Thanksgiving is upon us now, only days away. Dried noodles and frozen pumpkin filling are patiently waiting in their zip locked containers for the upcoming week. And as we prepare our turkeys and mashed potatoes among other things, perhaps amidst the fray we’ll be able to stop and think, if just for a minute, about all the things which we have to be thankful for. Perhaps for having a job during tough economic times. Maybe for having family and friends when it’s so easy to find yourself lonely. If we are so lucky we may even gain a sense of how these things are truly blessings, dependent much more upon the grace of God than we’re usually inclined to give credit for.
Maybe, if we’re watching the game after the big meal, or a special on the History Channel while we’re preparing the food, we’ll think for a moment about the fabled origin of this holiday; not the legalized national origins when an official date was set in 1941, but the story of Plymouth Plantation, the 53 Pilgrims and 90 some Native Americans. We might think of them giving thanks to God after a successful harvest following a difficult year.
And that’s always how it’s coupled, I think. Blessings in the midst of suffering, boon and bane together. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that bad times make the good times more valuable, rather I think good times make the bad times more bearable. I think, in the midst of difficulties, we get glimmers of hope, things to hold on to, promises that can still create faith amongst the barrage of worries, fears, and doubts; faith in the middle of a world often gone drastically wrong.
As we will see in the upcoming seasons of Advent and Christmastide, one of the chief themes of the story of the nativity is that God is with us, even amongst the rubble; which is, of course, what the name Emmanuel means, God with us; a point I’m sure I’ll emphasize from time to time. And it’s a good thought to keep in mind during this time of Thanksgiving as well, especially as we draw to a close our time in studying First John.
It worked out rather well that we are able to finish right before Advent begins. Looking back now, though, there are several themes which I wish I would’ve hit on and taken more time to examine. Perhaps the chance will present itself later.
However, at this point, the theme which has emerged for me in writing these sermons has been a focus on “what God does.” I can’t be entirely too sure how much of that comes directly from the book and how much of it has been a matter of hearing what I, at least, needed to hear as I read through it.
There have certainly been a few points in these handful of sermons where I’ve taken a tangent to what John is actually saying to focus on what appeared to me at the time as a particularly useful application. There’ve been times when I’ve been fairly aware of what I think John was trying to address, but not included that content in the sermon itself because it perhaps seemed a bit too geared towards factual information rather than spiritual application.
You see, that’s one of the things that I’m still learning to balance. As I mentioned in one of my previous sermons, sometimes when I read passages, a few red-flags will be set off in my head, and those will be the things which interest me and which I pursue as I study the passage. But, I’m realizing that while chasing down the solutions to those problems is worthwhile when developing a sermon, they might not always be so beneficial when delivering the sermon.
In a way, it’s kind of like reading a mystery novel or watching a crime drama on T.V. The writer or writers always throw in an extra amount of garbage information, or, through the lens of the story, they have their characters hunt down this information, only to end up not needing it when they solve the puzzle. But yet they needed to know that they didn’t need it.
Likewise, when writing a sermon, it’s inevitable that I’m going to try to follow all the little trails that my mind believes is there before I can really get down to the business of writing the thing.
That was the case in writing this weeks sermon as well. When I began getting prepared for the sermon on Tuesday, I decided to try a new approach in getting ready. I remembered from composition classes in High School and College having to practice using a brainstorming technique where they’d have us draw a circle, or a bubble, in the middle of the page and write some idea down in that circle. Then you draw lines from the circle to other circles with other ideas that the first one made you think of.
So I tried this method, and I took as my starting passage verses 14 and 15:
“And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He will hear us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we ask of Him.”
I wrote this passage out to the side, and then in my first bubble, I wrote a question which my inductive Bible study professor in college told us always to ask before we began preparing a sermon. You see, when studying the Bible there are always a few foundational questions which the person doing the study is looking to answer.
Sometimes the question is “what are the principles that can be gained from this passage?” This is where your typical three-point sermon usually comes from- “here are three principles you can apply to your life based on the life of Jeremiah,” or whatever the subject may be.
Other times the question may be “what did this passage mean to it’s original audience?” This is where your typically more informative sermons come from, sermons which spend a lot of time emphasizing cultural clues and nuances of the Greek.
Still other times the question may be “what is the Holy Spirit saying today through this passage?” And this is where your typical topical sermon comes from, drawing a lot from contemporary news stories and politics, and usually focusing on one or two verses rather than the entire passage.
All of these are very valuable questions, and without a doubt every good sermon touches on these questions as well; you need to know context, principles, and application. But what my professor believed to be the single most important question lying behind any study of Scripture was this: “what does this passage tell me about God?” Given that we believe Scripture to be the recorded revelation of God to the world, our first question ought always to be what that revelation is; ideally everything else will fall into place.
So, I wrote this question in the middle, and intended for it to be the guiding point of my looking at this passage. But, the inevitable happened yet again. As I stared at those two verses, I felt that, before I could ask what this passage was saying about God, I needed to ask what this passage was saying at all.
These two verses, on the face of it, can be very confusing to a modern-day Christian. Let me read them again quickly so you can see what I mean:
“And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He will hear us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we ask of Him.”
Now, when I read that, I see two “principles” that jump off the page and stare back at me. First, we must ask according to His will. Second, when we ask according to His will, we have what we ask.
You know, sometimes when I read the Bible I get the impression that the authors had in mind their future interpreters, such as ourselves here, and as a sort of joke intentionally threw in verses like malicious kids throwing sticks and rocks onto a bike path. It’s almost like their trying to trip us up, or at least cramp our style.
As Christians today, of course, one of the chief things we have to deal with here in America is bad PR, caused in no small part by some of the more popular preachers out there. And the message of many of those more popular preachers, though perhaps it’s fallen on hard times in our recent economic situation, is the health and wealth Gospel; this idea that if you have enough faith, life is going to be rosy for you from here on out. One may very well ask how they deal with things like the book of Job and the promises of Christ that we, too, will have to carry our cross, holding onto faith in the midst of suffering.
But when it comes to passages like these, the health and wealth folks can have field day. It seems to play right into their hands.
And so, in a matter of minutes, a whole page worth of bubbles appeared below my first one. The first bubble, of course, asked “what does it mean to ask according to His will?” And next to that I asked questions like “does that mean His moral will?” (I.e. His revealed will that we should love one another and love Him). Another bubble asked “is it His specific will, and do you have to guess at it?” (I.e. is it according to what He has willed in a specific situation, which we are incapable of knowing, and if you guess right then you get what you ask for because you asked for what He was already going to give?) Another question was “does His will change when we ask?”
And, before I knew it, I had already missed the point of the passage. I had never really asked, “what does this tell me about God?” Instead, I was asking, “what doesn’t this tell me about God?”
As simple as it sounds, whenever we approach any Biblical passage, there are two categories of thought at work: what we know, and what we don’t know. And often, we as Christians have to hold certain things that we do know in a sort of paradoxical tension because of the things we don’t know. For example, we know that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all referenced to as being God, in an equal sense, they are all three part of the same God. Simultaneously, we know that the Son is subordinate to the Father and the Spirit is subordinate to both the Father and the Son. What we don’t know is how in the world that works.
A more pertinent example may be that we know God loves us. We know, because of the Cross, that He loves us with an infinite, perfect love of an infinite, perfect, and omnipotent Father towards His children. At the same time, we know that the world in which He has placed us can often be an awful, brutal, vicious place which seems filled with anything but love and often characterized by immense suffering. What we don’t know is how those two things work together. We hold these truths to be self-conflicting.
The same is true when we come to our passage for today. We know that, as Christians, even when we ask with the sincerest intentions for things which we deem to be within the scope of God’s will, we don’t always get exactly what we’re asking for. We know that not every prayer offered up within the walls of Riley’s Children’s Hospital by a suffering mother with a dying child gets answered in the affirmative. We know that not every person who has worked hard, tried to be honest, and prayed fervently gets to keep their house when the market collapses. And we know that not every police officer that prays for protection in the morning makes it home in the evening.
We know these things by experience. And yet there are several things John wants us to know about God by revelation, as he asserts in the first verse of our passage:
13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.
He wants us to know that we have eternal life. And that word there, “know,” is eido, which you may remember from a sermon two months ago; in that sermon I indicated that eido was something known more as a fact, something known with your head.
He wants us to know for certain that we have that eternal life. And that life is not just “un-ending” life, not just a continual existence, it isn’t just infinite life. Rather, it is eternal, that is, drawn from the only thing which is eternal, God Himself. Through Christ, we are brought into the life of God, the supernatural reality which is more real that reality itself. We are drawn into life as it ought to be. We have become, as the King James version translates 1 Peter 1:4, “partakers of the Divine nature.”
And this reality, because of Christ’s work on the Cross, ought to make us confident before God, as John says in the next verse:
“14And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.”
We can be confident, because we have been bought and brought in, that we have an audience with God Himself; He hears us. And lest we skip over this fact and move on to the next verse which seems so much more important, let’s look at that for a moment.
What is one of the chief complaints when someone is having difficulty in their prayer life? They often say “I feel like I’m talking to…” a brick wall, the thin air, myself, no one. Whatever the object, the point is that they feel as if they are not being heard. And that is so important to us, isn’t it?
We’ve all been told a time or two that men and women are supposed to function differently when it comes to making complaints. Men are supposed to focus on fixing the problem, women are supposed to just want you to hear them talk about the problem. But I don’t think it’s so cut and dry as all that. Take away from a man all of his friends, and he will be in just as desperate a need to have someone hear him as anybody else, regardless of what gets fixed. In fact, that is exactly the starting point of them getting fixed in the first place.
As a side-note, that, in part, is why I wish we protestants hadn’t been quite so eager to get rid of the sacrament of confession and absolution in the first couple centuries of the Reformation. Sometimes you just need to be able to make a good confession to someone who will remind you of your forgiveness, as well as perhaps offer some guidance.
Thankfully, though such an opportunity tends to be more difficult to find amongst us, we can still remind ourselves of the one solid fact which lay behind the whole system of confession, and that is that God Himself does hear us. He does hear us, in all of our prayers, regardless of whether or not we feel like no one is listening.
And there’s an important point there too, the old distinction we make between hearing and listening. I can’t count the number of times my wife has told me “you may have heard me, but you weren’t listening to me.” But that word for hear, akouo, implies something which is listened to, something which is heeded, something which is considered. It does not go through one divine ear and out the other, but is considered, it is heard by God with concern, you might even say empathy.
And yet, while we believe that God hears every prayer that is offered, even the crudest and most vile of our prayers, there is one stipulation which John insists that we apply to our prayers. As I, and I hope you, have been told, God’s shoulders are big enough to take any abuse we may throw His way in the midst of our prayers. Yet, if we hope to grow, if we have the faintest hope of doing prayer “rightly” you might say, we ought to offer it “according to His will.” And despite my philosophical quarrels with that particular phrase, it’s meaning really is quite simple. It’s not a matter of whether we ask according to His moral will, His revealed will, or His unrevealed will, so much as it is a matter of approach.
The question is not whether or not we know what God is going to do, but whether or not we are okay with whatever He chooses to do. Can we say with Christ, at the end of each prayer “yet not my will, but thine be done.” Can we make our requests in faith? Can we make them knowing that such faith hinges on the promises of God, namely that He loves us and loved us first, and that “He works together all things for the good of those who love Him”?
Let us not focus on what He may or may not do, but rather on what He has done; and by knowing what He has done we know that He has loved us. And knowing that He loves us we know that none of us will be able to turn to Him on the other side of eternity and say “God you have not done right by me.”
We will have what we ask, even if we don’t have the foggiest idea how in the world that will work out.
“15 (And) if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”
But we must step out in faith and actually do the asking. God is ready and willing, you might even say eager, to help us in any trouble. As we are told in Philippians 4:6 “do not worry about anything but pray about everything.” And, frankly, if the Lord and Creator of all the world is eager to help us in any trouble, eager for us to ask Him and trust Him, why wouldn’t you.
Imagine our problems and stresses as a hunger, a hunger which we carry around with us at all times until we are half-starved, then imagine someone in such a state, so hungry, having a full-meal placed before them, and saying, “no thanks, I’d rather take care of it myself.” Christ calls to us “come to me you who are heavy laden and I shall given you rest” in the Gospel of Matthew.
Yet, if He is eager to help, we are often eager, as well, to hold on to our problems and refuse Him. Why is that? What is it that we are holding on to? What is it that makes us hold it? Perhaps, in part, it is pride, the first sin to assert itself in the Bible. We want to “be as gods,” to be our own god, to be our own source of good.
You see, at the end of this passage, John closes this book with the statement:
“Little children, keep away from idols.”
This, at first, sounds like more of a “and one last thing” sort of statement, tacked on to the end without any real context, almost a type of salutation. But, then, what is an idol? I remember several times over my life being rather frustrated when people in church would go on about how money could be an idol, or food could be an idol, or popularity, music, and personal appearance could all be idols when they take the number one spot on our list of priorities. Then metaphorical lines would be drawn between giving up certain things to reach your priorities and making sacrifices to your idols.
Now, I’m not saying that this frame of thought isn’t worthwhile, in fact it’s so worthwhile that it’s common sense, you ought to keep your priorities straight. But that’s looking at the issue of idols from a “works” or “Law” standpoint you might say. What an idol is, rather, goes much deeper, I think, than just something you are obsessed with or have put high on your priority list. It’s not something you merely enjoy, or are good at, or spend a lot of time doing.
Rather, an idol is a god, and thus to know what it means to have an idol you must know what it means to have a god. A god is not merely something you enjoy. A god is something you trust. A god is what you look towards to provide you with all that is necessary and good. And in that sense, any and all of these things can become an idol if we treat them as the creation rather than the creator. Money, friends, power, our own strength, and even our very selves can become idols if our trust is not in God.
And yet we know all these things will fail us. Money burns, friends move away or pass away, power only last long enough for someone else to take it, and strength is relative to the next stronger person.
Rather, God says, “Look to me. If you ask, I will hear you, if you pray, I will give life, if you are weary, I will give you rest, I will protect you from the evil one, just ask.” This is His word to us about Himself, this is what our passage tells us about God.
Amen.
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