Foot Washing

The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.
The evening meal was being served, when Jesus got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. Their teacher, their master, Jesus, stood before them dressed in something like a long undershirt. That’s the way slaves would have been dressed to serve a meal. He tied a towel around his waist and poured water into a basin. He began to wash their feet, drying them as he went with the towel that was wrapped around him.
It would have been shocking, even embarrassing to the disciples present. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?"
It wasn’t really about feet. There was something bigger happening here. The one into whose hands the Father had given everything now takes his disciples' dirty feet into his hands to wash them
"No," Peter said, "no, you shall never wash my feet." But Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no part with me."
Peter, never one to do anything halfway, responds, "Then, Lord, give me a bath all over! Wash my head, my hands, everything!"
But Jesus said, "No, you are already clean; you need only to have your feet washed."

The disciples had already been cleansed of their sins, they already belonged to Jesus, and as Jesus had said, nothing could snatch them from his hand-- except for Judas, into whose heart the evil had already entered and was even now doing its work.

But walking through the streets of ancient Jerusalem gets your feet dirty, just as walking through the world of today gets your soul dirty, even those of us for whom the price has been paid. We begin to pick up the attitudes of the world around us -- sometimes without being aware of it. That was what had happened to the disciples, and that is what happens to us today.

And so Jesus washes their feet. The remedy for dirty feet is foot washing. And the remedy for a dirty soul is washing too; The Apostle John was there. The Lord knelt before him that night and washed his feet like all the others. He would later write, “but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”.
When we gather around the Lord's Table, it is just as though we were put back into the same situation that the disciples experienced.

The Lord is here washing our feet this morning. And as we remember him through the taking of this bread and this cup, as we examine ourselves, and confess our sins to him in silent prayer, his blood is continuing to purify us from all sin.

It is only because we are his that we could ever be clean all over in the first place,
and it is only because we humble ourselves, and allow him to wash even our feet, our dirty, unpresentable feet, as he kneels before us with a towel, can the defilement that our souls have picked up this last week be washed away now.

Come to the Table

And he began to teach them saying:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

With that the upside down world of the Sermon on the Mount begins.

I would like to be rich in spirit, but I’m not. I would like the room to light up with the generosity of my spirit, my courageous tranquility, and noble charm whenever I walk in, but it doesn’t. But today the good news is even the poor in spirit have been invited.

The King sent out his servants with the invitation, “Come to the Wedding Banquet of my Son.” But the prominent and worthy bidden guests that were first invited proved to be unworthy, couldn't be bothered, had better things to do, so now he has gone out on the streets and invited whosoever will to come in.

The prophet Isaiah was aware of his spiritual poverty.

"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.

The Apostle Paul writes,
I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. When I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?

Spiritual poverty has been a hallmark of all of God’s great servants down through the years. David the murderer, Abraham the liar, Peter the hothead and turncoat, Jacob the swindler. God only uses imperfect people, but when he lays his spirit on them mighty things begin to happen.

For without an awareness of our own spiritual poverty it is impossible to please him. An “atheist" can't find God for the same reason a thief can't find a policeman. He feels “no need”, doing what is right in his own eyes.

But one day he becomes aware of what might be called a cancer of the soul. It becomes impossible to ignore it, the sin by now is running wild unchecked throughout his spirit, and a craving grows within him for righteousness, a real righteousness that he knows he has never had.

You, fellow Christian, may have stood for years outside the gates of prayer dressed in nothing but your raggedy scraps of threadbare morality, holding up your little cardboard sign, “will work for salvation.”

I finally laid down my sign, and bowed my head.

And then the Father comes and clothes you in his best robe, and puts sandals on your feet.

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to the cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.
Not the labor of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law’s demands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and Thou alone.

Let me assure you, if I can be invited to the table, so can you.

The Strugglers

One of the amazing blessings we have is that although God loves us more than we could ever love him, yet he is not discouraged. From the beginning of our lives he holds out his hand to each of us and watches every move we make. There is a limited window of opportunity to respond. It’s called a lifetime, and then we are harvested like wheat, and a new crop of human beings takes over the earth. 50 generations between Christ and us and so far the people still keep coming.
In each generation some are called by the Holy Spirit to be the church, to carry on the ministry of Christ. We are, as we say, Jesus Today. When we are gone, a new generation will be Jesus Tomorrow. At all times those who make up the church are the ones who seek God’s face, who pray to Him to know his Spirit, who come to the table of God on Sunday morning to receive his blessing and to align their spirit with His. And these are the ones, who instead of walking away, “having loved this present world”, have struggled to stay in relationship with him…refusing to let him go. The Apostle Paul says they are the true Israel of god…for the name Israel means those who wrestle with God.
And who was the first to be called that? Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, Jacob: the successful business man and conniving liar, Jacob the cheat and swindler, who despite his failings, through one amazing night until daybreak, wrestled with god, and won.
So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man.
Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, (he Struggles with God) because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”

And so despite our weakness, we stay engaged with God. Faith is not an emotion and we don’t mistake it for one. Faith is a choice we make to surrender to God. God will let you wrestle for as long as you like. You can’t hurt him, but you cannot prevail. Then with a touch of His hand you will be weakened to the point of submission, and you’ll hang on to him and beg for His blessing. As He gives it, Revelation 2 says you too are promised to receive a new name.
As with Jacob, at the end of the night a new day will dawn bright and clear and if you’re limping a little it’s because He wants you to lean on Him. Such is the love He has for you.

Gratitude

Gratitude
We live our life mainly in two flavors, an attitude of gratitude for what we’ve received, or an attitude of resentment because we didn’t get what we feel we’re entitled to.
God freely gave his son that we might escape the consequences of our sinful and corrupt lives
Psychological research has demonstrated how and why people feel gratitude when they receive a gift like this.
1. Do we see the gift as as a thing of worth, a “pearl of great price”, or do we say, “who needs it, it’s just a piece of cheap junk?”
2. Is the gift costly to the giver or do we say, “What difference does it make to him, he can certainly easily afford it.”
3. Is the gift given to us for unselfish reasons, or does the giver have some secret cynical purpose in giving it to us, like is he just trying to make himself look good, or make us feel guilty?
4. Is the gift given to us gratuitously, that is with no obligation to do so, or given only because for some reason he has to.
Paul summed up god’s gift like this: God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
When you hear about this you have heard the gospel. If hearing the gospel doesn’t impress you that much, if you laugh it off, or postpone thinking about it indefinitely, you are allowed to go off and make your own way in the world. If on the other hand, your heart is touched, if you feel grateful for what God did in sending his son, you may enter through the door of repentance and baptism into a state of salvation. The gift you receive will be an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you. While we may be quite impressed by our worthiness or lack of worthiness to receive this gift, weighing carefully, in the words of Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey, the great big terrible things we’ve done and the great big wonderful things we’re going to do. Our hopes, our regrets, our loves, our hates. All very large. But God is not. He simply says "By grace you have been saved though faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God

A gift that is not received is a gift null and void. Whether you know it or not, hearing the gospel is the central test of your life, and I believe, the reason you were born.

Even As Also I Am Known

In all the universe there’s only one creature that would turn and look God full in the face and offer to give him pointers about what he should do to make us like him better. And when we grow up we make the big decision about whether or not we will worship him. But the stars worship God day and night, without thinking. And our failure to automatically do so is strange, racked as we are with many tragic and ridiculous flaws. Our test of God’s goodness is whether or not he is willing and able to meet our needs as we see them, to save our skin when we’re in trouble, and help us to get a good job when we are unemployed. We size up his unshakeable moral laws from tiny hearts filled with lonely highways of corruption.
What makes us “tick” lies concealed from neighbors and spouses, and even from ourselves, but not from him. When we think we want a Corvette we really want a hug. Folks, we just don’t know ourselves very well. For our little mind is a many layered contraption, like seven layer dip. In the top part is our conscious mind from which we speak our opinions to everyone we meet, make demands for benefits and favors, order French fries, and make complaints. Then there is the unconscious of which we know little and have heard but rumors. In that part of the soul 24/7 sweep dangerous and vexing emotions which we try in vain to manage and conceal. And then further still beneath that is the vast and titanic body of forgotten and suppressed memory, rising in the night as we lay down to close our eyes, dominating us for six hours, holding us captive, and like the unseen mantle of our planet composing the overwhelming majority of our soul. It is forever encased in darkness, and is probably molten at the core. We know nothing of it, but is it the real “us”? There, at least, we are in fact, “out of control”, as our own dreams prove. Do you commit sin in your dreams? Are you responsible for these things? After all it is your mind they are going through. No wonder the prophet sang,
"The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?
The question for me has always been, how then can we pray, not knowing our own state, or even who we really are? Who am I to tell God my needs, as if I know them and he doesn’t? Does he not know me far more completely than I do?
The answer is simple. Though we pray from small hearts filled with doubt and corruption we pray with faith into the great heart of God, and that heart is filled with eternal grace through the gift of his Son.
This thing bothered the Apostle Paul, and he wrote about it. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
To know, even as we are known: this is the sweetness of heaven, and for those who trust in God and the one he has sent, it is even now on the horizon, in the great scheme of things not many days away.

Riddle me this:

There is an irresolvable conflict that rests within the heart of God and therefore an irresolvable conflict within the entire universe, which after all is just his footstool. Over here is the infinite God who can do anything he decides to do…who says let there be light and there is light….And over there is the finite and flawed human “us”, who can’t do right even if he wants to, and often doesn’t want to in the first place. The aching heart of god contains two contradictory ideas…that man must pay for his own sins, that is justice which is what God forever, by his nature, must have, and yet man must go free from his sins so he can be with God, because that is what God wants the most. Hear the contradiction in a nutshell in this account in Exodus: And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation." What God wants more than anything else is us, you and me, our love, our voluntary obedience motivated out of love and respect, in short he wants intimate friendship with us, the only ones in creation who can be called his own offspring. But our sin gets in the way. Habakkuk 1:13 says, his eyes are too pure to look on evil. He is God…The one thing he cannot do is contradict his own nature. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sits down on a hillside and introduces us to God’s standard of righteousness, and I for one have always found it to be a terrifying thing … as high above my generation’s idea of morality as the moon is above my back yard. Look at a beautiful woman walking by on the street with lust in your heart; you are equal to a man having an affair with another man’s wife. Can’t control your wandering eye? Dig it out with a screwdriver. Can’t keep your hands off things that don’t belong to you? Cut them off with a hacksaw. Angry with your brother without a good reason, to God you are as good as a murderer. Or try this: somebody slaps you, don’t fight back, but instead haul around your other cheek so he can have another go at it. And from what I can tell God doesn’t grade on the curve. These ethics seem to us like climbing Everest…theoretically possible, but in practice simply unattainable. First time I turned to Matthew 5 to find out what the good news is I, like the young man in Matthew 19, went away sorrowful, because like him I was not willing to give away the ethical system I already owned. In Romans Paul said you could be saved if you lived a righteous life…but no one does. The prophet Isaiah wrote:
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
When offered the sumptuous and fulfilling lives of royal sons and daughters we choose instead seventy years of hog troughs filled with cheap thrills and petty substitutes He has followed us down through the years like a broken hearted father, sending prophets, miracles, voices from the sky, smoke and fire from the mountaintops, floating axe heads, suddenly visible armies of angels materializing in the clouds, anything but waving his gigantic arms and we keep running away and as we look back we laugh in his face. God with a weeping voice says what else can I do? Praise god there is an answer: Today, those of us who are on the other side of the grave of baptism, can sing the song the elders sang in Revelation 5: Worthy is the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world. What happened was, a lamb without blemish found, and was led forward and placed on the altar before the living God. It seems it was God’s one and only son. It apparently was always destined to be so. His throat was cut, his blood was spilled, and he was of such perfection that the sacrifice was accepted. This sacrifice was sufficient to cover all the sin of those who would rely on it, even yours, even mine. But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. If you are one of the imperfect ones who doesn’t live the Sermon on the Mount this is what you must have faith in. This is what you must rely on. It is reliance on this that is what this meal represents, and it is that faith that makes you eligible to participate in this holy meal today. Paul says examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith, in short, to see whether you are a Christian.

Refuse The Sedative

One of the promises of the gospel is that life as a Christian is to be life unmedicated by delusion. Like Jesus when he refused the vinegar and gall on the cross, we are being strengthened to refuse the sedative. Life is full of offered sedatives; things to calm us down, things to cheer us up, compliments about our personal coolness, little gifts to make us look the other way and just let things go, addictions to take the edge off.

But in the boldness that comes from the Holy Spirit, and in our finer moments we can draw a line in the sand with the toe of our boot. Friends and acquaintances may mock, but we say what happened to Jesus in the tomb was real and physical and literal, not just a little story. As John Updike says in his poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter," we insist the decomposing molecules were knit back together, the amino acids lit back up and began to fire, the heart that had withered and stopped bumped back into action and began to pump.

Or have we forgotten? When we were baptized we came to the big river that divides one country from the other. By confessing Christ and submitting in faith to immersion in water we crossed the bridge and then we blew it up; our way back to what used to be home and ignorance is now blocked. We know better now. We have no option but to go forward. This is not a matter of our attitude. This is a matter of fact. We went to a new country when we put on Christ and like it or not we cannot go back.

"No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." Like Jesus we now live on the road. Our McMansions, our bungalows, our apartments, they're just shacks. Albert Brumley's old song goes, this world is not our home, and we're just passing through. And we never will be able to feel at home in this world any more.

The story is told that in 1519 Hernando Cortes planned an expedition into Mexico to plunder its fabled treasures. He presented his plan to Diego Veláquez, Spanish governor of Cuba, who was so excited that he gave him eleven ships and seven hundred men. Cortes did not tell the men or the governor his whole plan. After months of travel the eleven ships landed in Veracruz. Cortes had the men unload everything from all eleven ships. As they headed into the jungle the men turned back and saw all eleven ships burning! Their reaction was to fight back; surely an enemy had initiated the attack. But Cortes halted the men. This had been his plan all along. It was he who had ordered the ships to all be burned. Cortes did not know what he and his men would find in the new land. What he did know was that by "Burning the Ships" he had completely eliminated their option of going back, and at the same time creating an intensely powerful motivation to succeed.

If we have confessed Christ and gone down into what the old time preachers used to call "the watery grave of baptism," if we have started walking on the road with Jesus that will without fail lead to Jerusalem, try as we might we cannot be unbaptized.

Romans 6:3-5 (New International Version)

Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.