Today we are in the second week of our January series called, ‘It’s not about me’ and I hope you were able to hear Barry’s introductory sermon last week… his sermon focused on Philippians 2:1-11, a profoundly important passage that tells us that: ‘considering others as better than ourselves’ and ‘not thinking too highly of ourselves and ‘being humble’ are the keys to living an ‘It’s not about me’ life… the kind of life that we here at Grace believe God wants all followers of Jesus to live. Now, Barry did say that living this ‘It’s not about me’ life is difficult, primarily because for most of us, me included, our natural tendency is to be ‘all about me.’ Plus, the bulk of what we hear in our culture, particularly in advertising and in much of the media is that we are entitled to having it our way. I’m even finding that in this stage of my life I’m subtly being pushed to think almost exclusively about who I want to be and what I want to do in my later years. And to be honest, many of these messages aren’t all that subtle… the message is that after years of raising children and putting in so many long, hard days I’ve now earned the right to focus on me. And I’ll admit that looking at life through a ‘Yes, it is all about me’ lens can sound pretty sweet at times. In fact, last week I was hoping that Barry would add a bit of, ‘Of course, if you’re over a certain age and you’ve put in your time, you can now ignore much of this ‘It’s not about me’ stuff and focus on yourself.’ But he didn’t. And the reason he didn’t is that Philippians 2 doesn’t tell us that ‘being humble’ and ‘not thinking too highly of yourself’ aren’t stages-of-life values… No, Philippians 2 tells us that they are followers-of-Jesus values. So, I guess, this ‘It’s not about me’ stuff is all about me, too.
Of course, if we are taking a month to talk about it not being about me, that begs the question, ‘Who, then, is it all about?’ And last week Barry did a great job of showing us how Philippians 2 also tells us the answer to this question… is ‘It is all about Jesus.’ Now, I know that this answer, ‘It’s all about Jesus,’ sounds like what we have to say here in a church… but we don’t mean this in a cliché way at all. Interestingly, Jesus himself, said that our lives should be all about him. We find him saying this in another very important passage, Matthew 11 verses 27-30. Why don’t we all turn to this passage and see what Jesus had to say about, ‘Who it is all about.’ You can find this passage on page ??? of our house Bibles. Hello to the people online… Pray!
Let me give us some context for what we are about to read. Earlier in this chapter Jesus had been talking about how hard it is to get through to people who have already made up their minds about things… and, in particular, those who’d made up their minds about him! He’d pointed out that a number of people had criticized John the Baptist because John had lived such a strict, even severe, life… he lived out in the wilderness, he’d worn rough, camel hair clothing and he’d eaten locus and wild honey, for heaven’s sake! This was just too over-the-top for a lot of the religious folk. But then, the very same people who had criticized John for being too strict were now criticizing Jesus because he wasn’t living a strict enough life… Jesus ate and drank and laughed and associated with all sorts of people and these same folk, who’d made up their minds about how everyone should live, were now calling Jesus a drunk and a glutton; they’d made up their minds about Jesus and they were sticking to it! Then Jesus pointed out that even in the face of his many amazing, life-giving miracles, many people still didn’t believe that Jesus had been sent by God. They’d already made up their minds about what was spiritual and since so much about Jesus didn’t fit into their way of thinking, they weren’t going to change their minds. Their conclusion, in fact, was that Jesus was doing these miraculous things by the power of Satan. And you can feel Jesus shaking his head in these verses. It’s no surprise that, in what was clearly a moment of great frustration and disappointment, Jesus called out to God in verse 25 and prayed “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike. 26 Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way! You can feel Jesus’ deep thanksgiving for those whose hearts weren’t so hardened that they could see that Jesus was bring them truth from God.
And then he says this and now we are getting to the question of the day, ‘Who is it all about?’ I picture Jesus taking a deep breath… and standing silently for a while… and with a look that says, ‘Okay, now we are going to get serious!’ saying, 27 “My Father has entrusted everything to me. No one truly knows the Son except the Father, and no one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” I have to stop right here and tell you that no one in 1st Century Israel would ever have referred to God as their father… not their personal father in the way Jesus unashamedly does here! They would say, ‘Our father,’ including all Jews together, when they spoke of God, but never, ‘My father’ like this. And Jesus didn’t just say God was his father, he said that he and his father have a relationship that is very exclusive. And look at what Jesus was claiming that HIS father had done: he said, ‘My father has entrusted everything to me!’ The Greek word that is translated as ‘entrusted’ here in the house Bible, is ‘paradidomai’ (paradidomi), and ‘paradidomai’ is a big word. It has far more power than a simple ‘entrusted.’ It was a word that was used to say that something or someone was handed over to someone… it has a sense of forcefully or very purposefully placing something or someone into the trustworthy hands of someone else… it is a word that carried the underlying assumption that that something or someone was resolutely given to another person because that person could be trusted to take care of things. It was also used to say that some specific information had been passed on or taught to someone because they could be trusted with this knowledge. I have seen this word translated in all sorts of ways in this verse because I’m sure that translators struggle to get to the deepest core of what Jesus was saying when he is quoted as saying, ‘My Father paradidomai-ed to me everything. Well, in my thinking, I believe that overall Jesus was saying something like this, ‘I know that a lot of people are questioning whether I should be taken seriously, but here is the truth folks, my father, who happens to be the God of the universe, by the way, before he sent me here to you, he passed on to me, he handed over to me, he taught to me and gave to me… ALL THINGS, as in Everything, because he knew he could trust me with everything!’ Now, think about this statement for a minute. Think about what Jesus was literally saying! He was claiming that God, God let me remind you, God had forcefully handed over the knowledge of and the responsibility for everything to him. That’s a very bold statement. In my mind there are only 3 ways responses to a statement like this. First, Jesus could be delusional… crazy even. God hadn’t really handed everything over to him… he wasn’t lying… he believed it, but, come on… he wasn’t in his right mind… everything? Jesus was just out of touch with reality. Second, Jesus could have just be making this up… he only said he had this kind of connection to God to help him gain some sort of power. Him saying, ‘God has entrusted everything to me,’ could simply be a calculated lie. Or third, Jesus could be telling the truth. And I have to say that what he says next in verse 28 doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy or lying… it sounds like someone who knows exactly what he is saying, and he means it completely. Let’s look at verse 28 28 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Notice how Jesus is putting the focus on himself here. This is really important for us to take in when the question is ‘Who is it that it’s really all about?’ Jesus, after telling us that he has been entrusted with everything, wants us to come to him in the difficulties and the hardships and the weariness of life. He doesn’t offer us words of wisdom… he doesn’t suggest practical ways to find margin… he doesn’t recommend the teachings of others to help lead us in a new direction… no, he offers us himself… because what it is all about… is him! And then he goes on in verse 29 to say, 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” Jesus was talking about a one-man yoke here… something that a person put across their shoulders to make carrying a heavy load easier… something that most of the people in the crowd that day would have probably used often, maybe every day, in some way. Jesus was from a carpenter’s family. He knew about yokes. Now, he doesn’t say that he’ll take away the work… he is even implying that the labor that he will give to us will need a yoke… there is going to be some heavy lifting… but if we take on his yoke, we’ll find that his yoke is an easy yoke… that means it will be made specifically for you… it will fit perfectly on your shoulders, and it won’t overwhelm you… and then he adds that the burden you’ll be called to carry is light. I’m sure those words resonated deeply with his listeners the day he first said them… and they can still resonate with us today. And when he said, ‘Let me teach you’ we must keep in mind that the source of his teaching is ‘the everything’ he was given by God. That’s amazing! And then he added something very powerful… he didn’t stop at, “Let me teach you… he went on to tell us why it would be wise to listen to what he has to say, ‘Because I am humble and gentle at heart.’ Now, when we think of someone’s heart, we think of it as the emotional center of a person; it’s the place where we fall in love; our heart is the part of us that fills up when something joyous happens and breaks when something sad happens. But in the ancient world the heart wasn’t thought to be the center of our emotional world. They believed that our guts, our intestines and such, were the well-spring of our emotions. And they also believed that our hearts were the place where our practical decisions and our logical conclusions came from. We believe that the source of our logic and practicality is our brains, but they believed that all rational thought originated in our hearts. So, when Jesus says that he is ‘humble and gentle at heart,’ he isn’t talking about his feelings towards us. This isn’t an emotional statement. What he is saying is this: ‘I’ve thought it through… I have a deep understanding of the realities of your life. I want you to know that I’m not interested in lording over you, and I know that you respond best to gentle things. So, I have come to the wise, logical conclusion that what I need to ask of you practically and the way I should act towards you should only lead to giving you rest.’ I don’t think I am putting words in Jesus’ mouth here… and boy does this encourage me. This passage tells me that Jesus is thinking clearly about you and me; that he knows our circumstances and that he knows what is best for us… he’s thought about it, a lot, and he’s come to some strong conclusions about what you and I need… and so what we need is to let him be what it is all about… because when we do he will take all that he has been given from his father and all that he has been taught by his father and he will use it all wisely, even as he calls us to difficult work on his behalf. And in the process, he will give our souls rest. By the way, the word that is translated as ‘souls’ here is a word that means ‘the entirety of our being’… everything about us. Jesus the one who has been given everything… wants to make certain that everything about us… finds rest. And it all starts with making it ‘all about him.’
I’m convinced that the tendency of mankind broadly is to drift into our own wisdom and our own ways of thinking about things and believe that our own assumptions and our plans and our intensions are wiser than God’s. Actually, this tendency for just about everyone to ‘go it my own way’ and make it ‘all about me’ is one of the overarching themes of scripture. We see people not taking God up on his offer to teach them his ways everywhere in the Bible… and always to a bad end. In fact, this was such an issue… this not listening to God and not letting him be what it is all about… it was such an issue that the Jews had a song that was purposed to remind people about the importance of surrendering to God and taking him up on letting him lead them into a life filled with his rest. And I know why God wanted his people to have a song like this… because for some reason we were created with the ability to remember song lyrics… I know that when I hear a song often enough, I can’t seem to forget the lyrics. I hate to admit it but when a Herman and the Hermits song from 1965 is playing somewhere, I know the lyrics… It’s uncanny, but it’s true for just about everyone. So, God made certain that a specific song of David’s ended up in the Hebrew song book and that it was sung often… so everyone would remember that ‘it’s not about me!’ I’m just going to read some of the words to this song… a song we now know as Psalm 25 and I’m going to read it from the Message because I think this translation gets to the heart of what God wants us to remember. And what he wants us to remember is that if we set aside thinking that ‘it’s all about me’ and take Jesus up on his offer to let him teach us and lead us, he will give our souls rest. Here are some of the lyrics from Psalm 25: Show me how you work, God; School me in your ways. Take me by the hand; Lead me down the path of truth… Forget that I sowed wild oats; Mark me with your sign of love. Plan only the best for me, God! God is fair and just; He corrects the misdirected and sends them in the right direction. He gives the rejects his hand and leads them step-by-step. From now on I want every road I travel to take me to God… and if I keep my eyes on God, I won’t trip over my own feet.
I’m sure you can see that if you sang these words often enough, they would stay in your mind… how they could become a constant reminder of how ‘it isn’t about me’… it’s all about God and his son Jesus.
A long time ago I went to post graduate school in England… to a theological college where I studied under some of the best minds of 20th Century Christianity. And when the time came for Jennifer and me and our children to return to the states, I had a plan… I knew what I wanted to do with my life now that I had this education. What I planned to do was be a preacher… not necessarily a pastor… but an itinerant preacher… someone that just traveled from church to church who would sweep in and give amazing, awe inspiring messages without having to deal with all the ins-and-outs of local church life. That was my plan… and in retrospect, even though I thought I was planning to do what I believed was ‘God’s work,’ in all honesty, my plan was all about me… about me preaching and being known as an important someone. I don’t want to go into all the details of what happened over the next months, but let’s just say my plans and my intensions weren’t what God had in store for me…. Eventually I ended up needing to find a way to support my family and through some old connections I found a job working in management for a large landscape company here in Indianapolis… and can I say that working there was about as far away from my plans as I could have imagined. And what I soon learned was that while I was tasked with managing a great deal of landscape work… more than that, my real job was managing dozens and dozens of landscape workers. And I’m talking about people who were from every kind of world that you can think of… and I do mean every kind… and almost none of them had a clue that my world, my world of graduate level theological training, even existed. But what was relevant to all these people was how I treated them, if I took an interest in them, if I was fair and kind and spoke to them in ways that showed that I respected them as people no matter what the circumstances of their life might have been. What I had to consciously do was set aside my ‘wisdom’ and my ‘plans’ and my ‘intensions’ and trust that God’s map for my life came from His wisdom… and his humble and gentle heart… and, to be honest, this did take work, but what I eventually realized was that yes, I was functioning as a landscape manager, but what I was becoming was a pastor… someone that people trusted would tell them the truth and care about the achings of their souls. I know I have talked about this time of my life before… but for me, that time is so relevant this morning; God gave me the opportunity to let go of my ‘it’s all about me’ attitude, to let him teach me and begin to honestly live an ‘It’s all about Jesus’ life with people who needed to hear about his humble and gentle heart. And can I say that the results of those years were completely unimaginable… those years changed my heart… my wife’s heart… the tone of our family’s life and I know for certain the lives of a whole slew of people who would never have once thought that they would want to have anything to do with people who called themselves followers of Jesus. I have no idea where my life would have ended up if I had been unwilling to abandon my ‘it’s all about me’ attitude back then. But one thing I know for certain: I would never have been a pastor here at Grace… I may have achieved what I thought I deserved, but I would have never found the rest for my soul that I’ve found doing the hard, yet important, work I’ve been called to do as your pastor.
There is an old hymn, a song that I sang many times as a boy growing up in the church that is a Psalm 25 to me… a song with words that I can’t forget… and they are always in the back of my mind reminding me that it isn’t about me… it’s about Jesus. Here are some of the words:
May the mind of Christ my savior, live in me from day to day by his love and power controlling all I do and say.
May the words of Christ dwell richly in my heart from hour to hour. So that all may see I triumph… only through his power.
May the love of Jesus fill me as the water fills the sea; Him exalting… self-abasing… this is victory.
And here is my prayer for you today to paraphrase David in his 25th Psalm: my prayer is that you will step away from any hint of living an ‘It’s all about me’ life and allow God to show you the right path. That he will lead you by his truth, that he will teach you, and he will continually remind you that he is the God who saves you. And that all day long, each and every day, you will put your hope in Him.