If there is one thing that I can be especially grateful for, in the midst of all the amazing things that have happened during this incredibly unique season, is that we – as congregation and as community- have been invited to reflect more and more in the character of God, which sometimes leads to deeper devotion manifested in worship, prayer and study of the Bible, sometimes leads to deeper questions that invite us into a journey that can be exciting and frustration and provoking and all of that together. But those seasons present the possibility of rethinking, recreating and re-centring ourselves in the truth of who God is, and when we do that all other areas of life seem to find their right place as well. Times like these are a privilege, even in the face of so many challenges. That was my heart last week with a message that explored the answer to the question “where is God?” and that presented the answer: God is with us. And this week I’d like to go a bit deeper with an affirmation that is central to my faith, to my understanding of reality, to my day-to-day walk and at the same time essential for my walk through life and into eternity: God is for us.
Have you ever had one of those days in which everything seems to be going against us? These are the lyrics to one song that helped me through some hard times, one of those times that I don’t want to see ever again! It was 2009 and we were spending time in South America while we waited for our visa to return to Australia. We left in January thinking that we would be away for a few months in which we would work on our missionary support, spend time with family and rest, returning to our home in Adelaide renewed, rested and ready to continue our adventure. But weeks became months and months piled up and we were still in South America without a perspective to when we would be able to return. Isabella left Australia as a one year-old baby and was growing up between Uruguay and Brazil in different houses at different times, and I was growing more and more frustrated by the day. One of the consequences of having a growing baby is the need for bigger clothes and one day Fernanda told me we needed to go to the shopping centre, first to buy Bella some clothes and also to get me out of the house to change my mood! I wasn’t happy and the long journey by bus, the heat and the prospect to walk around a mall didn’t help either. I had spent some time praying about Australia, asking God to teach me whatever lesson I had to learn so we could return and presenting my frustration before God quite honestly. I asked for the grace I needed for the day and off we went. In the way to the mall we went through this long stretch of beaches, but I could only remember the Australian cost. When we arrived at the store that Fer wanted to see (first and last, first to find the clothes we needed and last to buy them after checking every other store in the mall…) it seemed like someone thought the “Australia” should be the theme for their next collection! Every t-shirt seemed to have an Australia motive: Gold Coast, Bondi Beach, Surfers’ Paradise, Outback, Great Barrier Reef… I couldn’t believe my eyes! If I was in a good mood I could have seen that as a sign that we would be back, but under the circumstances we were I started to see those signs as a provocation! “Really, God? What are you trying to do? Was this necessary?” The last straw was a t-shirt that Fernanda showed me: it has the figure of a cricketer finishing a cover drive, it had the Australian colours, but it said “Polo” on it… wrong sport! I had had enough. It seemed like the whole universe was set up against us! And of course all those negative thoughts were flooding on my mind: we were too poor, our churches too small, our support wasn’t enough, Australia didn’t want people like us, the YWAM team wasn’t trying hard enough… Have you ever been there? In circumstances where it seems like the Universe decided to pick just on you for no reason whatsoever? Maybe you experienced that when you lost your job, or when the doctor came with the diagnose you feared, or when your tie fell on the soup or you stepped on some poo or the seagull decided to let its drops on you in your way to church… So when we got to Fernanda’s family home I went to the room and I put on some music, because good music always helps! Randomly, the player went to a song called “In your arms tonight”:
Missed the alarm, got up late; some days start out second-rate
Locked my keys in the car, tripped my way down the stairs
If I had it together, I'd be almost scared
It's just the real world, everything don't always go right
But all I know is: I'll be in your arms tonight
I'll be in your arms, I'll be in your arms tonight
I'll be in your arms, I'll be in your arms tonight
The grace to face our failure, the strength to carry on
The love you gave us through you, the heart to sing our song…
That’s Resurrection Band for you lovers of good 70’s Christian rock n’ roll. Those lyrics broke through my clouds of darkness and reminded me of one simple truth: God is for us. We would be OK!
Do you believe that God is for you? That God’s heart for us is that we grow and flourish and thrive and shine his light and love through our day by day life? That God created you in love and wants you be everything you can be as you become more and more like Him? I dare to believe so. But as much as I see this declaration as straightforward based on the teachings and the life of Jesus, I know that for many of us this truth has been buried by the pile of “God is against” declarations that they have seen in judgement, boycotts, wars, inquisitions, crusades and terrible PR done by the sermons that declare that God will love if you just… or God is for you as long as you… The life-giving, life changing, powerful counter intuitive declaration that God is for us is lost and it’s time that we as children of God reclaim the fundamental Christian message that God is for us! That’s right, it’s time we get louder!
And I don’t meant it in a way that seems like I’m trying to become a motivational speaker that promises you (now, make an effort to read this as a motivational speaker, dressed in a super expensive suit with dozens of spotlights on them and many rings in their fingers and an expensive watch in their wrist…) God will do all these amazing things to make you happier/richer/powerful/healthier if you just… believe more, give more, blindly follow… you know that kind of speech. You are probably tired of it, because if you followed it, it left you tired and frustrated and asking what is wrong with you. No. I’m not saying that believing that God is for us a bulletproof assurance that you will stay healthier and good-looking and in perfect relationships while driving a better more expensive car living in a bigger more expensive house keeping up with the Joneses (or the Kardashians) and hitting a hole-in-one every week. Not because that would be too much, but because centring our faith in those goals would be too little. The reality of you growing and flourishing is way deeper, pointing out to a more fulfilling, enduring and satisfying journey in you becoming more and more like Jesus.
The problem, of course, is that we have been conditioned to think that becoming more like Jesus is our responsibility, that if we could simply become better – have a better moral, proclaim the right theology, be more disciplined and more spiritual, holier or more righteous- then we will be accepted, embraced, affirmed by God. Then, only then, we would be in. But in one of his first messages Jesus dares to declare that “Blessed are the poor in spirit, because theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The poor in Spirit? Not the have-it-all-together, dressed correctly with Christian jargon in their speech, but the ones who are painfully conscious of being lacking, acutely aware that they don’t measure up- the ones that feel like they don’t belong, the ones that love God but are tired of religious games or church politics, the ones who see in the mirror only the worst version of themselves. For them the word blessing comes with a rich and loaded meaning, saying “God is on your side!”
God is on your side when you don’t feel like you are enough, when you tried harder and harder only to be reminded of your brokenness, and the Gospel declares over and over again that God is for you! God is for you when you are going through your darkest days, when you are in your moments of greater despair or failure or sin or weakness or frustration or pain. God meets us there and declares for eternity I am on your side! The Gospel is the counterintuitive message that God doesn’t wait for us to get everything together, proper, polished, ready, but that he encounters us in our day by day reality, and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created. The gospel is a message of grace, and grace is a gift, and you don’t look at a gift and then ask what you need to do in order to receive it, but you simply accept it- it’s yours. So whatever change takes place, whatever transformation is inspired in you is ultimately a response to the love you have received, not an attempt to conquer or deserve or justify that love, because it is already, unconditionally and eternally, yours.
The reality that God is for us then invites us to a radical change in the way we think, a shift of astronomical dimensions in our understanding in how we see ourselves and as consequence, how we see the world. It invites us to get out of the religious game of keeping points for being good and losing points when we fail, and invites to accept the reality that God is with us, on our side and for us. It invites us to the powerful dynamic of being radically honest with ourselves and with people around us because we don’t need to pretend or hide or play games any more. It invites to live in freedom!
When I was 20 years old I left my country to go to Brazil to do a Discipleship Training School with YWAM. Now, I wish I could tell you that I was a confident, committed and radical young man ready to change the nations with the love of Jesus… but it wouldn’t be true. Actually, I had just gone through 2 very difficult years and I was hanging to my faith by a thread, almost on my last try. I had many questions and no answers, and I couldn’t even point out to what was wrong in my life. Then on the second week of the school we had a teaching called “Brokenness and Humility”, in which the base leader started to talk about the consequences of sin in our world and in our lives. But the way he did it wasn’t by doing a theological exploration or by pointing his finger to us or others, but by sharing his own testimony and telling us all the bad things he had done or felt or thought about doing. I saw a man safe enough in his identity to peel the layers away and showing us his worst, to then proclaim the forgiveness and redemption he found in Christ, while being honest about the fact that he was far from done and that the journey ahead was still long. What I saw was the exact opposite to all the acting, playing, hiding that I had seen in other places. So he invited us to do the same. Twenty-eight students were invited to share their journey, or not. We were free to share or be quiet. One by one, each one of us shared and found love; we told our worst stories and we found understanding, forgiveness, grace. We shredded our images and found a response of friendship, against everything that we have heard throughout our lives- by opening about our worst, we found the strength to change and people that believed in our best, more than I could believe for myself. I found the love of the Jesus that touched lepers and heard the cry of the oppressed, who had dinners with tax collectors and prostitutes, that found people on the edges of society and invited them into the Kingdom of God- the Jesus that went after them, that searched for them, that left the 99, that met them in their places of despair and hurt, abandonment and failure, and transformed their lives. And he transformed mine. I opened my heart and shared my worst. I admitted my mistakes and the weight that I was carrying in guilt and shame and regrets- my deep need for real connections and my crippling fear of rejection- and I was embraced by the love and forgiveness of Christ and by the friendship and compassion of my brothers and sisters that put flesh and blood to the message of God’s love.
Jesus is the living declaration that God wants everyone to be rescued, to experience renewal, learning how to be reconciled to God, to ourselves, to our neighbours, to our world- a living revolution of love, mercy, grace, belonging… the Gospel made alive. That God is with us and for us in our best and in our worst, in the presence or in the absence, in the power and in the powerlessness. God is for us when everything is going great and we can’t help but to smile, and God is for us in our tears and in our doubts, when we ask questions or when we stay quiet. God is with us and God is for us even when we dare to say that he doesn’t exist or that he doesn’t care- loving us in the midst of our crisis. And that reality leads me now to an invitation….
I need to invite you to experience all of this, maybe for the first time or maybe all over again. I need to invite you to dive again in the reality of the Gospel, regardless of you being part of a church community or not, thriving or doubting, alive or barely there… I feel that this invitation is for all of us. Because the Gospel needs to be experienced. Because it is one thing to tell you all the information about how a kiss feels like- the hormonal response, the emotional response, the cultural expectations, the oxytocin inundation… and it’s another thing to be kissed! I’m not here to elevate doctrines and dogmas over living breathing experiences of God’s love and grace. The message of the Gospel was so compelled to the first Christians because it was a message of embodiment- God coming to live among us, from an idea to a man of olive skin and bones, from theoretical abstractions to a human being able to experience thirst and joy and tiredness and laughter and betrayal and death and resurrection- from word to flesh. And that reality invites a response.
So if you are tired of religion or if you are excited about church life; if you are experiencing the best season of your life or if you are barely hanging there; if you are sure of your identity and your salvation, or if you are carrying the weight of questions and doubts… if you are committed Christian or if you have been hanging at the margins waiting for an invitation… well, this it: I invite you today to open your heart and your mind and your spirit to the beautiful reality of this God that created us all and that send Jesus to show us who he truly is and that is with us right now and that is for us for eternity- in saying “come and made me yours again, show me the way to live my life as you created me to, and help me to respond to your love by embracing your will, your heart, your Spirit- make me alive in you.”
It is not a coincidence that we are stepping again into the building today. The building is the same, but we are not; the building has seen the great depression and the second World War, has seen the cold war and has gone through the cultural revolution of the 60’s, the rise and fall of superpowers, has seen generations come and generations go, and now has gone through a pandemic! It stands as a reminder but also as a challenge- the life that we speak about is declared and proclaimed and remembered inside of it, but needs to be taken outside and made, once again, flesh and blood to our community. Not because the building is beautiful or our denomination is special or because our religion may be the best or our minister has the coolest accent… but because God is love and this love was made real in Christ and our lives were transformed and we want to see everyone experiencing this love, this message, this reality, this Gospel. Because Jesus is worthy! So I invite you to receive and believe his love... to incarnate his love… to live out the truth of the God who is forever for us. May God bless you and inspire you as you take the next step.