Does my past define me?

As soon as I walked into my daughter (Kailyn’s) room last night, she announced “Always and Forever!” 

 

If you were not here on Sunday or were serving in the children’s ministry and did not get a chance to listen to the sermon, I would encourage you to listen to it online.  You can find it at www.westk.org.

This past Sunday was the second week in our sermon series Galatians 3: The Performance Trap – we dove into Galatians 3:6-9 and debunking the lie of your past defines you.

I love that in the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 4) and Mark (chapter 1) when Jesus calls Peter, Andrew, James and John, it is recorded that he says, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”  Come follow me… and “I will”, not you will, not your momma will, not your church will, not anything else.  He says, “I will make you.”

This is opposite of how teachers would select their students in the culture that Jesus lived.  In fact, back in that day, every Jewish boy would study the Torah (first 5 books of the Old Testament) and memorize it in hopes of becoming a disciple of a Rabbi.  And when they were ready, they would go to the rabbi and ask  if they could be their disciples.  Here is the kicker, unless you were best and the local rabbi thought you could do what he was doing, you were sent home to finish learning your father’s trade.  Unless the Rabbi thought you could already handle his teachings and instructions, you were not accepted to be under his personal teachings.  In a round-a-bout way, unless your past already positioned you to be a disciple, you would not be accepted.

Having been raised in this culture, these Jesus disciples would have went to synagogue and studied the Torah and at some point had a Rabbi tell him you don’t have it in you to be my disciple.  You cannot do what I’m doing because your past did not position you to receive my instructions.  We know this is true  because of what Peter was doing when Jesus calls him… He is fishing in his father’s boat.

As a teen they had been told “you cannot follow me because you don’t have the ability to do what I do.”  But a few years later when Jesus comes calling, Jesus seeks them out.  They doesn’t seek Jesus out, Jesus seeks them and calls them while they are fishing. 

Have you ever been around someone who has been fishing all day?  How about someone who has been fishing all day half naked, out in the sun, with no deodorant?  Because this is Peter and the other guys.  And Jesus calls THEM.  Jesus seeks THEM.  And he says come follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.  Jesus calls them in all their filth and nowhere does he say clean up your mess.  Nowhere does he say wash up and act the part.  He says come exactly as you are, regardless of your problems, regardless of your past. In essence, he says, “I’m not concerned about who you used to be, I’m not even concerned on who you think you could be, because I will make you a fisher of men.”

That is why I love the church so much.  We are not a perfect church because we are not perfect people.  We got real people, so that means we got people with problems.  We got people with financial problems, marriage problems, relationship problems, identity problems.  We got people who have a past full of sin.  We have the Triple A sinners (recovering alcoholics, addicts, and abusers).  We got people who have been abused, people who struggle to forgive, people whose current circumstances are a result of either their sin or the sin of someone else.

We are a church of messed up people… and I love this church… and so does Jesus…in fact Jesus loved the messed up people in this church so much he was willing to leave heaven and come to earth and to die on a cross so that our past, our problems, our circumstance and situations, the choices we have made and the things that were done to us don’t have to be the things that define us.  So our past doesn’t have to define our future. 

Ronald Rolheiser, in his book the Holy Longing, puts it this way.  He writes: “To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description.  It also, at the same time identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender.  To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul… because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion… God hung among thieves.”