With a New Year, you may have been one of many to have made a resolution. You know the sort of thing; I’m going to loose six kilograms, that’s one I probably should have made!
I’m going to work harder at my job, at school, at keeping the garage tidy. I’m going to give up this, that or some other thing. I think that I will improve my relationship with so and so; well I’ll do my bit anyway, you know the sort of thing!
I see that our Mayor Bob Parker said at his age “making a New Years resolution is like testing a bear trap with your own foot.”
Gary McCormick though took the approach that he intended to bring about world peace and stop global warming, as well as let himself go to the pack.
The interesting thing about starting a new year, resolutions or not is that we want it to be a good one. In fact with anything we do, it is our hope that it is successful.
Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount addressed ways in which we could live for the Kingdom of heaven here on earth and that we could do this successfully, being merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers and the like.
Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount seems at times to be a bit disjointed in the way he approaches his preaching, bouncing from topic to topic.
Up until this point, and I’m looking at chapter seven verses seven and eight; he’s given a picture of what it would be like in the Kingdom of God, what is required for kingdom living, he’s addressed the law and how it should be carried out, he’s given the Lords prayer as an example of how to pray. He goes onto address how we should live in relation to fasting, money, anxiety, judging and prudence and other things.
Jesus then re-addresses prayer again. It is as if he needs to expand on his earlier teaching on the same subject.
Many in the Christian faith see the verses that he addresses the people with, as an excuse to ask for anything and everything and then either accept the blessing if those things arrive or to grizzle if they don’t, complaining that God is not faithful to his word.
We need to look at the context that Jesus was preaching in. He had just taught some very radical teachings, many of the concepts that he was putting forward, while not completely changing the law that the people he was addressing lived under, they did in some respects clash with the way the people were interpreting the law.
I would pick that a good deal of the people who were listening were sitting there with their mouths wide open at this teaching, a little shocked or even stunned.
All of a sudden they had gone from a teaching of gouging out peoples eyes in return for having ours gouged out to giving them our cloak when they ask for your shirt, what’s that about? From building up earthly treasure, to building heavenly treasures, remember there may have been some of those listening, to whom heaven was a very vague concept. For some life after death was something another Jewish sect believed in.
Jesus teaching then was completely radical, and countercultural, it still is.
So what Jesus is saying here is not along the lines of if you want this or that; the sports car or the block of ground that you can plant nut trees on, or top marks in your exam without the study, or all the money you can eat, just ask and God will give it to you.
What he is saying is I know this is hard to understand, let alone live up to. Along the lines of this whole Kingdom of God living is so radical that I know you are going to struggle with it, God knows his hearers are going to struggle with it.
So what he says is along the lines of, ‘You want understanding of this stuff; you want an understanding of how to live by Kingdom values, then ask!’ If we want to live in God’s kingdom we need to know who he is.
Let’s look at it again.
“Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
For us to truly experience the reality of his values, his Kingdom we need to be actively seeking after them. It’s not enough to just rock up to church on Sunday and get a weekly top up. It’s not enough to pray to God to release you from that sin that keeps tripping you up; it’s not enough to rely on the prayers of your friends to save you from yourself.
What is needed is to break through reliance on others, chance, speculation and yes even superstition and really seek after an understanding of Kingdom values and God’s will for your lives.
So what does this look like?
1) Ask…, well the people at this sermon had Jesus with them. They would have asked him for the answers, we have his book; we are able to pray, we have the learning of those who have studied the word of God. I know myself I have had a few people approach me in the past year for prayer, with battles they are facing, but I ask myself and I do it too.
Why do we take the approach of reacting to an issue when we could be acting much earlier to stop the issue developing in the first place?
Often in life we see what is a small weed growing in our lives and before we know it we have a metre high Dock plant with a tap root that has imbedded itself deep into our psyche.
Well the answers to that question are within this book – shall we study it cover to cover to seek after the wisdom of God. The creator of everything did not give us the Bible to gather dust or hide under the bed. We can pray constantly, God answers prayers prior to the need for emergency calling. Let’s not be like Gary McCormick’s resolution, allowing behaviours that allow us to go to the pack. Instead let’s devour the words of this book and live by what it teaches us.
2) For Kingdom living we need to ask for and seek after Kingdom principles and live them. Putting aside our own desires and following what God desires for us, to live by his values. Then and only then is a right relationship with him possible, and with that relationship comes life in abundance.
So where to from here; what of 2010, three days into it already, do we make it another year of stumbling going it our own way?
Our do we say, “Lord I will ask after your counsel, in fact I will seek it in the Bible daily, I will ask the questions that will give me the answers I need to be in a right relationship with you, I will meet with others who are doing the same and put living for your Kingdom first in my life, I will pray for your leading. Because then I know life change will occur.”
The Holy Spirit is our Helper, comforter, counsellor and friend, are we seeking his leading. If I want to live in relationship with God and by his leading I need to know who he is.
One thing about God is he leaves these choices to us, God does not force us to do anything, It’s not like he holds us down and force feeds us his teaching, what kind of relationship would it be if he forced it apoun us, what he does is offer us abundant life (we can break free from the things that bind us). Our choice is do we accept it?
3)Do we knock upoun that door, no longer just giving our futures over to chance, to our own desires, but seeking after an understanding of his plan for our life, seeking after Kingdom living, seeking after a right relationship with the Most High God.
What does Jesus say will occur if we do this? “For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Knowledge of God is vitally important if we are to grow in him.
There’s a man called Ben Carson raised in the ghetto of Detroit and one of my personal heroes, he grew from class dummy to one of the worlds most celebrated neurosurgeons, he says this about how it occurred.
"Even though we had no money — no money for anything, between the covers of those books, I could go anywhere in the world; I could be anybody; I could do anything. My horizons began to open up. Instead of wanting what everybody else in my class wanted — which was to get out of school, get a job in one of the Detroit factories and buy some cool clothes and a cool car — I began to imagine myself in a laboratory pouring chemicals from a beaker into a flask, watching the steam rise; connecting electrical circuits; looking through a telescope, a microscope. I could never walk past a standing puddle of water. I had to get a specimen and look at it under the microscope. And, I began to know things that other people didn’t know, and by the time I was in the seventh grade, I was at the top of the class."
Think about it; if a man can undergo such change reading books written by men, what can be gained praying and in the reading of "The Book" given by the inspiration of God?
if you have read this sermon please rate it, Ta, Andrew
