Another way

Not sure you realized it or not, but this week Skye brought us full circle.  Some of you weren’t here during fall 2012, but we spent that semester talking about the story of this amazing father found in Luke 15.  We talked about the two ways expressed in the lives of the two brothers and the fact that we all knew there had to be another way.

Skye brought us back to this story this week, and broke it down for us like this: we either see our lives as lived for God, a life of Christian activism – older brother; or life from God, where we live for what he will give to us – younger brother.  Both leave us feeling empty and longing for something else. We all know deep down inside there is something wrong with the way both brothers in this story are living, but at times it’s difficult to determine what that looks like. 

Thankfully, there is another way. 

This week, Skye put it like this: life with God.  In his thank you tweet to our campus, his stated prayer for us was that God would bless us with Himself.  That leaves us with a decision to make by answering the question, Is that enough? 

I would say, without a change of heart, the only answer to that question is no.  We will never be satisfied with our lives if we continue to see God as an object to be controlled by what we ask for.  Many in our society have limited God to a cosmic Santa Claus, crediting him for good, or blaming him for the bad that comes their way.  When things go wrong, we wonder where he is.  That is what Skye was talking about Wednesday when he said that our lives are not about what we do, but how we see.  I often ask the question, What are you hearing? This week I want to ask, What are you seeing?

How we see shapes what we do.  So we don’t respond to the need in the eastern part of the U.S., then expecting God to look at us as differently or better.  We have to fight off the urge to play the comparison game over the next couple of weeks, and just respond because there is need. We must realize they are like us, undeserving of the hand that has been dealt them, experiencing great need, and so we respond for these reasons — period.  We don’t do this to earn anything from God that we haven’t already received.  We don’t participate in service or ministry as a form of penance. 

Without this new heart that we’ve talked about all semester, what we do is just activism or point tallying.  My prayer for us is that the things that we do come from a heart that is shaped by the One who made us, so we act without expecting anything in return. 

Text for the week:  Luke 15:11-32