Be Still (and Know That You’re Not God)

       When did you first realize that you aren’t God? 

       I’m sorry.  Was that a shock to you – to find out that you’re not God? 

       It can come as a big shock.  We’re born with the belief that we are God – or at least gods with a small g.  Babies begin life with the belief that it’s all about them.  “My food, my comfort are the big things in life.”  A thwarted toddler in the grocery store reacts to being denied some treat with a level of rage that would be murderous if they weren’t so powerless.  

       Some adults are little better.  I know of doctors who secretly think that MD stands for M Deity.  I know of misguided artists who think its all about them. 

       But how could it be?  Everyone in his or her right mind knows that it’s all about me.

       I’m just kidding.  It’s not about me.  It’s about God.  That is why we pray each Sunday as Jesus taught us, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

       It’s all about God.

       So last Sunday we began a Lenten sermon and small group series on knowing and doing the will of God.  We looked then at the important difference between three aspects of God’s will…His intentional will, His circumstantial will, and His ultimate will.

       We saw last Sunday how intentional will speaks of God’s intention of love toward human life.  Circumstantial will speaks of God’s will in and for particular situations…given the fact of evil and the reality of human freedom.  Ultimate will speaks of those things that are predestined to occur because God has decreed them.

       Of the three, the most important for our understanding today is the circumstantial.  This is because the intentional will of God and the ultimate will of God are fixed in concrete.  No matter how much we pray, God is not going to stop intending good.  His intention of good grows out of His basic nature, which is love.  God’s nature does not change.  In the same way, God is not going to abandon those who trust in him.  God keeps His promises. He is totally faithful.  The salvation of those who trust Jesus is assured.  God has decreed it.

       It is only the circumstantial will of God that is changeable or dynamic. This is because God’s circumstantial will is a response to immediate situations with the goals of achieving his ultimate purpose.  We used the example of Joseph from the book of Genesis. How God took the circumstances created by the sin of Joseph’s brothers when they sold him as a slave in Egypt and made something good out of those circumstances. God preserved the nation He had called to be the seedbed of faith.  Joseph told his brothers, “You meant it for evil.  Evil was you’re your goal.  But God meant it for good.”

       This circumstantial will is the aspect of God’s will that people usually mean when they talk about wanting to know God’s will.  It is the will of God as He interacts with our day-to-day lives.  We know God’s ultimate purpose for our lives…that we glorify Him and enjoy Him forever.  What we don’t always know is God’s will for the next hour, week, month, or decade.  We don’t know if we should take this job or that job, go to this school or that school, or, if you are female, marry the boy next door or George Cloony.

         I’m not going to answer those questions today.  I will answer them later but not today.  (Well, maybe not the one about George Cloony). Today we need to lay some groundwork.  If we are going to grasp God’s will for our lives, we must have some understanding of how God works.  That’s what we are going to look at this morning.

       God declares in Isaiah 55: “My ways are not as your ways and my thoughts are not as your thoughts.”  Part of what this says to me is that God has a different sense of timing and priorities than we have.

       Let’s look at God’s timing first.

       One thing we can definitely say from the Bible is that God is not in a hurry.  Take a look at the long developing streams He brought together at the birth of Jesus.  This is history, but it is important history.  It’s the most important history you will ever hear – history as “His Story.”

       First, there is the stream of religious awareness.  Over an eighteen hundred year period God called out and guided a people, the nation of Israel , to be the seedbed of salvation to the whole world through Jesus Christ. During this time of tilling the soil, God nurtured and weeded that small plot of ground at the junction of three continents until it was prepared to bring forth the desired fruit.

       God gave his people two things, the law and the prophets.  He gave the prophets to guide the people and to reveal to them the promise of a Christ of Messiah.  God prepared His people to recognize that something special was happening.  Some of them did.

       He also gave them the law as a way of proving, to them and to us, that we cannot achieve moral perfection by our own efforts.  The law is like a mirror.  It shows us how dirty we are but it has no power to make us clean.  The law proves that we need a savior.  This is why in Galatians Paul calls the law a “school master or truant officer to lead us to Christ.”

      Next, in God’s plan, there was the stream of culture.  The rapid spread of the gospel required a common language and a common understanding of philosophical ideas.  This common culture was provided through Alexander the Great who conquered the known world in the fourth century B.C. and spread Greek culture in the wake of his armies.  The New Testament was written in common or market place Greek.  The gospel could be read by educated people from Egypt to Spain .  People all over the world could grasp Paul’s allusions to races and games because of the races and games that took place in their own towns.

       Third, there was the stream of politics.  The first century world was dominated by Rome .  The empire had open borders, good roads, stable government and provided reasonably safe travel by keeping bandits in check.  All of this benefited the spread of the gospel.  This was not the decadent Rome of the later Caesars but the powerful Rome of Caesar Augustus…the Emperor when Jesus was born.

       These three streams, religious awareness, culture and politics, matured and came together.  At last, as Paul says in Galatians 4:4, the “fullness of time” arrived.  The time was ripe from God’s point of view and He sent His son into the world. 

       But, and here’s the point, this was eighteen hundred years after God launched the process by calling Abraham.  God is not in a hurry.

        This is something we need to realize in our lives when God doesn’t seem to share our sense of urgency.  God does not call us to burn ourselves out in a glorious hundred-yard dash and then retire with our medal.  He calls us to long-haul discipleship -- a long haul that doesn’t even end with death.  As believers, we don’t need to hurry our lives on a rigid timetable and go into mid-life shock when we don’t meet our goals.  God has given us all eternity for self-fulfillment.

       I have friends who have experienced what they perceive to be a call to Christian ministry.  Their first instinct is to quit school and enter some kind of full time work with one Christian organization or another.  But they soon learn that God can use them more effectively if they stop to prepare an adequate foundation -- academically, spiritually and personally.  Christian maturity doesn’t come by spiritual hormone injections or sanctified steroids.  It is a process of growth and in growth there is no substitute for time.

       In seminary I met students who went first to Christian high Schools and then to Bible college before entering seminary.  They worked only in Christian organizations, saw only Christian movies and read only Christian magazines and books.  Then they expected to go out and speak to the world.  They had no idea what the world was thinking about.  If they had taken time to work with their hands like Jesus did -- to punch a time clock -- they would be that much more effective.

       I graduated from college at the most inopportune time for a person with a BA and a teaching credential.  The nation was in the midst of what was called a teacher glut – too many teachers chasing too few jobs.  The first job I could find after I graduated from college was as a short-order cook at a Jack in the Box.  I lasted there one horrible, terrible, ghastly night.  Then I began a several weeklong career as a door to door salesman.  “Hello, I am your Watkins personal shopper.”  That lasted until I landed my career job as a shoe salesman at Montgomery Ward.

       Through all of this, I honestly began to wonder what God was up to in my life.  I can look back now and see two things he was doing.  One was to put me into situations where I would have to get out of myself and talk to strangers.  The other thing God was doing was not letting me get too rooted in anything because He had another goal in mind.

        When we get in a hurry, we need to remember that Jesus lived quietly, working as a carpenter, “growing in favor with God and people for thirty years before He began His three years of public ministry.  During this time He was learning to speak to the people in stories of laborers, housewives, farmers and traveling salesman like the Samaritan oil merchant.  That was time well spent.

       In the same way, after the Apostle Paul was converted on the Damascus road, he spent seven years -- first in Arabia and then in Tarsus -- before he was called by God through the voice of the church for his first missionary journey.  That was not wasted time.  He was studying and learning.  And God was still able to accomplish quite a bit in the time that was left.  In fact, the world has never been the same since.

       Sometimes, in our haste, we act like a football tailback who tries to run up the center before the blockers have opened the hole.  We get nowhere and run a good chance of getting hurt.  We need to wait for the “blocking line” of God’s timing -- for the streams He may be bringing together -- even when He doesn’t seem to agree with our sense of urgency.  The Psalmist wrote: “Be still and know that I am God”…which also implies: “Be still and know that you’re not God.”

       Richard Halverson, a Presbyterian Pastor who was also Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, wrote a poem which, I believe, expresses it well.  The poem is titled “Now!”

       “Now!

It may be as rebellious a word as “No!”

To demand “Now” of God is as disobedient as to say “No” to God.

God has timing for everything…

A perfect schedule.

He is never too soon, never too late.

The when of God’s will is as important as the what and the how.

Submission to God’s will includes submission to his schedule.

Someone has defined sin as a short cut: robbery as a short cut to work; lust as a short cut to love; etcetera.

One may sin not by what one does but by refusing to wait.

Wanting a good thing is virtuous.

Wanting it now may be sin.”

       And in the same way that we need to follow God’s pace, we also need to get a handle on His priorities.  He simply does not view our lives as we view them.

      Who would use a shepherd boy to become the King of a nation?  Who would use widow’s poverty to glorify the Lord?  Who would enter the world in a feeding trough for animals, if He wanted to claim our lives?  Who would use a bloody place of execution between two thieves as the supreme example of giving love?

       No one but God.

       Those with the priorities of the world try to work from strength.  They write books like “Power Dressing,” “Power Lunching” and “How to Win by Intimidation.”  Life is spent in search of the “extra edge.”  God also wrote a book.  It talks about “Power loving,” “Power forgiveness” and “How to win by serving others.”  God often works through apparent weakness.  As Paul writes: “He chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.”

       Carol and I enjoyed several days in Rome last summer.  We spent a good part of a day wandering around the ruins of the Forum – looking at all the remains of human greatness.  But the strangest thing, from the world’s perspective, is that mighty Caesar, the divine Augustus, never even suspected that he was emperor primarily for the benefit of a little baby in an insignificant land.  But that is God’s way of working.

       We see this in 2 Corinthians 12:7-9.  There Paul speaks of having a thorn in the flesh…a messenger of Satan…to buffet him.  Whether this was poor eyesight as some have suggested, or a mother-in-law as less serious scholars have supposed, I don’t know.  In any case, it was a weakness that caused Paul much distress.

       Three times Paul prayed to God that He would remove this weakness.  “God, look at how much more effective I’ll be.”  Three times he received the same answer: “My grace is sufficient for you.  My power is perfected in weakness.

       Paul then knew the reason for his weakness -- to prevent him from getting too puffed up over his own success.  If we are to know God’s will we need to remember where the focus must lie -- with the free, sovereign grace of God and honor His way of working.

       Up here on the pulpit I have taped some words from James Denny who was a pastor in Scotland a century ago.  Denny wrote: “No person can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time.  No person can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.”

       I need to keep those words in mind as I preach and as I live.

        The ultimate weakness, from our point of view, is death.  And yet, as Leslie Weatherhead points out, in his book The Will of God, probably death, and therefore the fact that we serve God in heaven rather than on earth, does not make any more difference to the ultimate plan of God than whether we serve him in Moorpark, Morro Bay or Michigan .

       We do not fully understand God.  How could we?  His ways are not as our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. He doesn’t view time as we view it.  He doesn’t view power as we do. 

       But any God we could fully understand would be no bigger than our own minds.

       Even Jesus, the revelation of God, did not explain all because of our inability to understand.  On the night before Jesus’ death His disciples all asked Him questions. He said: “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Even Jesus did not say, I have explained the world.” He said “I have overcome the world.” For a time we need to trust where we cannot see, walking in the light we have, with the promise that one day…for this has been promised us -- we shall see God face to face and know Him as He knows us.