Pentecost 8
2014a
August 10, 2014
August 10, 2014
“The Four ‘Ds’
of Discipleship: Discernment”
Proverbs 2:1-5
Back
in June of 1943, during the midst of World War II, our neighbor to the south,
Mexico, was attacked by naval gunfire.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t under attack from enemy forces. It was actually being fired on by its biggest
ally: the United States.
As
official Navy records indicate, an American patrol boat under the command of a young
Lieutenant anchored for the night near some islands off the coast of California. The Lieutenant wanted to show his men some
fighting spirit, so he ordered them to open up with the ship’s cannon and with
rifles and machine guns for some target practice at the nearby uninhabited
islands.
Unfortunately,
they weren’t uninhabited. And in fact,
they weren’t off the coast of California either. Due to his poor navigation the Lieutenant had
actually sailed his ship into Mexican waters, and the islands were Mexican
territory… guarded at the time by a company of Mexican navy troops. Without realizing his mistake, the American
Lieutenant was firing on allied forces.
Fortunately,
no one was hurt. But the Mexicans were,
understandably, a little upset, so they filed a formal complaint with the
US, and an official Navy Board of
Inquiry wound up relieving the Lieutenant from his post and recommending that
he not ever command anything again. The
officer who was lost and gave bad directions to his crew, by the way, was
Lieutenant (Junior Grade) L. Ron Hubbard.
A few years later he would go on to create the Scientology
religion. Hubbard has been dead for
decades now, and he still seems to be misleading people.
It
is so easy for us to be misled in our lives.
Sometimes we’re misled by others, and sometimes we mislead ourselves.
And this is an important topic for us; because as disciples of Jesus Christ:
the fundamental question for us every day is this… what are we to do? Whose leading shall we follow: our own inclinations,
or the leading of God? This is called discernment.
The
question before Christians is not “am I saved?”; nor is it “how am I
saved?”. Both of those questions have
been answered once and for all time. How
we have been saved is crystal clear: by the blood of Jesus Christ, the Only Son
of God, who took our sins upon him and suffered and died for us on the Cross
and rose from the dead for us… because He is the way and the truth and the life
and no one comes unto the Father but through Him, and those who share a death
like his in baptism will most certainly share in the new life of the
resurrection with Him, AMEN!
And
we are saved in our baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In Mark
16:16 Jesus says, “He who believes and is baptized shall be
saved.” You can’t get more
definitive than that. Do you
believe? Have you been baptized? Then you shall be saved. As our President likes to say, “Period. End of story.” Yet so often Christians seek
to reassure themselves of their salvation again and again and again. Like children probing with their tongue the
empty space where a tooth used to be; they seek to affirm what God has already
proclaimed. So they go through an
endless cycle of altar calls, or they pray for God to do what God has already
done, or there is preaching and Bible study that never move past the question
of salvation… and never gets to the REAL question that confronts disciples of
Christ. NOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN SAVED… WHAT ARE WE TO DO?
This
is the most fundamental question confronting us as disciples. And to answer it, we have to learn and
practice discernment.
This
morning we conclude our four part sermon series entitled “The 4 ‘Ds’ of
Discipleship.” Over the past weeks we’ve
come to see that discipleship is the step beyond merely believing as
Christians; discipleship is living in imitation of Christ. And there are at least four key actions in
being a disciple. We’ve talked about the
first step being the diminishment of the self… making God’s will supreme
in our lives and diminishing our own will.
And we’ve talked about the need to develop spiritual discipline
of prayer and engaging God’s Word in preaching and the Scriptures. Then we talked about the need to be devoted
to God above everything else in our lives as disciples. And finally today: we address the need for discernment
in discipleship.
Discernment
can be defined as determining what is right and what is wrong through God’s
mind. But since the dawn of humankind we
have tried to discern what is right and wrong through our own minds. Way back in the Garden of Eden we became
estranged from our Father in Heaven. In Genesis 2:17 God told the first
man that he could eat from whatever tree he
wanted to in the garden, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil you shall not eat…” So, what do Adam and Eve go and do in the next
chapter? They ate of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. Immediately
they began determining for themselves what was right and what was wrong; what
was good and what was evil. And the
first thing that they did was discern for themselves that being naked was
wrong; so they sewed clothes for themselves out of fig leaves. And God found out and banished them from
paradise.
In
his seminal book “Ethics” Dietrich
Bonhoeffer asserts that discerning according to our own minds what is right and
wrong is what separated us from God in the first place, and that separation is
repeated in our own lives every time we determine good and evil for ourselves.
Bonhoeffer
may be on to something. Perhaps the most
dangerous words that a Christian can utter are the words “I think…” ‘I think that what those people are doing is
wrong’… ‘I think that we should do this and not that…’ To say “I think” is to say we are discerning
for ourselves what is right and what isn’t; it is following our own mind and
not the mind of God. The problem is: if
we follow our own mind we cannot help pleasing ourselves. But if we follow the
mind of God we cannot help pleasing God.
So,
how do we do that? How do we move from
discerning through our own mind and begin discerning through God’s mind? Well, we find guidance about this in our
reading from Proverbs this morning.
Verses 1 through 3 of our reading from Proverbs: “…receive my words and treasure up my
commandments… make your ear attentive to wisdom… incline your heart to
understanding.”
The
Word of God is many things to us; one of them is a guidebook of how we are to
live as disciples. Psalm 119 tells us “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light
unto my path.” The Bible is a
road map for life… it tells us where to go and what to do or not to do. If we follow God’s guidebook, then we will do
well. If we follow our own minds… not so
well.
But
there are people who disagree.
Especially in our culture today some will say, ‘But I did it my way and
I still succeeded!’ They don’t
understand that when we succeed despite ourselves it isn’t our discernment that
is so good – it’s God’s grace that gets us through.
Thomas
Wheeler, former president of the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company,
tells about a day when he and his wife decided to take a drive out in the
country. They were tooling along when he
noticed that their car was low on gas, so he pulled into some rundown little
gas station. He asked the attendant to
fill the tank and check the oil, then went off to the restroom.
As
he was coming back to the car, he noticed that the attendant and his wife were kind
of deeply engaged in conversation. They fell silent as he got near, and he paid
the attendant and got back into the car.
As
they drove away, Wheeler asked his wife if she knew the man. She said, yes:
they had gone to high school together, and they’d dated and even gone steady
for a year.
Wheeler
got a big grin on his face, and he puffed out his chest and said, “Well,
“Boy,
were you lucky that I came along. If you had married him, you’d be the wife of
a gas station attendant instead of the wife of a corporate president.”
And
his wife just smiled back and shook her head, and she said, “Oh, no, dear. If I’d married him, he’d be the president and
you’d be the gas station attendant.”
If
we follow God’s guidance instead of our own discernment, we will please our
Father in Heaven and we will live well.
But if we follow our own minds yet are saved from failure or overcome
adversity we cannot take the credit. It
is God’s grace acting in our lives.
But,
wouldn’t it be better to follow God in the first place?
As
disciples we come to know that the only measuring stick for what is how God
wants it to be. Let us not say “I think
that is right or that is wrong…” Let us
say, “GOD tells me that is right or that is wrong…”
As
disciples of Christ we surrender our judgment… and instead accept God’s
judgment. And who do we do that? Verses
1 through 3 of our reading from Proverbs: “…receive my words and treasure up my
commandments… make your ear attentive to wisdom… incline your heart to
understanding.”
The
path of discipleship is a path of crucifying our old selves every day, and
taking on the heart and mind of God and nothing less. This is what Christ calls us to, and it is a
hard calling. It is letting the Holy
Spirit change us a little bit more everyday… gradually becoming more and more
an imitator of Christ our Lord.
Discipleship is like growing older:
it is not for the faint of heart.
But
the reward… if we undertake this journey… if we surrender all to Him… if we die
to ourselves and put on the mind of Christ… then something wonderful
happens. Because we not only come to
discern the righteousness of God: we also discern the love of God. The
closer we grow toward Him, the more we realize how much He loves us… and
that He always has; even when we didn’t even realize that He was watching over
us.
When she was 34 years old, Susan’s life went dark. A medical condition stole her sight in less
than a week. All of a sudden instead of
being independent and confident she was scared… and totally dependent on her
husband Mark.
Mark was an Air Force officer
stationed in Washington D.C., and he tried to help as much as he could. For a year he would leave Susan in their
apartment during the day, coming home to help her at night. But after a year of that, Susan decided that
she wanted to work again. She got her
old job back; but there was a problem.
Her office was across town. To
get there Susan would have to take the public bus. The very thought of that terrified her. But Mark promised to help her, and he
did.
For
two solid weeks Mark, in his uniform, went with Susan to and from her work
every day. He encouraged her to use her
hearing, her other senses… He helped her become familiar with the
intersections, the crosswalks, all of the things that Susan had always taken
for granted. Now she slowly tapped along
with a white cane.
After two weeks it was time for Susan
to take the bus on her own. On that
Monday she was terrified, Tuesday was a little better, and every day after
seemed a bit easier. By the time Friday came, she could feel her old confidence
coming back, and she was feeling proud that she’d overcome so much on her own. As the bus stopped and opened its doors to
let her off that morning, the bus driver said something that was the last thing
Susan expected to hear. As she felt for
the railing to the steps down, she said to her, “Boy, I sure envy you.” Susan said she thought at first that she was
being mocked; why would the driver envy a blind woman? So she said, “Why do you envy me?”
And the driver said, “Honey, it must
feel wonderful to have someone watch over you like that.” Susan asked what she meant. The bus driver said, “Every morning for the
past week there’s been a fine looking man in uniform standing on that corner
across the street. He watches you get
off the bus, and I see him watch as you cross the street… and he stays there
until you go into your building. Then,
every day, he blows you a kiss and walks away.
You may not know it, but someone sure seems to love you!”
Here is a promise for us this morning:
the closer we draw near to Christ in discipleship, the more we will experience
His love. And we will develop hindsight,
and become aware of just how much his love sustained us in the past… when we
didn’t even know he was there.
Let
us embrace the call to discipleship; let’s open our hearts and let the Lord
transform us every day. And let us walk
in the steps that Christ calls us to as his disciples: to diminish our will and make God’s
will sovereign in our lives; to undertake spiritual disciplines of
prayer and engaging God’s Word; to be willing to identify those things in our
lives that compete for our loyalty with God, and remove them and devote
ourselves to Him; and to set off our own insight and our own insight, and
instead discern what we are to do in accordance with God’s mind.
And
if we faithfully follow Him, each day He will transform us a little more. And we will become aware of a depth of his
love that we didn’t know when we first believed: a love that will sustain us in
all things; that will yield us joy in all circumstances; and will empower us to
serve Him and do His work… doers of the Word, as He calls us to be. AMEN
The Reverend M. A.
Greenauer 2014
Permission is granted to
reproduce this work in whole or in part if the glory for its content is given
to the Lord
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