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What Does the Lord Require of You?
The messages of Youth
DiscipleNow Weekend
February 14, 2010
Austin Fischer,
DiscipleNow leader:
One
of my favorite theologians is Mr. Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers said, “I firmly
believe that the space from my mouth to your ears is holy space.” I say that
because I want you to know that I recognize along with the blessing that it was
to get to speak to your students this weekend, it was also a great
responsibility. And so, if nothing else, I want you to know that I know that and
take it very seriously, and am grateful for the opportunity.
This
weekend we looked at this idea of “What is it that God expects from us?” And we
observed that it seems like it should be easier than it is. You know we have
lots of information on the topic. We’ve got the Bible. And if Richmond’s
anything like Texas, we have more churches than gas stations. And yet, it’s
difficult to get a handle on it. We’ve got all the pieces to this puzzle, but we
have a really hard time putting it all together - due in large part, perhaps, to
the fact that when we come to God asking this question, “God, what do you expect
from us?,” we don’t come empty-handed but we come with a lot of baggage. In
particular, we come with our expectations of God, which tend to look little like
the unpredictable God of scripture and much like the sterile sort of God of
western Christianity who allows us to stay comfortable and in control.
One
philosopher said, “As a rule, we tend to see what we expect to see, and little
more.” And so a good starting point in adjusting this issue, “God, what do you
expect from us?” is to give God just a little bit of space to tell us who He is,
perhaps, instead of us telling God who God is supposed to be.
We
look at Micah 6:8, this great summation of Torah, of all 613 commandments of
Torah. If you really want to know what God wants, here you go, right? Do
justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Do
justice.
We
spoke about how a lot of times when we think about doing justice, it ends up
looking a lot more like charity. It’s throwing money or throwing pity at
someone, feeling bad for them. And while those things are certainly important,
they’re not doing justice. Rather, doing justice is built on the biblical
assumption that the way things are are not the way things are supposed to be,
that the world doesn’t look the way God wants it to, and that’s not OK. And so
we join with God, because God is utterly committed to setting things straight.
Second, to love kindness.
As
one scholar puts it, I like this, “to love tenderly and tenaciously.” We looked
at how there’s a lot of different things that are called love in our culture,
and a lot of them look a lot different. In particular, a lot of times it looks
something like Romeo and Juliet. It’s beautiful, romantic, ‘I can’t live without
you.’ And it really does look pretty, but once you get past the veil you see
that it’s a love predicated on selfishness. It’s a grabbing love; it’s us
needing to get something from someone else so we use the beautiful little cover
of love to take what we need. And in short it’s not the love God asks us to
have. Rather, the love God asks us to have, it’s not a giving love, it’s not a
grabbing love, it is a giving love. We don’t need something from other people,
we’re not trying to take anything from them, we’re just giving ourselves away,
and we can do that because we believe the unconditional love of God enables us
to be the sort of people who can do that.
Last,
walk humbly with God.
We
spoke about how it’s a Hebrew verb, it’s actually a really rare verb that means
to live in communion with, to live attentively. The idea being, when we leave
places like this, especially for the students, you leave a weekend like this
where you’re just saturated with God-stuff and you go out into a world that is
not. It can be difficult to find God out there. It’s not too hard to figure out
what it looks like to be a Christian on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights,
but on Monday morning and Friday night, it’s a different story. But the world we
go back into is a world absolutely dripping with God’s presence. God didn’t show
up this weekend; all we did was give God our attention, and that makes all the
difference in the world.
And
we ended with this. To be honest there’s many things that you can do, to put it
in more student terms, that’ll be cooler than doing justice and loving kindness
and walking humbly. It probably won’t get you ahead. It might get you in some
trouble. It’ll definitely require that you make yourself vulnerable. But there’s
nothing better that you can do. Nothing better that you can do.
What does it mean to do
justice?
Josh Belflower, Youth
participant:
This weekend as Austin
spoke to us about doing our duty, and doing justice, loving kindness, and
walking humbly with our God, he talked about how doing justice is something more
than just, as he said earlier, more than just giving charity. It is something of
doing something out of the heart. And as he said, the way the world is and the
way it should be, the way God intended it to be, is not the same. It is our duty
to make the world a better place, as God intended it to be. He said there were
three things that would help us become more… actually do justice more out of our
heart more effectively and truly, genuinely. He said, the first thing that you
have to truly believe in your gut is that no one is less important than you are;
no one is more important than you are. We are all equal in the eyes of God.
Secondly, our possessions, everything that we gain, that we acquire through our
successes or charity are not our own. They are gifts of God, and therefore, we
should not fear in giving them away. It is not our choice to give them away.
Again, it is an act of the heart. It is what God requires of us, as we go
through our church and through our missions it is doing justice that we do to go
into different countries and serve missions there.
What does it mean to love
kindness?
Porter McRoberts, Youth
participant:
Love
is an interesting thing. And the Bible has a lot to say about it. Now as Austin
said, “love kindness” can also be translated as “love tenderly, love openly,
love unreservedly.” The Bible calls this agape, which at its basic form is the
love a parent feels for a child. At its most sublime, it is the love God feels
for man. Now, I really like this word. I like it because it looks like our word
“agape,” which means “mouth wide open; stunned,” because that’s what we are when
we meet agape. It’s not a love we meet often. We have romantic love, and we have
brotherly love, but we don’t often meet agape. And when we do, it leaves us
floored. We meet it when we first have a child, and we look into the eyes of our
child and we think, “Wow,” and that’s all we can think. And then when we meet
God, it’s even more “Wow,” and that’s all we can think; we’re agape. But God
somehow expects us to feel agape for everyone and everything that he has
created. That is what he means by “love kindness.” Now, the Bible also says that
love is patient, love is kind, does not envy, does not boast, and unfortunately,
we do all of these things—and a lot—but this is why we’ve talked about
expectation a lot this weekend. And the fact is that we can live up to the
world’s expectations, but doing so chases us far off the path we’re supposed to
follow. God’s expectations are as perfect as he is, and that makes it impossible
for us to live up to them. But when we chase after them with all of our might,
when we chase them tenaciously, as he said, that is when we are doing what God’s
expected us to do. I’ve seen this in our youth group. When we go on mission
trips, no only do we do justice, as has been mentioned, I’d like to think that I
see a good bit of loving kindness. When we were last summer in New York went to
a church by the name of First Baptist Church of Jersey City, and there we met
the pastor. And her name was pastor Day, and was the most loving and kind woman
I have ever met. And we and her, we all got along famously, and together we did
much that was good in the sight of God. Here at this church, Hannah, Lynn
Turner, many of the people in this youth group are loving and kind, and while we
don’t always feels agape as we should, I like to think that I see a lot of it
around. Without this youth group, I think that I would not know nearly as much
about love as I do today.
What does it mean to you
to walk humbly with God?
Holly Jesensky, Youth
participant:
In
addition to acting justly and loving mercy, God expects us to walk humbly with
him. One of the first things that I noticed about this requirement is that it
is a verb and not a noun. In the sixth chapter of Micah, the Israelites
initially think that God desires concrete gifts, such as burnt offerings, but
instead, God replies that we wants our action of walking with him. Walking with
God implies moving consistently alongside of him despite life’s circumstances.
It takes faith to follow God, not only during the high points of your life, but
also during your greatest struggles. Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith, it
is impossible to please God. God can’t show you the great things he has in store
for your life unless you progress forward with him through faith. Another key
word to this verse is the word humbly. When the Pharisee in Luke 18 gave his
offering, he did it with pride and insincerity. This type of self-righteousness
only creates a barrier with God, and hinders us from coming closer to Him. God
sent his son to save the sinners, and according to Romans 3:23, all mean have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The tax collector didn’t try to hide
his mistakes and who he was in the past. He just came as he was. And that is
what God asks of each of us. The first step to a relationship with God begins
with the humble admittance of our sin and our need for God’s mercy. God has
given us the gift of eternal life, but we don’t have to wait until after death
to experience the fullness of God. Let God surprise you and exceed your
expectations of him by walking humbly with our God.
Jim Somerville:
This
day, the Gospel has been heard in so many good ways. We have been reminded that
what God requires of us is not complicated, it’s just not easy. To do justice,
to love kindness, to walk humbly with God may be the hardest things we have ever
done, but also, ultimately, the only things worth doing; the only things that
will really last.
It
does take regular commitment, daily commitment. We have to wake up in the
morning say, ‘All right, Lord, today I’m going to try to do the right thing. I’m
going to try to love the kind things, and I am going to try to remember who is
God and who is not. You are and I’m not.’ That posture at the beginning of the
day will make all the difference in the way the day plays out. That commitment
to doing the right thing and loving the kind thing will make all the difference
in the way this week plays out. So let me challenge you to do that. To do those
things that God loves and to do them with your whole heart, not just because
it’s Valentine’s Day but because God loves you and you love God, and in that
relationship real life begins.
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