Called to Obedience...Even When It's Inconvenient

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Exodus 17:1-7
True story about a woman we’ll call Jill.

It all started after Jill’s marriage ended. There she was, a single mom with a mortgage. Shortly thereafter, she lost her business.

Fortunately, she was able to get another job. But it was100% commission and she wondered how she was going to make it as she built up clientele and referrals.

In the midst of this turmoil, it struck Jill that it had been awhile since she had given God much thought. She went to a worship service one Sunday and heard the preacher challenge the congregation to consider tithing. The Bible speaks of believers giving 10% from the tops of their paychecks. That’s a tithe.

The pastor challenged the congregation with God’s words to the people of Israel in the Old Testament book of Malachi: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

Jill had no idea what sorts of blessings God might have in mind for her and her child, but as she prayerfully considered those words, she decided that this was as good a time as any to put God first.

She realized that the Christian isn’t required to give a specified amount in offering to God. Jesus wants our whole lives, not just 10%, after all. But Jill felt that her tithe would be one way she would keep the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” and the first part of Jesus’ Great Commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

Jill remembered God’s past blessings and above all, the blessing of new life that belongs to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ as God, Savior, and Lord over their lives. Jill felt that these past blessings were good reason to trust God now. The following Friday, Jill received her paycheck. It was next to nothing. But on Saturday, she wrote a check equaling 10% of her skimpy pay for her offering.

“The funny thing is,” Ann and I have heard her say, “after that I always had what I needed. God took care of 100% of our needs on 90% of my income.”

Over time, Jill’s financial situation improved. Eventually, she joined our former congregation. On the first Sunday that she visited with us, Jill heard me say during the service, “If you are a first-time visitor, you’re not expected to make an offering; it’s our privilege to worship with you today.” When Jill heard that, she later told us, she thought, “There is no way you can keep me from giving my tithe, buddy!” Jill remembered God’s past faithfulness, even in a hard time, and, determined to obey His call in her life, her relationship with God was strengthened and deepened.

This is not a sermon about money. It’s about something else.

We Lutherans believe that justification by grace through faith—the salvation of sinners from sin and death through what Christ has done for us and through our faith in Christ—is the central doctrine of Biblical faith. But we also believe that it’s not the only doctrine of our faith.

We also confess that all who believe in Jesus are called to obedience to the will of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That also is a doctrine of Biblical faith. Martin Luther wrote: “When our Lord Jesus Christ said, Repent!, he meant for the whole life of the believer to be one of repentance.”

Repentance, you know, is more than mere sorrow for sin, it’s a constant turning to God in faith and in obedience to God’s will. We are to always hold our lives up for examination in the light of the Ten Commandments and seek forgiveness and the amendment of our lives through Christ. Obedience to God, however imperfectly rendered by we human beings, is the proper response to a life transformed by the grace and goodness of God, given to us through Jesus Christ...even when it’s inconvenient.

The same God Who claims us in Holy Baptism had saved His ancient people, the Hebrews or Israelites, when He led them through the waters of the sea and sent those same waters to drown the armies of Egypt, their one-time captor nation. Our first lesson, from Exodus, finds the Hebrews in the midst of their forty-year journey through the wilderness, heading to the land God had promised to their ancestor Abraham.

God’s people often found their forty-year trek an inconvenient time to be obedient to God. But God expected them to be obedient nonetheless.

Please pull out the Celebrate insert and look at the first lesson. Read verse 1 with me silently, please:

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.

Now, the wilderness of Sin has nothing to do with sinfulness. “Sin” here is just a word related to “Sinai, S-i-n-a-i,” a name for the entire region through which the Hebrews were traveling.

We’re told that the people were moving by stages, in the orderly fashion commanded by God. The place God commanded them to go had no drinking water.

Had they stopped and thought, they might have remembered...

• the ten plagues that God performed in Egypt to spring them loose from slavery; or 
• God parting the sea to get the Egyptian army off their tails; or 
• that just a short time before this, when also facing thirst, God had turned bitter water sweet and drinkable for them; or 
• that only recently, God had provided them with meat and manna when they were hungry. 

But, like all of us sometimes facing life’s wilderness experiences, the Hebrews forgot God and His past help.

I once heard a speaker ask a group of us, “What was the thing you were most worried about one year ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago?” All of us were hard pressed to remember the answers to any of those questions. The point: The God Who has helped you through past difficulties is capable of doing the same thing for you in today’s wilderness. God is still in the blessing business; we shouldn’t allow panic, worry, or challenges cause us to forget that!

Read verse 2, please.

The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 

The Hebrews seemed to operate under the assumption that God would only allow easy times to accompany them through the wilderness. They couldn't imagine now that God had delivered them from Egypt He would ever allow any bad or difficult times come to them.

We can entertain similar thoughts. But that’s “magical thinking,” not real life faith. If God the Father didn’t insulate God the Son from the cross, what makes us think that any of us will be insulated from the realities of life—from the wilderness—in a fallen world?

The good news though, is that the God Who has conquered sin and death through the cross and Christ’s empty tomb gives all who trust in Him strength for our journeys through life and the certain hope of eternity with God!

Read verses 3 and 4 silently, please.

But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" So Moses cried out to the Lord, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 

Look at Moses’ prayer and see how self-absorbed it is: “What shall I do…?” “They are almost ready to stone me.”

Moses here seems to forget that it’s God Who has freed and provided for His people in the wilderness, not him.  God is the shepherd; Moses is only God's imperfect human underling.

Moses suffers from the common workaholic tendency to think that the fate of the entire universe depends on him. (Believe me, I know what I’m talking about!)

Moses forgot that God is God and that he wasn’t. This is why our psalm for today says that Moses and his generation weren’t allowed to enter the promised land. Disobedience has its consequences even when we are repentant and God forgives us our sins. (I know about this, too. Even though I know God loves me and in Christ my sins are forgiven, I suffered a heart attack last summer, caused by my making the same mistake that Moses made, forgetting that God is God and I'm not! Even forgiven sinners must sometimes wrestle with the consequences of their sin.)

Read verses 5 and 6 please:

The Lord said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." 

The message God gave by telling Moses to use his staff could not have been clearer. This was the same staff that God told Moses to use to turn the waters of Egypt blood red and undrinkable in one of the plagues God used to force Egypt’s king, the Pharaoh, to let His people go.

God was reminding Moses and the people of Israel that, no matter the crisis, His power was undiminished. He could provide for His people.

Water is still known to run through lime deposits in the Sinai Peninsula today. But in bringing water from this rock in Sinai, the Creator of the universe bent creation itself to His purposes for His people. The God Who raised His Son from the dead to give life to all who believe in Christ can do similar things for those who trust and obey Him today.

Read verse 7, please:

[Moses] called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?” 

Moses gave two names to the place. Massah means test. God had tested the Hebrews faith and the Hebrews had, contrary to God’s commandment, put God to the test. Meribah is translated as quarrel. But it has a more specific meaning; it’s the word used when a plaintiff sues someone else in court. The people thought they were bringing suit against Moses, but really their beef had been with God. Their question was, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

We may be tempted to ask that same question at times. I'll never forget a Saturday afternoon in my first parish when I was called to a hospital in Toledo, where a member of the congregation had been life-flighted. While using a torch to cut a barrel in half for some neighbor boys, the barrel had exploded and crashed into his skull. When I arrived at the ER, he looked like someone who had been through a battle. The doctors said that his prognosis was hopeless. His mother, a wonderfully faithful woman who had endured the deaths of her husband and a grown child already, kept asking of this calamity that had befallen this son, the father of small children, "How could God have let this happen?" Where had God been? she wondered. We've all been in that wilderness!*

But, as our Gospel lesson reminds us, the God Who caused water to spring from a rock in the wilderness has come in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, to be the living water from heaven!

Jesus refreshes and makes new the thirsty souls of all who trust in Him and live lives of repentance and obedience to Him.

May we turn each day to Jesus, even in the inconvenient wilderness times of our lives, and live! Amen

*I'm happy to report that the man in question not only survived, thanks to the prayers of many, but is strong and well to this day!

First Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (February 24, 2008)

[Every week, I try to post a these explorations of the Bible lessons around which worship will be built on the following Sunday. The idea is to help the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. Others may be helped, too, since our lessons are those appointed to be used by what's called the Revised Common Lectionary. That's explained here.]

The Bible Lessons:
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

The Prayer of the Day:
Merciful God, the fountain of living water, you quench our thirst and wash away our sin. Give us this water always. Bring us to drink from the well that flows with the beauty of your truth
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen

General Comments:
1. Each of these lessons are unique and have their own important themes. But a single motif runs through all of them and a single theme unites them.

The motif is water.

In the Old Testament lesson, there is a crisis of faith experienced by Moses and the people of Israel when, during their forty years in the wilderness, they run out of water and see no ready supply at hand. They doubt that God will provide it for them.

The Psalm recalls this incident, calling a later generation of Israelites to trust in God.

In Romans, the apostle Paul uses the image of water to speak of how God's love is "poured into" the hearts of believers through Jesus Christ.

Finally, in the Gospel lesson, Jesus' encounter with a woman at a well is the occasion for Him to describe Himself as "living water."

Water, of course, is fundamental to life. According to Wikipedia. com, "To function properly, the body requires between one and seven liters of water per day to avoid dehydration..." Scientists tell us that while human beings can live for long periods of time ingesting only water. And, of course, water is essential for agriculture. Wars have been fought over water.

So, you can see the point of all this water imagery: God is as essential to life as water AND it's a gift.

2. The theme is one that extends from last week: Faith or, more accurately, trust.

The Israelites, who had seen so many of God's miraculous signs, didn't trust that God would help them in the wilderness.

In Romans, Paul demonstrates to those who think his faith is bunk because his life was so marked by pain and adversity, that a Christian's faith is not based on God making things easier for us in this life. We know that our faith is authentic when, as we trust God, we experience peace with God. Peace isn't, he says, the absence of difficulty, pain, or tragedy, but reconciliation with God through Christ.

At the end of the Gospel lesson, the people of Samaria, enemies of God's people, believed in Jesus as the long-promised Messiah. Faith in Christ can transform anybody from an enemy to a friend of God.

3. Exodus 17:1-7: This incident is recounted in more detailed form in Numbers 20:1-13.

4. The Wilderness of Sin was a place lying between Elim and Mount Sinai. "Sin" doesn't refer to sinfulness. It's thought that the word has to do with a moon-deity worshiped by some Semitic peoples there. It would also appear to be the word Sinai.

5. This incident, in many ways, echoes incidents recounted in Exodus 16. Those involved the desire of the one-time slaves, recently freed from their captivity in Egypt, for bread and meat. Now, they want water.

6. Chris Haslam interestingly points out that earlier in Exodus, God gradually gained freedom for His people through the performance of ten signs, which He did through Moses. Now, in the wilderness, God undertakes ten tests, each designed to demonstrate the faith--or lack of it--of His people. The question is: Do the people believe in God as their provider? As Howard Wallace notes:

The people appear not to have developed much trust in God’s providence from the provision of the manna, for here again, they begin by complaining to Moses that he has brought them out of Egypt only to kill them, this time by thirst rather than hunger.

The upshot is that the people of Israel and their leader, Moses, fail their tests. God is with them. But the generation God sprang from captivity in Israel--with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, who always trusted in God--won't get into the Promised Land. It's their children who will make it.

Their experience and that of Moses point out that even when we repent for our sins and have our relationship with God restored, there are consequences to our faithlessness. Moses, as is confirmed in his appearance with Jesus at the mount of Transfiguration many centuries later, was and is part of God's kingdom. But by his rebellion, his life here was less than God had in mind for him.

7. The staff God commands Moses to use at Horeb is the same staff Moses had used to strike the Nile River (when God turned the water of Egypt into blood) and which he held up when God caused the waters of the sea to part for the escaping Hebrew slaves.

The staff had no magical powers. It was simply what God used at particular moments and at particular times, a means by which Moses was signaling God's presence and power. The act that God performs when Moses strikes the stone with the staff addresses the key issue behind the quarreling and questioning of the people: "Is the Lord among us or not?" (v. 7)

The same issue is addressed, in a different way, in the next incident recounted in Exodus. There, God's people face enemies who want to prevent their advance, the Amalekites. Moses puts Joshua in charge of recruiting and leading a group of Israelites in battle. In the meantime, Moses goes to the top of a hill and holds his staff aloft to God.

Again, the staff isn't magical. By lifting the staff to God, Moses was seeking the help of God. It was a confession that the battle to do God's will--which entering a promised land was--could not be done unless God accomplished it.

The staff may be easier to understand for those believers of a more sacramental bent of mind. When it comes to the bread and wine of Holy Communion or the water of Holy Baptism, we Lutherans, for example, believe that something really happens in these sacraments. The presence of God comes down to earth. The Spirit really does move in the water of Baptism to claim the baptized as a child of God. Jesus really is mysteriously present, body and blood, in the bread and the wine. But these elements remain, at the same time, what they were: water, bread, wine. As Martin Luther responds, in The Small Catechism, to the question about Baptism, "How can water do such great things?":

It is not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such word of God in the water. For without the word of God the water is simple water and no baptism. But with the word of God it is a baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost...

Luther writes in similar terms in answering two questions about Holy Communion:

How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things?

It is not the eating and drinking, indeed, that does them, but the words which stand here, namely: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins. Which words are, beside the bodily eating and drinking, as the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins.

Who, then, receives such Sacrament worthily?

Fasting and bodily preparation is, indeed, a fine outward training; but he is truly worthy and well prepared who has faith in these words: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins.

But he that does not believe these words, or doubts, is unworthy and unfit; for the words For you require altogether believing hearts.

Like the bread, wine, and water of the two Sacraments, Moses' staff in itself wasn't special. But what God did with it for one who faithfully used it in accordance with God's command was special.

8. I find it so interesting here that God shows such patience with the people--and with Moses--in spite of their whininess. Remember, this incident is a test from God. Like many of the tests of faith we go through in life, there will be no Technicolor sign posts saying, "This is a test of your faith." Often, it's only after we've gone through--and failed--a test of faith that we see it for what it was.

The time to prepare for a test is before it comes. We're prepared when, in the good and easier times of life, we rely on God, seek Him out in prayer, read His Word, attend to worship, and seek to do His will. God is close at hand all the time.

[More tomorrow, I hope.]