“Finding Happiness”
John 14:15-21
May 4, 2008
Rev. John A. Fleming
I would like to throw up a couple of words up in the air
this morning as we make our way to the communion rail this morning. Here are the words. I’m wondering how they will land in your
heart. The first word is trust. The second one is obey.
John
Stammis wrote the words and the music using those
words way back in 1887. John attended a
crusade that year. Today we would call
the crusade a revival. John attended
this meeting. He was there when the
Spirit grabbed hold of his life. He and
others went to the altar and gave their lives to Jesus. And when it was all over, the preacher asked
those who had been to the altar to give a testimony, to say something about who
God is in their lives and what they were going to do about it. John wasn’t the first one to give his
testimony. In fact, he was one of the
last. He listened to what the others
were saying and he did not understand their words. They explained God in ways he had never
heard. So when it was his time and his
turn to speak, he stood up and said, “I’m just going to trust and obey and hope
that’s enough!” I like the way he thinks
and I love this hymn he wrote so long ago.
Since I was a kid, I have sung the words of his
song. My pastors through the years have
chosen it to go along with their sermons.
Directors of choirs have suggested and chosen it, too. It’s chorus sings,
“Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy with Jesus than to trust
and obey.”
Now that I am in my forties, not only do I want to sing
the words of this hymn, I also want to live them. I would like to make them a part of my life. Today in our sermon, friends, I would like
for us to think about what it means to trust and obey this Jesus we love.
These two words are all through our lesson for this
morning. Last week, our lay readers read
the first part of John’s fourteenth chapter.
Jesus brings up the subject of trusting him at the beginning of it. The New International Version of the Bible
puts it this way, “Let not your hearts be
troubled. Trust in God, trust also in
me.”
Now what is trust anyway? How do
you define it? This week I’ve read a lot
of definitions of the word. One preacher
I know says that to trust means to have confidence in, to rely on, to depend
on, to believe in someone. I heard about preacher say, and this makes
perfect sense to me, that if you wanted to sum up the entire Bible with a
single word, that single word would be the word trust.
As for His part, God has given us so many wonderful things. He has given us a place in His family. He has given us his love and his care. He has given us his grace. Our
God is a generous God. As for our part,
the real question today is this one, “Do we trust Him? Do we believe in Him?”
Can we trust this God of our’s with our past?
One of the great Methodist
prayers has us praying for forgiveness.
In it, we pray for those things
we have done but shouldn’t have done, and we pray for things that we should
have done but never quite got around to doing.
As Christians we know that we don’t have it all together. We know that we never get it right the first
time. We know that we will go back again
and again to God asking for his forgiveness.
Maybe our prayer is like this one, “God, it’s me again and I’ve done it
again. Please forgive me!” Have you ever prayed that prayer? Can we trust God with our blunders and
our failures and our faults? I think we
can.
Can we trust this God of ours with our todays, with the things we’re facing today? With the things that are in front of us and
confronting us today, right now? There’s
another great hymn that we sing from time to time. It’s a new hymn written in 1904. We sing these words from time to time, “Be not dismayed what e’er
betide. God will take care of you. Beneath his wings of love abide. God will take care of you.” Can you trust Jesus with your day today?
And what about tomorrow, can you
trust Jesus with your future? I like
this image. Jesus is with us today,
standing beside us, but he’s gotten things ready for our tomorrows. He’s set up the scene and made sure
everything is ready. None of us know what
tomorrow will bring, but we can trust God for tomorrow.
Trust in God, trust also in me, said
Jesus. And the disciples of his day
really needed to hear that word. I hope you will remember that the words of Jesus that began
in the thirteenth chapter and continue until the seventeenth one are called
Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. In these
passages, Jesus is talking about leaving his disciples. Jesus says, “Trust in God, trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s
house. I go to prepare a place for
you.” Jesus was leaving and the
disciples had no idea how to handle that.
What were they going to do when he was gone? What would life be like if he weren’t with
them? Then there was, perhaps, the most
important question, “What will happen to us once Jesus is gone?”
What about us?
That’s a question disciples have been asking for two thousand
years. I want to remind you that John’s
gospel was the last one written. John’s
first readers wanted to know where Jesus was.
He had promised to come back. Where was he?
Another question that asked is this one, “What about us?” John’s gospel was written a generation after
the life and death of Jesus. Were these
followers of Jesus supposed to live a secondhand faith? Were they to feast on a diet of memories? Were they to spend all of their time wishing
that had lived earlier, then and there instead of here and now?
Jesus had an answer for them. It is an answer for us, too. There are a lot of Bible verses that compete
for best. I don’t mind putting up the
eighteenth verse of our lesson up among the others. Jesus said, “I will not leave you
orphaned.” It really means that he will
not leave us alone.
I know people who have lived their entire lives with
their parents near their side. Most of
the time their mothers and their fathers were as close as a computer click or a
phone call away. If they wanted to see
them, the drive was worth it. Then their
parents got older. Their moms and dads
weren’t as quick as they used to be, their memories weren’t as sharp as they
once were. There was a stroke or an
illness. There was a hospitalization and
a call to the funeral home. Maybe daddy
died first and then sometime later their mother also died. I have stood in cemeteries and sat in homes
where this very thing has happened, and I have heard these words more than
once, “I feel like an orphan now. I’m
fifty years old and I feel like an orphan.”
I want you to know this.
Not only does the word orphan apply to children who no longer have their
parents physically with them, the word was also used for disciples and
followers of a teacher when their teacher was no longer around. Jesus says, “You don’t have to worry about
being an orphan. I will not leave you
that way. I am coming to you. In a little while the world won’t see me, but
you will. In a little while you will
feel me in your heart and I will whisper things in your ear. On that day you will know that I am in the
Father and you are in me and I am inside of you.” I
will not leave you orphaned. You can
trust that.
We started our sermon with two
words. We know what it means to trust
God. Now, what does it mean to obey
Him? Here is what I think. I
think obeying Jesus means following him, loving him, and serving him. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
I hope you will remember the story that Luke tells about a lawyer who
one day came up to Jesus. He was there to
test him and he asked Jesus, “What’s
the greatest commandment?” Moses had
come down from
I want you to hear this, love and obedience are
always together in the New Testament. We’re the ones who have separated
them. We think of obedience as something
that we have to do, some law we have to keep, something that demands something
of us. We obey, friends, because we love
this Jesus.
I want to warn you, says Jesus. If you love me, then I want you to take some
time everyday to reaffirm your love of God and God’s love for you. And if you love me, you will keep my
commandments. That requires a little
work on your part. It means doing things
like telling the truth, serving someone else, and making someone else’s life
better and fresher and more abundant just because you came by, wrote a note,
left a gift.” This demand to love God by
obeying his commandments is as hard and as easy as it can be. If you obey the commandments of God, then you
were serve faithfully and speak truthfully. You will pray a little every day. You will simplify your life and you will
leave everything else up to God.
What we need to remember is that we are not alone. We never have been. God has sent us a comforter. God has sent us a helper. Jesus says, “My father and I will come and
take up some room in your life if you will just make some room for us.” I like that.
Let us pray.