Central Church - A church in Edinburgh, Scotland

When we are suffering, many questions about God can arise - we question his love and we question his power, does he care, and can he help? God’s solution to suffering in Job’s life is to offer himself, to reveal his glory and greatness, to show Job that he has been there all along. Suffering changes so many perspectives in our lives and creates many ‘new normals’, so what perspective does God offer us of himself in our places of suffering, how could we allow God to be the ‘lifter of our heads’ (Ps 3), to lift our heads towards him?

Job's friends begin well, weeping with him, sitting with him, seeing the depth of his suffering, not trying to make it better. But that fades and like all of us, they go into problem solving mode, offering a multitude of advice and options for Job as to why this may have happened. How do we relate helpfully to those who are suffering? Do we know our own tendencies and defaults to fix and offer advice or are we able to sit in the tension. Learning how to be family together means learning how to rejoice and how to weep together. Jesus wept with his friends and Paul told us to weep with those who weep. We are to enter into each other’s sufferings as much as we are meant to enter into each other joys.

Job was just a normal, faithful man and then his whole entire world implodes. How much is this many of our own stories, maybe not to this extent, but suffering does not give us fair warning, it comes and raids our ordinary, faithful lives. The opening of Job, as with many of these wisdom writings, asks the questions about the just-ness of God and those are the questions we often ask in times of suffering ‘why God, how God etc’. Jesus told us that in this world we would know trouble but he also is the Good Shepherd who is with us in our troubled times.

Solomon’s life shows both a life lived in devotion to God and a life fragmented by divided loves. There was deep devotion to God in Solomon’s life, he sought God, he worshiped God, he built the temple for God, he desired the wisdom of God. Yet, he became a man with many options and avenues open to him and he began to choose other things. For him it was turning away to other gods, dividing his loves and the influence of those around him. For us it will be something else but there are many things that will seek to divide our heart, many things that could become idols for us. How can we live with undivided hearts before God?

Last week we learned that God told David that he would not take his steadfast love (his chesed) away from him. The love of God endured with David through his times of faithfulness and his times of deep unfaithfulness. There is profound tragedy in this part of David’s story, showing us how the tendrils of sin can so easily entangle (Heb 12). There is tragedy for David and Uriah and Bathsheba and the unnamed child. We can heap all sorts of judgement on David and exclaim all sort of unfairness for Bathsheba and her child and all of that is right but ultimately, we can see ourselves here and we know that just like David, we too need God’s steadfast love that endures with us through our many wanderings. King David was redeemed not because he deserved to be but because God had made a promise. Part of ‘Living in the Story’ is that we live as people under a promise.

David is a good and faithful King, faithful to God and faithful to the people of Israel. There is a similar faithfulness here in David as Abraham had; radically trusting in the word of God. Where Saul sought his own promotion, David desires to elevate God, seeking His revelation and direction in his life. 2 Samuel 7 describes the Davidic covenant, the promise made by God to David that he will establish him and raise up a descendant from his line (not a direct messianic prophecy but setting up an enduring hope of God’s provision even through generations of failure). What does this hope mean for us? How does it call us to faithfulness in God, to trust in his promises and to endurance in living for him?

This story says as much about the people of Israel at this time as it does about Saul. They were the ones who had demanded a king, and the king they got was a man whose heart was taken over by pride and ego. This story is not too far from our own, who we follow really matters, the opinions we elevate, the blame we cast, the pride we fall prey to, it’s all really important. The voice of God is loud and clear here, but God is not listened to, the same is true for us, the voice of God is loud and clear, let us be a people who listen.

The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is far from palatable in any kind of modern society (or even not so modern!). This is not a felt-board story. Perhaps we misunderstand the principle that God was setting out through this story. Child-sacrifice was not new, it was not an uncommon practice to sacrifice your child to a god or a deity. When God asks Abraham to do this, he is testing his faith and devotion but most importantly he is setting up a (very dramatic!) way to say in the Jewish faith, this abhorrent practice has no place. God is always setting up a different story than the one in the world around us. We get to live in that different story every day as we follow Jesus.

What does it mean when God makes a promise? God made a pretty big promise to Abraham and maybe the more surprising thing is that Abraham believed God even though the circumstances around him would’ve told him otherwise. This covenant sets up something important for us; we are people living under a promise and we can trust that God fulfills his promises to us. How can we find a renewal of that faith and trust in our own lives?

Abraham, the father of the faith, received a call to go to an unknown place, and he said yes. He followed the call of God even though he didn’t know where it would lead or what it would lead to. Abraham started a trend among the people of God that extended right through to the disciples and to us - we are a people who go, we are a people who follow. We don’t just go anywhere, and we don’t just follow anyone, so what does it mean to follow the call of God, to go to the people and places he is leading us to even when we don’t have the whole story?

Few passages in Scripture are as challenging to read as this one. We sometimes stop it short and only read what is palatable to us, or we don’t read it at all, choosing blissful ignorance instead, because we find it troubling. Neither are good approaches; we must read it all. Some think this passage to be a herald for social action, others are troubled by its seeming closeness to justification by works. It’s about neither; at its heart it’s about our relationship to the Kingdom and our relationship to the King. It tells us we are accountable, that the great revealing awaits everyone, that we’re not all going the same road and that there will be surprises! Its heart is the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Messiah has come, Jesus is here, what are you going to do about that?

‘Are you envious because I am generous?’. Such a question has the ability to cut all of us right to our core, it exposes our jealous hearts, our resentful spirits, our entitled ways, our wounds and our disappointments. The Kingdom of God, as we have learned, is unexpected, is upside-down, is not measurable by the world’s standards and yet so often we still push ahead and try to squeeze it into our human-sized metrics. This parable shows the immense and confusing generosity of God as well as showing us the shadows that creep into our own hearts. How can we realign our hearts towards God’s metrics instead of our own?

The Kingdom of God is costly. Jesus speaks so strongly in this passage around the theme of wealth and it can be hard for us to hear, lots of us (but not all) live fairly well-off lives and in our society there is a growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Jesus is saying something so subversive here, it would be commonplace in Judaism that riches were a mark of God’s favour, no one would imagine that they could be a stumbling block to entering the Kingdom! Isn’t it the same with us? We live under the guise that money gets us what we want (and for the most part, it does) yet that is not the way of the Kingdom. The Jews could not pay their way and neither can we, our money and possessions will not come with us. What hold does money have on our lives? Has it grown any pride in us? Has lots of it or lack of it let fear grow in us? How can we allow Jesus to shape our worldview of wealth and live differently in this generation?

The Kingdom of God is deeply merciful but with God’s mercy comes God’s justice. Matthew is showing us here how Jesus is not interested in cheap grace. From Peter’s seemingly innocent question following through to the parable of the servant and the debt, we see that forgiveness is to be given freely and abundantly and that resentment harbours deeply scarring wounds. What is the lesson to us here as believers and as a church, how can we usher in the Kingdom of God by walking in the way of mercy and justice?

We’ve seen over the last two weeks the work of mystery and the work of the small and unexpected and these same themes continue here. These two parables teach us how the Kingdom of God spreads – just like the tiny mustard seed and hidden yeast, the Kingdom of God grows and spreads, it pervades society and permeates the whole world! How can our faith be orientated towards this aspect of the Kingdom of God, living with expectation of its wide reach?

In the present, the way that God's Kingdom works is often unexpected. It can be messy, often doesn't work to the timescales we would like, and while we would like to see evil fully rooted out our experience is that God works in amongst the brokenness of this world, and good and evil often grow together. The promise of the kingdom of God is that this will not always be the case, it is messy now but, in the end, evil will be rooted out, God’s justice will be enacted, but for now we are called to wait, to worship and to work in the midst of the messiness.

The Kingdom of God is mysterious, we are trusting in a work that is unseen and not within our control. This parable speaks of small and unseen beginnings that result in a wonderful harvest. Jesus’ ministry didn’t look like the sort of kingdom-of-God-movement people were expecting, it was small and unknown in the beginning and yet the miraculous harvest of it was incredible and we still live in the light of it today. Similarly, God’s work in us is often small and unseen, there is a mystery to the Kingdom of God being realised in our lives and much of it is out of our control. How can we learn to lean into the mystery of all that is beyond our control and lean on the One who is in control?

God is holy and just, and invites us to be people of justice who fight for freedom from injustice. Jesus consistently draws near to the marginalised and oppressed. He ushers in this ministry to the most vulnerable. The victims of injustice need our consistent loving mercy as we respond to Jesus' call to love people as He loves them. In what situations are we being called to persevere, to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with Jesus?

The most important thing about us, before anything else, is that we are followers of Jesus! Like the first disciples, we are called to follow Jesus, we get to respond to that call by yielding to his plans for us and taking time to listen to who he is pointing us towards, because this life is not just for us, we are disciples who make disciples. How can we continue to live into the vision that we have as a church to follow Jesus with everything we have?

There are many people in this church being very generous with their time and money. How can we be increasingly sacrificially generous with our time, our talents, our gifts and our money - what is God saying to us? It's about our heart - not obeying a command, but expressing gratitude for the grace we have received. It's also about our holiness - giving is between us and God, having the same attitude as Jesus. It's about the health of the church - equality means that those who need to receive will receive, and those that are able to give more abundantly will do so. And it is important that the church has transparent finances and stewards really well all money given. Let's be a generous church, loving this city, going the extra mile, being sacrificial.