8
Essentials to Being Like Jesus
June
26, 2005
First
Presbyterian Church Carson City
There is a saying in baseball, "You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball." These are the basics and like the basics in faith everyone on the field likes to think they already know them. But all you've got to do is watch "Baseball Tonight" with the review of major league baseball to see that it isn't true. All we have to do is look at our own journey and we will see the same in faith. The most basic things; like intimacy with God are presumed to be in place. But whether it's baseball or faith in Jesus Christ, (there's a difference?), if we don't regularly work on the basics we will not be ready at critical moments. Any time in life is a critical moment. This is why we need to be schooling ourselves in the ordinary elements of faith all the time. We need to be as Paul has said, "to be taking every thought captive to the will of Jesus Christ."
This morning as we focus on the first
essential of intimacy with God we need to realize that there is within every
person a longing to be someplace we know we need to be; a place we know exists,
that is a home, but a place we’ve never been able to find. It is the longing for true intimacy. “Intimacy” writes pastor Chuck Swindoll, “is
the state of being intimate, belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest
nature
This week and in the following weeks we
are going to focus on what it takes in very practical terms to come into
deepening relationship with Jesus Christ.
This will take discipline. But a discipline need only be a burden when
it is undertaken with things that have no place in our lives. When we truly exercise discipline we focus
only on the goal that matters and leave lesser things out of our lives. (this reflects last week on cleaning out the
closet. It is why Jesus says, “Come to
me”. This is our discipline – coming to
him and letting him carry us.
Of this discipline of intimacy, a friend
of mine has written, “God’s knowledge of us is intimate, visceral, personal –
an intercourse of which the earth form is but a shadow. It speaks of union and self-giving. Isaiah says, ‘As a bridegroom rejoices over
his bride, I so will rejoice over you.’” (Isaiah 62:5) (Patterson, “He Has Made Me
Glad” p. 82). This is God’s desire for
intimacy with you and me. He wants to
rejoice over us. That is why we need to
come to him; so that God can rejoice.
Like the prodigal, we need to come home. Intimacy with God in Jesus Christ is the road home.
Jesus calls us into this intimacy with
these words, “Come to me”. He tells us
that our discipline to know intimacy is to come to him. In this invitation Jesus identifies why we
need to come to him – because we are burdened.
With what are we burdened? We
are burdened with trying to find sufficiency in this life apart from or before submitting
ourselves to Jesus. A wise man has said
of this,
We have not advanced very far in our
spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the
effect that we are most free when we are bound. But not just any way of being
bound will suffice; what matters is the character of our binding.
The one who would like to be an athlete,
but who is unwilling to discipline his body by regular exercise and by
abstinence, is not free to excel on the field or the tracks. His failure to
train rigorously and to live abstemiously denies him the freedom to go over the
bar at the desired height, or to run with the desired speed and endurance.
With one concerted voice the giants of
the devotional life apply the same principle for the whole of life with the
dictum: Discipline is the price of freedom.
Citation: David Elton Trueblood, The New Man for
our Time, Harper Collins, (January 1970)
In this discipline Jesus does not say he
is giving us another thing to do. He
says he will give us rest. He will give
us rest by removing from our lives the things that we have as burdens but do
not recognize as such. Jesus calls us
in this discipline to the basics – throw the ball, catch the ball. Pray and listen. It is easy. It is only
hard because we make it hard.
Jesus acknowledges that we get
exhausted. Do we? Do we realize we are as
worn out as we are? DO we come to Jesus
with our exhaustion? Do we know that we
are spiritually weary because we haven’t been disciplining ourselves to spend
time with Jesus?
Do we realize what Jesus offers to give us
if we will come to him? When we will
discipline ourselves to come to Jesus he will not give us another hoop to jump
through. Jesus knows better than we do
that we are exhausted. He realizes that
we have depleted ourselves of what we need most. And what we need most is HIM.
He offers rest. The word in the
Greek describes refreshment. That’s
what spiritual intimacy is; refreshment; restoration of the relationship we
most need, but that has been neglected and in the process left us
exhausted.
I know, we say, “But I can’t take time
for what Jesus is talking about. I’ve
got stuff that needs to get done.” Like
what?
Here is what makes Jesus our Savior. He can offer something no one else can
because he is God; because he has come to give himself for us and to us. He says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble
in heart.” With this Jesus says, “I’m
not like every other religion or scheme.
I want to give you less homework to do.
With me there is less to learn.”
What we need to learn is to put on Jesus’ yoke.
Vacationing in the British Virgin Islands
with his family, magazine editor William Falk found himself longing for a
simple life. Gazing across the water, a little island caught his attention. He
learned that the population was known for enjoying a carefree lifestyle. Falk
decided that's where he wanted to go.
He confessed:
I have no real
wants; if anything, my life is too full. "That's precisely the
problem," author Gregg Easterbrook says in his new book, The
Progress Paradox. Most Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than
99.4 percent of the 80 billion human beings who've ever lived. Yet we're not
content. "Our lives are characterized by too much of a good thing."
Easterbrook says, "excess at every turn." We're surrounded by so much
food that obesity has become a national crisis, are tempted by so much
entertainment and information and stuff to buy that we sleep three hours a day
less than our grandparents. At times, it leaves you staring at a four-mile-long
island on the horizon, wondering what it would be like to chuck it all.
Jesus calls us to learn from him. If I am going to learn from him I need to
spend time with him. I will need to
learn to live as he lived. He regularly
took time apart to pray and to rest and to let himself avoid being pulled in by
the world’s carousel. Do we learn this
way? One person describes how we avoid
intimacy with Jesus by inadvertently getting caught in the spin of the
world. She tells this story. Is it about us?
Ted, a man from my church, had just
returned from a business trip and went to get his luggage at the baggage area
of Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Almost everyone had gotten their luggage, but
there was one man older than Ted slowly making his way toward his bags, which
were just behind Ted's on the conveyor belt. Ted figured he could beat out the
older man and grab his bags before they cycled through the canvas flaps into
the back room.
Ted's health condition makes him a little
shaky on his feet. As he reached for his bag, he became dizzy, lost his
balance, and fell onto the stainless steel snake carrying his bag. So there he
was, flat on his back, hanging tightly to the handle of his suitcase over his
head, and riding the conveyor through the flaps into the darkness beyond.
Several thoughts were going through his mind: I've been
wanting to do this for years. I could get arrested. Now is probably not the
best time to get off.
So he rode the belt, still gripping his
suitcase, till he and his bag passed through the flaps again into the light. At
this point he looked up into the face of an official-looking woman who said,
"You're not supposed to do that!" To which he replied, "Have you
ever tried this?!" And she bellowed, "No!" And he said,
"Don't!" Then he swung his feet to the floor, tightened his grip on
the suitcase handle, stood on the edge of the conveyor belt, and walked off.
Life is like that sometimes, isn't it?
Somehow, without ever intending to, you fall on this moving belt gripping your
bag, and now you can't get off. Even though you're not going where you want or
where you should, you just can't get off.
Jesus tells us to come to him. He wants intimacy with us. He wants us to put on his yoke because his
yoke is easy and his burden is light.
“How can this be?” we ask. Jesus
shouldered the weight of the world. How
can his yoke be easy and his burden light?
Because it fit him. Because it
was what he was meant to carry.
And what we are meant to carry is Jesus,
in our hearts, in our ordinary experiences, everyday, all the time. And when this is who we are carrying; when
this is our burden it will be light. It
will fit. It won’t chafe. There will be room for all that we need and
no room for what doesn’t belong. And it
will be the road home. It will be where
we start and where we begin. It will be
where we learn to trust and pray and lose the stuff that seems so important
until…until we give it away to Jesus.
In the end as in the beginning God calls
us to come as children; to do as we learned from the outset in childhood to do
the basics; to throw the ball and catch the ball. To stay in constant contact with him in the back and forth of
prayer and obedience. This is where we
learn…where we learn to be like Jesus.
It takes the rest of our lives and that is just the right amount of time
because then we will be home. Then we
will know what it means to be intimate and disciplined. Then we will know what it means to rest in
him. May today be the day YOU and I go
deeper into learning this lesson in intimacy.
Amen.