Many times throughout Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus says , "He who has ears, let him hear". There is a sense in which both our ears need to be attuned to two frequencies... the voice of God who invites and welcomes sinners (Matt 11:28-30), and the voice of the world (Jonah 4:11) which cries out for God. We need both ears open. There are however also 2 classic ways by which we try to block out the call of God to live with his heart for the hurting.
1) We attempt blissful ignorance in isolation.
Jonah 4:5-6
"Then Jonah left the city and sat down East of it, where he made himself a
shelter and sat in its shade to see what would happen to the city.
So the LORD God appointed a vine, and it grew up to provide shade over Jonah’s head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant."
Jonah's eagerness to settle, to allow the world revolve around himself, and see where it went without his missional involvement may strike us as comically small minded, but many of us do this in various ways. Searching for a routine habit or lifestyle groove that enables us to "feel secure and safe" is the most dangerous way of trying to apply the Christian life. However, individualism is the reset application of many in the West, who have bought into the lie that "me time" will make me happy. What we are doing whenever we block our ears to the mission of God is substituting the truth for a lie. Instead of proclaiming that "God is all we need", we start living as though "comfort is the reason I exist". The truth is that...
a) God is sovereign - he provides all our comfort. (James 1:17) God is gracious, he is a father who loves to provide for his children. In Luke 15 we are reminded that God gives even us prodigals the best of what he has in Christ. (v22-24)
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
Seeing God's gifts in the context of redemption gives us Joy, but seeing his gifts merely for us alone will ultimately make us grumpy, selfish, angry, and discontent, no-one would even want to be with us.
b) Because he is sovereign ... he can equip us and provide for us in the intensity and complexity of following his plans. You and I have a tendency to orchestrate our own routine of comfort. Jonah was happy to view the entirety of his life under the canopy of a plant, but we can see the whole of life through other comforts (buying a new car, redesigning the kitchen for a 3rd time or building the mother of all summer houses, getting our kids through the next stage with financial help, building better facilities at church). None of these things in themselves are intrisically bad, but our eagerness and passion to go for them, as priorities for life, be consumed and energised by them, can be an act of great ignorance and and defiance (sin). What we are really saying to God (internally) is that we reject his plans to be exercised and challenged or trust him for the unexpected hurdles, and incomprehensible messiness of mission. In short our immovable preference is for ourselves, not mobilisation in the priority of his purposes. Instead of listening to the reality call of others and imminence of eternity, we chose for ourselves the temporary comfort nest.
What will God do about this? He will be good and gracious in his purposes as he always is... but be aware !!! we will experience great personal pain as our defiance, sin and idolatry is exposed.
"When dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered.
As
the sun was rising, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun
beat down on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint and wished to die,
saying, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
Then God asked Jonah, “Have you any right to be angry about the plant?”“I do,” he replied. “I am angry enough to die!”
But
the LORD said, “You cared about the plant, which you neither tended nor
made grow. It sprang up in a night and perished in a night. So
should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than
120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and
many cattle as well?”
Jonah 4:7-11
Attempting isolation never prevents God from moving forward with his plans. Blocking our ears never blocks out the God who speaks. If we do not listen... God will have to take away our object of comfort and affection, and if he does so ... it will be a gracious and good thing. Whenever we trust or hope in anything to make our lives "better" / what we want them to be, we have made an idol out of a good provision of God. God is just in taking what we find as "too precious" away from us. Suffering can take many forms. Because he is God, (and we are not), submission and humility to all God's purposes in suffering is part of following Christ (the suffering servant) - but this we gladly do in the context of his good providence and redemptive purposes. When we have nothing, there is nothing to distract us from serving him in clarity. If he takes away our selfish obsessions it is to rewire us in order that many will be blessed, rescued, renewed and find joy in him through our lives of fruitfulness. It is a good thing when God lightens the load of our consumeristic mentality and therefore the burden also, and we start living for the eternal big picture, finding our joy, hope and comfort in him alone. This is why Jesus tells us as his disciples to travel light through this life as we follow him.
Luke 9:3
He told them: “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt."
One of the beautiful characteristics I have discovered in those who live faithfully for the mission of God is their peace and contentment. Godliness with contentment really is great gain... a richness of life far above what this world offers. (1 Tim 6: 6-11). Yes they may have very little of this worlds goods, and are acutely aware they live in the middle of a war, both military and spiritual., or that they serve a starving people displaced in a refugee camp... YET... they have a greater, clearer picture of who God is and the goodness of His purposes. They have peace and settled contentment from THE SPIRIT of GOD, a reality which can never be taken away by any circumstance.
"Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Romans 8:35-39
There is a less painful way... to not love comfort too much in the first place, but readily submit to the missional purposes of God. May God open our eyes to see all he has given us within the context of his bigger purposes and glorious plans of grace to all the world.
2) We attempt cultural ignorance under a veneer
of fake holiness.
It is often rightly said that churches cannot stand still but only either go forwards or backwards. We either progress and move forward in gospel growth, or we decline and shrink back into a huddle (war bunker mentality), until we die off. It is the ordinance of God that churches cannot stand still. There is no "neutral" in the missional gearing of God's church, only forwards and reverse. Treading water, passing time, getting ourselves comfy is not what God has planned for us as his people this side of eternity. Freewheeling as we disengage with the mission of God will only end in disaster.
During covid it has been interesting (and alarming) to see two UK church cultures/ mentalities collide. There are those who engage and those who seek to avoid, those whose mission boundaries have grown, and those who have created a micro culture of "safety". What do we do about the mess, the inordinately selfish excesses people have resorted to without Christ (buying too much, eating too much, watching too much, indulgence of any sort.) ? Some church cultures have scorned it publicly, preached against it, legalised against it. Ordering the congregation to remove the netflix, amazon and spotify subscription or app has been the logical conclusion of some, in an effort to orchestrate a "holier" approach to life, to build a wall of division / distant perimeter in order to avoid eye contact with the waywardness and depravity of our world. But is this a biblical definition of holiness and the heart of God?
Why legalism will always make us angry and ugly.
Legislation is not the gospel (Romans 8:3). Making more rules (especially based on personal preferences) is not what our world needs right now. Holiness is not just a list of what not to do, it is far more, it is a life which follows the heart of God. Holiness is about loving what he loves and detesting what he detests. The thing is ...God loves the lost, and is today seeing the lost and seeking the lost, as he looks on with searing intent, a heart of understanding and compassion, readied by active grace.
When Luke's gospel is read from cover to cover we see that the priority missional move of God was from a monoculture who knew Jesus (1st century Jewish Palestine) to a global multiculture who followed Christ in all cultures (Luke volume 2 - also known as ACTS). To not engage with the world God has placed us in is to block our ears to the biblical plans and progressive directives of God. To say that our culture is the only one which shows Christ to the world is not only arrogant but a defiant barrier to block the spreading of the gospel of Christ.
Legalism says "if we forget about the mess of the world ...we will be more Holy."
Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Luke's gospel particularly reveals his priority for spending time with the destested, hated, marginalised, oppressed and those forgotten about or avoided in Roman - Jewish society (the Samaritan woman, the tax collectors, the leper, the publicans and sinners). This was frontier ministry (4:16-30). Some saw following God through their personal lens of legalistic isolation, and viewed Jesus as defiling himself as he bothered with the messed up cultures of this world they personally had nothing to do with. This was arrogant and full of pride, blasphemous as they told Jesus what Holiness was and how he should live. They accused Jesus of being a "drunkard, glutton friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Luke 7 :34) . Jesus saved his most searing judgments for such, who pretended they knew the heart of God but displayed not a shred of grace. They had no relationship with the living God (even though they taught his law), and went into the future defying him, to face the consequences as enemies of him.
Should Christians engage with culture (netflix, amazon, youtube, social media included) ? Unless we do, what use are we? In what ways are we like Christ when we only answer questions in church that the world is not asking ? In what ways are we like Christ when we define holiness as segregation, when we program to avoid the most messed up, and those who have been rejected or segregated by this world? How can we expose life idols and show that Christ is better ...when we do not live amongst the depravity with open eyes, understanding what people are searching for, with warmth and welcome in our hearts?
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens,
he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
(Acts 17:16).
Non of these things (netflix, amazon, youtube, social media included) should be defined as our personal objects or habits of affection, but neither should they be avoided as a badge of holiness to please God, a merit to be gained by not engaging with the world he has placed us in. Of course the way we spend our time (and money) is an issue of conscience, but when there is no intention to understand the world we live in and no effort is made to connect with those who are very unlike ourselves, it says a lot about our hearts. The heart of God opens our eyes to what others use as substitutes for his love. Unless we read our hearts, and the heart of this world through the lens of Christ's redemptive grace for all, for "whosever may come", we do not hear the heartbeat of the living God today, or see the massive, active, cosmic size of his grace towards us. His grace is inordinately bigger than neflix and amazon (and they are pretty massive).
Legalism says "I will be happier on my own ... not engaging with the world".
Segregation never leads to happiness, it is not in the purposes of the relational God who has made us relational in his image (Gen 2:18). The Older Son in Luke 15 (v25-32) saw the world through his own selfish eyes not the eyes of his father who looked outside the house to welcome the lost. His Dad was generous, but with blinkers on the son only saw that as a personal benefit. When we are selfish with the grace of God it makes us many things, and all of them are ugly.
We become grumpy and angry when we wish that God's grace was just for us.
Jonah 4:9 "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”
- When we live with the attitude of "I am the only person God cares about, or should care about", we not only look foolish, but we will be jolted (Jonah 4:8) by the reality of circumstance and his sovereign plans, so that our eyes are lifted to the bigger picture of his global, cosmic redemption.
- For Jonah life became unbearably dissatisfying in isolation.
- The "Older brother" in Luke 15:28 instinctively became destructive with good relationships and himself, wanting to cut himself off from grace, goodness, and redemptive joy. Notice the context in which Jesus tells this parable (15;1 "Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him.") .
- Job however, became more profitable (Job 42:12) than he had ever been before in life, as he resisted the temptation to live in legalistic isolation and self pity (despite being surrounded by suffering and a culture which defied the grace, wisdom, sovereignty and goodness of God).
There is true Joy as we submit to the global mission of God's grace for all peoples and all cultures in all circumstances. As you and I learn to trust, engage, submit and go under his direction we do so knowing that his grace, goodness and love has covered every eventuality, for us, all circumstances and all peoples.
God is good ! The incomparable bigness and faithfulness of our gracious God and his redemption. Where would we be without his grace, and those who engaged with us in our selfishness and sin, to tell us of him ?
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