Going Deeper - Great Risks

Thanks to Rev. Jordan for his sermon this past Sunday. He had me doing a continuous amen! As I sought to do for last week's sermon, I hope to go a step deeper and do some thinking about how to make the discipline part of everyday life and not just a Sunday worship thing, or for that matter, a practice that comes out only in times of crisis.

If I understood Rev. Jordan correctly, if our purpose is to please God, and surely that is a primary purpose, the how we please God is by walking in faith - and that means walking in faith even when it is of great risk to us. Now I suppose that idea of great risk does not necessarily or solely translate to life-threatening or dire circumstances (obviously for us here in NA, but acknowledging quite a different situation for many others outside of NA). For us, great risk may lie in the direction of being considered foolish by the world's standards or by other believers who see Christians as being bound by the standards of the world (though not all but some).

I am not certain walking by faith means keeping our eyes on doing what is "right" and performing good works and working hard to accomplish great, or even just good, things for the Kingdom - as righteous as that appears at first blush, or even by being better people (by that I mean sinning less). I am not convinced our great God is concerned about efficiency, effectiveness, and frankly, about us transforming the world (my thinking is that has been already accomplished at Calgary) and quite frankly I'm not sure I would want to live in a world that was transformed in the manner I thought best, however sincerely I prayed about it.

Maybe just maybe our awesome God is more concerned about a people who listen to His voice (John 10:4). Eugene Peterson in the Message says it rather bluntly in Matthew 7:23-23, "knowing the correct passwork- saying Master, Master, for instance - isn't going to get you anywhere with me. What is required is serious obedience - doing what my Father wills."

And I have this sense that God will ask us to do things that make no sense to those who calculate the effectiveness of their actions or how absurd and ill-fitting the request may be - whether in terms of the economics, the outreach numbers and such things or will ask us to do things we think are impossible - like Rev Jordan being on the other end of middle age and being told to go back to school - but He is remaking His world (God is reconciling the world to Himself - again Peterson says it well in his The Message, God put the world square with himself through the Messiah.... God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them, in 2 Cor 5:17-22) and He is looking for people to join Him in that journey - regardless of how crazy or impossible the command.

So walking by faith - obeying the voice - means entering by faith into that world where it is His voice that we hear and obey, where we with fear and trepidation work out our salvation for it is God who is at work in us for His great pleasure (Phil 2:12-13 in the ESV). But a big note of caution, listening is not a solo enterprise either.