This is the message given in the Sunday night service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on Sunday, July 25, 2021. The Bible verses used are Joshua 24:2-15.
How often, in the course of a normal day, do you think about God?
I want you to really consider that question. You don’t have to tell me the answer, and I’m not assuming what the answer is. My point in asking this question is not to pass judgment on anyone. But I want you to think about what your answer is. How often, in the course of a normal day do you think about God?
I tend to think about God fairly often, but that’s not because I’m so holy or such a great Christian or anything. It’s because my job pretty much forces me to. To write sermons, to lead youth group or confirmation class, to do a lot of the things I do, I have to think about God. I could not avoid thinking about God even if I wanted to. But as many of you know, I’m going on vacation tomorrow. I’ll be out of the parish for about a week and a half. How often will I think about God then, when I don’t have to? I don’t know.
But we need to. We need to think about God. Because if we don’t think about God, we’re not likely to have God impact our lives in any significant way. We would say we believe in God, and to an extent we do. We would say we believe in Jesus as the Savior, and to an extent we do. But it’s a passive belief. It’s a belief that just stays in the background of our lives. It’s there, but that’s all it is--just there. If our belief in God, and our belief in Jesus, does not affect our lives, if the things we say and the things we do are not noticeably different because of that belief, just how real is our belief?
For our faith to have any meaning, it needs to change our lives. It gets back to what we talked about last Sunday night--taking off the old self and putting on the new self. If we say we believe, but we remain our same old selves, is our belief real?
But the thing is, it can be easy to just kind of go through life on cruise control. We go day to day, we do what we do. Life goes pretty much okay. Not great, not terrible. Sometimes we may wonder where it’s all headed, but we probably don’t think about it all that much. We’re just living our lives, doing whatever we do.
Sometimes, we get a wake-up call. It might be an accident. It might be an illness. It might be a loss of a job. It might just be an important decision we have to make. It might not even be something that happens to us personally--it might be something that happens to someone we care about. But whatever it is, it shakes us up. We realize that we can no longer live our lives on cruise control. Our belief can no longer be a passive belief that just stays in the background. We have to make a decision. We have to choose. Are we going to let our faith become active, become real? Are we going to trust in God and rely on God? Or are we going to give up on God and put our faith somewhere else, or nowhere at all?
But sometimes we don’t get that wake-up call. Sometimes we stay in cruise control. And we might think the people for whom that happens are the lucky ones, but really they’re not. Because if they never get that wake-up call, they never make their choice. And they never know if their faith is actually real. And it’s kind of a scary thought that you or I could come to the day of judgment not knowing whether our faith is real.
That brings us to our Bible reading for tonight. Joshua had been the leader of the Nation of Israel for a long time, ever since Moses died. But Joshua was old now. He knew he would not live a lot longer, and he would be able to lead Israel a lot longer.
He knew this was going to be hard on the people. Not because Joshua thought he was so great. Joshua knew that anything he had accomplished was because God was with him. But it’s hard to replace anyone who’s been a leader for a long time. People get used to someone. They get used to the way he’s done things. They have a certain amount of respect for him. They trust him. Israel had its ups and downs under Joshua, but for the most part, when Joshua called on the people to serve God, they did, because they trusted him.
But now, Joshua was not going to be there. The people would not just be able to rely on Joshua to keep their faith strong. They were going to have to make their own decisions about what they were going to do. Would Israel remain faithful to God? Or would they go off after other gods?
Joshua reminds the people of all that God has done for them. He goes back to the days of Abraham. He goes back to the days of Moses and Aaron. He reminds them of how God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, made a path for them through the Red Sea, and then closed the Red Sea back up to destroy the Egyptian army. He reminds them of all the battles they fought against all kinds of neighboring nations, and how God gave them victory over all of them. He reminds them of how God “gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build” and that they eat from “vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.”
And then, Joshua provides them with a choice. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.” He tells them what he thinks they should do: “Fear the Lord and serve Him with all faithfulness.” But, he tells them, if that’s not what you want to do, then choose someone else to serve. But, he says, “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
The people of Israel had their wake-up call. They knew they could no longer live on cruise control. They would no longer have Joshua there to protect them, to bail them out. They knew, now, it was up to them. They would have to make a choice. They were going to find out if their faith in God was real.
But what about all the people who had lived and died before Joshua presented them with this choice? Some of them probably stayed in cruise control. Some of them never knew just how real their faith in God was. What happened to them, when they came to the time of judgment? We’ll never know.
We may not live long enough to get a wake-up call, either. So the time to get out of cruise control is now. The time to make our decision is now. Because ultimately, as the old song says, you got to serve somebody. If we don’t choose to serve the Lord, we’ll end up serving someone else.
One of the best things we can do in making that decision is what Joshua did for the people of Israel. Review all the things God has done for us in the past. Think about all the times God has been there for us. Remember all the times God helped us. Think about times when it seemed like you were in an impossible situation, and somehow you got out of it. That was God. Think about all the battles you fought and won, sometimes against huge odds. That was God. Think about all the blessings you’ve gotten, even though you did not deserve them. That was God.
If we’re really honest, we can all think of some of those times. Maybe, at the time, we did not even realize God was there. But now, we can see that He was. God has been there for us time after time after time. It’s important not to take those times for granted. Because those are the times that can give us confidence in God. Those are the times that have enabled us to live on cruise control for a while--because God was always there in the background, taking care of things for us.
If God has been there for us in the past, we can be confident that God will be there in the future. In fact, God wants to be there for us in the future. But God leaves the choice to us. Will we fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness? Or will we choose other gods to serve?
We cannot stay in cruise control. Society won’t let us. And really, God won’t let us, either. It’s time. It’s time for us to stop being passive about our faith. It’s time for us to decide to make our faith active and real. It’s time for us to get our faith out of the background and make it front and center in our lives. It’s time for us to let our faith in Jesus Christ affect every aspect of our lives.
The cruise control is being taken off. The time to choose is now.
No comments:
Post a Comment