Road Work
Mark 8:34-38
My wife and I used to live Uptown on Octavia Street between Constance and Laurel just two blocks from Tchoupitoulas. At that time, the Port of Orleans was redoing Tchoupitoulas. When the street was dug up, they found that many of the feeder drainage pipes from the neighborhoods were busted and leaking and needed to be replaced as well. Our street was one of those. They dug up our street, replaced the pipes and then refilled with dirt and sand. And it stayed that way for 6 months. I felt like we were living in a third world country. Every time it rained, it was a mess. Finally, I got so fed up, I pass out flyers on our street encouraging every resident to call our Councilwoman to complain all on the same day, April 1st. She finally tracked me down as the source and asked if this was a joke and I told her no and invited to come see for herself because we were miserable. She came and couldn’t believe what she saw or how long our street had been like that. They started work on the street the next week.
Anybody been Uptown lately? There’s roadwork everywhere! What was a 10 minute drive can be 30-40 minutes. Even right outside the side doors of our sanctuary, Jefferson Parish mysteriously dug up Elmeer even though the concrete slabs looked just fine. We lost parking for weeks and the road noise interrupted our Healing Service. What a headache? And let’s not forget the 10 years of construction on I-10 through Metairie. Roadwork! It’s everywhere! Nobody likes it. Since Katrina, it seems we have had one consistent fact of life and that’s roadwork. The Times Picayune writes, “Dodging road construction zones will be a way of life.” They’re right, As a result, we try to avoid roadwork any way possible.
When you think of it, roadwork is a pretty good analogy of the journey of faith. God accepts us where we are but wants us to become like his Son. For most of us, that means there’s serious roadwork to do. Roadwork is usually a three step process: tearing up the old, redoing the subsurface and then constructing the new. (put all on one slide) And in many respects that’s exactly what God wants to do in us. He wants to remove all of the old which reflects more of the world than it does His will and ways. This can be a painful process because many of us have become entrenched in our ways and have grown comfortable with the way things are, even if they don’t necessarily line up with God’s will for our lives. Second is the subsurface work. This is where God moves beyond the outward actions and appearances we project and begins to do interior work, realigning our heart and mind with God’s. This too can be difficult work because it can involve many things we have buried long ago but never really dealt with. It can also reveal many non-Biblical assumptions and attitudes we hold dear and near to our hearts. The third thing that God wants to do is to instill new practices, attitudes and behaviors in us which reflect those of Jesus. This often involves building a new road for you to journey filled with new attitudes, new eyes through which to see the world, new habits and new actions.
Roadwork can be difficult and painful. It’s why we do just about everything to avoid such experiences and why many don’t choose the road less traveled. This is why Jesus tells us to calculate the cost before we ever start this journey, because it’s not a matter of if there is roadwork that needs to be done in you and me but how much. Now listen to me very carefully, Jesus accepts you as you are but he’s out to transform you into the person you were created to be.
So again and again, we see Jesus warn us that following him is difficult, exhausting, time-consuming, strenuous and costly. There’s a cost to following Jesus. It could cost you your family, your job, your friends, your hobbies, your lifestyle and quite possibly even your life itself. So how do we embrace the work that God wants to do in us?
First, verbally declaring your commitment. Most people think their faith is personal and private.” It’s not! You’ve got to speak it out loud. The problem is that when you declare a commitment out loud, everything changes! When I was in college, we had a discussion with some of my fraternity brothers of what we were going to give up for Lent. One person said they were going to give up chocolate. Another said they were going to give up fried foods. I said I was going to give up Galaga, the video game sitting in the front entrance of the fraternity which I was addicted to and the reigning champion of the house with the highest score. After three weeks, I was dying watching all of my fraternity brothers playing the game I couldn’t and I was itching to play. One Friday afternoon, I was ready to break down and put my quarters in when someone said, “Hey, what about your commitment for Lent?’ That’s the power with public commitments. Others are going to hold you accountable.
What you speak from your mouth reveals the commitments of your heart. Romans 10:9 says: “If you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Now, that Greek word “saved” means complete wellness in every dimension of your life. It’s not just eternity for heaven. It means wellness in your health, your finances, your relationships. If you name and declare your commitments, you’re expressing the core values of your heart. This is literally what Jesus means when he says, “If any of you are ashamed of me….” One of the ways we do this is by keeping silent. But when you speak it out loud, you’re not only making the commitment and bringing accountability in your life, you are making it a reality. The words you speak will become the physical reality that you live. Faith is not personal or private! It’s public and that helps us be held accountable to the faith we profess.
Second, roadwork means practicing self-denial. Jesus said, “If anyone wants to come after me, first they have to deny themselves.” The Greek word for “deny” literally means “just say no.” And you thought that started with Nancy Reagan! Jesus calls us to just say no to self. This is so difficult because you and I have been entrenched in this culture of consumerism, and brainwashed to think the road to happiness is found in getting our needs met. All you have to do is look at advertisements, magazine covers or go into any bookstore to see that everything is about focusing on the self. Here are a few: self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-empowerment, and self-enlightenment; do I need to go on? That’s what Jesus means when he says “when you love your life, you will lose your soul.” And that is why we have to learn to keep saying no to self to find true life. It is only through self-denial that you will find true life.
M. Scott Peck tells of spending much of his 9th summer on a bicycle. About a mile from our house the road went down a steep hill and turned sharply at the bottom. Coasting down the hill one morning, I felt my gathering speed to be ecstatic. To give up this ecstasy by applying brakes seemed an absurd self-punishment. So I resolved to simultaneously retain my speed and negotiate the corner. My ecstasy ended seconds later when I was propelled a dozen feet off the road into the woods and into a tree. I was badly scratched and bleeding, and the front wheel of my new bike was twisted beyond use from its impact against a tree. And then he writes, “I had been unwilling to suffer the pain of giving up my ecstatic speed in the interest of maintaining my balance around the corner. I learned, however, that the loss of balance is ultimately more painful than the (act of giving) giving up required to maintain balance. It is a lesson I have continually had to relearn. As must everyone, for as we negotiate the curves and corners of our lives, we must continually give up parts of ourselves.”
Third, roadwork means daily discipline.1 Timothy 4:7 says “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.” There are three things we learn from this. First, it’s a command. God doesn’t give us a choice. He tells us to discipline ourselves. Second, it’s for the purpose of godliness which is another word for “holiness” or “Christlikeness.” Third, discipline is not a one time thing, it’s a daily program that you put in place to achieve your objective.
George Foreman was a two-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world. At age 45, he became the oldest man in the world to win the title. In his book, God in My Corner, he writes, “When I started my comeback, I had to get rid of some excess George. I was extremely overweight. In the nearly ten years I had been out of boxing, I had ballooned from 220 to 315 pounds. And it wasn’t muscle that I gained! To get back into an exercise regimen, I started with the basics—running every day. I was so out of shape that I couldn’t go far. At first, I couldn’t even make it around my block, which was about a mile. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, huffing and puffing. Just imagine a big, fat guy, gasping for air, barely able to jog around the block, who claims that he will be the heavyweight champion of the world again! I looked ridiculous to everyone who saw me. I’m sure they laughed as they peeked through their curtains early in the morning while I slowly shuffled past their houses. Only two people on this entire planet believed I could recapture the title—my wife and me. But I had to get my weight down. I would walk and run, walk and run. Finally, I was able to run the whole time without walking. Then I began running longer distances, and with the combination of a proper diet and regular exercise, the fat continued to melt away. I kept running (every day) for the next eight months, until I finally got down to my fighting weight—229 pounds. The flab was fun to put on, but hard to take off.” It took daily discipline.
There are four critical elements to discipline: 1) Picture: You have to have a clear picture of what it is that you want to achieve in your life, whether it’s financial, relational, or spiritual. 2) Plan: You have to have a plan to accomplish that picture. 3) Practice: You have to have a persistent daily practice to accomplish your plan. 4) Get a training partner. It is easier to train with somebody than by yourself. There is pain in the journey, but there is joy in the journey with others. Picture, Plan, Practice and Partner. This is what discipline is all about.
You can’t separate faith and discipline. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” So I work out, and God works in me. You cannot separate faith and discipline. Look at all of the illustrations of athletic events in the New Testament to support the daily roadwork of discipleship. Paul said, “I beat my body and make it my slave.” When was the last time you put that type of effort in your spiritual growth and transformation? What Paul is talking about is the necessary pain that comes with the achievement of serious gain. You cannot separate faith from discipline. He uses the example of a boxer, and says, “I don’t box aimlessly as one beating the air.” For a boxer, the victory is not the win; that’s the outcome. The victory is in the training. And there is a lot of pain in training, but there is also great joy. This is why Jesus tells us, “Calculate the cost.” Don’t start this journey if you can’t do what it takes to finish this journey, because you will bring great embarrassment to the Father’s name. Your life will either be a witness for Him or it will be a detriment to Him. The choice is yours.
In his book “Courageous Leadership,” Bill Hybel speaks to leaders and I think to all of us when he writes, “I know the only way to keep myself from sliding into depravity is to lay myself before God each and very day…I hate that wandering and rebellious spirit that surfaces in me from time to time. But I can’t ignore it or just refuse to address it. It’s there and it’s real and I have to acknowledge it. I have to fight it with a whole array of practices. These practices, I confess, can become burdensome. But I know their value, so I hang onto them like a drowning man hangs onto a life preserver. I need the daily discipline of writing out my prayers in long hand to stay focused….I need the daily discipline of solitude so I can listen to God even though the demands of my day scream out to me like wounded animals. I need the disciple of being accountable to people in my life who have the courage to tell me the hard words I need to hear….Every leader (Christian) must figure out what rigors, practices and spiritual disciplines are necessary for overcoming his or her proneness to wandering…Every leader’s routine needs to be customed design. That day I prayed, “Oh God, I want to finish my assignment without reproach on you.” Amen.
