Wednesday - Change It - The Night That Changed The Religious
We saw yesterday how the religious experts who read prophecy day in day out, still got it wrong when it came to Jesus. They missed that one of the ancient prophecies about the Messiah was happening before their eyes.
So what did they miss? They missed grace and hope.
Religion at its worst can be about building a ladder to heaven, trying to make ourselves acceptable to God under our own power.
But what Christmas means is that God has come to us. No ladder required.
Two weeks ago, we contrasted grace and law as part of our Becoming Like Family series.
Grace means we have hope. It’s not primarily about what we do for God, it’s about what God has done for us, and everything we do is a way to say thanks.
The problem is if you’ve invested a great deal in self-help, you may not recognize or accept true help when it comes. You can be so sure of your hard work that you brush off help saying “I’ve got this!” when you really don’t.
Who would have expected God to come as a baby, much less a homeless baby born in questionable circumstances, with the most common name at that time, Jesus?
But people didn’t just call him Jesus, he called himself God, and others came to do this as well.
Yes, Jesus claimed to be god. That is a claim that no other leader of a major world religion has made.
Jesus didn’t go around standing on street corners shouting “I am God” in language that plain and simple, but when you look at what he taught and claimed, he was conscious of, and claiming to be God in some more subtle ways.
And he was subtle for good reasons. In the culture of his day, saying he was God would have been considered blasphemy – a crime punishable by death.
So he showed it in all sorts of interesting ways:
He spoke of himself using “I AM” sayings – a deliberate hint to the Jewish name of God – Yahweh, which means “I am”. He also said,
he was one with the Father
he was the Son of God.
he had the power to forgive sins
he was greater than the temple – the most important place of worship for the Jews and God’s presence on earth
In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is asked directly by some religious leaders “Are you the Christ (anointed one), the Son of the Blessed One ?” Jesus said “I am …”
Jesus was making an incredible and dangerous claim to be God incarnate—which means God in the flesh
One of the central truths of Jesus’ religious context was that there is only one God. When Jesus started to talk in this way, it was dangerous, but it was also life changing. He wasn’t claiming to be a new God, a second God, even a demigod. He was claiming to be the God, their God – the God who created, and then stayed with the Israelites through their history, there with them in an entirely new way.
Question: Do you know people who change when their boss, or parents, or another authority figure enters the room? How would the world change when God entered the room?
Reminder: We have a great Christmas event coming December 14th, 2013: The Original Christmas Party. Hope you’re coming!
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Jesus is challenging those who pray in public in order to get ahead, to look religious.
He says they got the reward they wanted, immediately. People saw them, were impressed. Done.
Problem is, empty reward.
What is God's reward for prayer?
It's him. A relationship with him.
This happens to be what true prayer is about anyway…talking to God…spending time with him.
God makes himself, the reward, available to all who will receive him.
Closet prayer is like training, shutting out all ulterior motives until we learn to pray for God alone.
God is the best spectator for prayer - he sees prayer and motive.
Even the worst prayer - God sees the right motive.
Even the best prayer - God sees the wrong motive.
The word "closet" in this reading is not where someone kept their clothes. It comes from the Greek "tameion" which means storeroom. This suggests there are immediate "treasures" when you pray for God alone.
When we pray for God and God alone, we are seeking God, and he is ready and willing to hold up his side of the relationship by giving us what we were seeking.
When we pray for others to see, we’re clearly not seeking God but our own benefit, so he gives us that reward we sought, but that's all.
If we want applause, he says we can have it. But we're settling for second best.
I once got a phone call, informing me that someone was taking Christianity 101 student because he wanted to be baptized in hopes it would helps him immigration case.
In the end, I was happy for him to take the course, and would even baptize him if he decided to follow Jesus as his Lord. Those things are highly rewarding in and of themselves! An eternal relationship with God through Jesus Christ – nothing is more rewarding.
What about the immigration thing? I doubt it would have helped. One might have a case as a persecuted refugee if they were a baptized Christian at home, before coming to Canada. But immigration authorities probably wouldn’t care if he was baptized in Canada last year.
If he took my course, and was baptized, all because he wanted to improve his chances at immigration, he would quickly discover it was an empty reward, nowhere near as good as the real reward.
We settle for second best sometimes.
We pursue rewards in life, on earth, when we could be pursuing rewards in heaven!
We can do this with prayer. We say a bunch of things about God, and call it prayer, when we could be talking to God.
We say some words we don’t really believe, simply because someone told us we should.
Question: Have you ever tried to regularly spend time in prayer alone with God? What did you find easy comfortable, or difficult and uncomfortable about the experience?
