If Jesus Was Serious | Week 5 | (5-10-26)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Ask, Seek, Knock."

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Transcript

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Uh, have you ever felt entitled to something? Have you ever felt like you deserved something? Uh, maybe it's uh just because you just showed up. So maybe somebody owes you something. Uh, if you haven't felt that yourself, I bet when I use the word entitled, somebody comes to your mind. You think of somebody else, and they're so, you know, we we think of people who are entitled with disdain, like, oh, that celebrity, they're so entitled. Or that kid, they're so entitled, they think they should get whatever. I I I love my children. And uh it's amazing to me how quickly the word mine becomes such a prominent part of the vocabulary. My two-year-old, he barely knows any words, but he knows mine. Like the first thing he does when he sees somebody else who has something he wants, he points to it and goes, mine, right? As if like he's entitled to that because you know, he he anybody who has something he wants should just give it to him. I didn't teach him that. It's kind of like it's something that was just a part of his human nature. My parents blessed them. They're wonderful. They were here at the 845 service. Um, they tried their best to keep me from growing up that way. My sister and I both, you know, they they tried to raise us to know the value of hard work. We had to have jobs in high school to pay for gas if we wanted to go anywhere. We had jobs in college, we paid back our loans. You know, they made sure they instilled a good work ethic into me, um, but they did not know that I had a secret weapon who was also in our 845 service. Her name is Grandmother. And if any of you have a grandmother or are a grandmother or know a grandmother, uh, my grandmother is like most, where she wants nothing else in this world than for her grandchildren to be happy. And so uh I would go by her house or hers and dandy's store, uh, grandmother and dandy's what we call my grandparents, and and she just, you know, randomly just give you a five-dollar bill or a$10 bill, just because, because she loves me, because I was there, because I was cute, right? And on the weekends, uh, any anytime I had to, you know, my mom needed to drop me off some. I'd lobby. Can we go to grandmother and dandy's? Can you take me to the store? Especially the store. I like them their house because I got money there too, but the money at the store was better because the store was right next to Adventureland. And in Dothan, Adventureland is the bomb. It is uh uh the biggest arcade in town. It's got mini golf, it's got go-karts, it's got bumper boats, it had batting cages. And my grandmother, if I got dropped off of the store, she gave me like$20 and she'd say, Go have fun. We'll see you when you're done. And I might sometimes know go back and be like, I didn't really have a lot of fun. And she'd be like, Here's another$20, go back and have more fun. And I'll go, and my grandfather, years later, she told me that when those things happened, my grandfather one time said to her, Sue, you know he's manipulating you, right? And she said, Wayne, I'm smart enough to know that, but I like it. Plus, my grandmother, she she didn't mean uh, she wasn't like like I'm gonna turn him into some entitled kid. I did that fine enough on my own. She she didn't need to do that for me. But but I I I do think uh what I realized as I got older is that it's a lot harder to earn$20 when you're not some cute kid with a wonderful grandmother. It it it uh it got I gotten used to just getting spending money just because, just for showing up. And and uh I I it the realities of life hit hard when all of a sudden I needed gas, and it was time for me to figure out how to get it on my own. I'd gotten entitled, I gotten used to getting a little something that I wanted. Maybe that tapped into you in that way, maybe it's somebody you know, maybe it's somebody in your family, and you're like they need to learn how to provide for themselves. Some I I I don't know how it might be for you, but I bet we'd be hard-pressed to find somebody in this room. No, I bet everybody in this room has some season of their life, some place where you felt like a little entitled. Like, you know, you maybe it was a job that you just felt like you deserved. You worked hard, you deserved that job. Or maybe it was uh some favorable treatment you'd come to expect, or maybe it was your family's pew in the church, right? That poor visitor, they didn't know that was your pew because you sat there every week and you were entitled to that seat because of your faithful attendance. And somebody just needs to remind them that's where you're supposed to sit. You don't see that much anymore. I mean, I know most of y'all sit in your six same kind of common areas, but like your pew designation back in the day, that was a big deal. However, you've seen it, either in your own life or in the life of somebody else, Jesus recognized that entitlement, that these kind of uh uh uh desires for self are a part of the human condition, are an inescapable feature of who we have become. When we read these famous verses from Matthew 7, uh our entitlement instinct kind of flares up, right? It creeps in to how we read what Jesus is saying. Uh, these are some of those verses that we call it, coffee mug verses, ones that when you just take them out and you put them on a coffee mug, you see this type of verse everywhere, ask, seek, knock. It's the ones that get stitched into or embroidered onto a pillow. Uh that sounds like this enormous promise, like Jesus is just giving us a blank check. Just ask, just seek, just knock, and it'll be given unto you. But anytime a verse gets that famous, it's worth slowing down. Because often the more familiar a verse is, the more likely we are to hear it without actually knowing what it says. To read it without understanding what Jesus is trying to tell us. Ask and it will be given to you. What you hear uh when you hear that, do you start mentally drawing up a list? Well, I'm gonna ask for this, I'm gonna ask for this, I'm gonna ask for this. Uh okay, God, I'm asking. Now I'm expecting. I've asked, so now you do your part. These verses, they sound on their own like Jesus is saying, Here's your Christian credit card with no spending limit. I've talked before uh about the dangers of proof texting. If you're if you haven't heard that term, proof texting is something that uh I really always caution Christians to be wary of because proof texting is what happens when we pluck a verse out from its context and then use it to defend our previously held position. It happens all the time. Now that you know what it is, you'll see it everywhere. Anybody can find just about any verse in the Bible to defend what they already believe. And we can even find a verse that defends what you believe and what I believe. And if they do in a disagreement, we can still say, well, the Bible says that we're both right. How can that be? And so that's why it's always good to read scripture with other scripture in context around what it's been saying. I don't think we intentionally proof text Matthew 7, 7, but I think sometimes we remove it from what Jesus is saying. We remove it from the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, right? When we treat these verses like some free-floating promise, instead of the next lines in the sermon that Jesus has been preaching for two and a half chapters. I mean, look at where we are in Matthew. For a month, we've been asking, what if Jesus was serious when he said these things on the Sermon on the Mount? We've been journeying through the Sermon on the Mount, asking, what if Jesus was serious when he said, You are salt and you are light? What if Jesus was serious when he said you should love your enemies? What if Jesus was serious when he said, Hey, don't worry? Today, Jesus says, Ask and it'll be given to you. And so no wonder our entitlement instinct kind of creeps in a little bit if we're taking Jesus seriously and he says, just ask, and it will be given to you. When you read these verses, without the context of the whole Sermon on the Mount, you see uh that you miss that Jesus is telling us, hey, first you cannot serve two masters. A couple weeks ago, Jesus said, You cannot serve two masters. Then Jesus says, Seek first the kingdom. He says, Don't worry about what you will eat or drink. Seek first the kingdom, and these things will be added to you. And now he's saying, Ask, seek, not. The order of these things matter. The reason why we didn't do this sermon first is because we needed to hear the other ones before we could hear today's. The fact, the fact is, the order in which Jesus says these things is kind of the whole point. It's what he's building up to. Jesus isn't telling us, just ask God for whatever you want, and then God will deliver it to you, right? He's telling us that when we seek first the kingdom, when we stop trying to serve two masters, when we stop worrying, we stake everything on God, then we'll start asking different kinds of things. Then the things that we ask might not be the things we would have asked before. Because when you're seeking the kingdom, you stop seeking things for yourself. And you begin seeking things that God wants, things for others. When your desires get shaped by the will of God, you stop asking, God, what can you do for me? And we start asking, God, what can we do for you? God, what are you doing for others? It's no longer about what you want, it becomes about what God wants. And that's a prayer I think God is very delighted to answer. Uh this passage, uh, it's not a promise that you can pray hard enough and you're gonna get a Lamborghini. A lot of you will try to treat it that way. But it's naming what is possible when our hearts get aligned with the heart of God. As a preacher, it makes it a lot easier to write sermons whenever the scriptures line up with what we see in the world, right? Where you can draw a straight line from this is what the text is saying to this is where we see it in our lives on a random Tuesday. And this is kind of one of those texts. It's not exactly what we're seeing in the world, right? This doesn't live out perfectly. This is this is the ideal of what we hope to see in the world. It's the goal. Um, but we do see all around us uh places where we have asked, where we have thought, where we have knocked, and the door wasn't opened. I already mentioned, you know, like maybe you were praying for a Lamborghini that didn't open, right? That's an example. I remember another for me was when I was a teenager, I really wanted to go on a date with Morton Carpenter. And I prayed hard for that date. I prayed every night and it never happened. I asked, I saw it, I even like put a note in her locker. I didn't put my name on it because I wanted to see her response first. You know, just in case. But I prayed about it and it never came to pass. In in hindsight, there are plenty of times where we've prayed for something and God did not say yes, and it was a good thing, and we didn't know it at the time. But there are other prayers that are not silly, that are not small. Like there was a day between when August was born, when Bradshaw was born, when Brianna thought she was having a miscarriage, and we prayed. And we asked God to hold this child. And I knew everything in me, what I wanted, and we held our breath when we were at the hospital, and when we held each other when we didn't have words, and we prayed. Every day, somebody sees a hungry child and says, God, please stop this. Don't let this happen anymore. It's a real prayer. God, end this. Don't let another child go to bed tonight hungry. Every Sunday, churches around the world pray for peace, for God to bring peace on earth. And then on Monday, we wake up and we see homes have been blown apart and children are pulled from rubble, and we wonder what were the prayers even for? Is God listening? If we're going to take Matthew 7-7 seriously, when it says ask, seek, knock, and it will be given, we have to take seriously these questions. Like people have been sitting with this gap for centuries between what we're asking and where we see God moving. Because there's a fancy theological word for this tension in our lives. It's called theodicy. And what it means is this we have a question of how can God be good and all-powerful and still allow suffering in the world? I think every Christian comes up against this at some point. If God is good and God is all-powerful, why does he let these things happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do bad things happen to anybody? How can be God be all-loving and all-powerful and this world still be full of grief? Theodicy is a question that I'm not going to be able to solve in one sermon. And it's not even a question that I think has a complete solution. But it does give us a chance to name this gap where most of us actually live, in this space between what we're praying for and what we're seeing happen. Leslie Weatherhood had wrote a book, and it's a wonderful book. It's called The Will of God. He wrote it in 1944. And for 80 years, it has been helping save people's faith. Uh, I hope that uh you might consider joining Pastor Mike if you're able to. He's gonna teach a summertime weekday study. It's gonna be the midday lunchtime hour. Um, and he's gonna teach about this book. He told me this week he's gonna teach about it. And I started thinking about that book, that fits really well for the sermon. And so I hope that you'll sign up for that if you can. And let me give you just a little preview of what you'll discuss as incentive. In the book, Weatherhead says that uh the trouble with our prayers is that we think this we tend to think of God's will as static. We think of God's will as one thing. We think uh, you know, God uh only he either wants something to happen or he doesn't want something to happen. And so when something terrible happens or or whenever tragedy occurs, we get stuck in a corner. Because either we blame God for wanting this thing to happen, or we say that God was too weak to stop it. And neither of those fit with our faith. That's not what we believe about God. And so Weatherhead suggests that God's will has more than one layer. There's what God actually wants, what God wanted at the beginning. This is God's intentional will, the way God created the world and what he hoped it would be. But guess what? As humans, we don't always follow God's will, and things get messy. Whenever we decide to uh break covenant with God, whenever our human freedom gets in the way of what God intends, God still works, but we call that God's circumstantial will. God's will in spite of what we've done, God working. That's when we say the Holy Spirit is moving, the Holy Spirit's guiding, we're discerning, doing these things. We are seeking how God is moving in this moment. But all of this sits with uh God's ultimate will underneath it. That no matter what happens, no matter what we do, no matter God always wins. Jesus Christ is evidence that death could not be defeated, cannot, death cannot defeat God and what God wants. Um, and so in this idea of prayer, what we're trying to do is we're trying to align ourselves with what God wants, with with God's intentional will, with trying to draw ourselves closer to the heart of God. We want to see as God sees, we want to want what God wants. And here's the thing about scripture: from the very beginning, from Genesis to Revelation, God has continued to be faithful. God is always faithful in spite of the circumstances, not because uh God gives us what we want or what the people have asked for, but because God is always there no matter what. God never abandons his people and never abandons his promises. God doesn't break covenants, God does not walk away. God is always there. God showed up for Abraham and then he showed up for Moses. He was there for Mary when the angel Gabriel told her she was gonna have a son, and she was he was there for Mary when that son was crucified, and he was there with Mary whenever he rose from the dead. When Jesus says, Ask and it'll be given to you, he is drawing on this character of God. He is naming God's faithfulness. That God will always be there. God will not quit, and God will not quit on you. And so that's why this passage ends the way it does. In verse 11, it says this if you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts, just imagine what your father in heaven will do for you. And and notice what Jesus does there. He turns the attention from us to the Father. He turns us from thinking about ourselves and thinking about what God does. He says, Look, even you, broken and self-interested as you are, you know how to give gifts to your children. You know what bread looks like, you know what a fish looks like. You're not gonna slip up and give somebody a snake or a stone. That's not how love works. How much more then will your father in heaven do for you? This is not a guarantee you're gonna get the Lambo. This is an affirmation that the one who you pray to hears you. It's a promise that God is present. And it's asking us to continue to trust, to continue knocking and know that that door leads somewhere. And so, as in every sermon, you can't we ask, well, what does this look like in our lives? What does this really look like for us on a day-to-day if we're to ask, seek and knock? Well, it looks like changing the way you pray, changing how we understand prayer. It looks like no longer asking God to bend reality around our desires, but asking God to bend our hearts toward the kingdom. Because often when we pray, we say, God, give me this. God, I want this. God, I need this. A better prayer is something like, God, I need you. Lord, I need you. Help me to see your kingdom. Help me, bending to where we understand better how to align our hearts with God's heart. So we stop saying, God, give me what I want. And instead we start saying, God, give me what you want. Help me to bring about what you want. Jesus doesn't tell us to stop asking. This is what I love. When you read the prayer, he's not like, you should stop asking for stuff. You're not gonna get it. You're unworthy. No, he says the opposite. He says, Ask, seek, knock. The Greek version of these, these are present-tense verbs. They're all actions. They're things that you're supposed to keep doing with persistence. Don't stop, keep going. But when we seek first the kingdom, our asking comes from a different place. It is no longer out of self-interest. We begin praying as a people who actually trust the one we're praying to. We pray as a people that have stopped expecting God to function like a divine vending machine, where we insert, uh, you know, here's our here's our verse, here we give us back our justification, here's what I want, give me what I've asked for. But we stead, we understand that God functions as our Father in heaven. The God loves us like a parent. And there is no doubt that this can be hard. This can be one of the hardest parts of your faith journey. To be uh to know that sometimes when we ask for things, even when we think they might be the right things, things don't always turn out how we want. This is why I I firmly believe that doubt is not the antithesis of faith. Frederick Beatner said uh faith, uh doubt is the ants and the panther of faith, it's the thing that gets it moving. Searching, asking more, seeking more. You don't have to have everything figured out to have faith. You don't have to have all your questions answered to be able to trust that God is still there. Because there are times when we pray earnest prayers for good things, prayers that are not for selfish desires, and sometimes they still don't turn out the way we hope. What about that miscarriage? What about that family member's cancer? What about that child who left home and never came back? When it comes to these really big, heavy realities in life, I'm not gonna try to give you some tidy answer about why sometimes certain things happen and other times they don't. Because we don't have that kind of answer. We don't have this perfect prescription of when and why, how these things work. But what I can tell you, what I've come to believe to be true after journeying with this church and journeying with my life in faith, is that God does not stop being good when our prayers don't go exactly as we wanted. God does not stop being faithful. God does not stop being present. Because uh the presence of suffering in our lives is not evidence that God has abandoned us, it's evidence that we live in a world that is not yet the way God wants it to be. There is still more to be done for that ultimate will to come to pass. And the witness of scripture, from cover to cover, is that God meets us in our brokenness. In fact, in our weakness is when God is strongest. In our moments of need is when God is closest. God does not always change everything to be like the way we want it to be. But God does not leave us alone in our pain. When Brianna and I were sitting in that ER and we didn't get that magic answer we were hoping for, what we did get was each other in a community of people who were praying for us. We got some peace that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and we got this strange certainty that no matter what, God was not going anywhere. It's not the exact same, it's not the same as getting exactly what you asked for, but I do think, I am convinced, is exactly what Jesus is promising that Jesus will be with us, whether it's through the people in our lives or a peace we can't account for, that even though the world is Not perfect. God will always be present, and you are never alone. Which is why I think it's so poignant that this verse came up on Mother's Day. We didn't plan it this way, it just kind of happened. Verse 11 says this is what a good parent does, right? You give a fish, you give bread, you don't give a stone or a snake. You know what bread is. Uh you would think about every mother and anyone who has a mother or anyone who acts like a mother in somebody's life. You when the kid asks you for something, you don't reach for something that's going to hurt them instead, intentionally. That's not what parenting looks like. That's not what love is. But sometimes we do say no. Sometimes we say no because uh you know something they don't. Right? Should I touch a hot stove? No, you shouldn't touch that hot stove. Other times you might say yes, but it might not be in the way they imagined, and they might not understand for years later what you did for them. I think that's what Jesus is saying about how God parents us. Is that the one that we are praying to loves us and does no better than we know. And sometimes we ask for things like, I'm really glad I didn't go on that date with Morgan Carpenter. Who knows what could have happened? I'm really glad that I haven't gotten a Lamborghini yet. I might get some judgmental stairs from my other pastoral colleagues. Also, I'd probably wreck it. I mean, let's be honest. But Jesus is saying that the one you're praying to loves you and will always be there for you. So don't stop asking. Don't stop seeking. Don't stop knocking. But ask as somebody who seeks the kingdom first. Ask as somebody who ask as somebody who knows that the answer might not look like what you thought it would look like, but trust that the answer is going to come from God's love. And when the door doesn't open the way that you expected it to, don't take it that as evidence that nobody's home. Take it as an invitation to keep knocking, to keep searching, to keep showing up, to keep looking for God, to take it as an invitation to seek the one who's been seeking you all along. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.