From Summit 2014 (a gathering of young Friends from Evangelical Friends Church-North America)
Today I want
to talk with you about how Jesus responded to popularity and success.
Right before
the text I’ve chosen to focus on from John 12 comes the story of Jesus raising
Lazarus from the dead. This was not the only person Jesus brought back from
death, but this one got a lot of attention from the chief priests and
Pharisees, the religious establishment. These two groups differed from each
other theologically, but they joined forces when a truly disruptive force
showed up to seek and save the lost.
The crowds
were so excited about Jesus that they welcomed him into Jerusalem with shouts
and waved palm branches. A small group of Jews from out of the country asked
Philip, a disciple, to introduce them to Jesus. Jesus was a celebrity, the man
of the moment, probably the Messiah born to set his people free.
Here’s how
Jesus responded, at the high point of his popularity.
This moment
has arrived
In order that
The Son of
Man, the child of humanity,
May have his
worth made known.
Truly, it is
true
What I point
out to you:
If a grain of
wheat does not fall down into the ground
And die alone
It survives
alone
But if it dies
alone,
It produces
many grains
If your first
concern is for your own life, your soul, your breath
You will destroy
it
If your last
concern is for your own life, your soul, your breath
You guard it
into unending, absolute life
If you want to
minister to me,
Join me,
accompany me, walk with me
And wherever I
am, you, my minister, will be also
If you want to
minister to me, the Father will value and honor you.
At this
moment, my own life, my soul, my breath
Is troubled,
disquieted, perplexed
And what shall
I command?
Father, save
me out of this moment?
No, this is
why I came into this moment.
Father, make
your worth known.
Then a voice
came from the universe:
I am making my
worth known
And I will
make it known again.
At the high
point of Jesus’s public career, he sees the hollowness of his popularity and success.
He sees that working to maintain them is the opposite of doing what the Father
wants. He affirms that his central purpose is to make God’s worth and God’s
will known. He empties himself and becomes obedient, even to death on the
cross, and burial in the earth, and God in response lifts him up, so that everyone
will bow to Jesus. Lifted up on the cross or lifted up in the resurrection,
Jesus draws all people to himself.
What I want
you to hear is that Jesus invites each of us to join him in this way of
walking. We do what God tells us and when success comes, we refuse to love it.
We love doing what God tells us instead. When we see our success or our hope
for success die, we bury it and wait for God.
Nearly 90
years ago, Frank Laubach, a missionary to the Philippines, left the
seminary he had helped to found in Manila. At the age of 45, he went without
his family to live among the Maranao Moro Muslims. He wrote:
August 21,1930
I shall be forty-six
in two weeks. I no longer have the sense that life is all before me, as I had a
few years ago. Some of it is behind - and a miserable poor part it is, so far
below what I had dreamed, that I dare not even think of it. Nor dare I think
much of the future. This present, if it is full of God, is the only refuge I
have from poisonous disappointment and even almost rebellion against God.
January 20, 1930
Although I have been
a minister and a missionary for fifteen years, I have not lived the entire day
of every day, minute by minute to follow the will of God. Two years ago a
profound dissatisfaction led me to begin trying to line up my actions with the
will of God about every fifteen minutes or every half hour. … But this year I
have started out to live all my waking moments in conscious listening to the
inner voice, asking without ceasing, "What, Father, do you desire said?
What, Father, do you desire this minute?"
It is clear that this
is exactly what Jesus was doing all day every day.
March 15, 1930
This week a new, and
to me marvelous experience, has come out of my loneliness. I have been so
desperately lonesome that it was unbearable save by talking with God. And so
every waking moment of the week I have been looking toward Him, with perhaps
the exception of an hour or two.
Last Thursday night I
was listening to a phonograph in Lumbatan and allowing my heart to commune when
something broke within me, and I longed to lift my own will up and give it
completely to God.
How infinitely richer
this direct first hand grasping of God Himself is, than the old method which I
used and recommended for years, the reading of endless devotional books. Almost
It seems to me now that the very Bible cannot be read as a substitute for
meeting God soul to soul and face to face. And yet, how was this new closeness
achieved? Ah, I know now that it was by cutting the very heart of my heart and
by suffering. Somebody was telling me this week that nobody can
make a violin speak the last depths of human longing until that soul has been
made tender by some great anguish. I do not say it is the only way to the heart
of God, but I must witness that It has opened an inner shrine for me which I
never entered before.
June 1,1930
Last Monday was the
most completely successful day of my life to date, so far as giving my day in
complete and continuous surrender to God is concerned - though I shall hope for
far better days - and I remember how as I looked at people with a love God
gave, they looked back and acted as though they wanted to go with me. I felt
then that for a day I saw a little of that marvelous pull that Jesus had as He
walked along the road day after day "God-Intoxicated" and radiant
with the endless communion of His soul with God.
As he worked on this
inner discipline, he took note of the conditions of the lives of those around
him, the Maranaos. He earned their trust
by asking them to teach him about the Koran.
He created a curriculum to teach them to read. As they became literate, they could see the
benefits to their lives, and they came to love him. He founded the program “Each one teach one”
that enlisted each newly-literate person as a teacher for someone who still did
not read. This literacy work changed the lives of millions of people around the
world.
Here’s what Frank
Laubach would like to teach us:
"All during the
day, in the chinks of time between the things we find ourselves obliged to do,
there are the moments when our minds ask: 'What next?' In these chinks of time,
ask Him: 'Lord, think Thy thoughts in my mind. What is on Thy mind for me to do
now?' When we ask Christ, 'What next?' we tune in and give Him a chance to pour
His ideas through our enkindled imagination. If we persist, it becomes a
habit."
Can we try this
experiment for a week? Whenever you
pause in the day, ask God to think God’s thoughts in your mind. If you’re organized, do this at regular
intervals, maybe at every hour. If
you’re like me, do it when you are collecting your thoughts, or have a moment
of forgetfulness, or are well into an anxiety.
And then the key will be to take what we hear from God seriously and
obey. We will be able to tell God’s
voice from others by comparing what God says to us with what Jesus showed us
about God’s will and priorities in his own life on earth.
Jesus
explained to the religious folks of his day: John 5:17, 19, 20, 21, 30 “My
Father is still working, and I also am working. . . . very truly I tell you,
the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; . .
. I seek not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
If we are
seeking to do God’s will by asking, listening, and then obeying, we will be
able to say with Jesus in John 4: 34 “My food is to do the will of him who sent
me and to complete his work.”
