The Way of God
Hello! What a beautiful fall day; get out there and enjoy it while you still can! We’ve got some great things happening here…this Sunday, it looks like we’ll finally be able to fully kick off fall with our picnic at the harbor (noon THIS Sunday – see below!), Central Learns kicks off next Wednesday, tonight is our Wednesday night bible study (7PM), and soon enough, we’ll have a paved driveway (which was approved at our Sunday meeting)! Praise God.
I want to take a moment to reflect on a big idea that has emerged and converged recently for me in a handful of ways: the idea that
The way of God is the way of self-sacrifice.
On Sunday, you’ll hear more about it through a man named Judah, but if you come to bible study this week, you’ll also hear all about it with Jacob (you still have an opportunity to if you come to our Wednesday evening bible study – tonight at 7PM! I hope you can make it!). Next month, we’ll encounter it as we look at the story of Moses in the Exodus (in our next sermon series), and then you’ll see it again in the winter and spring. We’ve already seen it in the Sunday message a few weeks ago when we encountered that odd scene with God ‘cutting’ the covenant with Abraham. In fact,
you’ll see it in so many of the Old Testament “stories that give us Jesus” because we see it come to fulfillment in Jesus!
Take yesterday’s bible reading, for instance. Yesterday, we read Hebrews chapter 2, where the author has this to say in verse 10:
It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
That is, Jesus – his life and ministry and model and example – is made complete through his own suffering. In other words, Jesus (our pioneer) is who he is competed only by his self-sacrifice on the cross. Jesus is Jesus – the Christ, Messiah, and Son of God – because he gave his life for us. And what the writer of Hebrews is telling us is
this is “fitting” for God…because this is what God has always been like.
When you start to look for it as your read the bible, you’ll see it in Judah, in Jacob, in Abraham, in Noah, in Moses, in Samson (in a very weird way!), in David, in Jeremiah, and then, in those mysterious poems of the ‘suffering servant’ in Isaiah. What the author of Hebrews is pointing out explicitly, is what the Old Testament says repeatedly implicitly, is what the death of Jesus displays for us all in plain sight – and what we remember at the Lord’s table every month:
The way of God is the way of self-sacrifice.
It’s the way that Jesus spells out when he says that there’s no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). It’s the way that Jesus models when he gets down on his knees to wash the feet of his followers (John 13). It’s the way that Jesus teaches when he tells us that the only way to ‘save’ your life is to ‘lose’ it (Matt. 16:25). It’s the way Jesus leads us when he tells us that to come after him means to deny yourself and take up your cross (Mark 8:34). It’s the way that Jesus goes when he breathes his last breath on the cross for a world that was against him.
And so it makes me ask myself: do I follow Jesus on this way? Am I willing to put myself aside in order to lift others up. Am I willing to ‘go low’ and serve others? Am I willing to lay down my life, even if only in a distant echo of the one who I claim to follow (as I claim the name ‘Christian’)?
It makes me ask us: do we, as a church, truly exist for the good of those not yet part of it? As the writer of Hebrews says, God’s purpose is to “bring many children to glory” – so do we exist for their ‘glory’ – or for our own? It makes me ask: how can we use our gifts, our resources, our energy, our creativity, our property, our time to serve those around us and so serve the purpose of God?
If the way of self-sacrifice is ‘fitting’ for God, then surely, it is fitting for us as his people.
Let’s go his way, then, in all our ways.
And seriously, come to bible study tonight at 7PM and hear more!