Matthew 11:25-30
I have a picture for you, of a child trying to cross a busy street, that will help us understand how walking with Jesus makes our burden light and easy. In digging around for a picture, before I decided to make my own, I also found this, “New research from the University of Iowa shows children under certain ages lack the perceptual judgment and motor skills to cross a busy road consistently without putting themselves in danger. The researchers placed children from 6 to 14 years old in a realistic simulated environment and asked them to cross one lane of a busy road multiple times.
The results: Children up to their early teenage years had difficulty consistently crossing the street safely, with accident rates as high as 8 percent with 6-year-olds. Only by age 14 did children navigate street crossing without incident, while 12-year-olds mostly compensated for inferior road-crossing motor skills by choosing bigger gaps in traffic.[i]
A child may allow eagerness to outweigh reason when judging the best time to cross a busy street. “They get the pressure of not wanting to wait combined with these less-mature abilities.”[ii] Bottom line, kids need help. Crossing a busy road is a lot easier if you’re holding Daddy’s hand.
It occurred to me that in many ways we are all still little children from God’s perspective. Even as adults, we may lack the perceptual judgment see the spiritual realities behind our circumstances and also lack the motivational skills to navigate a busy life consistently without putting ourselves in danger. Trouble is, because we are so grown up and able to handle many responsibilities, we have a tendency to think we can do it all or do without. Many people have no clue that God, our heavenly Father, wants to lead and protect us and make life a little easier, until after we have gotten ourselves hurt by going it alone.
That is of course especially true for people who know nothing of a personal relationship with God. But often, even after we believe in Jesus Christ for salvation and forgiveness, we often get only a little better than the average non-believer at looking up to God with childlike faith and dependence upon his wisdom to guide us through the rest of life.
The Scripture we read today has Jesus giving a good three-point message that will help us grow in grace without growing out of our dependence upon the heavenly Father. It will help us be sure that we do not forget the marks of the foundational experience of salvation and do not go off the path Jesus has marked out for us in the works he has prepared in advanced for us to do. Here’s the outline as I see it. First point, who may see God? Second, how can we see God? Third, what happens when we see God?
Who may see God? What are the marks of the foundational experience of salvation? They are child-like faith and a humble spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Jesus’ teaching often reminds us of this important truth: That, our Father, the Lord of Heaven and earth, has hidden many things from the wise and learned, and revealed them only to little children. Yes, for this is what it pleased our Father to do. Those wise and learned people Jesus referred to are really only wise in their own eyes if they are not humbly looking to God with child-like wonder at what he reveals to those who listen to him.
When Jesus spoke about the wise and learned, he was literally talking about the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and teachers of the Law, who were arguing with him and rejecting him instead of believing in him. Obviously, they were blind to the real significance of Jesus’ presence and mission. They just didn’t get it. And what is remarkable is that they were the top ranked students of Scripture, the most religiously faithful and disciplined keepers of the Law, of all people in Israel, they should have got it first!
It is hard for such self-proclaimed wise and learned ones to be open to new ideas. But we should remember Nicodemus, who came to Jesus at night to ask questions and listen more intently to Jesus’ answers. We know from the account in John 3 that Nicodemus was greatly perplexed and had a hard time understanding what Jesus was saying. Yet later, we learn the Nicodemus became willing to stand up for Jesus and try to prevent the injustice that was being perpetrated against him. And, after Jesus died, Nicodemus played an important role in honoring Jesus with a decent burial. So, we have evidence that at least this Pharisee did humble himself, learn from Jesus, and come to faith in him.
But most of the people who did understand and believe in Jesus were the simple people like fishermen and tax collectors, also demon possessed and adulterous people. Many of them had lived their lives foolishly. In a way, they knew they were in trouble with God just because the Pharisees and other more respectable people kept telling them and showing them with their scorn and judgment and looking down their noses at the sinners. But in Christ they found forgiveness, acceptance and power to live differently, to go and sin no more.
In 1 Corinthians 1: 26-30, Paul points us to the same truth when he says, “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”
I know this is true because it is my own experience. As a young man, I had been a pot head, and squandered my time in partying so that I flunked out of school, and then was ready to throw my life away as worthless. But God got hold of me. My Father in heaven got my attention, helped me believe in Jesus for salvation and lets me call him Daddy now. Plus, he has given me a ministry and life worth living! But I would not dare to boast that I am in any sense a self-made man. Jesus gets all the credit. I will boast in him!
If we boast in ourselves, we lack that humble spirit that opens our eyes to our need of Christ. But when we see ourselves honestly, then we can agree with Paul who wrote in Eph. 2:1-5, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
Do you see how Paulk included himself in the list of dead and rebellious people? He said, “All of us also lived among them at one time. For Paul to believe that and write it out that way, including himself as among the sinners it took a literal “come to Jesus” moment in his life. He used to be one of those self-righteous Pharisees! He was so sure he was right he was going around arresting and even executing God’s Holy Children! He just didn’t know it. He thought he was doing God’s work was actually doing exactly the opposite until he met Jesus on the Road to Damascus and got set straight.
And do you know which group of people in our world today have the hardest time seeing themselves as sinners the way Paul described us? It is people who have been raised in church, or who were born again many years ago! We have a hard time lumping ourselves in with the far worse looking sinners who never go to church, when we have lived our own lives write obedient to God’s commands and do not realize the rebellion of pride that leads us to think more highly of our selves than we ought.
We ought rather to rightly thank God for his mercy and grace that has led us sinners into saving faith based on what he has done for us and not on what we might think we can do to save ourselves! If that is our experience, then we are the little children to whom God has revealed many things that the wise and learned fail to see. What things? That God is kind and merciful, not judgmental and aloof. He invites the children to draw near to him. He is filled with love for all, not just for the well-behaved. That we are helpless to save ourselves, and when we try we only become self-righteous, better behaved sinners, not pleasing in God’s sight, not humble people crying out for his mercy. In God’s way of salvation, it is not shameful for a grown-up person crying out to our heavenly Father. “Daddy! Help me get through this! I can’t do it by myself!” That is not shameful. It is required of us!
As long as we remember that and never congratulate ourselves for progress without giving thanks to God for his power at work in our lives then we will remain open to his leading and remain as people to whom God will continue to reveal great truths, teaching us over and over, and more and more the meaning and significance of what has been written down for us in the Bible. That’s who may see God, humble people who do not think of themselves more highly than they ought.
Next Jesus tells us how we may see God. Focus on Jesus, the very image and likeness of God, in whom is all the fulness of the godhead. We have to keep working at the relationship we have with Jesus. Not work to get saved, work to keep on being filled with Spirit as Paul commands us to do in Eph. 5:18-20 “Keep on being filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Worshipping Jesus as God is a big key to how we see God.
Verse 27 spells it out quite plainly: “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” If we are focused on Jesus, Christ on the cross, Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the one who so loved the world that he laid down his life to take our place and spare us the judgement we deserve, then we get to know both him and God as we study the Scriptures that tell of his love and pray in Jesus name. This is the only way that we can truly learn and keep on remembering who he really is! We have to keep working at the relationship we have with Jesus.
But this is not something that automatically stays with us, requiring no effort on our part. We are talking about a living relationship with a real live person. When we look at it that way it is easy to see that you have to keep in touch. Can you really claim that you are married to someone if all you had was a wedding some years ago and then you lived in different houses and never talked to each other, or only called if you needed something? Or even if you at least hung out together once a week, it still wouldn’t be much of a relationship, would it? You might be legally married. But you’re not living like your married. Obviously, it’s not much of a relationship.
Similarly, if you claim to be born again, but you don’t spend any quality time alone with your Savior, how can you grow? How can you say you have a personal relationship with Jesus if you never spend any time with him, or enough time? Even if you if go to church once a week, if that’s the only time you spend in God’s word, it’s not much of a relationship. You might be saved. But you might really be someone of whom Jesus will have to say, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” This is why the church and its individual members need to regularly experience revival.
We can see it in history too. When Martin Luther tacked his 95 theses up on the church door, because he couldn’t do it on Facebook, he was trying to get the church leaders, the spiritual leaders of his day, to take another look at the Bible and compare what is there to what they had developed over the centuries of “doing church.” They had lost sight of some very simple and deep truths, such as salvation by faith in God’s grace. They had added in fund raising ideas that were looking like theology that wasn’t in the Bible. But these were Christian people!
We must hearken to this lesson. It is very easy for this blindness of the wise and learned to afflict people who are raised in church. After years of Sunday School lessons and sermons and getting things done in ministry, if we forget point one, that we are just children, humbly leaning on God for our strength, we easily end up just doing religion, rather than walking with Jesus. The difference is enormous and is expressed well in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of these verses in The Message. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? … Walk with me and work with me…Learn the unforced rhythms of grace”
I also saw in a recent devotion, in Our Daily Bread, this bit of wisdom, “If you find that Christianity exhausts you, draining you of your energy, then you are practicing religion rather than enjoying a relationship with Jesus Christ. Your walk with the Lord will not make you weary; it will invigorate you, restore your strength, and energize your life.”
When I think that serving God is all up to me, I’ve begun working for Him instead of walking with Him. There is a vital difference. If I’m not walking with Christ, my spirit becomes dry and brittle. People are annoyances, not fellow humans created in God’s image. Nothing seems right. Jesus wants us to walk with Him. He loves us! And we need to take a look at what happens when we do see God and keep on seeing him by working on that relationship. [iii]
You become a child of God! John 1:12 says: “Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God!” You begin to enjoy eternal life. That’s not something that just happens after you die on earth. Eternal life in you begins the moment you believe. Oh, death where is your sting? The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us! The old has gone that new has come. Behold all things are made new! All things work together for our good. Not that we don’t go through any hardship, but that God is with us in it, just like holding the toddler’s hand to help her cross the scary street. God has said: “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.” through thick and thin, giving us wisdom and strength in those difficult times, guiding and helping us on our journey in life.
So, come to Jesus humble as a child. Worship Jesus and cling to him. Let him do his will in you and through you and we will together serve in God’s Kingdom to do the works that he has prepared in advance for us to do. The work of sharing the gospel with the lost that they may be saved and join us in this fellowship.
Oh, that men and women would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful Works to the children of men! For he satisfies the longing soul, fills the hungry soul with goodness!! We repent, Father forgive us when we try to do things in our own strength it's not by our might nor by power nor by our own spirit that we can do all things, but we do all things by you leading us and guiding us today Holy Spirit in Jesus name!![iv]
I have a picture for you, of a child trying to cross a busy street, that will help us understand how walking with Jesus makes our burden light and easy. In digging around for a picture, before I decided to make my own, I also found this, “New research from the University of Iowa shows children under certain ages lack the perceptual judgment and motor skills to cross a busy road consistently without putting themselves in danger. The researchers placed children from 6 to 14 years old in a realistic simulated environment and asked them to cross one lane of a busy road multiple times.
The results: Children up to their early teenage years had difficulty consistently crossing the street safely, with accident rates as high as 8 percent with 6-year-olds. Only by age 14 did children navigate street crossing without incident, while 12-year-olds mostly compensated for inferior road-crossing motor skills by choosing bigger gaps in traffic.[i]
A child may allow eagerness to outweigh reason when judging the best time to cross a busy street. “They get the pressure of not wanting to wait combined with these less-mature abilities.”[ii] Bottom line, kids need help. Crossing a busy road is a lot easier if you’re holding Daddy’s hand.
It occurred to me that in many ways we are all still little children from God’s perspective. Even as adults, we may lack the perceptual judgment see the spiritual realities behind our circumstances and also lack the motivational skills to navigate a busy life consistently without putting ourselves in danger. Trouble is, because we are so grown up and able to handle many responsibilities, we have a tendency to think we can do it all or do without. Many people have no clue that God, our heavenly Father, wants to lead and protect us and make life a little easier, until after we have gotten ourselves hurt by going it alone.
That is of course especially true for people who know nothing of a personal relationship with God. But often, even after we believe in Jesus Christ for salvation and forgiveness, we often get only a little better than the average non-believer at looking up to God with childlike faith and dependence upon his wisdom to guide us through the rest of life.
The Scripture we read today has Jesus giving a good three-point message that will help us grow in grace without growing out of our dependence upon the heavenly Father. It will help us be sure that we do not forget the marks of the foundational experience of salvation and do not go off the path Jesus has marked out for us in the works he has prepared in advanced for us to do. Here’s the outline as I see it. First point, who may see God? Second, how can we see God? Third, what happens when we see God?
Who may see God? What are the marks of the foundational experience of salvation? They are child-like faith and a humble spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Jesus’ teaching often reminds us of this important truth: That, our Father, the Lord of Heaven and earth, has hidden many things from the wise and learned, and revealed them only to little children. Yes, for this is what it pleased our Father to do. Those wise and learned people Jesus referred to are really only wise in their own eyes if they are not humbly looking to God with child-like wonder at what he reveals to those who listen to him.
When Jesus spoke about the wise and learned, he was literally talking about the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and teachers of the Law, who were arguing with him and rejecting him instead of believing in him. Obviously, they were blind to the real significance of Jesus’ presence and mission. They just didn’t get it. And what is remarkable is that they were the top ranked students of Scripture, the most religiously faithful and disciplined keepers of the Law, of all people in Israel, they should have got it first!
It is hard for such self-proclaimed wise and learned ones to be open to new ideas. But we should remember Nicodemus, who came to Jesus at night to ask questions and listen more intently to Jesus’ answers. We know from the account in John 3 that Nicodemus was greatly perplexed and had a hard time understanding what Jesus was saying. Yet later, we learn the Nicodemus became willing to stand up for Jesus and try to prevent the injustice that was being perpetrated against him. And, after Jesus died, Nicodemus played an important role in honoring Jesus with a decent burial. So, we have evidence that at least this Pharisee did humble himself, learn from Jesus, and come to faith in him.
But most of the people who did understand and believe in Jesus were the simple people like fishermen and tax collectors, also demon possessed and adulterous people. Many of them had lived their lives foolishly. In a way, they knew they were in trouble with God just because the Pharisees and other more respectable people kept telling them and showing them with their scorn and judgment and looking down their noses at the sinners. But in Christ they found forgiveness, acceptance and power to live differently, to go and sin no more.
In 1 Corinthians 1: 26-30, Paul points us to the same truth when he says, “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”
I know this is true because it is my own experience. As a young man, I had been a pot head, and squandered my time in partying so that I flunked out of school, and then was ready to throw my life away as worthless. But God got hold of me. My Father in heaven got my attention, helped me believe in Jesus for salvation and lets me call him Daddy now. Plus, he has given me a ministry and life worth living! But I would not dare to boast that I am in any sense a self-made man. Jesus gets all the credit. I will boast in him!
If we boast in ourselves, we lack that humble spirit that opens our eyes to our need of Christ. But when we see ourselves honestly, then we can agree with Paul who wrote in Eph. 2:1-5, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
Do you see how Paulk included himself in the list of dead and rebellious people? He said, “All of us also lived among them at one time. For Paul to believe that and write it out that way, including himself as among the sinners it took a literal “come to Jesus” moment in his life. He used to be one of those self-righteous Pharisees! He was so sure he was right he was going around arresting and even executing God’s Holy Children! He just didn’t know it. He thought he was doing God’s work was actually doing exactly the opposite until he met Jesus on the Road to Damascus and got set straight.
And do you know which group of people in our world today have the hardest time seeing themselves as sinners the way Paul described us? It is people who have been raised in church, or who were born again many years ago! We have a hard time lumping ourselves in with the far worse looking sinners who never go to church, when we have lived our own lives write obedient to God’s commands and do not realize the rebellion of pride that leads us to think more highly of our selves than we ought.
We ought rather to rightly thank God for his mercy and grace that has led us sinners into saving faith based on what he has done for us and not on what we might think we can do to save ourselves! If that is our experience, then we are the little children to whom God has revealed many things that the wise and learned fail to see. What things? That God is kind and merciful, not judgmental and aloof. He invites the children to draw near to him. He is filled with love for all, not just for the well-behaved. That we are helpless to save ourselves, and when we try we only become self-righteous, better behaved sinners, not pleasing in God’s sight, not humble people crying out for his mercy. In God’s way of salvation, it is not shameful for a grown-up person crying out to our heavenly Father. “Daddy! Help me get through this! I can’t do it by myself!” That is not shameful. It is required of us!
As long as we remember that and never congratulate ourselves for progress without giving thanks to God for his power at work in our lives then we will remain open to his leading and remain as people to whom God will continue to reveal great truths, teaching us over and over, and more and more the meaning and significance of what has been written down for us in the Bible. That’s who may see God, humble people who do not think of themselves more highly than they ought.
Next Jesus tells us how we may see God. Focus on Jesus, the very image and likeness of God, in whom is all the fulness of the godhead. We have to keep working at the relationship we have with Jesus. Not work to get saved, work to keep on being filled with Spirit as Paul commands us to do in Eph. 5:18-20 “Keep on being filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Worshipping Jesus as God is a big key to how we see God.
Verse 27 spells it out quite plainly: “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” If we are focused on Jesus, Christ on the cross, Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the one who so loved the world that he laid down his life to take our place and spare us the judgement we deserve, then we get to know both him and God as we study the Scriptures that tell of his love and pray in Jesus name. This is the only way that we can truly learn and keep on remembering who he really is! We have to keep working at the relationship we have with Jesus.
But this is not something that automatically stays with us, requiring no effort on our part. We are talking about a living relationship with a real live person. When we look at it that way it is easy to see that you have to keep in touch. Can you really claim that you are married to someone if all you had was a wedding some years ago and then you lived in different houses and never talked to each other, or only called if you needed something? Or even if you at least hung out together once a week, it still wouldn’t be much of a relationship, would it? You might be legally married. But you’re not living like your married. Obviously, it’s not much of a relationship.
Similarly, if you claim to be born again, but you don’t spend any quality time alone with your Savior, how can you grow? How can you say you have a personal relationship with Jesus if you never spend any time with him, or enough time? Even if you if go to church once a week, if that’s the only time you spend in God’s word, it’s not much of a relationship. You might be saved. But you might really be someone of whom Jesus will have to say, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” This is why the church and its individual members need to regularly experience revival.
We can see it in history too. When Martin Luther tacked his 95 theses up on the church door, because he couldn’t do it on Facebook, he was trying to get the church leaders, the spiritual leaders of his day, to take another look at the Bible and compare what is there to what they had developed over the centuries of “doing church.” They had lost sight of some very simple and deep truths, such as salvation by faith in God’s grace. They had added in fund raising ideas that were looking like theology that wasn’t in the Bible. But these were Christian people!
We must hearken to this lesson. It is very easy for this blindness of the wise and learned to afflict people who are raised in church. After years of Sunday School lessons and sermons and getting things done in ministry, if we forget point one, that we are just children, humbly leaning on God for our strength, we easily end up just doing religion, rather than walking with Jesus. The difference is enormous and is expressed well in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of these verses in The Message. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? … Walk with me and work with me…Learn the unforced rhythms of grace”
I also saw in a recent devotion, in Our Daily Bread, this bit of wisdom, “If you find that Christianity exhausts you, draining you of your energy, then you are practicing religion rather than enjoying a relationship with Jesus Christ. Your walk with the Lord will not make you weary; it will invigorate you, restore your strength, and energize your life.”
When I think that serving God is all up to me, I’ve begun working for Him instead of walking with Him. There is a vital difference. If I’m not walking with Christ, my spirit becomes dry and brittle. People are annoyances, not fellow humans created in God’s image. Nothing seems right. Jesus wants us to walk with Him. He loves us! And we need to take a look at what happens when we do see God and keep on seeing him by working on that relationship. [iii]
You become a child of God! John 1:12 says: “Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God!” You begin to enjoy eternal life. That’s not something that just happens after you die on earth. Eternal life in you begins the moment you believe. Oh, death where is your sting? The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us! The old has gone that new has come. Behold all things are made new! All things work together for our good. Not that we don’t go through any hardship, but that God is with us in it, just like holding the toddler’s hand to help her cross the scary street. God has said: “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.” through thick and thin, giving us wisdom and strength in those difficult times, guiding and helping us on our journey in life.
So, come to Jesus humble as a child. Worship Jesus and cling to him. Let him do his will in you and through you and we will together serve in God’s Kingdom to do the works that he has prepared in advance for us to do. The work of sharing the gospel with the lost that they may be saved and join us in this fellowship.
Oh, that men and women would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful Works to the children of men! For he satisfies the longing soul, fills the hungry soul with goodness!! We repent, Father forgive us when we try to do things in our own strength it's not by our might nor by power nor by our own spirit that we can do all things, but we do all things by you leading us and guiding us today Holy Spirit in Jesus name!![iv]
Comments
Post a Comment