The Father's Heart: MDW & Why Sacrifice Matters

To judge from the culture, Memorial Day Weekend is a time for people to hold cookouts and for a bunch of people to get drunk and make bad decisions.  In other words, it is a time to engage in pampering yourself and focusing exclusively on you having a good time.

And yet, we know that the holiday is set aside as a time to remember those men and women who have sacrificed their lives in the defense of the United States of America through military service.  It is a day to commemorate self-sacrifice and valor.  These admirable qualities are often overlooked in today's increasingly self-centered society.

Sadly, many churches have the same problem.  With an ever-increasing consumer mentality dominating our culture, so many people ask, "what's in it for me?"

In culture, we can easily attribute this to the falling away from faith.  In the church, however, we can probably trace this back to a lack of understanding about the foundation of following Christ.

A lot of people boil Christianity down to the idea of proper behavior.  If you follow Christ, you should follow this lengthy list of do's and don't's.  The focus is constantly on the rules.  The problem with a fixation on rule-following is that it misses the point of following Christ--RELATIONSHIP. Also, when someone falls short of the ideal that God has for them according to those rules without a proper understanding of the healing power of God in restoring broken people and using them for great purposes, they might understandably walk away from Christ in shame.

Even looking the grand-daddy of all rules--the Ten Commandments, we can see that the law that God had given to the Israelites was really more about relationship than behavior.

What?  Did I just say that?  How can that be?

Andy Stanley writes in The Grace of God, that we should note that the rules came AFTER the relationship.  God initiated a relationship with Abraham, like a bazillion years earlier.  He pursued Abraham's heart and the heart of each succeeding generation.

He was a personal God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  And Exodus 20 begins by reminding Moses that "I am the Lord YOUR God"  not "Lord THE God."  Before God hit Moses with the Ten Commandments, He reminded Moses of the pre-existing relationship with the Israelites.  Andy Stanley writes, "God initiated a relationship with His people even before he told them what the rules were." 

Wow.  If you are like me, you probably never looked at that from that perspective.

Why is this important and what does it have to do with Memorial Day and sacrifice?

Because as Andy Stanley points out, "Rules without relationship lead to rebellion.  God understands human nature.  So He gave the Israelites rules after they shared a relationship."

Because God is a God of relationship.  Your value to Him is not found in WHAT YOU DO FOR Him.  Your value is found in YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO Him.  He wants your heart.  And from that heart will flow obedience, service to others, worship, and yes, sacrifice.

So many people miss that point. Sacrifice and serving others is born out of relationship.

It is not in our own strength that we can keep God's commandments, but out of the overflow of an intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Putting others first and sacrificing your life for something larger than yourself is not commonly found in human nature, but it can be!  It is a reflection of the Father's heart for us.  Jesus made that point abundantly clear in his brief time here on earth and through His heart-breaking sacrifice on the cross borne out of love.

Those men and women who have willingly laid down their lives for us have given a powerful example for the world of the kind of self-sacrificing love that would be commonplace if people would just embrace their identity as a CHILD OF GOD.

If you think that being a Christian is all about following restrictive rules, you are missing the heart of God.  Yes, He wants obedience, but He wants your heart first and foremost.  Jesus wasn't a huge fan of the pharisees--a group of "rules" fanboys if ever there was one.  He was looking for something more than simple rule-following.  He was looking for something more INTIMATE, like RELATIONSHIP.

Not convinced?  Just think about it this way--most of the time when you mess up and do something really destructive in your life, it is born out of a selfish motivation.  In other words, you usually hurt yourself and others when you are motivated by prioritizing yourself--your needs, your wants, your desires.  When you put other people first by serving them and sacrificing for them, you very rarely end up engaging in destructive behavior.   Nowhere is that contrast more dramatic than on Memorial Day weekend as people engage in binge-drinking and self-indulgence to commemorate those who gave up their lives so that others could taste and retain freedom.

So, given that context, let's re-examine Jesus' greatest commandments in Matthew 22:36-40:

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Obviously, not every person who has died in the service of the military was a Christian.  They do, however, give us a glimpse of the power that "the greatest commandment" has in changing our world. Loving God will transform you.  Loving others will change the world.  Doing both is the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its purest form.

Take some time this weekend to thank God for the people who sacrificed for your freedom.  Take a moment to think about what motivated them.  Take some time to seek the heart of God and just see if it will motivate you to do the same.

Branding Your Identity

Who are you really?

Who or what do you measure yourself against?  Honestly.  Think about this right now.  We all have this ongoing internal monologue about who we are.  Wait, you don't?  It's just me?

Assuming I'm not crazy and you have also spent a lifetime measuring your self worth by some standard somewhere, what is it?

Do you even know?

Our culture is kinda obsessed right now with branding, and re-branding, and image, and social media projections that have no basis in reality.  We're all obsessed with pretending to be something that we are not.  And this overwhelming focus on our false facades has completely cut us off from anything real.  For that reason, so many in today's society feel unsettled.  Unaccomplished.  Unimportant.  Unheard. 

We're binge-watching and tweeting away a FALSE life of no significance when GOD has an epic adventure awaiting just outside our door if we will just focus on what is TRUE.

In the JRR Tolkien novel, The Hobbit, there is a special moment early in the book where Gandalf touches on this idea.  Gandalf has mischievously selected a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, to join a throng of dwarves on an adventure to reclaim their treasure from a dragon named Smaug.  For those of you who aren't nerds, I will explain that a hobbit would probably be the last creature you'd take on an adventure of any kind.  They are short, fat, lazy, and not the sharpest tools in the shed.  They don't stray far from home, and they spend most of the day eating.  

The dwarves were not amused.  They questioned Gandalf's selection of Bilbo.  In response, Gandalf said of Bilbo, "There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself."

Gandalf saw a potential in Bilbo before anyone else did--including Bilbo.

And recently, I've been realizing the same is true of us.  In my own life, the voice that I've listened to in the inner monologue of my self-identity has been a hostile one. It told me that I didn't measure up.  It told me that I messed up too many things to be a success in life.  It told me that I wasn't as good as this person, or that one, or really anyone.  I'm not worth it.

It sounds childish for a nearly 40 year old to write this.  I get it.  And there's good reason for that. It's because I really was like a child cowering in fear.  The feeling of helplessness is like nothing that I can truly put into words.  Fear paralyzed me from moving forward and from seeing who I really am.  Fear caused me to passively accept defeat and embrace definitions for myself that were not TRUE.  

I believe that each person deep down inside answers two questions:

1.  Why was LOST cancelled? 

2.  What was that ending about?

Just kidding (for the most part.)  I believe the two questions that define everything in our life are:

1.  Who am I?

2.  Why am I here?

And how we answer that about ourselves determines our response to every aspect of life.  GOD has one answer for us:

Jeremiah 1:5:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;

Before you were born I sanctified you;

Jeremiah 29:11:

11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

2 Corinthians 6:18:

“I will be a Father to you, And you shall be My sons and daughters, Says the Lord Almighty.”

Sons and Daughters.  Known before we were formed.  Planned.  Created.  Given a future.  Thoughts of peace and not evil.  HOPE.

How often do we really listen to that?  Honestly?

If you are anything like me, not much.

Too often we compare ourselves to just about everything else--other people, standards and ideals that we will never meet, expectations, the words of others, our past.  These voices and thoughts drown out the still, small voice that assures us that we are LOVED.  That we are FORGIVEN.  That we are PRECIOUS.  

FEAR is one very powerful stronghold in the life of a human being.  It can keep you from the things you are destined to do and drive you to destructive behaviors designed to deaden your heart's pull toward your purpose.  It can simultaneously be a hidden and unseen force and a powerful prison from which you can't seem to free yourself.  FEAR can completely cut off the supply of HOPE coming from God and cause a person to be completely immune to words of life and hope spoken by loved ones and friends.

Just like Gandalf, however, God wants to silence those doubting voices.  God has a bigger plan and dream for your life than you could ever possibly fathom.  

Like Bilbo, however, you need to awaken your true identity and stop falling for false comparisons. When you stop accepting the false identity you believe about yourself, you will begin to see the sunlight.  A new day will begin.  God will reveal Himself to you in a new and more powerful way.  

When you correctly answer the question of who you are, you will be open to what massively important and amazingly life-altering journey that God has for you.  

Walk with me in this struggle.  Let's cast out fear and embrace our purpose.  I bet the world will thank us for it.

You are no longer a SLAVE of FEAR, you are a CHILD of GOD: