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The man who taught me the banjo and fiddle, Dwight Diller, one of my best friends way back when, passed away a couple of weeks ago. I last saw him fourteen years ago, but I have thought and will continue to think of him and his family every day. He gave me the gift of the music that occupied his heart. When you give like that people will remember you. He was also a very committed Christian with the heart of an evangelist/pastor. He had a question of a pastoral nature that he liked to ask. It’s one that I should ask more often but I don’t for fear that I would be interpreted as being intrusive about the private matter of faith. If we can be so mistaken as to call faith a private matter. The question is an important one and I think it is the cornerstone question of pastoral care. I guess you’re curious as to what that question is so without further ado, it’s just, “How goes it with the Lord?”
Now that’s a hard question to answer because it makes us cut right to the chase with what is going on in our lives. It sets right down on our relationship to Jesus and makes us think about and talk about something we feel very uncomfortable talking about not to mention ill-equipped to answer. How would you go about answering if I asked you, “How goes it with the Lord?”
I think when we try to answer this question using ourselves and our uncomfortableness with the topic as the starting point, it becomes a difficult question to answer. I suspect that for most of us we’ve been acculturated to think that the Lord’s presence in our lives is conditional upon what we do meaning we’ve been taught that God is not present in our lives or acting for us unless we are carrying out our end of the bargain. It that “God helps those who help themselves” kind of thinking. So, if we are doing nothing, then there is nothing between us and the Lord. Another thing we do is gauge the Lord’s presence and activity in our lives on whether we feel spiritual or on feelings of happiness or misery. If we are happy, we say “God is blessing me” or if we are miserable ‘God is getting me.” When we start to answer the question, “How goes it with the Lord?” by looking at ourselves, I think we open up a can of worms that in the end is self-destructive. It will leave us deluded with self-righteousness or mired down into the muck of trying to please some sort of unknowable god we know we cannot please.
Another way to go about answering this question and one that I think is more fruitful is to start with the Lord and to focus our thoughts more on the Lord’s end of things. Maybe we should ask “What’s the Lord doing in my life?” This is what I would call a theocentric or God-centered approach to life. You see, God is always doing something in our lives that’s ultimately for our good. His presence and his efforts are not conditioned upon anything we do. They are a given. God has intentions for us that involve teaching us who he is and his great love that he will bring forth in his own way and own time and what he is doing will and does change everything for us. This we can count on. I’m reasonably certain that approaching the question “How goes it with the Lord?” from the standpoint of what our Lord is doing in our lives as opposed to what we are doing for the Lord is where we find faith and vision for our lives rather than just being left with the feeling that we are failing miserably at keeping our end of a contract with God.
God’s call to Abraham is a good place to start when trying to define a theocentric or God-centered approach to life. Abraham was a wandering Aramean. He was part of a mass migration of people in his day who were moving along the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East from Ur of Chaldea in modern day Iraq up the Euphrates River into Syria and then down through Palestine almost to Egypt. Apparently, Abraham’s family stopped short in northern Syria at a place called Haran. I mention these details because I want you to understand that Abraham was not out on a crazy goat chase. He was part of something larger that was going on in his day, but he needed to go further than where he was at.
In his 75th year God spoke to Abraham and informed him of what he was doing in Abraham’s life. He says, “Go! Go! (“Lek! Lek!” in Hebrew) Leave your land, your kindred and your father’s house and go to a land I am going to show you. I am going to make you to be a great nation. I am blessing you and I am going to make your name great and you are going to be a blessing. No worries. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse. In you all the families of the earth are going to be blessed.” Abraham went and did according to this wonderful word. God opened up Abraham’s life for him. He does it for us too.
Paul Writes in Colossians, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” Your life is hidden with Christ. Look at Jesus and you will start to get a glimpse of it. God will open your eyes just like he did with Abraham to let you know what’s going on with you from the perspective of his intentions for you. Look to Jesus and you will see.
Now please notice that God’s word to Abraham was not a conditional, an if/then statement where God is saying if you do this, then I am obligated to do that. If that were the case, Abraham’s going would not be Abraham’s trusting God’s gracious promise. It would rather be making faith into work for which God was obligated to reward him. That’s not what is happening here. Rather, God is making clear to Abraham what he was doing in Abraham’s life not just for Abraham, but also for all of humanity, for you and me too. God was blessing him and making of him and his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to the rest of the world. If Abraham wants to participate willingly in this, then he would simply have to trust God’s word and go and be amazed. One may ask what would happen if he said “no”. Well, I’m inclined to think that God would have stayed after him until he did.
Abraham’s faith was that he trusted God to be telling him the truth about what he was doing in his life and he acted accordingly. He was a willful participant in what God was doing in, with, and through him. In the Hebrew language the urgency with which God told him to go (it was a double go. Lek! Lek!) made it clear that it would be for Abraham’s own benefit to go. In a sense, we could say that this was an opportunity that Abraham would be foolish to ignore. So, he goes and in salvation history his faith/faithfulness is held up as the model for what counts as righteousness or being rightly related to God, which is simply getting on board with what God is doing in your life.
God’s promise to Abraham, God’s revealing what he was doing in, with and through Abraham was the vision for his life that Abraham lived by. It was a forth-seeing. For the rest of the Book of Genesis, not only did this vision make sense of and guide Abraham’s life. It gave purpose to him and his family. Abraham was challenged to believe that this promise was what God was doing in his life and would continue on through his family even though he was 75 and he and Sarah were childless. It was a vision that seemed impossible but he believed it.
So, what’s God doing in your life? What’s the vision God is giving to you about your life? How is he blessing you? How is God’s love breaking forth on your life? How is he making you to be a blessing to others? How goes it with the Lord? Well, I can answer this question for you generally and you will have to fill in the specifics for yourself.
God the Father out of his love for you has saved you by grace through the faithfulness of his Son who has died for us to set us free from sin-warped perspectives and the fear of death and he is making that salvation real in you right now through his Holy Spirit who brings us together into communion with himself and one another. God has reconciled us to himself. Just as in Abraham God was calling forth a people to be his own special people, so through Christ Jesus in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, God is still calling forth and perfecting a people to be his own special people. He has saved us. He has placed in our lives an opportunity for us to become new people, a new people who truly know him as he is and are being made capable to love as he loves. God speaks to us, “Come! Come! Leave behind your complicated lives of self-absorption, fear, anxiety, and busyness and come into my presence right here in your midst that I will open your eyes to see as you begin to get know each other. I will move your hearts with compassion to love one another. I am making you people utterly new and pouring myself into you so that you will be a blessing. Come! Come! Love one another.”
The promise God made to Abraham is being fulfilled in the church, indeed this church. Get involved in a community of faith that is serious about being on the way with Jesus Christ and you will see just as clear as the morning sun what God is doing in your lives. This is what the Lord is doing here in this church. God is creating a loving community in his image so that we might know a taste of our salvation until he comes. This is the vision. If you want to know what God is doing in your life look right here. The yoke of freedom that we find as we learn to love one another and build one another up and bear each other’s burdens is God’s free gift of grace to the world. We’re Abraham’s blessing infleshed. Come. God’s given us more than a land. He’s given us himself and he’s given us each other. Let’s leave our dim self-driven purposes behind and center our lives around the vision of shining forth God’s life here in our midst. Amen.
