The Humility to Follow God

The message given in the Sunday night service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church.  The Bible verses used are 1 Corinthians 3:6-23.

            One of the biggest sins that we rarely talk about is the sin of arrogance.  Whether it comes from conceit, pride, ego, or whatever, arrogance is quite often one of the major sins we human beings commit.

            The Bible does talk about it a lot.  It might be the sin the Old Testament discusses the most.  Arrogance is a recurring theme in almost all of the books of the prophets.  And if we look at the more historical books, such as First and Second Chronicles and First Second Kings, we see arrogance showing up over and over again.  The people of Israel become arrogant and turn away from God.  God stops helping them, and they run into trouble.  The people of Israel humble themselves, turn back to God, and ask for forgiveness.  God forgives them and the nation of Israel prospers.  The people become arrogant and turn away from God again.  And round and round it goes, over and over and over.

            Arrogance is still with us today, of course, and it takes a lot of forms.  Arrogance, really, is one of the biggest things that keeps us from God’s Word.  It’s really kind of amazing how many times we hear about some supposed scholar who has suddenly discovered something in the Bible, some new interpretation of the Scriptures, that no one had ever realized before was there.  I mean, the Bible has not changed in nearly two thousand years, but somehow, someone manages to find something in it that all the greatest Bible scholars in history had missed.  In fact, there’s a book out now by a prominent United Methodist pastor that claims “unpack what the Ten Commandments mean today.”  I’m not sure what part of “thou shalt not” needs to be “unpacked”, but there it is.

            But think of the arrogance involved in these things.  To think that you, at a distance of two thousand years or more, could suddenly find something in the Bible that none of the millions and millions of people who’ve read and studied the Bible had ever been able to see.  That kind of arrogance is incredible, really.

            The Ten Commandments say what they say.  The Bible says what it says.  And while parts of it can be hard to understand, I always go back to the Mark Twain quote.  “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me.  It’s the parts that I do understand.”

            That’s what bothers a lot of us.  The problem is not that we don’t understand what the Bible says.  The problem is that, sometimes, we don’t like what the Bible says.  Sometimes the Bible tells us not to do things we really want to do.  And sometimes the Bible tells us to do things we really don’t want to do.

            When that happens, we have a choice to make.  We can, in humility, submit to God, doing what God has told us to do in God’s Holy Word.  Or, we can, in our arrogance, “re-interpret” the Bible, “unpack” it, find some way to make it say what we want it to say.  We can find some “new meaning” in the Bible that allows us to do the things we want to do and excuses us from doing the things we don’t want to do.

            And of course, if we choose that second way, we don’t admit that’s what we’re doing.  We don’t even admit it to ourselves.  We tell ourselves, just as these supposed scholars do, that we’ve come up with the “true” meaning of God’s word.  But in fact, what we’re doing is exercising our arrogance.  We’re claiming we know better than God.  We’re fooling ourselves into believing we’re following God, when in fact we’re doing what we want to do and pretending God approves.

            It’s really tempting to do that.  We’re all really good and finding ways to excuse our own behavior--I know I am.  And sometimes we honestly do not understand what would be so wrong about what we want to do, and we don’t understand why God said not to do it.  And so we try to come up with some way, some reason, to think that God must not have meant what the Bible says He said, and that what we want to do is really okay.

            And what also makes this so tempting is that society approves of it.  All these “re-interpretations” of the Bible, allowing us to do things God has said we should not do and telling us not to do things we should do, are applauded by our current society.  These books that “re-interpret” and “unpack” the Bible get rave reviews.  A book that says, “The Bible means what it says and we should follow it” is not going to get that kind of a review.

            The Apostle Paul captures our attitude perfectly.  He says, “Do not deceive yourselves.  If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become ‘fools’ so that you may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.  As it is written:  ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’, and again ‘The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.’”

            When we try to re-interpret the Bible, to make it say what we wish it said rather than what it actually says, that’s exactly what we’re doing.  We are trying to be wise by the standards of this age.  And that so-called “wisdom” is foolishness in God’s sight.

            Paul, of course, was the first great Christian evangelist.  He traveled all over the world, or at least as much of the world as he knew about, spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But Paul knew that nothing he did would come to anything if it did not have its foundation in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

            Paul uses the analogy of a building.  Now, I am definitely not a builder, but there’s one thing I know about buildings.  If you don’t lay a good foundation, your building is going to fall down.  It does not matter how much money you spend on the upper parts of it, it does not matter how much time you spend, how much care you take with the rest of the building.  If the foundation is not done right, the whole thing is going to collapse.

            Paul says that we are God’s building.  And as God’s building, each one of us has to start with Jesus Christ as our foundation.  That’s the only way we are going to be able to stand firm in our faith.  If our faith is built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, it can withstand anything.  If it’s not, it will fall.  It does not matter how much fancy stuff we put on top of that foundation.  We can put all the things the world values on that foundation.  Gold.  Silver.  Costly stones.  It does not matter how fancy the building of our faith looks on the outside.  If it’s not built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, it will fall.

            But that foundation of Jesus Christ means following the word of God.  And that gets us back to where we started, because again, the word of God sometimes tells us to do things we don’t want to do, and sometimes tells us not to do things we do want to do.  

And so, again, we get back to the choice we have to make.  Do we have the humility to submit to God and God’s Word, even when we wish God’s Word was different from what it is?  Are we willing to trust that God knows better than we do, even when that means doing some hard things?  Are we willing to live our lives God’s way, even when that means giving up some things we really want to do?  Or are we, in our arrogance, going to find ways to “re-interpret” God’s Word, so that we can pretend it does not say what it says and pretend that it says what it does not say?

Paul tells us not to be wise by the standards of the world.  In fact, he tells us that it is only by become fools by the standards of the world that we can truly be wise.  That takes humility, too.  Our egos want the world to think of us as wise.  Our pride wants us to have the world praise us.  I don’t know anyone who wants people to think he’s a fool.  And yet, that what Paul tells us to do.

And again, what that takes is humility.  It takes humility to follow God, even when the world tells us not to.  It takes humility to do trust in God and God’s Word, and to obey it, no matter what the cost.  It takes humility to do the things the Lord said to do even when we don’t want to.  And it humility to not do the things the Lord said not to do, even when we really do want to do them and even when we don’t see what would be so wrong about doing them. 

Human arrogance says we can re-interpret the Bible to say what we wish it said.  Humility says we should trust in God and in God’s Word.  Human arrogance says we should be seen as wise by the standards of the world.  Humility says we should be willing to be seen as fools if that’s what following God requires.  

            We cannot deceive God.  So let’s not deceive ourselves.  Let’s put aside our arrogance, and in all humility follow God and God’s Word.  It won’t always be easy.  But it will always be worth it.