Episode Transcript
CONSECRATE
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
HEAR
Luke 11:5–8 NIV
Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.”
CONSIDER
Let's go Gospelling.
So the Father had to pick a moment in history to send the Son to save the world. He chose the dawn of the first century. This means God had to reveal the deepest mysteries of cosmology and theology to the race of sentient (human) beings he created in his image and to translate it into their cultural forms, meaning structures and metaphors—and this so they could in turn translate it into their linguistic formats through all time going forward until such time as when the Father sends the Son to the earth again for the grand finale. (Said another way, the Bible is the Wake-Up Call!)
In today's text, Jesus is revealing a profound mystery about the nature of how God accomplishes his purposes in the world through human agents in the midst of a cosmological war of God vs. evil being played out on the field of a fallen creation. The mysterious way is prayer. And he's basically saying as relates to prayer, it's going to be super frustrating, very inconvenient, require extraordinary perseverance, supernatural faith—indeed shameless audacity—and though far from true, much of the time its going to feel like God is not listening and does not care. This is a first-century metaphor drawing on the framework of hospitality in an honor-shame culture and meant to reveal to us the complex and often confounding nature of the cosmological war of God vs. evil and how we are meant to join the fight. Okay, that's the setup. Now, I'm going to shift the midnight-snack metaphor to a more pressing present-day application.
My friend Betsy, a youngish sixty-two-year-old Jesus-to-the-core wife and mom from Mississippi, has come to me in the eleventh hour of her life-and-death match against cancer. I can't help her, but I know a Great Physician who can. I'm on my way to his house because it's after midnight now. When I get there I am going to bang on the door until my hands bleed and I'm going to shout at the top of my lungs outside his door until my voice gives out. We are pleading the atoning blood and healing wounds of Jesus Messiah as the chemotherapy cure of heaven into her very body. We are asking for this at the level of a sign to the unbelieving world that they would turn to Jesus and place their faith in him, that they would awaken to the purposes of God for their lives now and be saved for eternity's ages.
I wrote some days back of the need to keep the the big picture in mind in the face of the battles we currently fight. We will win some battles and lose some battles. Everyone won't be healed in the way we hope. In fact, anyone and everyone who is healed is going to ultimately die. None of us are getting off this battlefield alive. The thing to keep in clear view is this: Jesus has won the war. Newsflash:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26)
So what's the point of all this urgent pleading? It's love. And in the immortal words of the 80s anthem by the great rock-n-roll legend, Pat Benatar: Love is a battlefield. We are waging the war of the love of Almighty God. This is the travail of love. We love the suffering, sick, and the poor, and the hungry, and the naked, homeless, demon-possessed, mentally ill, lost, and broken sons and daughters of Eden. They are us. And we don't love them because God loves them as though an ethical ought-to will get it done. No, we love them because Jesus himself, who is abiding in us by the Holy Spirit, loves them in and through us—with shameless audacity—literally compulsively compelling us by his compassionate love.
So much more to say but I've got to stop. I'll say more in the podcast comments.
PRAY
Lord Jesus, thank you for Charles Wesley who wrote, "Jesus thou art all compassion, pure unbounded love thou art." Thank you that your Word teaches as your life demonstrates that "love never fails." Even if the one we love is not healed like we hope, love never fails because love and the act of love always heals in some measure. We travail in love also for the bigger reality of great awakening that all may come to faith in Jesus and know this love that changes everything for all time and eternity. All of it for your glory, for others' gain, and for our good—and in Jesus's name, amen.
