Sunday Night: It Must Be

Sunday Night: It Must Be

Place: BLCC

Date: 4/2/17

Text: Matthew 26.36-46

CT: As followers of Jesus we must accept God’s will for our life.

FAS: In his book Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton wrote fifteen lines that have become known as "the Merton Prayer": Merton was a priest who devoted his life to the Lord.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 79; submitted by Haddon Robinson

LS: Do we seek God’s will for our life or do we seek what we deem is what is right for our life.

Anyone recognize who spoke these words.

Mary, I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. I'm going to leave this little town far behind, and I'm going to see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. Then I'm coming back here, and I'll go to college and see what they know, and then I'm going to build things. I'm going to build air fields. I'm going to build skyscrapers a hundred stories high. I'm going to build bridges a mile long."

So says George Bailey in the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life. As it turns out, George is wrong. He doesn't know what he's going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. As it turns out, what he is supposed to do tomorrow is pretty much what he did today. God's plan for him is to do the ordinary thing—which, of course, is the last thing that George wants to do.

Ever had those kind of dreams. All the things you are going to get and acquire. The stuff I will have. The things I will do. The things we say when we are 17.

But than life catches up and we realize that the dreams we may have are not in line with what God would want for us. God actually says we must lose what we have to reach Him and His ideal. Lot of truth to that.

Mark 8. 34-38, 34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

What does God have planned for you? Do you seek to know or do you just ride the flow? As humans we have dreams of what we would like to become or achieve. As followers of Jesus, what should drive our actions? Jesus shows us in his final days what it really means to follow God’s will.

Jesus was a man. That is hard for us to comprehend sometimes. He had wants and desires. He felt pain and sadness. He cherished those around him. He even depended on them at times for encouragement and help.

Yet Jesus was One with God and had to deal with what God’s desire for him as the Son of God was. He had to lay aside any earthly desire he had.

In the time leading up to the Passion, Jesus’ death, many things had to be weighing on Jesus. The “man” had to be tempted to try and avoid what must come. Wouldn’t you?

Jesus had a destiny. Jesus actually had a secret ambition he had to fulfill. The profound enormity of the situation came to a head at Gethsemane.