Tag: miracles

Good Habits Versus Wrong Desires, John 6:24-35 (Ordinary 18 Year B)

John 6:24-35
Many of us remember fondly the Wallace and Gromit movies. The second one, The Wrong Trousers, finds Wallace taking in a penguin lodger to alleviate his debts.  

Unfortunately, the lodger is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw, and he spies the special techno-trousers Wallace has developed for taking Gromit on walks. Rewiring them for remote control and getting Wallace into them while he sleeps, he attempts to steal a diamond from the city museum.

The crowd in today’s reading don’t have a problem with the wrong trousers. They have a problem with asking the wrong questions. And their wrong questions betray their wrong desires.

As I said last week, the crowd has a choice between the grace Jesus offers them and their own mentality of grabbing. Ultimately, their wrong choices (which are also driven by wrong desires) will lead to them deserting Jesus.

Our desires are important – more so than we sometimes give them credit. Some Christians say we just need to get our thinking right and everything else will follow. It’s the religious version of the famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

But as the Christian thinker James K A Smith points out, that just makes us ‘brains on a stick.’ He urges us to remember the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who reminded us that what actually drive us are our desires and our loves. These are what form us, especially the habits they encourage in us. Smith puts it this way: ‘You Are What You Love.’

So it’s important to examine our desires. And hence today we’re going to look at the wrong desires in the crowd that are betrayed by their wrong questions so that we can nurture the right desires in our lives as Christian disciples.

The first wrong desire is to prefer physical satisfaction at the expense of the spiritual.

25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’
26 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 

They are glad to have had their bellies filled – and Jesus was happy to meet their needs. But after that, it all went downhill. Or perhaps it’s better to say that their real attitudes were exposed.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Jesus and his people meeting physical and material needs. In fact, it’s important, and it’s often the first step in Christian witness. As General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said: if you want to give a hungry man a tract, make sure it’s the wrapping on a sandwich.

The crowd is happy to receive the gift, but not the Giver. It’s me-centred, or perhaps we-centred, but not God-centred.

These attitudes still persist today. If God won’t give people what they want physically, then God must be rejected. It can be summed up in the T-shirt slogan, ‘He who has the most toys wins’ – to which the answer is, ‘He who has the most toys still dies.’ Paul’s teaching that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Timothy 6:6) is not popular teaching with our culture – and nor with our politicians and economists.

Nowhere is this more evident in our society than in the attitude to sex, where the typical time frame for a couple first to sleep together is now on just the third date. They would prefer to believe that God is a spoilsport and Christians are prudes to the truth that God actually has their well-being at heart when he prescribes a different and stricter approach.

We in the community of faith are not immune to these pressures to prioritise physical satisfaction and diminish or exclude our need to feed on Christ and his word. How easily we forget the way Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the tempter in the wilderness, that we do not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And that’s why we need to develop regular sustainable habits for our devotional lives. We have our regular habits for eating, and we know why we need them. So why do we shy away from doing the same for our spiritual sustenance? You cannot tell me that the average person cannot put aside at least ten or fifteen minutes a day for Bible reading and prayer.

And furthermore, we are spoilt for choice these days in the availability of resources to help us – from traditional daily Bible reading notes to apps for our smartphones.

Do we give an appropriate priority to our spiritual feeding as we do to the meeting of our physical needs? Or are we numbered among those the late AW Tozer had in mind when he said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

The second wrong desire is to prefer human works at the expense of divine grace.

Continuing the conversation with the crowd, Jesus says,

27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’
28 Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
The crowd falls into the trap of Jesus mentioning working for food that endures to eternal life. They want to work in order to receive approval from God. Did Jesus know their hearts and minds? I rather suspect he did.
For Jesus’ response is to tell them to do something that isn’t really work:
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
There are no works you can do to win the approval of God, he says. What God requires is that you put your faith in me.

The crowd makes a common mistake. People use the following of God’s laws either as good works that they hope will win favour from God, or as boundary markers to show who’s in and who’s out – hopefully proving that they are ‘in’.

And it’s a mistake to say this is just a fault seen in Jewish opponents of Jesus. The idea that we are not fundamentally sinners and can be good enough on our own to be accepted by God has been called by some ‘The English heresy.’ It has a long and tawdry history in our culture.

It is seen in the relegation of the word ‘sin’ to the salacious stories that were always so beloved of Sunday tabloids, usually of a sexual nature. Even in our day as newspapers are replaced by the Internet, there are plenty of these tales around.

But Jesus says we just need to believe in him, and that isn’t a good work that merits us the love of God. Faith is to hold out empty hands to God and believe that he is going to fill them with his good things.
Sadly, the good works heresy still squirms its way into the church. I have had people ask me if they were good enough for church membership. To which the proper reply is no, but neither am I. We are here by the grace of God alone, and we receive that by holding out the empty hands of faith.

It’s why whatever we say about right and wrong in society and in other people, we must be careful not to become judgmental. We are only in the family of God by his grace, received by faith in Jesus and his death for our sins.

I once met a Christian who had a particular way of reminding himself of this. I met him when we were both patients on a hospital ward, and he gave me his business card. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’, and I was puzzled. What degree or professional qualification was that, I asked him?

‘It stands for Sinner Saved By Grace,’ he replied.

‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

The third and final wrong desire is to prefer signs at the expense of the Saviour.

30 So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’

When I hear this, I’m inclined to think: what a cheek! You want a sign to prove that this is the One you should believe in? Well, what do you think you saw when he fed all five thousand of you?

It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul said in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians on this subject:

22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Some people have a lust for the spectacular and the dramatic. If there is a God, they expect a firework show with drones like the New Year extravaganza in London.

But Jesus points the crowd to the Father who gave bread from heaven in the wilderness, and ultimately to himself as ‘The Bread of Life’, because signs aren’t meant to be an alternative to faith in him and allegiance to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus did miracles. I believe he did. I also believe that miracles are not extinct. I do believe in a God who shows up in history and is not remote from us. And therefore, I believe in things like intercessory prayer.

But the signs are not an end in themselves. They are meant to point to Jesus. And that’s what we’re meant to focus on. That’s what matters.

Miracles are real, but rare, as CS Lewis said in his book on the subject. Why? Because the scientific laws by which our universe lives are a description of God’s habits – they must be, if it is true that Jesus ‘sustain[s] all things by his powerful word’, as Hebrews 1:3 says. The universe relies on God’s habits. Miracles are when God breaks his habits, but of necessity can only be rare, or the upholding of the universe will be disturbed.

Next time we want church or faith to be some kind of whizz-bang show, we need to ask ourselves whether we are putting our thirst for a religious performance ahead of our relationship with Jesus.
To be sure, I am not for one moment suggesting that church and faith should be boring. We believe in Jesus, and when we read about him we can be sure that he was many things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was boring.

But the life of faith is not the explosive adrenaline rush of the hundred metres sprint, it is the marathon. We keep Jesus and the finish line before us in what Eugene Peterson called ‘A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.’

Conclusion

So what if we are to make the right choices, not the wrong ones? At the beginning, I linked this with the need to establish habits.

If we are not to prefer physical satisfaction over the spiritual, then I talked about the habit of regular Bible reading.

If we are not to prefer human works over grace, then we need the regular discipline of both confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of forgiveness. So yes, let us notice this as a rhythm in Sunday worship every week. But we might also consider a daily review of our lives. There is an old Christian practice called the Examen, where we review the day before going to bed. We rejoice in the good of the day and where we have seen God at work. We also repent of those times we have failed him and are assured we are forgiven.

If we are not to prefer signs over the Saviour, then these first two disciplines, along with our other commitments of worship, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship will all be tools of the Holy Spirit to form us in the marathon race of God’s kingdom. Just so long as we keep doing them and they become regular habits.  
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The Tyson Fury Of Prayer? Luke 18:1-8 (Ordinary 29 Year C)

Luke 18:1-8

Back in the 1970s on Radio 1 the now-disgraced DJ Dave Lee Travis used to invite frustrated wives to send in stories of DIY jobs that their husbands had failed to do or failed to complete. Should their story be read on air, Travis sent them a circular object known as a ‘Round Tuit’, for when their husbands got ‘around to it’.

Perhaps stories like that encapsulate the unhelpful stereotype of nagging women. And if you read today’s Scripture superficially you may think it is about a nagging woman, the widow who wears down the unjust judge.

But that is to ignore the very first sentence of the reading:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. (Verse 1)

The theme is not ‘nagging’ but ‘Don’t give up.’ Specifically, don’t give up praying.

And if we pay attention not simply to that first sentence generally, but to the first word, we realise we need to take into account the context. The first word is ‘Then.’ Luke is telling us this is related to what has just gone before.

Now we didn’t read that, but let me point you to the way near the end of the previous chapter that Jesus is in discussion with people who are longing for his Second Coming, but who will not live to see it:

Then he said to his disciples, ‘The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.’ (Luke 17:22)

As the woman in the parable longed for justice, so there are many who long for the justice of God. But we shall only see it fully when Christ appears again in glory.

So why in the parable is the widow in need? The scholar Ian Paul lists three signs of her need:

First, she has to represent herself; courts are normally the province of men, and it appears that she has no male relative who will represent her. Second, she has to return continually, which means that she does not have the financial resources to offer a bribe and have her case settled quickly (not an unusual issue in many courts around the world today). Thirdly, she appears to have been denied justice, and the implication is that she has perhaps been deprived of her rights in inheritance. It might be that she has been deprived of her living from her late husband’s estate; later rabbinic law suggests that widows did not inherit directly, but makes provision for her living from the estate for that reason.

That’s quite a list. No professional representation. A corrupt legal system. And no financial support. How extraordinary that she is not cowed by her circumstances but is feisty enough to demand justice. She takes responsibility and takes the initiative in her relentless quest for justice.[1]

As such, she is an example for us. We may not face the same set of personal challenges as her, but there are so many terrible things in our world that we long to see changed, and so caring about justice can be disheartening. But just when we feel tempted to draw the curtains, curl up in a ball, eat comfort food, and ignore the wicked world outside our door, the widow in the parable says, ‘No!’

What we have here is a character in the story whose own circumstances and actions remind us to do what Jesus said on the tin at the beginning of the parable: ‘always pray and not give up.’

Look how she speaks up boldly in the face of corruption. She is so tenacious! The unjust judge gives up because he fears that she will come and attack him (verse 5)! Yes, he, the strong male judge, fears the poor, weak widow.

In fact, the Greek word for ‘attack’ here is one taken from the realm of boxing. It means ‘to beat’. Paraphrasing it, the judge fears the widow giving him a black eye.[2]

The world sees a poor, defenceless widow. The judge sees Tyson Fury!

Perhaps we too feel weak and feeble in the face of the wickedness and suffering in our world. Certainly, our opponents love to construe us this way. But a church that is bold to keep praying even in the face of unequal relationships and insurmountable odds is not a pushover.

One of my favourite images of this reality is C S Lewis’ description of it in The Screwtape Letters. You will remember that these are fictional letters written from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior one, his nephew Wormwood. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes this:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.[3]

In our ministry of intercession we may present as a poor widow but we are in fact terrible as an army with banners. We are the Tyson Fury of all things spiritual. That’s why we ‘should always pray and not give up.’

Nevertheless, bold as we may be with our prayers God is still playing the long game and we do not always see our prayers answered. I pray regularly that God will bring to naught various wicked regimes around the world that inflict persecution on their populations. But it hasn’t happened yet. I long for regimes to fall in China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and other nations. I watch and I pray, longing for the day.

So how in the meantime do we cope with unanswered prayer? If God is so unlike the unjust judge and promises a quick administration of justice, why have these governments not fallen yet?

I have found a response by Pete Greig, the founder of the 24/7 Prayer movement stimulating in considering this. In the midst of seeing many wonderful answers to prayer in the movement in its early days, Greig was facing caring for his wife who developed epileptic seizures. His prayers for her health went unanswered. Much of his wrestling with that painful dilemma can be found in his remarkable book God On Mute, a book I highly commend.

But he gives a shorter account in a YouTube video where he describes three reasons why we don’t always see the answers to prayer that we desire.

One reason Greig calls ‘God’s World’, in other words the laws of nature. He talks about how because God has set up a creation that works consistently according to reliable laws then miracles must by definition be rare occurrences, as C S Lewis (that man again) said. You would no longer be able to rely on those laws in good ways if every time something painful were about to happen they were suspended. Suppose, says Lewis, every time a Christian dropped a hammer that God answered the prayer for the hammer not to hit their toe. We would be walking around in a world where we could no longer rely on gravity. We would be making our way every day through lots of hammers floating in the air!

One preacher I heard described scientific laws as being descriptions of God’s habits. Miracles happen when God occasionally changes his habits. But these occasions really are occasional. Otherwise, the many good things that follow from having predicable laws of nature would fall apart.

A second reason Pete Greig gives for prayer being unanswered is ‘God’s Will.’ There are many ways in which we do know God’s will, particularly in terms of the ethical ways in which we are to live. But there are other ways where we shall not always know God’s will, and where his ways are not our ways. His ways are higher than ours. No mere human being knows the entire will of God.

Perhaps you thought it was God’s will that you married a particular person but it proved to be unrequited love. How many of us look back on things like those in our lives and are glad that life did not pan out the way we wanted? God did something better for us, but we could not have seen it, and so our initial prayers went unanswered. It may have been painful at the time, and it may be something we can only appreciate with hindsight, but sometimes God overrules or ignores our prayer requests because he has a better outcome in mind than we can anticipate.

The third reason Greig describes for not seeing answered prayer is what he calls ‘God’s War.’ There is opposition to God’s ways. There is a spiritual conflict. I am not blaming everything on demons, but I am saying that human beings actively choose to do things that are opposed to the will of God, from small acts of selfishness to large-scale acts of violence. Jesus may be reigning at the right hand of the Father, but there are still forces arrayed against his kingdom, just as we have King Charles III on the throne but there are still criminals at work in our society.

What should we do in such circumstances? Why, we should pray all the more boldly for God to overcome his enemies. It may take a long time, but it is worth the investment in prayer.

Indeed, in the face of all that we encounter in creation that is not according to God’s purposes of love, let us be bold in prayer. The weak widow is but a disguise for the heavyweight boxer. Spiritually speaking, we can punch above the widow’s weight.

And if we do, then the Son of Man will find faith on the earth (verse 8).

[1] See Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, p640.

[2] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-god-respond-to-nagging-in-luke-18/

[3] Cited at https://www.thespiritlife.net/about/81-warfare/warfare-publications/1877-chapter-2-the-screwtape-letters-cs-lewis

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