SERMON NOTES: THE POINT OF PARABLES
Why isn’t God doesn’t God speak more “directly?”
1. Because hearing implies doing
[Deuteronomy 5:1 – 29; 1 Cor 10:13; Jude 24]
2. Because Coercion isn’t Conviction
[2 Sam 23:15 – 16 / 1 Chronicles 11:16-19]
3. Because He already has
[Luke 16:19 – 31]
Title: Plainness isn’t Painless
Text: Mark 4:10 – 12
MP: God’s communication with us is more subtle, because he wants to woo us – not overpower us – into relationship with him.
SO: Introduce / Whet the appetite for the Sunday school series. Answer the nagging question
Outline:
Why isn’t God more clear?
1. Because hearing implies doing
a. A Few Good Men
b. Deut 5 – The people don’t want to talk to God directly. They want somebody in the middle!
c. Principle is that you don’t get more truth than you can handle (1 cor 10.13 Jude 24),
2. Because he doesn’t want to overpower us
a. 2 Sam 23 (David’s longing to drink from Bethlehem’s well)
b. Conflict of interest (Pastor / Counselee, Teacher / Student, President / Intern)
c. Coercion isn’t conviction
3. Because he already has been
a. We’re not attuned to it (TV signals)
b. Nature (without excuse) – Ps 19
c. The Bible – Luke 16
But because he loves you, he isn’t going to force himself upon you.
Did you hear what Jesus just said in our Scripture?
I daresay his speech writers and spin doctors wouldn’t have liked it very much. Here’s the guy who’s supposedly the greatest Teacher that ever lived, and he’s just told his disciples – We’d better not to be too plain. Otherwise, if they heard, they might turn and be forgiven. It’s almost sounds as Jesus hoped people were having a hard time hearing.
So much for the old advice, ‘Say it plain.’ You’d think that a bunch of people who need to hear Jesus would want it as easy to hear as possible.
The context of this is that Jesus had just finished giving a well-known parable – the one we call the Parable of the Sower, or the Parable of the Soils – and in it he basically said, look guys – the word is going out. It’s being broadcast all over the place. It’s just that a lot of you aren’t able to get it.
Even more interesting – God had already said as much. Jesus is actually quoting from Ezekiel – a book in which God talks as plainly as possible, and everybody comes away thinking God is either mean or weird. But the truth is, it wasn’t ever him, it was us. And he knows us, he loves us, and so he speaks as best as he can to us – assuming in his love he can afford for us to hear him.
Over the next few weeks, I want to introduce a book I’ve been reading by Dallas Willard called Hearing God. Bill is going to be leading a Sunday school series on it pretty soon, and this book does a really good job of tying together the threads about how God talks to us. But I have to say, even after reading the book, the sad truth is that hearing God’s voice isn’t nearly as easy as I originally thought I had hoped it would be.
I’m saying that exactly right there – hearing God is not as easy as I thought I hoped it would be. But one thing that I have already learned is that very ambiguity – the very hardness that I struggle with when it comes to knowing God’s voice – is actually a mercy of God.
This morning, I want to pose a simple question: Why isn’t God more obvious with us? I mean, let’s face it. This is the same God who parted the waters and appeared in the burning bush. I strongly suspect that if God were so inclined, he could take control of every TV set one evening and just, “Hello, everybody. Let me introduce myself – I’m God. Why are you all so screwed up right now?”
I daresay that such a prime time appearance would have a dramatic effect on behavior in this country. All God would need to do is say something like, ‘This Sunday, I want you all to go to church.’ I suspect attendance would be up. That wave right after 9/11 wouldn’t be a blip in comparison. Yes, it would change behavior, but I guarantee you it wouldn’t do a thing to increase the faith and the relationship that God earnestly desires.
Nope, this morning, I want to suggest to you that the very difficulties you and I have in hearing God’s voice directly relate to his purposes for speaking in the first place. I want to suggest three reasons why God’s voice is veiled – and my hope is that you’ll see that it has God’s love written all over it.
1. Because listening implies doing
I need to start by suggesting to you that hearing God implies you are going to do something with that which you just heard. I think we’ve known each other long to know that if you just wanted entertainment, you would have been a lot better off going to Book Club or watching a good movie on TV. My hope is that you are coming here because you want a word of Truth from God.
But, I have to warn to you that truth comes with a price. There’s old saying about sausage – sometimes you just don’t want to know how it’s made. Just ask anybody who sells pet food or children’s toys.
If I put Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson into your mind, I suspect you’re probably already know the movie and the scene I’m thinking about. The movie is A Few Good Men, and Jack Nicholson is Col. Nathan Jessep. The line is: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!” And the truth is, to a large degree, he’s right.
In our responsive reading, we touched on a few verses from Deuteronomy, in which the people responded to the Ten Commandments. Here everybody got exactly what they say want – a chance to see God in action. They were going to get the words of Truth straight from Truth himself.
And you know you what they did? They froze. They said – Moses – You seem to know this God guy. Would you please go talk to him?
There’s a story that one day Moses came back from talking to God, and his face was glowing so brightly that the people were afraid of that. God is scary. It’s not because he means to be scary, he’s just so holy, so perfect, that it’s impossible not to see it. God cannot stop being God.
You know that feeling that women get when they go to the beach and see all the other women in their bathing suits? At the risk of sounding sexist, I think most women especially can’t help comparing themselves to other women. And it doesn’t matter how beautiful they are, they don’t think they measure up. Well, when it comes to God’s holiness, we can’t ever measure up either. When we get the truth of how short of the glory of God we’ve fallen, well, let’s just say, we can’t handle the truth.
I have yet to meet a Christian who says they wouldn’t like have a better relationship with God – but I also know that as that relationship deepens we become more aware of our sin. I am amazed at the likes of a Mother Teresa or a Billy Graham. If I thought that I had to be one of those saints, I probably wouldn’t even try. But their walks are based on a life of constantly getting closer to God, and realizing in the end how much falls away naturally in his sight – over time.
I could probably list about 5 things that if God were to take them away, I’d probably crack. I can also list sins that I know still have hold on my life. That means those things are idols – things that I value more than God. But God knows that, and so he doesn’t demand those things of me yet. As 1 Corinthians 10:13 says he won’t test me beyond that which I can bear, and he provides a way for me to stand up under it. But God does know what I can bear, and he uses those things to strengthen me so that I can stand in his presence before his glory, blameless with great joy. [Jude 24]
He gives me as much truth as I can handle, and desires that I can handle more. But that’s what anybody in a loving relationship does.
2. Because He doesn’t want to overpower us
And that brings me to a second reason why God isn’t too obvious. Frankly, he doesn’t want to overpower us. It is the simple truth that coercion is never conviction. You can never force your way into love.
Any teenager who has ever tried to woo a girl knows that step 1 is never the corny card that expresses that undying love. You have to be subtle; you play it cool. You pray to God that she notices, but in the end, you entice her with a carrot – you don’t beat her over the head with a stick.
It makes it even worse when there is a big power difference in the mix. Every few months, you tend to hear some silly story on the news about a teacher and a student who fall in love, and then the teacher goes to jail, because we don’t like that. There’s a good reason we do that too – teachers inherently have a power over students that makes free love really out of the question. It’s the same reason psychologists don’t date their patients, and pastors don’t date their parishioners. Any relationship between people in an unequal power arrangement is bound to be unequal.
There’s a story about a King who really loved his men, and whose men really loved him. They fought for him, and they would die for him, but they loved him. Now, the story goes that he had been forced out of his city in a coup. As he was trying to get back into his own capital one day, he just let out a loose saying – one of those silly things you just you just say. It was hot, and he said, ‘Oh, I wish I could just have a drink from my own well.’ Well, his men heard this, and they said, ‘Let’s do it!’ They loved their king, after all.
So, three of them sneak out at night, do some daring fighting along the way, and they come back with their prize – a canteen full of the king’s own water. Great gift, right? He says, ‘Dudes! You could have been killed! What were you thinking?’ Their love for their King was mixed with their service to him, and the end result was something their King would have never asked them to do in real life. That’s why power and love are so scary.
That story, by the way – you can look it up in 2 Samuel 23 and it’s repeated in 1 Chronicles 11. The King is King David, and the story is true. He was a king that people loved, but the very fact that he was King made it difficult to be a loving king in return.
Imagine how much more so it would be with God. Earlier, in our responsive reading, we read about the people who were hearing the Ten Commandments. God desperately wanted to give them this gift, but they were too afraid. They couldn’t hear God directly, because God is, by his nature, terrifyingly in control. He is the ultimate in charge. That’s one of the reasons we are drawn to him. But in a relationship, there must be give and take. And tell me, what can you really give God that he couldn’t just take if he wanted? And yet again, if he did, would it really be love?
I said earlier that if God took out an ad in the New York Times, you’d be bound to see a spike in church attendance. But let me ask you, what do you next? God doesn’t want you to go to church so that he can get a power trip. He already directs your steps. He wants you to be built up by having a chance to worship him, to learn about him – to grow in your desire for him.
Telling you step by step each and every thing you were to do would hold all the romance of reading a sex manual to an android. The point isn’t the motions – it’s the emotion.
No, if you are after a relationship, you give letters about who you are, what makes you tick, why your loved one is so special. In short, you talk around the desire so as to see where that desire leads.
3. Because He Already Has
And that, my friends is something that God has already done. And that brings me to my last point. God already has spoken – as directly as he can – in this love letter we call the Bible.
In Luke, Jesus tells us the story of a rich man who died and experiences the lack of God first hand. His plea is simple - he asks Abraham to warn everybody about what’s coming if we’re consumed with ourselves. Abraham says, ‘Hey – they have Moses and the Prophets.’ That’s his way of saying, they have the Bible – they can read that. The Rich Man says, well, maybe if someone rises from the dead, they’ll listen to him. Again, been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. How much more obvious does God need to be?
Next week, we’re going to get more into the hows of hearing God, but for now I want to tell you that you already can [hear God.]
2 Peter 1:3 says that his divine power has already given us everything we need for life and godliness through the knowledge of him. That means we already have every Word of God that we will ever need in this life.
But in God’s love, he’s protected us from it too. When I used to read in 2 Corinthians that the Gospel is veiled to those who are perishing, I used to think that God was mean. And then I realized, he was just protecting people from too much truth. Too much light blinds us; too much holiness keeps us from recognizing that every good thing comes from him and to us.
You can handle the Truth, because he has given you all the truth you need. You are a sinner, but God loves you anyway. It doesn’t take a saint to know that Jesus is better, if only you’ll turn to him.
Whatever you already know of Jesus should be enough to draw you closer to him. Right now, I’m not calling you to go to the other side of the world or sell all you have and follow him. I’m just asking you to listen, softly and tenderly to that simple voice that is calling you to him. Come home, would you?
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Given a choice, I suspect most of us prefer things to be plain and simple as opposed to questionable. When I preach, I strive to make things as easy to understand as I can. That being the case, I have to say that this morning’s text is thus a bit confusing.
Jesus has just given us a parable that most of us probably remember from Sunday school. It’s called the Parable of the Sower or the Parable of the Soils, and it basically boils down the various means in which people are going to hear and accept the Kingdom of God. But in between the time it’s been told and explained, the disciples have a little question for Jesus. They ask Jesus, “Why do you always talk in parables?” – Why do you give them stories and riddles? Why not just lay it on the line and tell, ‘Yo, dudes – I’m God!”
Jesus was just quoting his dad here. He’s pulling back up Ezekiel – a very strange book in which God speaks very, very plainly, albeit it strangely – and he admits there’s a cost to being plain.
Now, pedagogically and academically, there are a host of valid responses to such a methodological query. But Jesus is a plain talker. His answer basically is: I’m purposely vague. I’m purposely hiding the truth. He even answers them with a prophecy of all things – and a harsh one at that.
He goes back to Ezekiel – the strangest book in the Bible to be sure – and he quotes them Ezekiel 12:2:
“Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see, but see not, who have ears to hear, but hear not, for they are a rebellious house.
And then, just in case they miss that point, he goes a step further. If they did hear, they might turn around. And if they do that, they might be forgiven! It almost sounds like Jesus is saying ‘Wouldn’t want that, now would we.’ It’s kind of odd that the greatest teacher ever is afraid of what will happen if his students actually listened.
But you know what? It’s totally consistent with how God speaks to us even today.
This morning, I want to begin to examine the topic of hearing God. I rarely hawk books from the pulpit, but I am going to suggest this one from Dallas Willard, called Hearing God. In a few weeks, Bill is going to start talking about this book in Sunday school. These last two weeks, I’ve read it, and it has a lot to say on the subject. Unlike Jesus, he’s purposely pretty direct. Next week, I’m going to focus more on the How of How we hear God, but before that, I need to address a more basic ‘Why?’
Why is it that God – who could speak to us in miracles, visions, bright flashing neon signs – chooses to be so subtle? We all know that God could be a lot more obvious. If God has done miracles to get people’s attention in the past, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be capable of it now. But, I think any reason
If you’ve ever seen the movie Bruce Almighty, you’ll probably remember the end when Bruce is wandering around asking God for a sign, and ….
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Long Branch Baptist Church
Halfway, Virginia; est. 1786
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Enter to Worship
Prelude David Witt
Meditation Joel 2:23 – 32
Invocation Michael Hollinger
*Opening Hymn #635
“In the Garden”
Welcome & Announcements
Morning Prayer [See Insert]
*Hymn #184
“Thy Word”
*Responsive Lesson [See Right]
*Hymn #564
“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”
Offertory Mr. Witt
*Doxology
Praise God from whom all blessings flow / Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise him above, ye heavenly host / Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
*Scripture Mark 4:10 – 12
Sermon
“Hearing God: Plainness Isn’t Painless”
Invitation Hymn #479
“Softly and Tenderly”
*Benediction
*Congregational Response
May the grace of Christ our Savior / And the Father’s boundless love
With the Holy Spirit’s favor / Rest upon us from above. Amen.
* Congregation, please stand.
Depart To Serve
RESPONSIVE LESSON
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—
And you said, ‘Behold, the LORD our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire. This day we have seen God speak with man and man still live.
For who is there of all flesh, that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of fire as we have, and has still lived?
Moses, you go near and hear all that the LORD our God will say and speak to us all that the LORD our God will speak to you. We will hear it and do it.
The LORD says, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I design, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Oh that they had such a mind as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever!
But to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.
‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’ ”
I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God; incline your ear to me; hear my words.
O LORD God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob!
I will look to the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.
Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly.
Acts 2:22; Dt 5:24-27;Is 55:10-12; Dt 5:29; 29:4;Lk 16:31;Ps 17:6; 84:8; Mc 7:7; Ps 85:8
MARK 4:10 – 13
10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that
“they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.”
13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?
ANNOUNCEMENTS
10/27 – Discussion re: Larry Morrison / Church
11/4 – Hearing God: Sundry & Sunday Things
11/11 – Linda Garrett
Crop Walk is November 17th
11/18 – Hearing God: A Whole(y) New World
11/25 – Frederick Fishback
Tentative Advent Series: The Mothers of God
MORNING PRAYER
Mike McCauslin, Martha Puryear, Susan Schulz, Warren Lee,
Brandi, Irene Griffith, Cory Keely, David Witt, Larry Morrison, Jeff Coleman, Zane, Bruce, Steve, Long Branch Church
