1 Peter 1:13-23

Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. ¹⁴ As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. ¹⁵ But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; ¹⁶ for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”^[a]

¹⁷ Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. ¹⁸ For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, ¹⁹ but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. ²⁰ He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. ²¹ Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

²² Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.^[b]23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

This morning’s scripture reading took me to 1 Peter 1 and this vitally important passage about our call to holy living. It is Peter’s call for us to live transformed lives. He calls us to live lives that reflect the nature of the God we serve. If God holy we too should be holy.

For some reason this morning Peter reminded me a lot of Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights. In the above pregame speech to his team he talks to them about expectation. He isn’t concerned about the expectations other people have for them, he is concerned about the expectations he has for them. He expects them to reflect the training that has been poured into them. That doesn’t just mean winning, it means paying attention to how they prepare and how they play. It isn’t just about the end result it is about how they get there.

Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.

The rallying cry for Dillon High is similar to the one Peter gives us here. The call to holiness is a daunting one. Often times it can feel to be an impossible calling. There is a pressure on us from the outside when other people call us to holiness. They look at us, watching us, waiting for us to fail. The world looks at us and judges us according to our actions. It feels like a call to holiness is nothing but a losing battle sometimes.

But God doesn’t treat our call to holiness that way. Peter in many ways reminds us here that God doesn’t care what anyone else has to say about our lives and how he lives. He calls us to be like him. He sets the standards, and while it is a far higher standard than the world sets, he also makes it an attainable one. Our standard for holiness is the God who created us, redeemed us and called us to be his children. He wants our holiness more than we do. He is more committed to it than we are. He is more capable of making us holy than we are ourselves. He is our father and every bit of our call to holiness is wrapped up in his nature.

So when we are called to be sober of mind, we are called to understand that God does not call us to do anything he does not also empower us to do. When we are called to be alert we are called to be aware of the power of God all around us that is working to reshape our whole existence to better reflect the image of Christ. When we are called to have hope and faith we are called to have hope and faith in the God who is mighty enough to save us and his ability to make us holy, not our own.

And so our call to holiness is a call to reorient the vision of our life. We are called to clearly see the God who has saved us. We are called to fill our hearts with his presence so that there is not a conflict of intentions. We are called to embark on a battle whose outcome is already determined by the work of Christ.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. Amen

The pursuit of holiness can feel like waiting for a snow storm sometimes. As we go through our daily walk with God we are seeking to be made into the image of Jesus. This is an image without sinful blemish. We may look at our lives and see nothing but blemishes. Some of them we can remove, but scars and pock mocks remain. We get cleaner, but never as clean as we want to be. Like scrubbing a sink clean but being unable to get rid of rings of rust, we do everything we can to be pure. But ultimately it is only the presence of God that can purify us.

Like snow falling from heaven, the Spirit of God descends upon our lives and suddenly we are clean. We are white as snow. Sometimes it is like a lazy afternoon snow, we see it falling but don’t really the effect for sometime until we look out and see the whole earth covered and realize everything is different. Sometimes though, it is like a blizzard. The Spirit blows in and the snow falls in flakes the size of your hand and you can see everything changing in an instant. In those moments you want to just dance, play, roll around, celebrate in amazement at what our God is doing.

So sitting here on a snowy Monday morning my prayer is for holiness. My prayer is for an overwhelming experience of God’s sanctifying presence to blow into my life, my family, our church, and your lives as well during this Advent season.

Father in Heaven, I have never toured the store houses of snow in your heavens. I can’t change the way the wind blows or make it snow. No matter how hard I dance or how long I wait, snow falls upon the earth according to your will alone. So would you send your Spirit rushing into my life anew today. Would you descend upon me like a blizzard. Cover my life like the snow covers the earth. Fall in big beautiful snow flakes upon my head and teach me anew of your love. Cleanse me, make me as white as snow falling on a December morn. Accomplish in my life what only you can. Make me holy, O Lord. Make me holy today.

Our dear friend Phil Criswell, who has long been an active member of our church and a popular and well respected part of the Duneland Community, passed away last night. Phil has been fighting a battle with cancer for years. Five years ago it almost won. He was dead for 17 minutes, but God saw fit to give him the gift of five more years with his girls and he never looked back. Phil will be missed so strongly because he loved to laugh, always had a mischievous smile on his face and never met someone he wouldn’t gladly help in anyway he could.

Death came as an act of mercy yesterday for Phil. He was given the gift of perfect healing. He was able to leave his ravaged body behind and find peace and joy that can only come in the presence of our creator. I rejoice for Phil even as I mourn for his loss.

And even as we gather and mourn there is new life. Little Sydney that I held yesterday is beautiful and healthy and perfect. To hold her is to hold all the potential wrapped up in a new life brought forth by the breath of God.

Life and death, all at once, all the time. Sometimes I am so busy living I miss the beauty of life and death. Both are gifts from God. Both remind us of the Alpha and the Omega. Both are reason for thanksgiving and praise.

So thank you Lord for our lives, as brief, complicated, hard, troublesome, wonderful, mysterious, and filled with laughter and heartache as they are. Thank you for breathing your breath of life into me and giving me the opportunity to discover you each day in all the big and tiny moments you have granted me. Thank you Father also for death. Thank you that there is an end to this temporary life. Thank you that through Jesus that end is now a beginning and in that moment when all seems lost we instead are given life eternal. Only you, O Lord, could be beautiful and loving enough to give us both life and death. Thank you for their mystery and for your presence in each. May this day I live prepared to die and when the moment comes for me to die may I die prepared to live. Amen.

That sounds like a blessing not a curse, at least as you first hear it, but the more you think about it the more you realize that often when we get what we want, we find it is far more of a curse than a blessing.

Last night our men’s group was looking at 1 Samuel 8 where the Israelites were demanding a king after Samuel grew old. Having just read the whole OT straight through I was struck by the realization that this decision, this desire to be like the other nations, to put trust in a king instead of God, this was the moment that the rest of Israel’s history was decided. They simply had no idea how much pain and suffering would follow this decision.

They didn’t know that their kings, for the great majority of the time, would lead them away from God. They didn’t realize their kings would fail them time and time again as spiritual leaders. They didn’t know that the failures of the monarchy would split the kingdom, send them into continual violence, lead to their exile and almost to their destruction as a people. But, they were insistent that they knew what they wanted, so God gave it to them.

I have experienced similarly stupid things in my life where I got exactly what I asked for, only to find out that I didn’t really want it and I definitely didn’t need it. We too often get sucked in by the delusion that we experience freedom by doing and getting what we want. Christ demonstrates the somewhat paradoxical truth, however, that we experience true freedom through submission to God’s will. When we exchange our desires for God’s freedom and blessing follow.

So I offer this blessing. (I’m not Irish or really anything, maybe it could be an Hoosier blessing or a Nazarene blessing or something like that)

“May you get not what you want, but what God desires for you and may you have the wisdom to discern the difference.”

The only person in town who didn’t have any family or land to farm or animals was an old man named Joshua  who lived by himself on the outside of town. The town’s people took turns bringing him food from their own supplies. In the fall they would bring him some of their harvest. They would bring him pumpkins made into pies and breads and wheat baked into delicious breads. In the spring time and summer they would bring fresh fruits and vegetables straight out of their garden and they would bake them into delicious treats and scrumptious stews.

Everyone loved the old man who was kind and never had a bad word to say to anyone. They delighted in taking turns making sure that he had everything they needed, especially since they all had so much. One day, however, things changed in the village. The Anderson family had an amazing harvest one fall. Their wheat crop was the biggest it had ever been. The pumpkins were as big as boulders. The corn was sweet and delicious and beautiful. They were so excited about the crop and they started to dream of all that the crop would mean for their lives. They would make so much off of selling their harvest that they could buy a new cottage, buy more fields, and get fancier clothes. Dreams of riches danced through their heads.

It just so happened that it was their turn during that season to take care of the old man who lived in the village.  So they started to prepare some food to take to him, but as they did so the realized that if they gave their best food to the old man they wouldn’t make as much money when they sold it. So they decided to give the old man not the best stuff they had, but the okay stuff that wouldn’t really sell for much anyways. That would cut down on their losses. So they still make plenty of food for the old man, they just made sure that they held back the best stuff themselves.

Other people in the village noticed what the family had done and they started to think about how much they were giving away to the old man in the village themselves. So they started holding back a bit when they provided for him as well. They still brought him food, but a little less frequently, and not the best that they had, and well just whatever they had that they didn’t really want.

After a while it was the Anderson family’s turn to bring food to the old man again. But this year they hadn’t had a very good harvest. After that first great harvest they had made a lot of money and they went out and rented more fields and bought more livestock and borrowed even some more money to rent a better cottage. But the next year and the year after that their harvest wasn’t as great and some of the cattle got sick and the new cottage needed improvements and well things were really tight. So when it was their turn to bring food to Joshua they decided they just couldn’t afford to do it. They told the next family in the rotation that they would have to do it because they couldn’t afford to.

That family didn’t understand, how could the Andersons say they couldn’t afford to help out Joshua? Their cottage was twice as large as their own and they had way more cattle. If the Anderson’s couldn’t afford to help out Joshua then neither could they. So they told the next family down the line. Well for the next couple of months there was a raging debate in the village about whether or not they should still  bring food to Joshua. Some of the families refused to help out, some said they would help a little occasionally and even a fewer said that no matter what they cared about Joshua and they would help provide for him the best that they could.

And so for a couple of years this went on and the longer it went on the less people cared for Joshua. Some remained faithful and they brought Joshua the best food they had to make sure he had enough to eat. Some brought good food on occasion and tried to at least do something. Most who brought anything brought their leftovers. They didn’t feel like they could afford to bring their best to Joshua and didn’t necessarily think he deserved it. After all they worked hard for their food and Joshua did nothing. Why should they bring anything to him? If they brought him their leftovers they were being generous.

One day everyone in the village was summoned to a meeting in the town center. They all gathered and there was old Joshua standing in the middle of the village square. He had a short list in his hand. He read of the names of a few of the families in the town. He then said, “If I read your name on this list then I just want to say thank you for all you have done to show your love for me. I am going to reward you by making your rich beyond your wildest dreams. You will have three times the cattle and four times the farm land that you used to. You will have cottages big enough for two or three families to live in. Thank you for your love.”

“The rest of you, if your name wasn’t read have one month to leave this village.”

The cry went up, “What do you mean leave the village? Who are you to tell us to leave this place?”

So Joshua spoke and he said, “How is it that you have all forgotten that none of you own anything in this village. This is my village and when you all came here I gave you houses to live in and land to farm and animals to raise, and they were all out of my own possession. I was has happy to do so and you agreed in return to bring me the fruits of your labor so that I would have what I needed also. As more of you came I gave away more and more of what I owned to you so that each would have enough and you continued to bring me the best of what you had and I was happy to live in a small house and have no land of my own but to simply enjoy what you brought to me. But many of you have forgotten that all you have is not your own, but it is mine. So now you must leave my village and you can take nothing that belongs to me because you have forgotten my generosity and instead have become selfish and greedy. There is no room for selfishness or greed in my village.”

And so many families went home that day and wept for they had fought so hard to hold onto their wealth but in fact they owned almost nothing. All they had was owned by Joshua and now he demanded it back to them. So they left the village with the clothes on their back and some food and an uncertain future before them.

God didn’t create us without purpose, and when we love God as he loves us we discover this incredible purpose for our lives. God wants to make us into the image of his Son Jesus. God summons us, through his love, to enter into a metamorphosis engineered by his love. God who has known us from before we breathed our first breath, has dreamt of shaping you into the perfect image of his son since he first thought you up. He wants you to be part of his family, a family filled with reborn brothers and sisters, all bearing the image of their father. God wants to adopt you and make you his own. And so he has chosen you through his love, and he has called you to come home. And all those who come home God will make their lives right and God will fix their broken pieces and God will heal you and make you more beautiful than anything you have ever seen or imagined.

What else can we say in response to such love? If God desires to give our life purpose and to redeem it, who can harm us or stop this process of transformation? Who can get in the way of the creative work of the ruler of all creation? God died for us, giving his own son up to a horrific death at the hands of those he loved, just to make sure that nothing, not even death, could prevent us from knowing this love. If we love God we will never know want, how could we? So line up the critics, bring forth all those who want to make accusations and tell us how flawed and sinful we are. Let them come forward with all their charges.

It just so happens that the judge is the one who has pardoned us. It just so happens that the judge is the one who died for us. It just so happens that the only one who is worthy of bringing charges against us has already forgiven us and wiped the slate clean. Jesus died for us and he is the one who now speaks on our behalf. Greater than any lawyer or court appointed advocate, Jesus, who is without imperfection, has borne our sin so that there could never again be a charge brought against us.

What could possibly overcome such love? What is more powerful than the love of a father for his son? What does anyone have to say to God our judge and our redeemer? The troubles we have in this life don’t stand a chance against this kind of love. The hardships we bring upon ourselves and the hardships others inflict upon us are laughable in the face of such power and love. People will try to convince us otherwise, they may even try to threaten our lives to convince us that they have more power over our lives than God does, but Jesus defeated even death itself so we know that isn’t true.

As a matter of fact the blood of just makes us champions. It invites us to be part of the greatest victory that has ever been celebrated. The love of God invites us to be winners and heroes and conquerors of such a magnitude that the world has never seen. And nothing is going to stop this victory celebration. Nothing is going to keep us from dancing and singing and praising our God because he will never leave us nor forsake, or allow anything we face in this life or the next to come between us and our heavenly Father.

It doesn’t matter what list you come up with. Nothing in living or dying can keep us from God. No spiritual powers, good or bad, can keep us from the ruler of all realms. Nothing that has happened to us, no choices we have made in our past, and nothing that could ever happen to us in our future, none of it can keep us from God’s love. You can go to the top of Mt. Everest or the bottom of the Mariana trench but you can’t escape God’s love. Once you have felt the love of God, once you have been transformed, once you have responded by loving God, that’s it, you are his. Once we come home from the life of self aggrandizing and sinful indulgence that we all seem to want to live, once we come home and sit at our Father’s table and are called his children, well there is nothing that can take you away from that love. There is nothing that can ever separate you from the renewing, redeeming, transforming, life changing, purpose giving, Spirit filling love the God gives us through our precious savior Jesus Christ our Lord.

I found some funny images of modern Jesus’ that reflect this desire we have to repaint Jesus into our own image. What does your Jesus look like?

I have been taken with this picture since I actually saw it. At first glance you can’t quite tell what is going on. Then you think I flipped around the picture digitally. But, in reality the picture is exactly as it was intended to be. You can distinctly make out the cloud shapes, see the outline of the mountains and even catch the blue of the sky. But, the reflection isn’t quite the same. The reflection lacks the overwhelming expanse of the sky. You can see the bottom of the lake as you look closely, covered with smooth stones weathered over time be the natural rhythms of the water. The blue, the light, the clouds, they aren’t really there either, just poor reflections of the real thing.

Sometimes life is like that, an upside down reflection. Everything seems to be right, or almost right, but in reality it is just a reflection. The water that day was pretty calm, but if a wind picked up, the reflection would really be hard to see. All those images would be lost. When we live our lives outside of God’s will, when we make our own path and determine to make the world what we want it, upside down reflections are the result. The infinitely expanding hope of the stratosphere is replaced by a rocky lake bottom mere inches away and if a storm hits, all those images are lost amid the waves. Sometimes it takes getting away from the norm, away from routine, and removing distractions to get right side up again. I pray that is what this trip did for me, and even more so for the youth who have professed transformation because of it.

How about you? How is life looking? Do you ever feel like you are standing on your head? Take some time, change your routine, and give God space to right you again…

“I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

 
After the Resurrection, the disciples weren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. They seemed lost and unprepared for the realities of their new world. We can understand their sense of being lost, can’t we? There are many different types of change that we face in our lives, there are some we are prepared for and there are those we couldn’t be prepared for, and both can be difficult. Sometimes these changes are thrust upon us, and sometimes we know they are coming for a long time. But, how does our faith help us through the many changes we go through in life?

 Recently I was reading a book that discussed the difference between continuous and discontinuous change. Continuous change is predictable and ordered. These are the changes we know are coming and our experiences prepare us to face. Think about the school system. Each grade builds upon the previous ones and prepares us for the changing requirements and opportunities that are to come. Changing grades is hard, but we should be prepared to face that change. Discontinuous change is change that takes place in a way that nothing that has come before prepares you for this change. A sudden death, a windfall, or being thrust into a completely unfamiliar context are all examples of discontinuous change.

As we read the story of our faith, we find that our faith is a story of discontinuous change. God acts and changes our entire understanding of the world Jesus Christ. As we encounter Christ everything we thought we understood about who we are, how the world works, and who God is are changed. In the passage from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul reminds us that the changing is not done. In the blink of an eye Christ will return again and everything we be changed, including us. God often calls us to a new path or a new opportunity that feels completely new in every way. We think that nothing in life has prepared us for that calling and it scares us. We ultimately seem a lot like the disciples after the Resurrection; either huddled up in a room with the door locked or going back to a life of fishing that sounds comfortable and familiar.

The joy of our faith, however, is that amidst all the changes, no matter what they are, there is one constant. God is unchanging. Malachi 3:6 says, “I the LORD do not change.” Jesus promised his disciples before he sent them into the world in Matthew 28:20, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” The disciples had a hard time adjusting to the new reality of their lives because they forgot that although their lives were constantly changing, God never changes. God is always faithful, always present, always comforting, always encouraging, and always providing whatever it is we need for the life he has called us to. So as the changes, whatever they may be, keep rolling into your life, don’t lose site of the one constant in all of creation, God our creator. Rest assured of his promises and you may even learn to enjoy the ride, come what may.

To quote one of his fine prayers, “Dear little baby Jesus, who’s sittin’ in his crib watchin the Baby Einstein videos, learnin’ ’bout shapes and colors. I would like to thank you for bringin’ me and my moma together, and also that my kids no longer sound like retarded gang-bangers.” The scenes involving his family dinner time prayers are very humorous, but they also touched on a thought I have often had. How you picture God goes a long way in determining how you pray.

What I mean by that is this: our image of God directly effects how we communicate with Him. Growing up I had an image of God sitting on a throne wagging a finger at me. He always saw me doing bad things, and my prayer life mainly consisted of me asking forgiveness. On the days when I felt I had earned God’s favor I might ask for something or just say hi, but those days seemed few and far between.  For the most part God was kind of like Santa Claus for me back then. I just tried to stay on the right list.

As I have grown older and my image of God has changed, so too has my prayer life. The biggest change came for me when I began to see God smiling at me. It took me a lot of years to understand how much bigger God’s love and grace are than I could ever imagine.  When God looks down on His children who love Him, He smiles. It is amazing that I grew up in the church, in a loving Christian home, and had a degree in Biblical Studies before that thought ever crossed my mind. The words of Zephaniah 3:17 began to ring in my head, “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”

As a parent I understand so much more how God could delight in His children, even when they are immature, stupid, disobedient, and imperfect. As these thoughts of God began to take hold of my soul, I began to seek God out in entirely different ways in my prayer life. Excitedly I rushed to talk to God about the joys and hurts of my life. Remorsefully I confessed, carrying the pain of disappointing a loved one, not just fear of retribution from a higher authority. Submission, obedience, and guidance became much realer to me as my image of God changed.

I hope my image of God will continue to change throughout my life. As I am shaped more and more by God’s hands and by listening to His voice, I pray that I will have bigger and more vivid images of the God I pray to. I hope that a familiarity will develop that will be like that you see of old friends or spouses who have been through so much together and know each other so well that they can sit and enjoy each others company while barely even using words. I pray that I will see God like that one day and the act of seeking Him out will have that kind of familiarity.

So thanks Ricky Bobby, you great big hairy American winning machine. Your infantile prayers are a great reminder of we limit our prayer lives based on our images of God and the desires of our hearts.

May all of us who seek God find images of glory far greater than our imaginations can conjure and far bigger than our minds can actually comprehend.