The Bevans

Prepare The Way For The Lord!

So far we have painted two pictures of God. The first is perhaps a somewhat disturbing portrait of a mighty, awesome God who demands our obedience. The second is perhaps a more comforting portrayal of a God whose passionate love overflows towards us. It has been said that it is the work of the preacher to "comfort the disturbed" and to "disturb the comfortable". In Jesus’ own preaching of the good news of the Kingdom, we see this very tension.

In Matthew 11, Jesus makes the following offer:

Oh, what an offer! Do any of us, in our busy world, not find ourselves weary and burdened at times? Do any of us not need to let Him take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of His peace? As the Apostle Peter writes, we are invited to cast all our anxiety on Him because He cares for us. He wants to set us free from all that weighs us down, all the tension, all the pressure, all the striving.

Surely, this is the heart of the gospel, a free offer so astonishing as to be almost beyond comprehension. We, who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it and indeed much to disqualify ourselves, are given the possibility of being totally set free from slavery to sin and from all condemnation and guilt, of knowing the God of glory personally as our heavenly Father, of being filled with the Holy Spirit thus enabling us to live in His power, of being transformed into His wonderful likeness, and of looking forward to dwelling forever with God. And all we have to do is come to Him — and place His yoke on our shoulders.

But, why on earth does Jesus offer us a yoke? For His listeners, the word "yoke" was used to symbolise bondage and the burdensome servitude of a nation; it was a symbol of oppression. Surely, Jesus should be offering simply to remove the yoke! But no, Jesus knows that the only way we will find peace and joy and rest for our souls is to let Him direct us, to be joined to Him as it were by a yoke and led the way He knows is for our greatest good — indeed, to follow Him as those first disciples did. When we try to run our own lives and make our own decisions we often end up pressured and stressed, trying to do too much. Jesus, who was never rushed off His feet, offers us an alternative. His yoke is one of peace and contentment — of shalom. We cannot be yokeless. If we are not under Jesus’ light yoke, then we will find ourselves under the harsher yoke of our own weaknesses and of the expectations of our demanding society.

In Luke chapter 14, we read of Jesus telling the following parable to describe the Kingdom of God:

We are all invited to the great Messianic banquet to come. What a day that will be! The offers Jesus makes to us are surely the greatest ever made! But, sadly, we recognise ourselves all too easily in the guests who make excuses, living lives in which the everyday and the trivial often take priority over responding to Jesus’ invitation to come to Him, to spend time with Him, to walk with Him, to receive from Him.

Immediately after telling this parable, Jesus goes on to say:

He concludes, "Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be My disciple." The gospel Jesus preaches seems to look rather different from what we preach today! Jesus not only makes the most astounding free offer ever made, but also the most preposterous take-over bid of all time. He expects to have every part of our lives. And not in some abstract ‘spiritual’ sense, but in reality. He wants control!

Unfortunately, much of our evangelism this century has been very one-sided. A whole generation of Christians has come up believing that it is possible to ‘accept’ Christ without letting Him take control of their lives. We have made ‘converts’ but not obedient disciples who are taught to obey everything the Lord commands. Yet surely the true challenge of the gospel is much closer to Jesus Christ is Lord! What are you going to do about it? than we would like to think.

Os Guinness makes the following observation about Jesus:

How different from the spiritual diet most of us feed on. The "scandal of the cross" is almost unrecognisable in the ‘gospel’ that is preached today. Christianity is considered respectable — surely a contradiction in terms if ever there was one — and almost no real demands are made on those who join the church. As a result, our faith is considered an irrelevance by the vast majority, and also often has very little real impact on the way we go about much of our daily lives.

When we pray, we refer to God as "Lord" and "Father". But do we mean anything by these words or do we just use them as names? Jesus once asked His followers, "Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not do what I say?" For the word "Lord" means master, and was most commonly used when talking about masters and slaves. As a master had complete ownership of his slaves, and the right to decide how they spent every moment of their lives, so too, our Master should have the same position of authority over us. Like the centurion who came to Jesus, the Lord should be able to tell one of us, "Go", and he goes; and another, "Come", and he comes; and yet another, "Do this", and he does it. We should be those who not only believe that "Jesus is Lord", but behave as if He is too.

And what of the word "father"? Rightly, perhaps, we focus on the amazing truth that through Jesus we can know God personally and intimately. For Jesus’ use of the Aramaic word for ‘Dad’ (Abba) to refer to the Almighty God was a revolutionary departure, indicating the close nature of the relationship we could have with God under the New Covenant. However, if God is our Father, then surely that too is a relationship in which He should have complete authority over His children. In Jesus’ day, children were expected to obey their parents. Indeed there was provision under the Old Covenant for a rebellious son to be stoned to death! And even today, living in a society in which respect for authority continues to decline, fathers still expect their children to do what they’re told, even though our children don’t address their fathers as "Sir" as they do in some parts of the southern United States. If only we had the same attitude to God that we desire of our children towards their parents! As the Lord said to the Jews through the prophet Malachi, "A son honours his father, and a servant his master. If I am a father, where is the honour due Me? If I am a master, where is the respect due Me?"

Surrender to the Father’s will was the hallmark of Jesus’ life, seen most poignantly as He faced His death, when He prayed in anguish, "Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done." We are called to follow Him, surrendering all. C. S. Lewis expressed it like this:

We are not supposed to give Jesus only a part of our lives, not just the ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ part, or even the best part. No, He desires to have all of us, every hour and minute of our days, our work and leisure, our wealth and all that we possess, every conversation and relationship, every thought and emotion, every like and dislike, every dream and desire. Jesus says that if we would follow Him, we must deny ourselves and take up our cross. Similarly, the apostle Paul testifies that those who truly belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the old nature with its passions and desires. It has been said that a man on a cross has no further plans of his own, and surely this is what this language of "denying ourselves", "taking up our cross", and "crucifying the old nature" is talking about. We should no longer be our own, but in all we are and do, demonstrate that we are God’s and His alone.

So, is God in charge of our lives or is He merely one of the crew? Does He decide things or only help us to carry out our own plans? Is God in the driver’s seat controlling where we go or is He only a passenger whose advice we heed when we feel like it? Do we seek to be God-driven, Jesus-driven, Holy Spirit-driven people in every aspect of our living, or do we want to hold on to some parts of our lives for ourselves?

Does this seem a hard thing with little reward, to hand over everything to God? One saying Jesus repeated on a number of occasions was this, "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me and for the gospel will save it." Jesus ‘invitation’ to us to deny ourselves and take up our cross seems very strange until we recognise that it is the key to the full, abundant life that He came to give us. The glorious benefits of the gospel become ours only as we surrender ourselves fully to Him.

Three hundred years ago, François Fénelon wrote the following words out of His own experience:

For His views, Fénelon was denounced by the pope for "having loved God too much, and man too little"! But how can we love God too much? It is the divided, double-minded heart — in which God the King has a place but isn’t truly on the throne — that misses out on the inexpressible and glorious joy that Jesus desires to lavish on us.

Commenting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost Of Discipleship, Dallas Willard has written:

Let us seek to find life by losing it completely to Him!

The following questions and exercises are to help you to respond to what the Lord has been saying to you through what you have read. They can be used in any way you like, either individually, or for discussion in a small group or between friends.

1. In your own life, how have you experienced the tension between the ‘free offer’ and the ‘take-over bid’ in the gospel? When you chose to follow Christ, how aware were you that following Him meant handing over control to Him? In what ways do you let the trivial and mundane prevent Him from having His way in your life? Renew your resolve that He, rather than your situation, should be your Master.
2. All I once held dear, built my life upon,
   All this world reveres and wars to own,
   All I once thought gain I have counted loss;
   Spent and worthless now compared to this:

Knowing You, Jesus
Knowing You, there is no greater thing.
You’re my all, You’re the best,
You’re my joy, my righteousness,
And I love You, Lord.

What is it that you hold dear? What dreams and desires, which of your possessions and plans are important to you? Use these words, based on Paul’s testimony in Philippians 3, to hand them over to the Lord for Him to take and do with as He wishes.

3. In what ways has it been your experience that the more you have given yourself to God, the more you have found contentment and joy? Do you agree that letting God be Lord and Master and taking on His yoke is the key to having life in all its fullness? Try it! Taste and see that the Lord is good!

Chapter 4: God Helps Those Who Let Him

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