Series: “Bringing Back the Bands”
“Holy Discontent”
2 Corinthians 3:17-18
A sermon for 1/31/21
Pastor John Bright
2 Corinthians 3 “17 Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
Last week I introduced a way of thinking about the Christian Journey from Seedbed Ministries. JD Walt, a former Dean of the Chapel at Asbury Seminary, works for and writes for Seedbed. He describes our lives within the two halves of the gospel. Last week I shared this quote: “The first half of the gospel is about believing in the love of God for the world. The second half of the gospel is about becoming the love of God in and for the world. We stand on this conviction: the world will awaken to the first half of the gospel as the people of God awaken to the second half of the gospel.” (Discipleship Bands: A Practical Field Guide)
I wanted to go into a little more detail. JD Walt often talks about finding the two halves of the Gospel in two Bible verses. The first half of the Gospel is found in John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s a verse we ALL know! That’s the BELIEVING verse of the first half – “believing in the love of God for the world.” To find the second half of the Gospel we look to 1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” This verse describes the transformation of BECOMING like Jesus that is the second half – “becoming the love of God in and for the world.”
Sooner or later, to get on with our Christian Journey, we need to pass from the BELEIVING that we did all on our own and get to the BECOMING that we have to do together. That part of the journey – in between the two – is what JD Walt describes as the BELONGING TO JESUS. It is a seismic shift in the life of a Believer to move a way from belonging to the world and move toward fully and completely belonging to Jesus. It sounds like it should be so much hard work… but instead it takes the hard decision to surrender. We can say over and over – “Jesus, I belong to you.” We can band together so we have allies in the effort to surrender that does not come easy to most of us.
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Anybody remember the days before you had Google Maps on your smarty-pants phone? Do you remember the days before we got on the computer and printed out a hard copy of the directions for a long trip? We had map books and maps on paper that were a mighty challenge to fold back the the original shape. We sat and planned. We wrote out directions on a note pad. It was an adventure that folks today who only have a pleasant voice saying “Rerouting” over and over will never know.
You get the directions (one way or another) – then you take a water bottle or two, maybe a snack – then you go to the car, maybe check your tire pressures – and finally you are sitting in the car. You just sit there. Maybe you even start the car and make sure none of the warning lights stay on and then you sit. You know where you want to go and you even made plans. Then you just sit in the car staring out the windshield… going nowhere. That’s a picture of a Believer that is stuck between the two halves of the Gospel – they are on the journey between BELIEVING and BECOMING.
This is “The Gap” between where we are and where we need or want to be. Getting to the other side of “The Gap” is part of our Christian Journey. That’s where we encounter Holy Discontent.
We all want to be free – v. 17
“17 Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
We live in country that values liberty, or we may call it freedom. We think of ourselves as free but when you are stuck – you may not even realize it. That’s what Jesus told the folks in Israel:
John 8 “31 Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. 32 And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. 35 And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. 36 Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”
You were set free when you became a Believer. You felt the calling of God and responded with a “YES!” In that moment, you were set free from the penalty of sin in your past and the stain of sin passed down from Adam and Eve. When that happens, many feel like a weight has been lifted off them. It is a feeling of relief. Then we keep living our lives and stuff happens. I have talked to you about that “junk in the trunk” and how it may not be what we did but what was done to us that keeps weighing us down.
If this is as far as you have come in your Christian Journey, you may have only been sold some “Eternal Fire Insurance.” You got your “Get Out of Hell Card”, but now you keep a stiff upper lip and wonder, “Is this all there is?” Then you read God’s Word and see that there seems to be so much more to the Believer’s Journey – like freedom. It’s in the gap between where we are and where we want to be that we begin to feel what JD Walt calls “Holy Discontent.”
We can open our Bibles and see the Red Sea parting. We can read about a long night that Daniel spent in the lion’s den. We can wonder what it would have been like to be right there with Jesus when He fed thousands with five loaves and two fish or when the boat was in the middle of a storm and Jesus calmed the waves and wind with only a word. We can be left dumbfounded and amazed reading about the disciples healing the sick and being released from prison by angels in the night. WOW!
JD Walt wrote about this happening in his life:
“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
(John 14:12-14)
“I don’t know about you, but years ago, when I started really reading those words, I began asking hard questions of God and of myself. Questions like, “This is either not true or I am just not getting it.” And because I believed it was true, I came to accept the reality that I was not getting it. Something was missing. Through this process, the Holy Spirit sowed the seeds of a holy discontent deep in the pit of my soul. As those seeds grew, I came to the painful and yet beautiful conviction that I didn’t lack faith. I lacked love.” (The Power of Holy Discontent, Lesson 6)
We all know the change that is needed v. 18
“18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
When I think about needing a veil to be lifted so we can see what is possible, I can’t help but think about addiction and recovery. Praise God I have been clean and sober since 1985! The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem because denial is like a veil that keeps you from seeing the truth. I found it described this way on a recovery website – “Denial is the willful refusal to accept the truth. The reason this empowers addiction is because the only way to take strides towards sobriety is to accept that you need to be sober in the first place. There is no shame in being addicted, and there is no shame in struggling to overcome that addiction. There is no other way to put it – being in denial is tantamount to letting addiction win. But if you end up admitting addiction, you’re already one massive step ahead of the disease.”
https://transcendrecoverycommunity.com/admitting-addiction-recovery/
Holy Discontent is the working of the Holy Spirit within the life of a believer that moves you to admit are a Believer who is stuck – stopped short of Becoming the love of God in and for the world – when you realize the car is still in the driveway. Your level of Holy Discontent may be low or off the charts. You may have learned to live with it… believing that is just the way it is in the Christian Journey.
I think Discipleship Bands offer us a new way to travel together. The work of transformation, also known as Sanctification, will not happen to you as a Lone Ranger Christian! In the last few decades, the Church has offered small groups and accountability groups and study after study after study. We have gathered in stadiums and huge auditoriums as thousands of men or women for retreats and conferences. There are more books on Discipleship today than ever before. None of these are meeting the need that can be addressed in a small group of 3-5 men or 3-5 women.
Let me be clear – we don’t need better books or Sunday School studies. We don’t’ need bigger movements of Men’s or Women’s ministries. We don’t need someone to discover “The Way” for the individual Christian to sit at home and become all that God wants you and me to be. As I said last week, we are Wesleyans and there was a way that worked 200 years ago and kept on working that we, as a denomination, abandoned at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the band meeting.
I don’t want to sound all negative and blame the system – to be an Unoly Malcontent, as JD Walt wrote:
“It is quite easy to be an unholy malcontent, to endlessly diagnose the problem as “out there.” It’s another thing entirely to get in touch with the matter of one’s holy discontent with themselves. Holy discontent is that sense of soul that says, “There must be more of God than what I presently know.” It is the size of the gap between the story the Bible tells and the story your life is telling. Holy discontent is the distance between the truth one knows and the reality one experiences. Holy discontent is the beginning of the movement from spiritual milk to spiritual meat; from infancy in Christ to mature faith.
If the first half of the gospel is, “Lord you took me out of Egypt,” the second half is, “Now take Egypt out of me.”
If the first half of the gospel is believing in Jesus, the second half is becoming like Jesus.
If the first half of the gospel is forgiveness of sin, the second half is freedom from sin.
If the first half of the gospel is coming to faith in Jesus Christ, the second half is growing in the fullness of the Holy Spirit.”
https://www.seedbed.com/the-second-half-of-the-gospel-it-begins-with-holy-discontent/
Start to think back to scriptures you have read and thought – “If only this were true in my life.” Remember all those times you followed up a promise of God with a “yeah-but” (those two little words we make one word and tell ourselves that promise can’t be true for somebody like me). Most of you have heard me talk about meeting the men in prison through the Kairos Ministry. Behind the concrete walls, steel bars and miles of razor wire, I have met the freest Believers of all. Some of them are lifers with no hope of release and yet they walk everyday in freedom. You might wonder – “Pastor John, how can that be?” Let me tell you – they stopped with the “yeah-but” after a promise – they read the scriptures and realized there is just as much of the Holy Spirit in there as anywhere. They moved from the Unholy Discontent that would blame their location and circumstances - with no car they got moving on the journey to BECOMING - like Jesus – the love of God in and for the world – their world – a place of darkness that needs more and more bright, shining lights! In Kairos, they meet in Prayer and Share groups
What would it take for us – free on the outside, but maybe with holy discontent on the inside to move from here to there? Let’s begin moving together in these small Discipleship Bands that read together, meet together and pray together. Next week I will look at those parts and how they work together as we work together.
One final question – are you still breathing? Yes? Are you sure? If the answer is still Yes – then God ain’t done with you yet! Can I get an AMEN? Amen
