing. According to the Aksam newspaper of Istanbul, Turkey, in July of 2005, a group of shepherds was eating breakfast just outside of a town called Gevas, Turkey. They were startled to see a solitary sheep jump off a nearby cliff and fall to its death. Then they watched in stunned silence as the entire flock of nearly 1500 sheep…leaped off the very same cliff. Some of the sheep survived because about half way through the flock, the pile of sheep already on the ground was so deep that it padded their fall. Yet in the end, 450 sheep died.
The estimated loss to the people of that town topped $100,000.00. That’s a pretty hefty sum when you consider that the average family there only earns about $2,700.00 a year. Doing something just because everyone else is doing it is not necessarily a good idea. The moral of the story is: Sheep make lousy shepherds.
Now with that in mind, we might be a little insulted to discover that the Bible often refers to us as sheep. Sheep are not the brightest of animals. As we saw in the aforementioned story, they tend to follow the crowd, whether it’s a good idea or not. Yet if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, don’t we see a bit of a parallel here? We humans tend to follow the crowd, as well… whether it’s a good idea or not.
In the passage we read from the gospel according to John, Jesus is addressing a group of Pharisees. He says to them, “I am the good shepherd.” The contextual implication here is that they had not been good shepherds. They had not been good leaders of God’s people. At this point in time, however, I don’t want to get into all that. Instead, I want to consider the concept of the shepherd himself. Why is it that sheep follow a shepherd?
In a word…it’s trust. The sheep follow the shepherd because the sheep trust the shepherd. Why do they trust the shepherd? They trust the shepherd because the shepherd has taken the time to build a kind of relationship with them. They know that they can trust him by way of experience. They can count on him to lead them to green pastures and to protect them from that which might do them harm. And that, my friends, is how Jesus Christ serves as the good shepherd to us. He aims to lead us to green pastures and to protect us from that which might do us harm.
That’s why Jesus said things like, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And, you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” He showed us how to love, he taught us how to pray, and he revealed the true meaning of sacrifice. Jesus was trying to lead us to green pastures and to protect us from that which might do us harm. And all that far too many people seem to be able make of what he gave his life to teach us is to feel that he has somehow constricted our freedom. There seems to be something missing here. Perhaps the question now is, “What does God want from us?”
Back in 1985, a group of 150 biblical scholars came together to form what they called The Jesus Seminar. Their goal was to determine the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus. In other words, they sought to uncover in the Bible what were the real deeds and sayings of Jesus, and what they believed were essentially first-century church editorials. Now let me say right off the bat that I have a hard time with such an endeavor. I just think that the people who composed the Scriptures in the first place were much closer to the actual events. What right do we have to question what they – inspired by the Holy Spirit – so painstakingly scribed, in spite of our sophisticated, modern scholarship? That said, allow me to continue.
Marcus Borg, a professor of religious studies at Oregon State University, was one of those biblical scholars. In the aftermath of his work on The Jesus Seminar, he wrote a book entitled, Jesus: A New Vision. One of the questions with which he wrestled was this: “Why did God send his Son, Jesus Christ, in the first place?” Borg determined that the primary reason God sent his Son was so that we might have a relationship with God. Aside from all the other things Jesus Christ accomplished, the primary reason God sent his Son…was to enable us to have a relationship with God. He noticed that apart from Jesus Christ, we do not have a relationship with God.
Ladies and gentlemen, with that…I believe we have just stumbled upon the answer to the question we asked a moment ago. The question was, “What does God want from us?” I think the answer is, “God wants to have a relationship with us.” Like a sheep to its shepherd, God wants to have a relationship with us.
Perhaps the question now is, “How do we get there?” How do we form a relationship with God? When it comes right down to it, I think the answer is this: We form a relationship with God… through prayer. We form a relationship with God through prayer.
In spite of our contemporary intellectual achievements, we have not outgrown our need for prayer as an attempt to change the way things are. Sometimes we just need to change the direction life seems to be heading, and we can’t help but turn to God to make it so. This kind of prayer is a part of who we are as human beings, and any approach to prayer that does not take it seriously is simply unrealistic. We offer up to God those needs which we feel most deeply. Thus, perhaps our most genuine and sincere prayer begins with our own sense of need.
Now most scholars will tell you that there are three basic answers to prayer. Those three basic answers are: Yes, No, and Wait. Yet a number of years ago, someone in this church informed me that there are actually four basic answers to prayer. Those four basic answers are: Yes, No, Wait, and…You’ve got to be kidding! Suffice it to say that there are only a few basic answers to prayer. We tend to be happy with God when the answer to our prayer is, “Yes.” We tend not to be happy with God when the answer to our prayer is, “No,” or “Wait.” So what do we do?
Because we live in an age in which results seem to be the measure of success for any venture, it thus becomes tempting to view prayer as being successful only when it encounters the desired results. The fear that God will not give us what we want tends to hover over all our prayers. This seed of doubt may even keep people from praying. They simply do not want to take the risk of having God let them down. Emily Herman, author of a book called Creative Prayer, calls this a state of “arrested development” in prayer. The trick is to get beyond our state of arrested development in prayer. The question now is, “How?”
Once upon a time, a minister was on an airline flight after a long and tedious church conference. The first hint of an approaching problem came when the sign above his seat flashed: “Fasten Your Seat Belt.” A few minutes later the flight attendant announced on the PA system, “We will not be serving beverages at this time as we are expecting a little turbulence. Please be sure your seat belt is fastened.”
As the minister looked around the aircraft, it became apparent that many of the passengers were getting nervous. Then, the flight attendant got on the PA system again and announced, “We will not be serving the meal at this time, either. The turbulence is still ahead of us.” And then the storm broke.
Ominous cracks of thunder could be heard even above the roar of the engines. Lightning lit up the dark skies all around them. Pretty soon that great big jet was being tossed about the skies like a cork on the ocean. One moment the plane pitched upward; the next moment it seemed to be heading straight to the ground. The minister later confessed that he shared the trepidation of all those around him.
He said, “As I looked around the plane, I could see that all the passengers were quite disturbed. Some were even praying. The future seemed ominous and many were wondering if they’d make it through the storm. Then I noticed a little girl across the aisle. Apparently the storm meant nothing to her. She had her feet tucked beneath her as she sat on her seat. She was reading a book and everything in her world seemed so calm and serene. When the plane was being buffeted by the terrible storm – when it lurched this way and that, as it rose and fell with frightening severity, when all the adults were scared half to death – that little girl was completely composed and unafraid.” The minister could hardly believe his eyes.
When the plane finally reached its destination, everyone scrambled to get off of the plane. The minister, however, hung back to talk to the little girl. Having commented about the storm and the jerking about of the plane, he asked her why she had not been afraid. The little girl looked right at him and said, “Because my daddy’s the pilot, and he’s taking me home.”
Trust comes by way of experience. Her daddy had been faithful to her in the past, so she was convinced that he’d be faithful to her in the future, as well. That’s the beauty of relationships. Maybe that’s why God wants to have a relationship with us, as well. Amen.
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