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“God’s
Good Pleasure”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Luke 12:32-40
“Do
not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to
give you the kingdom.”
DEAR SISTERS AND BROTHERS, God the Father has pleasures, and they have
to do with us. Our Father
feels joy, is happy, and is delighted when he gives to us the reality of
his being the Lord of our lives. One
of my favorite quotes has been by a preacher named A.W. Tozer, who
wrote, “God thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers
as any other person may.” God
identifies with us.
Jesus is teaching his earliest disciples, the small
flock, that we are not to be afraid regarding certain issues in this
world because of the very pleasure that our heavenly Father has in
giving to us. And at the
same time, as Jesus is teaching this, if we looked farther down in this
chapter, at verse 50, we would also read Jesus saying, “I
have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under
until it is completed!” Stressfulness
is suffering. And the
baptism Jesus is referring to is his upcoming crucifixion that he knows
about. Jesus is human; he
came down into the trenches, and he knows what it is to be in pain.
And he is the one telling us to stay ready, to keep going, to
hang in there and know that God’s blessing is coming to us because
that is God’s greatest pleasure.
In the Presbyterian Church (USA), our denomination, today is the Sunday
of Homelessness and Affordable Housing.
When I was teaching in Asheville, NC, we had a group of students
involved in community service, and we met a woman, in the beginning of
her later years, who lived in a cabin in the mountains. It was the most poverty oriented situation I had ever seen in
my life. Her cabin only had
one room, about the size of one of our master bedrooms.
She had one couch, one table, one chair. She did not have any electricity; no kitchen, no restroom.
She did have a wood burning stove, candles that she lit at night,
a cord hanging across her ceiling with food wrapped in plastic
bags—and I hope this does not offend you—she had a five gallon
bucket next to her couch that she used with what we call restroom
circumstances.
Certain local ministries found out about her situation—she had been
living in those circumstances for years—they purchased her a trailer
home, connected it with electricity, and filled it with furniture,
kitchen appliances, lighting, and a television. The
students at our school collected pillows, blankets, sheets, and curtains
for her. I went to take them to her one morning, a late morning time,
about 11:00 AM. I drove up
the mountain, knocked on the front door.
She said, “Come in!” I
walked in, she was sitting on her couch, her feet resting on her living
room table, and her TV was showing a sop opera .
She was drinking a beer. And
I thought to myself, “This is great for her. All that she has gone
through, I am so happy that she is able to do what she is now doing.”
I’m sure she knew that God had blessed her.
And she was participating in the very pleasure of God.
In the midst of his own stress, Jesus is telling his closest friends, to
not be afraid even when you find yourself in tough situations; hope for,
be ready for God’s pleasure of blessing you in your life.
He uses one of his little stories, with a house keeper being at the
house, with the responsibility of being ready to let the owner in when
he gets home. He stays
dressed right, lights a lamp, so he can see.
And stays ready for his boss to get home.
Of course, we can imagine someone (even ourselves) in a situation like
that, who has stayed up all most all might long, is tired and worn out,
and starts to think, “Oh well, the boss may have said, ‘I’m coming
back tonight,’ but, I know this boss, and he doesn’t always keep his
word. I’m wiped out. I'm
going to bed.”
When we go through stressful times, we feel pain.
We hurt. We have
questions. Why is God
putting me through this? Where
is God in all this? Am I
being punished because of my sins?
What is going to happen?
In this parable that Jesus is telling, he is talking about going through
a dark night, and even coming to the place where the thinking is that
the night is over. A dark
night is a time in our sufferings where we cannot really understand what
is going on. There is a
sense, in which, even using what we have learned to do and think in our
religion, we still cannot see through the dark.
St. John of the Cross, wrote the spiritual classical, The Dark Night of the Soul. His
teaching seems to be that God allows us to go into a dark night, because
it is in that night when we experience giving up all that we think we
can do to connect us with God, and experience God totally through God
accomplishing it completely for our greatest encounter with God.
The dark night of the soul is the greatest blessing from God in
this life. Through this
kind of belief, we are ready for God the Father to come to us and sit
down and feed us, as He is serving us with His love.
I would like to use this passage to show us where we have already
experienced this. Have you
ever had a time in your life, where your struggles were so difficult,
where your pain was so prevailing, that you could not depart from it?
Have you ever had a time when you did have a doubt about God
will, God’s presence, God’s help, and you were tempted even to give
up what you had claim to believe and understand about God before?
Have you ever had that kind of time and experiences in your thoughts and
mind, and then all of a sudden, you thought to yourself, “Stop
thinking like this. God
does love me.
God will help me. God
will bless us. God is God. So,
I am not going to give up. I
am going to keep on!”
My friends, my sisters and brothers, the main reason we are here
today, is because we all have had that those thoughts before.
And here is what we may hear.
Yes, these were our thoughts; but they did not come from us.
Jesus Christ is the one saying to his disciples, “Do
not be afraid…be dressed for action…be ready for the Son of Man is
coming at an unexpected hour.”
When we have told ourselves not to give up, but to keep on going, and to
keep on looking for God’s being, even in the midst of our stressful
pain, yes we told ourselves this. But,
we only told ourselves this because Jesus Christ downloaded that thought
in our minds and hearts. We
did not create it. Yes, we
think we are talking to ourselves, and we are, but we are only speaking
to ourselves in this way because Jesus Christ gave it to us to think and
believe and hope with.
When I was being brought into the Christian faith, in the Presbyterian
Church. I was riding on a
bus, one day. And when it
pulled over to a stop, a homeless person--who back in those days, I
would have probably called a bum or wino—came on the buss and he sat
down beside me. We did not talk, but when he pulled down the cord to get off
at his stop, he stood up, and turned to me, looked me in the eyes, and
said to me, “Jesus Christ loves me and he will love me all my life.”
He wasn’t trying to evangelize me, by looking at me and saying,
“Jesus will love you all your life if you believe in him and invite
him into your heart.” He
was being the greatest grand witness of God to me.
He spoke to me what he speaks to himself.
And, it is not just him speaking this to himself; he is speaking
this to himself because Jesus led him to say this.
Jesus is speaking this to him, because Jesus loves to give us
what gives God the Father His greatest pleasure.
Let us pray…
Amen
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