September 27, 2009 Sermon

IS QUALITY JOB 1?

I was watching a snippet of a television show where a nurse was talking to a patient that was terminally ill, struggling with the idea of having surgery to prolong her life… but the surgery was not without significant risks… she could die on the operating table… suffer and die in recovery… very risky surgery… the nurse questioned what she wanted the patients quality of life to be like… the question really became not about the amount of time she might live; but about how she would live with the amount of time she had remaining… in other words loving and nurturing and being nurtured and loved by the people in her life… what was that worth?

“Isn’t it better to enter life maimed than to have two feet and thrown into hell?”

I want us to consider that Jesus is asking us to consider the quality of our life

And here’s how he’s doing it:

9:42 Jesus sets up the argument by saying (in essence) that anyone (not a believer) who willfully causes a Christian (little ones who believe in Jesus) to sin (to turn away from their faith, to act in opposition to God’s will) will suffer a fate worse than painful death. The question is, “what is a fate worse than death?” For many the idea of any physical torture or agony comes to mind. But the idea of hell where one is eternally separated from God’s presence is more accurate. Jesus often talks about a person being thrown out into the outer darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Many interpret that as the agony of being eternally separated from God—a fate worse than a painful death because the painful death (read millstone around neck thrown into sea) has a beginning and an end. Eternal separation from God does not.

So now a starting point for comparison is established (which is emphasized in v.48) for the believer who is subject to this temptation to turn from God either through threat and coercion or by appealing to our human weaknesses (food, sex, etc.) that play upon real or perceived hurts or wants. To do this Jesus uses what appears to us to be an extreme and painful (and negative) example:

⁴³If your hand (foot, eye) causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed (lame, one eye) than to have two hands (feet, eyes) and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

Jesus does not literally mean that if we engage in a sinful activity that involves our hands, feet or eyes that we should lop them off our bodies. He himself says that it is what comes out of the heart that defiles or causes to sin. In other words it is our attitudes toward ourselves, others and especially God that lead us to sin, OR not to sin.

What he is doing though, is exemplifying the seriousness of our faith and the consequences of our choices regarding our faith. What we are shown are the negative consequences so we have a tendency to focus on the negative. There is however another perspective to this that focuses on the positive consequences of the abiding presence of God even if it doesn’t sound like it:

it is better for you to enter life maimed

The key words here for me are… “better for you to enter life.” What does it mean to enter life? For me as a disciple of Jesus; Jesus is life. He is who defines who I am (or who I try to be), what I do (and what I try to do), and how I relate to my family, friends and the world around me (again how I try to do that). So life (or the quality of life) is determined and measured not by what I have or don’t have, how I feel at any one particular moment, what my circumstances are (financially, relationally, etc.) but how closely I maintain my relationship with Jesus.

Quality of life defined by our relationship with Jesus… the quality of our discipleship. It should not be based upon our idea of quality… the question here isn’t if we are happy. The question should be… is God happy… are we pleasing God… are we making Him smile?

Life lived in a relationship with God through faith in Jesus is what is able to sustain us, give us purpose and worth regardless what it is we may lose… (Jesus’ example of hand, foot, eye). It is a parallel verse to, “what does it profit a person to gain the whole world but to lose their soul. Those who would hold unto their life will lose it and those who give up their life for me and for the gospel will keep it.”

That is what I strive to be the pivot point of every decision I make. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I fail miserably. But even when I fail I pray that I realize why I failed and resolve to do better the next time I face the same or similar situation.

John Wesley had belief that we as Christians could achieve what he called Christian perfection… and at the heart of it, it didn’t mean that we wouldn’t sin but that as we sinned, we became more and more aware of our sin, felt grief over it (convicted of it), and then more and more turned away from it and toward God. In other words we grow more and more into the character and nature of Jesus… our relationship with him grows closer… the quality of our life grows better from God’s point of view. We also call this the process of sanctification.

The key to this is how we maintain or nurture this relationship with Jesus so that we can continue to grow in our discipleship (having the character and nature of Jesus formed in us) to maintain or increase the quality of it.

I’m not aware of any one who was a person of faith that woke up one day and out of the blue said, “you know what, enough of being a Christian, I don’t believe this anymore. I don’t want this relationship with Jesus or my so called Christian friends… or it’s that we say we’re going to go drinking, lying, cheating, sleeping around, etc.” But it just doesn’t happen that way. What happens is that we find ourselves or put ourselves into situations that begin to lead us away from Jesus and from his body, the church. What they call in politics “incrementalism.” Slow changes in the way something is done; choice by choice by choice. The same way we nurture our life of faith… choice by choice by choice.

One way we can understand these experiences or situations that we find ourselves in is as tests to either strengthen or weaken our faith—what Jesus called being salted by fire. If we have established healthy spiritual disciplines then not only will we survive the situation but we will come out with a stronger faith and witness to God’s faithfulness. The allusion here is that of forging metal. The forging process eliminates impurities that weaken the metal and also allows the metal to be shaped into a form that is useful. If we don’t have the spiritual disciplines to either endure the situation or to hear God speaking to us in it and/or refuse to respond to God’s leading, then our faith and witness will be weakened or possibly lost.

And it is not possible for us to restore our own faith, our own witness (how can saltiness be restored) for with man it is impossible. However it can be through the difficult times in our lives that God is able to speak to us and perhaps we can begin to listen and turn back to God when before we were either unable or unwilling (but with God all things are possible). The choice then is ours in how we respond.

The reality is that none of us really knows how we are going to respond in a circumstance before it happens. However that does not mean that we should not prepare ourselves spiritually in a regular or disciplined way in anticipation of the situations that we know will come.

So the question before us is how do we do that? Well in response to the warning not to lose our saltiness… our witness to our faith or relationship with Jesus… our life of discipleship… Jesus says (in essence)… “have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.” Here’s one way of understanding this:

Each of us has our own gifts, strengths or ways we can express or live out our faith… we have salt in ourselves. Peace can mean a lack of hostility and wholeness or completeness; which go hand in hand… so in light of what’s come before I’m understanding this to say that each of us, using the gifts of faith we’ve received, are to help each other live out our lives of faith… to nurture our faith… our relationship with Jesus… so that the quality of our lives as individual people of faith and as the church is nurtured and strengthened.

James gives us some insight into how we can work toward that:

¹³Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁹My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

Pray for each other with the laying on of hands and the anointing of oil; confessing our sins to one another and praying for one another so that our sins will be forgiven but also so that we know we have someone to help us keep from sinning again… accountability… because the prayer of the righteous is powerful. (Life Transformation Groups)

And what’s the result of this? What’s the payoff? , if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death

We will have helped a brother or sister improve the quality of their life… we will have helped them grow closer to Jesus… to know Jesus like we know Jesus.

That is quality of life.

And quality is Job 1.