Beth Moore - The Art of Showing Up - Part 4
Turn with me now to Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11. That portion in Genesis 22, they don't even have him saying a word till the third day. Now, I didn't mean he didn't, but isn't it something? I mean, can you think, I mean, we wouldn't even be able to talk. It's like, have your own conversations. I can't even think. All I can think about is I've got to get to that mountain. And this is what I've been told to do. How am I to do this? What in the world is going through his head? Well, probably a hundred different things and some of them we would find too painful to imagine. But I want you to look at one of them.
Look at Hebrews chapter 11, that's going to describe what is going on in his head. Hebrews 11:17: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac". So he did indeed offer him up. "He received the promises and yet he was offering his one and only son". In other words, that he received this promise and now every bit of it's gonna be forfeited in his mind and his reasonable thinking. "The one to whom it had been said, Your offspring will be called through Isaac". Verse 19: "He considered God to be able even to raise someone from the dead; therefore, he received him back, figuratively speaking". In other words, some of your translations say it better than that. But what is part of what's going through his head? Well, I'm going to tell you this. If you make me take his life, you've got to raise him up. Because you already told me my line's going to come through Isaac, and so this can't be the end.
Now I don't know how this is going to work, but this is the same one, listen carefully, listen carefully, because none of us will know God for long without coming to the tension of this question. This is the same one who, Genesis 18 and 19 when God is about to rain down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah and he is telling Abraham about it as he's walking with him, that Abraham has the guts enough to say to him, "Will the judge of all the earth do right"? And there are times that we'll be in that situation where we think, "Lord, can we trust you to do right? Because this seems terrible to us". And the answer in that dialogue, you get to the end of it and you know that God has answered him affirmatively, the judge of all the earth will do right.
I'm incapable of doing wrong, incapable of it. God is light and in him is no darkness at all. God has no dark side. You need not fear his dark side. He does not have one. He does not have a perverse side. He doesn't have a side that just wants to see how much he can torture you. That's not our God. And you're at Hebrews 11, I want you to turn to Hebrews 10, and I'm finally going to tell you now why I've even got you in this particular subject matter this weekend, what God used to get me here. I want you to see these words.
I'm going to read Hebrews 10:1 through 10: "Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, and not the reality itself of those things, it can never perfect the worshipers by the same sacrifices they continually offer year after year. Otherwise, wouldn't they have stopped being offered, since the worshipers, purified once and for all, would no longer have any consciousness of sin? But in the sacrifices there was a reminder of sins year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, as he was coming into the world," and this is Jesus. "As Jesus was coming into the world, he said: You did not desire sacrifice and offering".
Now he's quoting out of Psalm 40. I love when Jesus quotes the scriptures that he himself inspired. I love that. So he inspires them to the psalmist in Psalm 40 and now he's saying them because he's actually going, "Well, I gave those to him early, but I just want you to know that they were about me". It says: "Therefore, he was coming in the world. He said: You did not desire a sacrifice and offering, but you prepared a body for me. You did not delight in whole burnt offerings and sin offerings. And then I said, 'See...'"
Okay, this is the Greek rendering of the same Hebrew that we have been talking about in that remember that we said there are words that could be behold, see, look, now, certainly, truthfully, all these kinds. It could be translated all sorts of different ways. But I want you to see it in the NIV, so Yoshi bring that on up and let me read that to them there. It says, "Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: 'Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. And then I said, "Here am I. Here I am, Lord. Here I am".'" Everybody say those words, "Here I am".
"'"Here I am, it is written about me in the scroll, I have come to do your will, my God".' First he said, 'Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them', though they were offered in accordance with the law. And then he said," what are those three words? "'I have come to do your will.' He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all". Okay, if you're willing, you might write down, do a little line out beside it and write in the margin of your Bible, that in the NIV, it goes ahead and translates, "Here I am". Could be translated all sorts of different ways.
"Look" is certainly the meaning of it. "See," just like we hear in the CSV. The SV would have it beautifully translated, but the NIV does it this way, as following in one of those moments that someone says to God in a very profoundly significant way theologically, "Here I am". So here's what he's saying. So I want you to jot down, okay, I want you to go ahead and jot down this venue, and I'm gonna keep talking to you about it for a moment. Look at these words. So the next venue, because we're seeing it here, we're seeing him talk. You and I know how it is, he's going to give his body. He's going to give his body, on the what? On the cross.
So our fifth venue is this: the cross, where the incarnate I Am offered himself as the Lamb. So Christ, you understand like he's leaving the presence of God. I just always wonder what that's like, that he's going to no longer be where they can see him in the heavenlies and in the unseen realm, but he's going to then be a tiny, tiny little dot in the womb of Mary. And so as he comes before that happens, he's like, "Sacrifice and offering is not that... it never has done it. I'm going so that I can go fully man, fully God, and give my life for the sins of the people". And so he says, "You've asked me, a body you have given me and it is what I give you back".
I want you to hear some words out of this article and I pray that it will be as meaningful to you as it was to me. It is years old. I think this is posted in, like, 2010, and it's by a scholar, J.G. Janzen, a biblical scholar, and he had been, it's called, "How Shall I Live My Cancer? Here I Am". Listen to this. "It's Thursday morning, November 9th, 2006. It's 10 after 9. I'm at my desk working through Ecclesiastes for a book I'm about to write. The verse I'm working on goes like this: 'Better a handful with quietness than two fistfuls with toil and chasing after wind.' In the middle of this verse, the phone rings. 'This is Dr. So-and-so. Your biopsy has turned out positive, and it's bizarre. It's a rare aggressive cancer of the prostate,'" he's told, "and I'm to come in for a CT scan. Suddenly everything has changed. In a split second, I have become one of them, a cancer patient. Suddenly, I find myself encapsulated in the present moment. Suddenly, I find that my past, last year, last week, yesterday, an hour ago, is a country I used to live in. And I'm unable to imagine the future. There is just this present moment. And it continues like that for several days. No panic, no anxiety, just a sense of utter, settled clarity. So," he says, "the chips are down. Now we see what I've believed and I've worked on in the name of all of these years is true or just a house of cards".
He goes on to say this: "I remember an interview on national public radio with an Arab storyteller who runs a school for the revival of oral folklore. He described a young Arab woman in his class who told her story under the title, 'How I Lived the War.' My first reaction had been to smile at how the Arab hadn't gotten the English idiom quite right. It should be, 'How I endured the war,' or 'How I survived the war.' Then I realized, 'No, that's it. How she lived the war. Not war as some extraneous event impinging on her life, but war as now shaping the life she was given to live. How I lived the war.' Remembering this, I think, yes, that's how I want to approach this, not my battle with cancer, though that way of approaching is helpful to many people. Perhaps because of my Mennonite ancestry, that idiom, that attitude is not available to me, doesn't ring true for me. A better question is, how shall I live my cancer and its treatment? For 2 or 3 years, a Small Group met each Wednesday at noon in a little prayer room. I'd drawn up a simple form of service in which the prayers for the bread and the cup ended with words that Teilhard had written on an occasion when he found himself in an Asian desert without bread and wine and had simply invoked all the parts and all the happenings of Creation as that day's Eucharistic elements. Bob had often participated in this noonday service and he reminded me the other day that I had concluded my sermon at his ordination by offering him Teilhard's Eucharistic Words as a context for his own ministry. When Bob came to the end of the part in Ed Wheeler's installation, he pulled out his wallet and drew from it a small, worn card onto which he had copied these Eucharistic words, and he offered them to Ed as I had offered them to him as a context for ministry".
Listen to this. "'Do you now therefore, speaking through my lips, pronounce over this earthly travail your twofold efficacious word, the word without which all that our wisdom and our experience have built up most totter and crumble, the word through which all of our most far-reaching speculations and our encounter with the universe are come together into a trinity? Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day again with the words, 'This is my body.' And over every death force which would want in its readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again in your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith, this is my blood.' And this I say to myself is how I want to live my cancer and its treatment. I want to say to him, 'Here I am in the body that you have given me.'"
The last part of it says this, and this is from the same scholar. "In the light of the gospel of a crucified and risen Lord, there is no conceivable situation in which that deepest work can be thwarted or aborted. Simply to follow, to say, 'Hineni, here I am, to live my living, and sooner or later to live my dying as part of your Creation, groaning in travail and in hope.' That, it seems to me, is also what Paul means when he says in Romans, 'If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.'" And so here's where this goes. Because would we be willing, just as we are, to go, "Here I am in the body you've given me"?
Now I want you lastly to just go with me to two quick places. The first one is Romans 12:1. Romans 12:1. This is our sixth venue and it's not going to use our words "Here I am". What it's going to do for us is illustrate the concept to us. "Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies". Is this making more sense now? "Present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good and pleasing and perfect will of God".
So this is how we begin to approach life. That we present our bodies, and the reason why I keep bringing this up is because a body he has given you. And so it's what we drag around everything else in. You know what I'm saying? We, like, it's what keeps your soul and your spirit from just, like, spilling out on the floor. It's all, you know, that's a slight exaggeration. But it's just like, here we go. And so when I say "my body," it's just all, every part of me, every part of me. "And offered a living sacrifice". I love that because he's saying, "You know what, Christ has already died on your behalf. I'm not asking you to be a dying sacrifice. Christ has already done that for you. I'm asking you to live". Somebody simply needs to hear the words, "Live again, come back to life". Yes, it was devastating. Yes, yes. But it's time to say, once again, "Here I am, and I'm still alive and drawing breath".
If you are still alive, for the love of all things holy, actually live. Actually live. Live into the fullness. Live in the abundance of grace. When you fail and when I fail and when I falter and when you falter and when I sin and when you sin, and we're quick to repentance. That is one of the things, if I remember this, and it's something that I have prayed over my children, and you might pray over your nieces and nephews or your friends or whoever it may be in your life, I pray for quick conviction and quick repentance. Because what happens with me in the deepest and darkest days of sin in my life, it's that early on if I would have turned, I would not have gotten myself in the heap and the muck and mire of the pit that I eventually fell into. And so that we'd be quick to repent, that we'd repent at the point that we think to ourselves in our own mind, "I really cannot stand her".
Instead of then when we've really done her wrong, you understand what I'm saying? Get to the heart of the matter before it becomes something that's lived out in our bodies. Deal with the lust before it becomes adultery. Deal with, bring the need that is driving that temptation toward that sin. Let God get in under it and get to the root, the loneliness, the feeling like you are not desired. I want someone to know, you know, Jesus really does desire your company and your presence. This is not in my notes, but I just think that there may be many women in this room who feel like that, if you're married, that your mate no longer wants your body. And it can be devastating, because it's like, "I'm not desirable".
And a body you've given me, and I guess it's not good enough. I'm not wanted. As much as you may love that person and be devoted to that person, you cannot let them tell you what you are worth. Nobody but Jesus gets to tell you what you are worth. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? Nobody but Jesus. And when you say, "I present myself a living sacrifice, here's this body," of course, for a different purpose, but that you're saying that he says it's presentable to me. I love how I made you. I don't mind your aging at all. It's what I planned for you. And I want you to know something, you are gorgeous. You're gorgeous. You radiate the light of Christ. You pick that chin up. I do not care who has rejected you, Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, sinless and holy and perfect and gorgeous, thinks you are beautiful. Lift that chin up, open those eyes, and live, live.
Do not be conformed to this world. If we are not different from the world, how does the world know what we believe? If we're not kinder than someone else in the workplace that doesn't know Jesus at all, if we're not more generous, then what then? Want you to write down that sixth venue and then we'll do the seventh briefly. And the sixth one is the altar, where willing servants offer their bodies as "Here am I," a living sacrifice. Turn with me to Acts chapter 9. Well, you know, if you look up at the top of the chapter, you see that it's captioned something like, "The Damascus Road". And you're gonna know if you know anything about the history of the church that this is Saul, the very well-known persecutor of the church, a murderous persecutor of the church.
I don't know what your background is, but I'm gonna tell you something. I doubt seriously that you have out-sinned the apostle Paul. I mean just dragging, women and children, look at every part of his testimony that he tells and everything that is told by his dear friend, Dr. Luke, in the book of Acts, and it really is shocking. It's really shocking. And this is the one that Jesus is going to, I mean, bring such light to that he's going to blind him before he opens his eyes that he can see anew on that Damascus road when he calls out to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me"? I love that he's saying, "Why do you persecute me"? Because he's persecuting the people, and I need you to know, and this helps us to know that what happens to you Jesus takes personally.
When someone is unkind to you, Jesus say it's like, "Why are you unkind to me"? How you are treated and how we treat others, he takes very, very personally. So of course, he is led into Damascus, unable to see for three days and did not eat or drink, so pick up with me in 10. "There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, 'Ananias.'" And how does Ananias respond? Would you tell me? "Here I am, Lord". Here I am, Lord. I love that he knew him well enough to go, "Here I am, Lord".
"'Get up and go to the street called Straight,' the Lord said to him, 'to the house of Judas, and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, since he is praying there. In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and placing his hands on him so that he may regain his sight.' 'Lord,' Ananias answered, 'I have heard from many people about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And he has authority here from the chief priests to arrest all who call on his name.' But the Lord said to him, 'Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to the Gentiles, kings, and Israelites. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.' And Ananias went and entered the house. And he placed his hands on him and said, 'Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road you were traveling, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.' And at once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. And then he got up and was baptized. And after taking some food, he regained his strength".
And it says that he remained there for some time and immediately began proclaiming Jesus. It's just the wildest thing. And our last venue, because this is gonna happen. In some form or another, this is gonna happen. Our last venue is this: the street called Straight, where the Lord has the nerve to send us a curve. There are going to be times, you and I can count on it, where God calls our name and says, "I want you to minister to so-and-so". And we're like, "I don't even like so-and-so". Anybody? And to be willing, as one who has been saved equally by grace as they have, to say, "Here I am," and show up when you're gonna have to show love to someone who has shown nothing but hate to the community that you love. What you gonna do with that? What you gonna do? Here I am. Send me.