God's Way or No Way?
Heidelberg Catechism • Sermon • Submitted
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Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
Scripture: Matthew 16:24-28; Titus 2:11-14
Heidelberg Catechism: Lord’s Day 49 (Psalter 921)
Sermon Title: God’s Way or No Way?
We are returning to the Lord’s Prayer tonight, and the third request that we turned our attention to a few moments ago. I want us to think about the rhythm that we use to say the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven.” It can easily seem from the way we say the request before us tonight that we are simply repeating and confirming what we looked at last time. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” is not too far off from, “your kingdom come.” Especially when the Catechism’s focus on the kingdom was mainly related to us in the present. Answer 123 says that we are asking for God to rule us that we would submit to him, to keep and grow the church, and to destroy the devil’s work and everything conspiring against God and his word. There is a future sense that has us thinking about Christ coming again and bringing the fullness of God’s kingdom along, but the kingdom has already begun to take shape.
Aren’t we just restating those things now, asking for God’s will to be done here as is already occurring in heaven? Yes and no. Certainly the will of God brings about and will continue to bring about his kingdom. We as humans, even as covenant children of Almighty God, are not able to do that without his help. There is nothing that we can do that makes God say, “Hmm, I wish I had thought of that first.” No, all good that we do is done through the Spirit, and God is the source that he would be brought glory and his purposes fulfilled.
And yet there is a difference that Jesus was teaching his disciples and us from what we have already requested. We have asked for God to bring us into submission, but now we are asking God to help us be obedient with our wills to his will, and to have his divine aid truly help us as we carry out our work in this world. Those two words “will” and “work” are central to guiding our focus as we think about this request, and how it looks in our lives.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the first time I went through the Lord’s Prayer in a sermon series was after my second year of seminary, in a church internship over near Hamilton, Ontario. That was only three years ago, and yet it seems like it has been much longer. I came to this Lord’s Day, and I told a bit of my story. A young man who had grown up in Chicagoland, went to Dordt College, worked in Kentucky and Tennessee during those summers, and who was a student at that point in Holland, Michigan. I shared how at different times throughout high school and college I believe God called me to ministry through short-term mission trips, people that I interacted with, and a love for teaching Scripture and understanding doctrine. Throughout that process, I said that a drastic change had occurred from my plans to work in youth ministry and then juvenile corrections and then settling on pastoral ministry.
What I just told you in two minutes took me almost half of the message that night. I shared those things because I truly believed that’s part of what this answer of rejecting our own will and obeying God’s involves. I was good at talking back to God. Telling him, “I know what’s best for me. I know what my plan is. I’ve got a solid idea of what is to come.” Yet over and over again, I believe God let me do my thing for a time and then gradually or abruptly sometimes drew me back in to where he would have me.
I realize now that my coming around to ministry part of the way through college was not so drastic. I have met pastors who had successful construction businesses, or for some of the men in our area, were involved in farming or trucking for some time before entering into full-time ministry. At the same time, going into full-time pastoral ministry is not the only or most frequent way of following God’s will for believers. But I do think there has to be a genuine change at some point in each believer’s life when God calls us into his service.
But how often do believers pray and request of God “your will be done…,” and yet often have no desire for it to actually happen. We want God’s will to take effect on earth, just not too strongly on our lives. Most people would rather request, and maybe live under the impression that God’s will should conform to our will. But this is not how God intends for us to live, is it? “If anyone would come after me?” John Calvin sums that up, “If anyone would be my disciple.” “He must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” As we read Jesus went on talk about their souls—invest everything here and now securing and boasting about your life on earth—but miss out on eternal salvation, and you have lost your life. Be willing to lose it, to suffer, to be humiliated, even to die for your faith—those will find it.
Paul writes along a very similar idea. If salvation is ours, then we are to have learned to say “no” to ungodliness and worldly passions. To live, or maybe to say “yes” to self-controlled, upright, godly lives while we wait. The world he was living in did not have televisions and computers and smartphones and magazines constantly projecting images and ads of what you need to do or have or where you must go before you die to consider your life well-lived. But they had their own fun and pleasure activities, their own ideas of satisfaction—most which are not too different from today. Jesus and Paul looked all around and say, “You could do what everyone else is doing, but it comes at a price. Serve yourself, treat yourself, and have the world, that’s what we are told—take advantage of every opportunity, but is that really self-control, is that denying ourselves, taking up the cross of being a Chrisitan disciple, and following Jesus?”
We should not read this as being told that if you are a true Christian disciple, then your life should be miserable, there should not be any fun. Certainly not, there are times to experience blessing as well as pain. There are times where we can do things and go places that allow us experience the beauty of God’s creation, but do we look at life to be all about us, or is the focus on living to God.
What people want, and that does not exclude many Christians is often what’s convenient, what is fun and generally pain free for us. What will make for really good memories or a good story to share—not necessarily what will make us grow or look out greater for others. “Not your will, but mine be done,” a prayer for God to be successful in our dreams and plans likely is not the prayer we direct to God with our lips but we do offer it with the prayer of lives.
If we look back in Scripture, this request for woman’s will or man’s will is heard all the way back into ancient days. Moses, saying “I don’t know if I can speak, send someone else, Lord.” Gideon saying, “If it’s you Lord, reveal a sign and then one more sign.” Even Peter saying to Jesus, just before we started reading in Matthew, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you,” and those words coming in response to Jesus predicting his own suffering and death. But our need to present this request before God truly addresses the origin of our needing to pray. Adam and Eve, after receiving the will of God in the garden of Eden took the forbidden fruit, and by eating it, deciding that they were not going to do God’s will, but seek their own.
What about my freedom though we say, my choices, my opinions, doesn’t this just make us puppets? Does this mean there’s always only one right way and any other option is wrong? Do all of life’s choices have to be looked at as God’s way or no way? Well, yes…and no. On the one hand there are two choices as we have been hearing out of Titus. When we’re praying that God’s will be done, and we have this rejection of our wills, Scripture from what God commands the Israelites regarding how to live among the pagan neighbors all the way through the New Testament epistles to the early church teaches that there is godliness and ungodliness, in which because of the grace of God already appeared to men calls for us to deny ourselves to certain worldly things. I’m not going to give a list tonight of things which might be categorized as “no way” but we need to recognize those desires and practices which can get in the way of our relationship to God and his eternal will, and mark them as “no.”
But this rigid distinction of God’s way or no way is also not the way to look at it, and I think it’s this side that is so connected to our prayers. If we draw a hard line that when we obey our wills completely rather than God’s, then that should mean we have to make up the ground and figure out how to get back on track, and if we do, we go back on where we left. That’s not the image of the Catechism nor of Scripture I don’t think. Surely God does have a purpose in all things. There will be things that don’t happen according to our desire, things that might hurt; all things in life that we desire to control, we want things to go our way and we even cry out to God in prayer asking that they be done, adding “Lord willing.” We’re so quick to divide ourselves from him though.
A spirit of prayer, however, I believe, bring us into a Romans 12:2 mindset, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will.” Is it God’s way or no way, well no, because in us there is to be a transformation that’s taking place, which goes back to what we covered before, “If prayer is not filled with the recognition of God’s glory and his complete otherness, then it becomes just a list of things we can do on our own and are asking God to bless.” We don’t pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” meaning just cut off our wills to obey yours like robots, rather we request God’s help, that the Lord to do the renewing of our minds, to submit ourselves again to him, so that we have a will but it is in line with God’s.
It is not intended to become a burden on our lives, though it may very well feel costly in this life, but if anything it gives us freedom to do what needs to be done more than anything else, give joy and glory to God and to love our neighbors. God’s way is to influence all aspects of our life, not just a compartment that we create and call our faith. When we receive that influence, we carry out kingdom work. May it be a blessing when we get into the groove of finding, trusting, and being worked over by God’s will, but as he continues to bring his kingdom, may we continue to request that his will is made known and at work in the world and in our lives. Amen.
“Whatever happens, happens; I’m sure God has a reason.” Isn’t that how we often make sense of our lives, and then when all of a sudden something surprisingly good happens, we say give an extra praise to God? But this prayer request all of a sudden is no longer a casual statement; it’s a request taught here that digs to the deepest pain of humanity, the hole which following our will leads into, a hole where the original intent was for our wills to obey and to praise and glorify God in a multitude of ways, but which also gave way to the pain of our desire. “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We pray now that he would counteract what we have done, that the destruction we’ve caused with our will, thinking we know what’s best without any consultation. We request that God would so fully enact his being and his will on earth as it is already and always has been in heaven, our brokenness does not break our God.