Sermons
OBSTACLES AND TEMPTATIONS ON THE WAY TO COMMUNION WITH GOD
Mark 1:29-39 / Isaiah 40:21-31
February 5, 2012
I have shared before in a sermon that my family and I enjoy many of the episodes from the old sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. While most of them are silly and involve the comic edges of everyday home life, a few of them touch some very serious issues – and do so in an effective manner. One of my favorites in this vein tackles the subject of faith.
It begins one Sunday morning when everyone in the family heads off to church while Raymond plops down in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. Raymond’s daughter, Allie, wants to know why daddy doesn’t go to church. This question is probed in several humorous ways over the course of the next couple of days before Raymond and his wife, Deborah, have a serious conversation about it. Raymond’s defense of his defection amounts to this: he doesn’t feel like going. His heart’s not in it. More specifically, when he goes his mind wanders. He focuses on other people and the details of their dress or grooming habits. Or, he looks out the window and watches what’s going on outside. Or, he starts to think about things at work he needs to get done. If I’m not paying attention and just going through the motions I shouldn’t be there, he concludes. And Deborah agrees. You right. You shouldn’t just go through the motions.
I don’t feel like it. My heart’s not in it. I shouldn’t just go through the motions. That excuse is used a lot by believers when they don’t show up for worship. It’s used a lot by us, too, when we don’t show up for daily prayer before the Lord. There are actually many excuses we turn to for our defections from daily faithfulness, but this one is one of the most popular ones. And to relieve ourselves of even a hint of doubt about its propriety, we usually throw in the phrases it would be an affront to God if I did go through the motions; it would actually be worse than not going. And so, the whole of the dodge goes like this. I don’t feel like it. And if my heart’s not in it, I would be just going through the motions. And that would be worse than not going.
Let us back up here and begin with the basics on the subject of spending time with God: all believers ought to spend time in prayerful communion with the Lord daily. There are no outright commandments to this effect in the Bible, but they are implicitly found in the nature of Christian faith. Christian faith is about believers growing in the ways of Christ. It’s about believers taking on the character of Jesus Christ in all their interactions. It’s about believers becoming perfect in the ways of righteousness. This is a life-long process carried out by the Spirit of God indwelling the believer. The Spirit works on each believer, convicting him of his sin, illuminating her as concerns her weaknesses, leading them one and all to know and do the will of the Father. Such work requires our attentive and willing participation. It’s not a one-way street: as the Spirit tries to communicate to us, we need to make ourselves available for the Spirit to speak to us. We need to set aside time to listen to the Spirit. This we do when we commune with God in time spent alone with him.
The sum of the matter, really, was spoken by Jesus who told us that we have to abide in him if we wish to grow in grace. John 15 bears these compelling words. He is the vine; we are the branches. As the branches wither and die unless they remain in the vine, we will wither and die unless we remain in Christ. We must abide in him daily if we would produce fruit. To abide in Christ is to commune with him in prayer and worship and meditation upon Holy Scripture.
We are to be in daily communion with God. We are saved to grow in the likeness of Jesus; we can’t grow in the likeness of Jesus unless we spend time with him daily. It’s that simple. It’s that crucial.
Now, there are several things that get in the way of our spending time alone with God daily. There are obstacles and temptations galore. We could spend a whole day talking about them all. I have spent time in other sermons talking about some of them. I have spent time in another sermon talking about how our fast-paced living is a major obstacle to communion with God. We fill our lives with too much activity. We fill our lives with too much coming and going and doing. We make ourselves so busy that we literally have no time for God.
Now, we like to play the victim here a lot – we like to claim that our time obligations are imposed on us from outside ourselves. And to be sure, many of them are. But many of them are freely chosen by us, too. The fact of the matter is that we make our lives more complicated than they have to be. We make choices that push God out of the picture. And rather than sacrifice those options when we are made aware that we have taken them, we sacrifice time with God instead.
Another culprit in our faithlessness on this front is the distraction quotient in us. We live in highly distracting times. We live in a day and age of excessive and incessant noise, communication and activity. We are always being bombarded by commercials and announcements and text messages and phone calls. We are always dealing with multiple demands on our time and attention in any given moment. We have adapted to all this by becoming multi-taskers – by trying to do several things at the same time in any given moment. The result of doing this for as long as we have been doing it is that we cannot focus on single things anymore. We have no attention span any longer. Our minds are always buzzing, always ready to move on to the next thing after a few seconds. This is ruinous for spiritual growth. This keeps us from ever truly coming before the Father completely even if we have carved out the time from our busy schedules for it.
We could go on and on here. We could talk all day about the obstacles and temptations that prevent us from coming to God in daily communion. But we have come to talk about only one of these this morning. We have come to talk about the commonly employed excuse I noted earlier. I don’t feel like it; my heart’s not in it. I would just be going through the motions. And that would be worse than not going.
We are tempted by this excuse, and do fall to this temptation often. Jesus was tempted by it too, it seems to me. But he didn’t fall to it.
We turn back to the passage from Mark now. We have read this morning of the second half of that momentous day in Capernaum at the very beginning of his ministry. We talked last week about his preaching and exorcism in the synagogue on this Sabbath day last week. We took note of the huge response his activity generated. In today’s lesson, we are told by Mark that Jesus goes next to the home of Andrew and Simon; and that when he arrives, he is advised of the illness of Simon’s mother-in-law.
Jesus’ day is just getting going, apparently. He is told of the woman’s illness so that he might heal her of it. And this he does immediately. And after some down time in the afternoon, a crowd begins to gather at the door to the house. As the text we read last week reported, word of his mighty power exhibited in the synagogue service quickly spread. It spread that very day! And so people with all sorts of illnesses come to him that evening. And others who were just curious about this amazing man came, too. The whole city has camped out at the door of this home, Mark tells us.
By the end of this day, then, we can be sure that Jesus is whipped. We can be sure that he is drained. But we can also assume that his fatigue was of the good type – the type that comes from success in one’s endeavors after much hard work. We can assume that Jesus went to bed with a certain sense of satisfaction not unlike that on display in the creation accounts of Genesis 1. He could take a look at the day that he had just lived and have pride in it. He could see all that he had done and say that it was good.
Now, here’s where the temptation comes in. That’s what we’re after here – a moment of temptation like unto that which we are focusing on in the sermon. The night goes by quickly, and the early morning time of prayer hits Jesus in the midst of what surely must have been a sweetly deep sleep. Because of his fatigue, and because of his success, we can well imagine that Jesus was tempted to hit the snooze alarm and skip out on that day’s prayer. We can well imagine that he didn’t really feel like getting up and going out and praying. We can well imagine that as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his heart wasn’t much excited at the prospect of an extended time of prayer.
Let me anticipate your anxiety here. Some may think I am denigrating our Lord’s divinity with such talk. I am not. I am, rather, elevating his humanity. If he was fully human, as we believe he was, and if he was tempted in all ways as we are tempted, which scripture tells us he was, then he very well could have been tempted in precisely the way I have described it. Given the circumstances of the preceding day’s events, it is surely most possible, if not certainly true, that Jesus was tempted in exactly this way. I don’t feel like it. My heart’s not in it. I would just be going through the motions, which would be worse than not praying today. Yes, there is very good reason to believe that Jesus was tempted in exactly this way – that Jesus was tempted to skip out on praying that morning. And yet, what does the text tell us? “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
Jesus went to prayer just like he always did. He got up just as early as he always did. He went away just like he always did. He prayed to the Father in heaven just like he always did. Jesus didn’t give in to the temptation. He didn’t give in to his feelings. He stuck to the discipline of daily prayer.
And we can see the value of his time of prayer almost immediately. Mark goes on to tell us how the disciples go searching for Jesus when they wake up. They do because the crowds have returned. The crowds are clamoring for Jesus. They have heard about the night before and are anxious for Jesus to do more miraculous things. So, the disciples are eager to find Jesus. There is more good work to be done! And that’s what they urge Jesus to do when they find him – more good work. But that is a temptation for Jesus. It is a temptation to depart from what he came to do. For, he didn’t come to heal people of their earthly diseases, but to cure them of their spiritual affliction. He came to preach the gospel and to call sinful humanity to repentance and to bring us back to the Father. And so Jesus resists the temptation to merely do good; he strengthens his grip on his resolve to do what the Father has called him to do. And he is able to do this precisely because he spent time in prayer that day.
This is an important lesson for us to take hold of. This is an important example for us to follow. We are forever letting our feelings dictate our spiritual lives. And we are forever suffering the consequences of sinful living as a result. The fact of the matter is that we will not always feel like coming to church or reading our Bibles or spending time with God in prayer. The fact of the matter is that if we wait on our feelings to fall in line before we act, we will rarely take up the disciplines of the faith that grow us up in Christ. We have to have a duty-mentality about them. We have to have a should-do-them-mindset about them. We have to discipline ourselves to take them up every day regardless of our feelings.
Now, some will press the issue here. Some will ask, “what is the good of just going through the motions? Isn’t it an affront to God to just go through the motions? Shouldn’t we wait until our hearts are in the religious exercise in question before taking it up?” Obviously, that is the ideal – to have our hearts in the religious exercise before us. But, sometimes our hearts won’t join us until after we enter in to the exercise. You see, often it is in the process of going through the motions of a religious exercise that we are awakened by the Spirit of God. It is while slogging through the scripture passage assigned for this day that a word or phrase catches our attention and awakens us to a spiritual weakness in our heart. It is while mumbling through the words of the Lord’s Prayer in worship yet again that a phrase in it grabs our attention like never before and condemns our living and praying as being too self-centered. It is while skimming through the devotion for that day in our booklet that our mind’s eye gets snagged on the suggestion of a sin that has been hiding in our hearts for a long time.
Going through the motions is so very important. It is not an affront to God – or, at least, it need not be seen to be. It can be seen as an act of devotion to God in the face of feelings and desires that would lead us away from the Almighty. Indeed, God often leads us to blessing as a result of such feeling-defying faithfulness.
The author Kathleen Norris testifies to the power of going through the motions in one of her books (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith). Norris grew up in a Christian home, but then grew away from her faith as a young adult and a successful writer in New York. It’s when she relocates to her ancestral home in South Dakota that she begins to come back to the church. She starts attending a small, rural Presbyterian church. It does not come back easily, her faith. In fact, her weekly visits at first leave her feeling depressed for several days afterward. She has to skip a few Sundays here and there at first, just to survive. But she keeps at it. She keeps on going, even though the feelings haven’t taken hold of her. She keeps on going until the feelings do take hold of her.
And so, she came to see how repetition is so important to the life of faith. Repetition is vital to the life of faith. Going through the motions works the substance of thing into our hearts and minds and spirits, even though we usually don’t see or notice it.
In closing her chapter on this experience she relates a story she picked up along the way that drives home the point. It’s about a heated debate between a Greek Orthodox theologian/professor and a young seminary student at Yale Divinity School. They were discussing the Apostles Creed in class on this particular day. The young student confessed his difficulty in assenting to several parts of the Creed. What should he do, he asked the professor? “Well, you just say it. It’s not hard to master. With a little effort, most can learn it by heart.” The young seminarian, feeling as if he had been dismissed by his teacher, pressed the issue. How can I say it if I don’t believe it fully? “You just say it,” the professor replied. “Particularly when you have difficulty believing it. You just keep saying it. It will come to you eventually.” Incensed now, the seminarian shoots back that to do as the professor suggests will make him a hypocrite. It would be a lie for me to say things I don’t really believe. How can you tell me to keep on saying it? Because that’s how you come to believe, the professor says in so many words. “Eventually it mat come to you. For some, it takes longer than for others.”
Repetition is so vitally important to the life of faith. Going through the motions is so crucial. We can’t let our feelings dictate our religious activity. We have to do the things we are supposed to do, day in and day out, without exception.
Well, there are a couple of things our passage from Mark puts before us this morning. There are two things we need to take with us this morning. First, we all should have a daily regimen of communion with God. It is absolutely crucial to the believer. Without it, she cannot grow into the fullness of the faith. Without it, he cannot live the way of Christ. Second, we are to give ourselves to this routine every single day. We are to take it up on the days we don’t feel like it every bit as much as we do on the days when our hearts are in it. We are not to take any days off. In fact, on the days when it seems likely that we will just be going through the motions, we are to double our efforts.