(134) S1E30 Hope out of Complacency
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today's episode, we are going to be taking a little bit of a detour. So, a little while ago, I had to, or I was asked to do a Sunday school lesson on hope. And I got to pick the topic of hope that I wanted to do. You know, everybody's picking, like, well, hope for the distressed and hope for the distraught and things like that.
Derek:I I'm a little bit different, so I picked hope for the complacent. Because a lot of my experience, especially over the past 4 to 5 years, has been just this realization of my life of complacency and of of the the Christian life of complacency, specifically Christians in the West. And while this doesn't directly relate to nonviolence exactly, it does relate to it enough, and it relates to it in in two ways that I I decided it was sufficient enough to be able to put this in as a podcast. So first of all, a lot of people choose not to take the way of nonviolence because it's not comfortable. And then they can give lots of other excuses like, well, it's not practical, it doesn't work.
Derek:But, you know, we we've shown enough that that's just not true. Non nonviolence can be effective. But regardless, as Christians, objective morality is our standard, so that the that effectiveness ultimately doesn't matter. What it, in my opinion, boils down to is comfort and power and control. So complacency is a is a huge issue for us in in our motivation, what what we're motivated to do and what we're motivated to not do.
Derek:But then there's a second reason that I decided to share this, and the second reason is is the most important, and that is because there are most of these episodes, you could take in and of themselves. There are definitely exceptions to that, but, just talking about nonviolence and whether it works and giving examples, you kind of look at those episodes as stand alone episodes. And I I expressed in our Consequentialism series, particularly the Bonhoeffer episode, that one of the the ways I I recognized, I perhaps went wayward or or I wasn't doing a good enough job was in in pointing to Christ. Because the the thing that separates Christian Nonviolence and other nonviolence, especially secular nonviolence, is Jesus Christ and, enemy love. And our enemy love is derived from our savior, Jesus Christ.
Derek:So in in this, Sunday school lesson that I did, I think that that pointing to Jesus Christ as our hope and the reason for which we do things while also pointing to our complacency and and our comfort as being things which prevent us from doing the right things, I think that that hits spot on into, a very important discussion that people need to have, especially Christians need to have when discussing the issue of non violence. What is our hope? What is our motivation? Etcetera. So this this is a Sunday school lesson, and, because we were doing like, it it was during COVID, and, it was it wasn't really interactive.
Derek:It's almost more like a a sermon of sorts where it it's like a a speech, presentation. So, the the tone and the the way that things flow might be a little bit different than what a normal podcast that I put out is like. So just kind of be prepared for that. I think that's all the introduction I really need. Without further ado, here is my Sunday School lesson on Hope and Complacency.
Derek:Hope is a central topic for the Christian. Hebrews 6 calls hope our anchor, and Paul says in 1st Corinthians 13 that hope is a core aspect of what it means to love, and he ranks hope as one of the big three things in the Christian life. Faith, hope, and love. These things abide. Today, I specifically want to discuss how there is hope for the complacent.
Derek:Now I'll first explain what it means to be complacent and provide some examples, then we'll discuss why complacency is a problem, and, finally, we'll finish by looking at how we have the hope of freedom out of our complacency. So first, what does complacency look like? What am I talking about when I talk about complacency? We get a good glimpse of complacency in Deuteronomy 6. Starting in verse 10, it says this, when the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you a land with large flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant.
Derek:Then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. So God recognized that after slavery, wilderness wanderings, and decades of warfare, ease and satisfaction could and would cause Israel to become complacent and lose what should have been their first love, God. We can also find complacency in Sodom's sin, at least through the eyes of 1 prophet, Ezekiel. You know, when I was growing up, the sin of Sodom was always conveyed to me as being a particular sin, for which that sin was named. Right?
Derek:But Ezekiel, he points out something different. Here's what Ezekiel sees in chapter 16 starting in verse 48. Now this was the sin of your sister, Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and needy.
Derek:They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore, I did away with them as you have seen. So complacency, as I'll define it today, is a disengagement from true reality or disregard from that which is truly meaningful. It's a it's one of the ways that we misorder our loves as Augustine might see it. It's a failure to be motivated by what ought to be our first and greatest love, God.
Derek:So now that you know what I'm talking about when I talk about complacency, let's discuss what the problems with complacency are. I recently got on this early church kick, and a friend asked me, why why do you care so much about the early church? Like, what's what's the big deal? Why would you read people from so long ago? I mean, like, with with science, you know, we could read Ptolemy or, Archimedes and and other things, like, it might be interesting.
Derek:But in terms of understanding quantum mechanics and and all that stuff, we're way past that. Like, we've we have approached, we are much farther on in our journey towards the pinnacle of ultimate knowledge. Even if we never reach ultimate knowledge, we're way farther than they used to be. So why waste your time looking backwards? I mean, isn't that kind of the same thing with with, Christianity?
Derek:Like, people used to have slaves and and all that kind of stuff, but we're we're better than that now. I mean, we've we've recognized that we are closer to the pinnacle, aren't we? But as Christians, I I think that the answer is that science might move towards some pinnacle. And a lot of life, a lot of the the goals of people and institutions might be some pinnacle in the future. But for Christians, our pinnacle was 2000 years ago when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, when we saw the full revelation of God, and when the one to whom we are to be conformed was revealed.
Derek:So in my mind, the early church is so important because they were closer to the pinnacle of Jesus. They're often able to give us clearer glimpses of what it means to hope in Jesus because they experienced him where they walked with those who did. Hebrews calls fellow believers who remain faithful through time a cloud of witnesses. So when I read the gospels, when I read accounts of those who walked with Jesus, and when I read how spiritual encounters played out in the early church, I feel like I'm I'm reaching towards the pinnacle. I'm reaching towards Jesus, not away from him.
Derek:When I see how radically the church was transformed, their hope is so clear and so powerful. I see people like Saul who persecuted Christians, killed them, who after the road to Damascus, he became a Christian and was willing to be beaten and killed himself. I think of stories like Perpetua, who went to prison pregnant. They didn't murder her because she was about to have a baby. They allowed her to give birth, and her father came in to take the child and said, please just make the sacrifices, like recant this this stupid Christianity.
Derek:And Perpetua handed over her child to him and said, I'm sorry. I I can't do that. So not only did she lose her life, but she lost her child and didn't get to spend a lifetime with him. There's the story of, elders in the early church who they have catechumens or disciples who end up getting caught, and they're gonna be martyred. And these elders say, look.
Derek:We're we're there examples. Like, what if what if they're not strong enough? What if, what if they don't know enough? What if they're they're scared? And these these elders would turn themselves in to be martyred with their catechumens.
Derek:You can see in the book of Acts and all throughout the early church, people selling their goods and and dividing up the money to those in need. And then there are stories from a little bit later when Christendom has has started. We still get glimpses of this with somebody like Ambrose. Now Ambrose was, was presiding over the Eucharist at a time when Rome had, had their armies at war, and there were some captives taken. And Ambrose is there, and he's got these golden chalices that hold the the blood of Christ for the Eucharist.
Derek:And he's like, we gotta melt these down. We gotta go ransom some captives. And people are like, but but these golden chalices, they hold the blood of Christ. Like, that's that's sacrilegious. You can't do that.
Derek:And he's like, how how can you have these things that supposedly hold the blood of Christ, the blood that that ransomed captives, and then refused to use that to actually ransom captives? Doesn't make sense. Right? He said if the church possesses gold, it's to use it for the needy, not to keep it. Ambrose, did something else that was pretty cool.
Derek:He spoke truth to power. When Theodosius had this town rebel against one of his governors, Theodosius, this this self proclaimed Christian, slaughtered 7,000 men, women, and children. And Ambrose, even though he could have got his head lopped off for this, he confronted that power with truth and said that is wrong. Repent. So when I see the early church, a lot of times, they lived lives that looked markedly different and distinctive compared to my life as they had a a seemed to have a clearer grasp of the hope, which is in some ways more obscured for me both through time and through my cultural blinders.
Derek:So in my distance from Jesus and in my comfortable and complacent culture, I so often find myself shifted far from placing my hope in the pinnacle of my faith. In some ways, it's like I'm living in the promised land, and I've forgotten the Deuteronomy 6 warning. I have a life of ease where cross is rarely, if ever born. In my world, devoid of difficulty or cross, what do I have to hope in but a continuation of the life I have now? You know, for most of my life, when I've daydreamed of my hope, that hope was heaven.
Derek:And when I daydreamed of heaven, I simply imagined the continuation of American Suburbia just with the bigger personalized mansion that Jesus was working on as we speak. That was the view of most around me too. I'd imagine that it's the majority view today. We can see this in Audio Adrenaline's Big House song, which was popular when I was growing up. They say it's a big, big house with lots and lots of rooms, a big, big table with lots and lots of food, a big, big yard where we can play football.
Derek:It's a big house. It's my father's house. Sounds like, what most of us experience at Thanksgiving. Heaven is is basically just American Thanksgiving. We're importing our our current experience into the future.
Derek:Going back even farther, when I was just a little kid, we had a song called The Blast Off Song, which some of you might remember, but the the one part goes like this. It says, somewhere in outer space, God has prepared a place for those who trust him and obey. Jesus will come again, and though we don't know when, the countdown's getting lower every day. Now that doesn't sound too bad, but there's a picture book that came along with it, and the images conveyed this idea that Jesus was going away to heaven, which, of course, was in outer space, I guess, because he was getting there through a space shuttle, and he was he was going into heaven to start building my mansions. That sounded pretty cool to me.
Derek:Right? I I'd like to live in a mansion, and I couldn't wait to go to heaven to be restored, to play sports, Lots of sports there, I'm sure, because it's it's like always sunny and beautiful weather. You can eat lots of good food. I thought maybe we could see some dinosaurs, because surely God would bring those back. And then maybe you do, like, weird, unique, cool things that you couldn't do here.
Derek:Since you can't die in heaven, maybe you can go skydiving without a parachute. I don't know, but I thought it was gonna be fun. Heaven was going to be good because of all those cool things, but see, that's the thing. The new heavens and the new earth aren't good because there are fun things to do there. They're good because Jesus is there.
Derek:We sing the song in our church sometimes, and it has this line that says, the bride eyes not her garment, but her bridegroom's face. And in some ways, many of us have moved away from a focus on that main thing, Jesus, our bridegroom, and instead, we focus on the trimmings, the peripheral, the garment. So for most of my life, I I believe that Jesus created the world in 6 days, but he apparently needed 2 millennia and counting to build my heavenly mansion. What a mansion that must be, but the wait would be worth it for a perpetual American Thanksgiving Day. It was John Owens who first cued me into this misunderstanding of what John meant, the Apostle John meant when he talked about Jesus going to prepare a place for us.
Derek:Owen's claims that the cross and resurrection were really only a part of Jesus's priestly duty. They were an important part, but only a part. He would have been a failure of a high priest if he made a sacrifice and then failed to apply it. So when John tells us that Jesus goes to prepare a place for us, Hebrews helps to clarify what this means. Jesus went to plead his blood for us in the presence of God.
Derek:He applied the sacrifice. It's from this pleading that Christ's righteousness is imputed to us in the eyes of God, and it's this pleading from which the Holy Spirit then proceeds as our power and our assurance. But we tend to view our hope not as being in the finished work of Christ and the sending of the spirit, both of which we are partakers of now. We instead view our hope as in one day going to heaven and upgrading our houses. Don't get me wrong.
Derek:That's a good hope, just like the promised land was a good hope, but that's not Jesus. By looking ahead to heaven without properly looking back, we sacrifice Christ's radical call in our lives now, the power of the Holy Spirit now, and the fulfillment of God's blessings now, all for an inordinate lusting after the future. We are saturated with this idea of heaven as our central longing and a heaven that's really just an extended American suburban life. That future orientation feeds our complacency, because we essentially live as if we're already experiencing heaven now. I like the term that one of our, preachers had used, and he called it premature permanence.
Derek:Permanent now. Or another way that he put it in simpler terms was we've hung a do not disturb sign on our lives because we're already in heaven as we conceive heaven to be. Not only do we have our ticket punched to future heaven, but as Americans, we lucked out, and we got early access. We're in heaven now. This complacency often causes us to idolize comfort, and it causes us to fail to tap into our true source of motivation, power, and hope, Jesus Christ.
Derek:Our lives rarely look like the lives of the first disciples and the early church in large part because we're complacent. We're not drinking the same stuff they're drinking. Speaking of what they were drinking, let me give you an example from my life that that, I think plays well into this. So every year, there is this seasonal beer that comes out that I I really like, but it it only comes out in a very short window of time. And normally, if you wanted to, you know, have guests over or whatever and go get a beer, you'd maybe go get a 6 pack or maybe even some individual ones, depending on who's coming over and and all that.
Derek:Well, for the seasonal beer, you don't have the opportunity to do that throughout the year. So when it comes out, I get a case of it, 24. So, of course, you know, you start to crack some open, you start to invite people over, and, you start to share and enjoy. But in a little while, you go and you open up that case and you realize that there's a pretty big vacancy in there, and you start to count how many beers you have left. Oh, I only have 12 beers left, and we're less than a month into the year.
Derek:That's a problem. So you say, I have to start doing a better job. I have to start being more selective with who I share this with and and, how much I partake. And you do a pretty good job, but then, a little while in, you count the beers again, and you're at 6, and you're not even 3 months into the year. There's no way that these are gonna last you for the rest of the year until the the new beer comes out.
Derek:And so what I do is like a squirrel hiding its nuts, I I go into all the different closets in my house, and I look for places, like, up on high shelves, behind shoe boxes, or in the back dark corner of of my room, of my closet, and I I tuck beers away. And then every once in a while, I'll remember about it throughout the year, and I'll I'll go get one and I'll I'll drink it or share it with a friend. And then every once in a while, I forget where I hid 1 and I'll find it and be like, oh, I must have hid this like a year or 2 ago, and it's a pleasant surprise. Now when I look back to Jesus in the early church, I sometimes feel like I do the same thing with Jesus as I do with my seasonal beer. Jesus brought new wine, and he put it in new wineskins so that the old ones wouldn't burst.
Derek:The world had anticipated with groanings the coming of a redeemer, and he finally came. He brought the kingdom, and we live in it. But that hope and anticipation, they waned in the broader community as time passed. We realized that Jesus wasn't going to finalize things as soon as we thought he was, so we started to hold on to that hope, tucking it away in theological doctrines, but never sipping on that good new wine. Rather than looking to the culmination of all history at the cross and using that as our motivating force to move forward in the world, I tend to tuck the work of Jesus away as a nice historical event, and I describe it with appropriate doctrine while I await the real culmination of history and my future experience of Jesus in heaven, or as I've said, America continued.
Derek:I talk about Jesus a lot, but I don't experience him. I struggle to drink from his life and teaching of radical generosity. I struggle to drink from his life and teaching on loving our enemies. I struggle to drink from his life and teaching on prayer. I don't radically focus on being conformed to the image of Jesus here.
Derek:I'd rather live comfortably now and wait for God to snap his fingers one day and make me like Christ the easy way. I forego pursuing the difficult process of personal sanctification now for the promise of immediate glorification later, and that's one of the reasons why I'm not Catholic. I don't wanna go to purgatory. I don't wanna be sanctified. Give me that nice sweet glorification now.
Derek:My complacency has caused me to put that good new wine deep into the darkest parts of my closet where I forget about it. When I do this and misplace my hope, I fail to have the tools and motivation to live a life of radical transformation, and instead, I live out the mundane. There's a a good real example of this from from my own life. My wife and I, we met doing short term missions work in Mexico City, and we knew from from meeting from our initial meeting that we both wanted to spend our lives doing missions work. But we moved away from Mexico City.
Derek:We moved to the States. We started to pay off our college debt, of which we had a lot, and needed to do that. But we started to pay that off. We got good jobs. We're saving for retirement.
Derek:We started to have kids, and our excuses just started piling up as to why we couldn't pursue the mission field yet. Well, one day, Catalina kind of had a a realization all of a sudden. She came home and and she started unpacking, bags from a shopping trip that she had just had, and they were a bunch of picture frames, 100 of dollars worth of picture frames, And she she pulled them out, and she just all of a sudden realized that's 100 of dollars I could have spent towards pursuing missions. And what I'm really doing is I'm I'm growing my roots here. I'm making it harder to leave here.
Derek:Like, I'm becoming complacent. So we paid off our debts, and we, and and we pursued missions, and God did some miracles to to get us, like, literal miracles to get us to, to do missions in Romania. And thinking, of course, that, well, complacency is behind us. Now we're, you know, now we're moving out into the world, and our excuses are are over. Well, of course, over in Romania, when we we start living there, we have this, the Roma people.
Derek:Other other people call them gypsies, but that's a pejorative term, so I'm gonna use Roma. Roma would come to our door, and they would beg for for money and and food and other sorts of things. And, of course, coming from background where where we don't really know how to handle the poor, we didn't wanna enable them because we had heard that that's about the worst thing that you could do to poor people is give them things, because then you might enable them. And so they would come to our door and every once in a while, we'd give them some food, sometimes we wouldn't if they came back with with too much frequency, but we we also wouldn't let them into our house because if they came in, they might case the joint, and they might try to steal something from us. So we we didn't let them in, and we didn't give them much because we didn't wanna enable them.
Derek:And one day, this woman who had come to our house a number of times came and rang the doorbell, and I looked out, and I turned to Catalina and said, oh, it's her again. It's your turn to handle this. And Catalina looked at me, and she said, do we even know her name? And we didn't. Neither of us knew her name.
Derek:You know, it's easy for me who does missions work. It's easy to come across as somebody who's speaking into the American way of life and being critical from the outside and saying, hey. You guys are complacent. And that's not at all the point of me me talking about things like this. Complacency followed me halfway around the world, but then I realized maybe it didn't follow me.
Derek:Maybe I just create it wherever I go. And I'd argue that, unfortunately, the latter is probably true. I am a complacency creator, and I think we all are. Almost all of us desire premature permanence, and almost all of us try to distance ourselves from the truly radical. It's one reason Jesus was killed and we aren't.
Derek:He stripped away the facade of the premature permanence in his day to reveal the fickle impermanence of the world and institutions, and he made the radical a normative part of being his disciple. In simpler terms, he upset the apple cart. He inverted the normal order of things. He revealed an upside down kingdom. Complacency, on the other hand, seeks to subvert this upside down kingdom and restore order to our lives.
Derek:Complacency is antithetical to the kingdom. Okay. So we've now discussed what complacency is. We've discussed why it's a problem. I wanna finish off by talking about how we can have hope out of our complacency.
Derek:It's interesting to me that the Ten Commandments begin a bit differently than I thought they would begin. I would have thought they begin with thou should have no other gods before me. But, really, it begins like this. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. We see this invocation over and over and over again throughout the Bible.
Derek:We see it again in Deuteronomy 6, which we referenced at the beginning of this this episode. Before God warns Israel about becoming satisfied and complacent in the promised land, he reminds Israel who God is. He's the God who rescued them out of slavery. God was reminding Israel that the promised land wasn't the lasting hope, but that the Lord who brought them out of Egypt was. We see this all the time in the Bible as God has the people erect monuments or as he points back to who he is and what he's done.
Derek:Israel is to remember the solid foundation, the I am who is because he always was. Take Abraham as an example of grounded hope. You might say, but Abraham's hope was in in his future offspring. It wasn't in the past. But don't forget that Abraham was initially this old man with no hope until God came along and promised him something, and then God gave him a tangible sign to look back on as he passed through the animal carcasses by himself.
Derek:We see later that Isaac wasn't Abraham's ultimate hope. When Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, Hebrews tells us that Abraham reasoned that even God could raise the dead. Abraham could sacrifice his future and what we usually think of as his real hope because of his grounding in the past, his grounding in the immutable God. Abraham's ultimate hope was God, not Isaac, because of who God had shown himself to be. The apostle Paul also points to the past and says that if Christ be not raised from the dead, we are more pitiable than all men.
Derek:Our ultimate hope is not a big house or a big yard where we can play football. Our ultimate hope is Jesus and transform lives, which look more and more like him each day. Jesus is our hope for the present, the hope which infuses our lives with power and meaning, so that while we look forward to future events, our hope is derived from the past. Hebrews 6 perhaps gives us the best glimpse of this Christocentric hope. It says in verse 17 and following this, because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purposes very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath.
Derek:God did this so that by 2 unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. Hope is our anchor, which enters the inner sanctuary and is an eternal high priest for us.
Derek:So just as Israel was to avoid complacency by remembering the God who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt, so we are to avoid complacency by remembering the God who brought us out of the bondage of sin and intercedes on our behalf. We are to feed on Jesus and to experience him. Unfortunately, for a Western empiricist like myself, the idea of experiencing God is a foreign concept. I failed to seek personal experiences of God, and I failed to seek a connection to the experiences of the cloud of witnesses through theological truths. Theology usually ends up being a largely intellectual, dead and dry, esoteric endeavor for me most of the time.
Derek:This truth hit me when I I read a book recommended by my missions organization called The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. The book was written by this guy named Roland Allen, and he was an Anglican missionary. He was kind of fed up with, just this the practice that the church and the missions, agency had, which, you know, you'd have lots and lots of of churches with lots of nationals, but no pastor. And they wouldn't allow national pastors to go there without extended theological training. And Alan argues, he says, this extended theological training as a requirement is is ludicrous because they didn't have that at the beginning, and and the Holy Spirit is a teacher.
Derek:Now he wasn't undermining theology, but he did. He he rocked my world by explaining to me what theology truly is. So he he gives this example. So, okay, Peter. Peter felt Jesus touch his feet with a towel.
Derek:Peter broke bread with Jesus. Peter maybe touched Jesus's side or held his hand or put his arm around him. Peter experienced Jesus as human, but Peter also saw the transfigured Christ. He saw the risen Christ. He saw Jesus calm a storm with his voice.
Derek:Peter experienced Jesus as divine. Now the Trinity wasn't a theological doctrine until, what, like, 325? It took 100 of years to put words onto the experience of Peter. When we get the doctrine of the Trinity then, what we're getting is not just some abstract conceptualization of God or some deduction of who God is. It is the it it is these words that encase a true real experience.
Derek:The the experience is more real than the words that describe it. The words are just trying to figure out how to explain what actually happened. But what we do is we divorce theology from experience, and when we do that, it's stale. Just as bread becomes stale when it's left open to the air over time and loses moisture, so theology becomes stale over time when it's separated from the experiences that it houses. The Sabbath becomes a law for humanity rather than a gift to them, reminding us that God loves us, wants us to rest, and is our provider.
Derek:The Trinity becomes a mysterious complicated line in the sand rather than a beautiful testament of our incarnational God, who both created the world yet breaks bread with those he loves. The filioque becomes a doctrine that creates a schism in the church rather than a testament to the power of the spirit who dwells inside all believers, giving some the power as Jesus promised to do greater things than even he did. But for the complacent like me, it's easier to leave experiences tucked away in the deep recesses of esoteric theology than to take those experiences out, than to use theology as a vehicle to experience. If I was to drink from the new wine contained in the doctrine of the Sabbath, I might have to live as if my life depended on God. If I drank from the new wine housed in the doctrine of the Trinity, I might have to grapple with a life of self sacrifice even under suffering death.
Derek:It's a it's dangerous for us to drink from the experiences that theology houses because what if there's not enough new wine left for us to have real sustained experiences of God and his power? It's easier to tuck that good new wine away in the back of our closets and forget about it and wait until the next batch comes out in the new heavens and the new earth. We're so focused on the future realization of the promise. We're not empowered to live radically now, motivated by Christ's finished work. So rather than living now, a lot of Christianity is biding our time as we hold out for future hope.
Derek:Don't get me wrong. As my body ages, I'm getting more pumped for a new heavens and earth. But as with Abraham's ultimate hope being in God and not Isaac, and as with Israel's ultimate hope being in God, not the promised land, so our hope for tomorrow has to be grounded in the past in the finished work of Jesus. That's the beauty of tradition. Traditions are tangible means intended to remind us of the grounding of our hope, especially the Lord's table, which my church does every week.
Derek:It's a recentering of a hope grounded in the past and the finished work of Jesus. The God who brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt is the God who has brought us out of the bondage and slavery of sin. He has bought us with a price. We are his, and no one can pluck us from the father's hands. While we look forward to what will one day be, and rightly so, it is what now is that gives us the power to move out from our complacency and into the world with power.
Derek:We can give generously without fear of how we'll be provided for tomorrow. We can love self sacrificially, knowing that our life is hidden in Christ. We can maintain moral integrity and pass up pragmatic power plays because Jesus Christ himself demonstrated that the greatest power the universe has ever seen came in the act and seeming ineffectiveness of cross. Jesus won't just bring a restored kingdom. The gospels tell us that the kingdom of God was at hand.
Derek:He brought it. Jesus won't just reign in the future. He sits at the right hand of the father now. He won't just have every nation bow in the Escaton. He is making the nations his footstool as we speak.
Derek:We aren't waiting on our blessing. We have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms now. We, the complacent, have lost hope not because we have no future towards which we look and move. We so often lack hope because we have forsaken the foundation upon which we are to stand. As one of my favorite apologists says, our feet are firmly planted in midair.
Derek:Jesus is our firm foundation, and in him, we have a hope which pulls us out of our complacency and moves us towards a radical life which might otherwise seem foolish were it not true. Last week at my church, we sang words, and and the words said we can bear our cross as we await our crown. And I think if I were to rewrite that song for today's discussion, however, I'd change it just a little bit. We can bear our cross because he already wears his crown. Jesus is seated in power in the heavenlies and has plead our case before the father.
Derek:He has given us his spirit and calls us to radical conformity now. Today, when you partake of the bread and wine, don't forget that this is a sign God has given to us, not only to remind us of this great hope, but to provide us with a real experience as God's grace meets us in the elements. This is our hope out of complacency, the gospel. Nothing more and nothing less than the finished work of Jesus.
