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| Strength for the Journey #4 Awed by Joshua? |
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Awed by Joshua?
Reading: Hebrews 4:1-13
Introduction: Do you ever have those “heart to heart” moments with yourself when you suddenly feel not just inadequate but almost fraudulent in your existence? It’s not just that you got up on the wrong side of the bed and you’re irritable or that you just messed up on the job or said something you regret to a family member. It’s a wave of self-reflection that rolls over you and suddenly feel absolutely helpless. Or worse you feel completely compromised as a person because you don’t know who the real you is anymore. Perhaps it is one of those moments when it seems that the “outside”—the side that you work so hard to get other people to accept, the image that others have of you—seems completely foreign to the person you believe is living inside your body. Or a moment when the world around you has one image of you that, deep inside your soul (perhaps because of secret sin) you know to be false.
I have those moments…..moments when all of my education and credentials and history and longevity in church meet my fears of failure and inadequacy and ignorance. When all of the surface measures of spiritual understanding and social acceptance come face to face with deeper longings. When I have a moment that seems, on the one hand, to be a moment of clarity in the midst of all of my doing and busyness. Here I am rushing from one thing to the next, stroking my ego with this or that speaking invitation, getting to work at a big, growing church, scheduling my life away with appointments or sermon preparations or classes to teach. Busy trying to be liked and loved by everyone that I meet, busy building an image of the beloved Bible professor at a Christian University and preacher that everyone likes at church. Hiding from my schedule and responsibilities every now and then with a game of golf where I always wish that just once I could play my normal game, because even there I am more “wannabe” that reality.
I heard this described a couple of weeks ago as the search for the undivided self. The pursuit of wholeness in which one’s inner life matches all of the outward appearances. The lecturer was describing the need to nurture one’s “inner life,” that spiritual and authentic self deep within that often gets buried by all of our surface efforts to build image and esteem on the outside. The struggle to nurture this inner life comes because we live in a world that constantly encourages us to spend all of our energies creating a person on the outside for others to see that is distanced from our inside. We are promised pleasure and happiness and contentment through the creation of an image. We live in a culture that prizes outward appearance and social standing and gives identity through perceived credentials of importance like wealth or education or celebrity. In many professional circumstances we actually are taught to create a distance between the outside and the inside, to create a wall of protection between the outside that people see and the inside, our own deepest emotions and feelings. It’s unprofessional to say too much about the real self. Plus, all too often, the real self is in so much pain, hiding so much stuff—not just the sin or potential sin in our lives, but the loneliness and dysfunction of relationships, the hurting of mistreatment and alienation; all of the stuff never talked about, but constantly gnawing. We have to go about life on the surface in order to survive. Then, sometimes we least expect it, there comes a wave of clarity and we see what we try to keep hidden from the world and even ourselves. Sometimes it comes over us as a dark cloud of depression—of utter worthlessness and meaningless existence. Sometimes it comes as a wave of panic fear and the longing to escape. Sometimes it is an intense desire for just a moment of rest. Rest from the struggle; rest from the divided self; rest from the people and circumstances and pressures that are clueless to my real identity, or at least my real longings for identity. Sometimes, I beat back the wave before it ever becomes a conscious thought, especially when I am on a prestige roll—when everyone seems to like me and there are all sorts of things vying for my time and attention and they all stroke my ego. I can just enjoy everyone speaking so highly of me until I suddenly am on overload in my busyness and I start failing to meet all of those expectations—a missed appointment here, a teaching assignment blown because I was too busy to adequately prepare, a family member ignored because I was so full of myself.
Or there is the other extreme, when I decide to do everything for others—be attentive to everyone else’s needs, make sure that the kids get to be involved in every sport, and attend every school function and participate in every extra-curricular activity and not miss out on anything I wish I could have done when I was growing up. There is the life lost in making sure everyone around me gets everything and does everything and never lacks anything, so that they can be popular and fit in and be accepted. This is the life of apparent sacrifice, when I invest all of my time and energies into making sure that my family—my kids especially—aren’t missing out, and I become so invested in creating an outside life for them that neither they or I have time to conceive of an inner life. The outer life is the only existence I know. The outer life of image building and social acceptance and vicarious living through others becomes life itself. Even church becomes one more set of social image building—attending with the right people, maintaining the right image among one’s peers by the religion choices that I make.
Our ancient preacher to the Hebrews knew all about the divided self when he wrote this sermon we’ve been studying for the past few weeks. His audience is also caught in a series of circumstances in which they have these waves of inadequacy, even fraudulence, that sweep over them. You see they are caught between the social world that surrounds them—the world that gave them place and identity and structure and meaning to their lives at one time—and the new spiritual world of faith that they have been drawn to in Christ. Their Christian commitments are costing them dearly in the social world around them. They feel trapped between two worlds, living with divided lives. One world promises to nurture their inner self, the other world promises to maintain their outer self. Their immediate social world threatens rejection if they don’t conform. Their new Spiritual convictions promise new identity and an undivided self. The preacher calls it “rest.” It is the ability to live such a faith relationship with Creator God that one can trust God to provide in any circumstance. It is an overwhelming sense of peace the one experiences because it is the peace of Creator God himself. It is the peace experienced by God himself when he looked at all that he created and knew that it was good. It is not at all the temporal rest, the escapist rest found in what we call vacation and recreation, not the temporal “time-outs” of entertainment, or momentary escape from the fears and failures of life. It is the “rest” of the inner self at long last back in harmony with its created image.
Listen again to the preacher’s insistence that his audience pay attention to this rest that others have failed to enter. I pick up the sermon in 3:12:
“ Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. As it is said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’
Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? But with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. 3 For we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, ‘As in my anger I swore, “They shall never enter my rest,”’ though his works were finished at the foundation of the world. For in one place it speaks about the seventh day as follows, ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.’ And again in this place it says, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’
Since therefore it remains open for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he sets a certain day—“today”—saying through David much later, in the words already quoted, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day. So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs.” (Hebrews 3:12-4:1)
The preacher’s desire that his audience enter a Sabbath rest is not simply a matter of wanting them to go to church on Sunday, or even making sure that they don’t mow the grass on Sunday. It is about the inner life! Entering into God’s rest, the preacher says, takes us back to creation itself, back to God’s designs and desires for humans when he created us in his image. It was life in the garden lived in community with God that occurred on the seventh day. That life was stripped from humans by sin, but God kept offering to restore it. It was the promised rest offered to the people of the Exodus, the rest promised to people of faith when they reached the land at the edge of the wilderness. But the people had hard hearts. They perceived their enemies as giants and themselves as insects. Joshua did indeed lead them into the land because he, along with Caleb, understood that they rested in the protective hand of God. But the people chose not to live in God’s rest. The preacher keeps repeating one sad refrain from Psalm 95: “They shall never enter my rest.” “As I swore in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”
Israel’s problem was they never became undivided in their allegiance and longing. You remember the stories. No sooner had they gotten into the land than they began to worship the gods of the land. They never could quite figure out how to give their allegiance to the God who brought them into the land in the first place. They couldn’t stay out of the social entanglements with the world around them.
The preacher in Hebrews sees his audience struggling with the same divided loyalties. Only this time he says the stakes are much higher. This is not the Joshua of old, this is Jesus. This is not a faithful successor to Moses, this is the Son of God! This rest is not about land, it’s about eternal habitations! And make no mistake, this journey is in progress and everyone is headed some place. Everyone is either entering or exiting. Just as Israel stood at the threshold of the land and refused to enter, finally to the point that God said, “They will never enter my rest,” so “Today,” the preacher says, his audience stands in the threshold. Entry into his rest is already theirs, but it’s not yet theirs if they refuse to continue forward on their journey.
So how do they decide? How do they make the right choice? How do they deal with the social pressures threatening to ruin their existence in the present for the sake of a promise they cannot yet see? How does one experience rest with God when current life circumstances seem to be getting worse instead of better? How can they believe in God’s rest when their current circumstances seem hellacious? The preacher believes that the critical ingredient for completing their journey is their willingness to let God’s word do divine surgery.
“Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. “ (4:12-13)
God’s word is alive. God’s word cuts through/pierces the walls of the divided self. God’s word reveals the superficial claims of the current social circumstances and opens up the heart to the One who created and truly sustains life. The preacher is not calling your Bible a sword here. This is not a statement about the authority of Scripture, it is an appeal to the inner self to hear the word of God calling out to each of us today. Today, if you hear his voice. Today, do not harden your heart. The preacher believes that God still speaks. Yes, he speaks through Scripture. But it is a living voice, a voice that speaks today. A voice not contained in pages of a leather bound book, but a two-edged sword enlivened by God’s Spirit that turns an ancient hymn in the song book (Psalm 95) into a two-edged sword. It is a word of judgment upon hardened hearts; it is a word of promise to those who can hear.
In a world full of divided selves, in a world in which even this week we have tried to understand our own citizenship and loyalties, when it’s been difficult to know whether we are American first and Christian second or vice versa, when we have been steeped in all sorts of activities that have us culturally fitting in, when we are so tempted to nurture the image, the outside that we want other people to see, rather than allowing the heart and soul to declare the truth of our existence. God brings to us this morning his two-edged sword and offers to do divine surgery. Today, if we can hear his voice. Today, we stand on the threshold of rest. Today, not because it’s Sunday, not because we fulfilled our Christian duty of stopping by church before the game, not because this is one more social appearance that we act out. Today, eternal God offers eternal rest, entrance into the life of the undivided self. No, it’s not a completed journey…but it is an opportunity to move forward into wholeness rather than letting the wave of opportunity pass and escaping back into our busyness and distraction and hiding. Please understand, the stakes are high! We’re talking about eternity here, not the end of the football season, not the outcomes of the school year, not the fulfillment of career goals, not just a retirement fund. Eternity.
Today….if you hear his voice…Today.
Delivered at Woodmont Hills, September 15, 2002.
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