I said before, that the culture war is not our fight. Both sides are against the Gospel, one openly and one more subtly. The left seeks out new sins and the right wallows in old sins. The left denies the reality of His resurrection and the right denies its power. But if, as I say, we are not to fight this fight, which so many churches think is the bulk of our mission, what are we to do? How should a Christian in America in 2021, live the life that God has given him or her?
From Luke 12 3 Then one from the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”14 But He said to him, “Man, who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?”
How did we arrive at unelected bureaucrats telling doctors what medicine to give their patients, property owners when they can remove someone from their property, parents when they can send their children to the schools that they pay for, all of us where we can go and what proof of our right to be there we must show? The answer I think is a small and simple thing, called task creep or mission creep. Every agency, every worker, starts out with a simple task-dig this hole, build this house, answer this phone, fill out this form, treat this patient, improve this process, administer this law, believe this truth, forgive this sin. And slowly, innocently, other things creep in. Help out over there, show the new guy the ropes, make things a little more fair, build this kingdom, set wrongs right, we use our position to do good things, and I won't bother to drag you through the whole slippery slope thought process. That seemed a lot more necessary on the other end of the slippery slope, but here at the bottom it is enough to point to the root cause, the results seem pretty apparent.
And I think that the awareness of mission creep is a good way to begin and a good explanation for Our Lord's surprising answer to this man. We read "Who made Me a judge over you?" and our instinct is to yell at the Lord, "Well you are the judge. Your Father gave all authority into your hand. My brother is doing me wrong. If not you, Lord Jesus, then who is the one who will fix it?" Our desire is to fix our nation, and ultimately our world. To build a righteous kingdom, if not for ourselves then at least for our children. Jesus Christ refused to build the kingdom. He refused to do this good deed, and it would have been a good deed, certainly He would have judged well. He refused to have a righteousness of His own, a righteousness that His Father had not called Him to. And in everything that follows that is the example that we must keep in the front of our minds. The Lord who didn't come to judge but to seek and to save that which was lost.
15 And He said to them, “Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.”16 Then He spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. 17 And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ 18 So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.” ’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’21 “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
How many of us have prudent friends, or are prudent friends, who have been saving and prepping either for the general uncertainty of our world or specifically for the dark time we find ourselves in? Before saying something like what I am about to say there are a lot of weasel words that are conventional, but I think that there is far more danger of these words being taken too lightly, viewing them in too airy and spiritual a way, then there is any danger of being taken too literally, too seriously so no weaseling, no CYA. Just gonna say what I was given to say. Whatever supplies you have, whether food, or ammunition, or silver and gold, or real estate, or medicine or I don't know what isn't going to get you through to the other side of the problems that are coming your way. You and I haven't put back enough. Not nearly enough to see us through the problems that are coming our way. And it is too late to do anything about it now. More to the point, our preparations, whether financial, or material, or mental, or spiritual are not a suitable place to lodge our hope or our trust, even for things that seem to be in their realm. I am not trying to bludgeon you with the idea that you can't buy eternal life but more directly that you can't buy just regular old life. But I am getting ahead of our text, Jesus said it more simply and more directly than I can.
22 Then He said to His disciples, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; nor about the body, what you will put on. 23 Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? 25 And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 26 If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest?
All of our preparations come from worry. There is no need to dance around and justify our "prudence", our "preparedness", our "thoughtfulness". We do these things because we are worried. Because life is scary. I am intending to convict you of this sin, and if you feel like you have slipped around the edges then you don't understand what I am saying, or more to the point what the Lord is saying. Whether or not you think or feel psychologically or emotionally worried or anxious your actions and mine identify us as behaving in a way that Our Lord is about to describe as heathenish unbelief. But a brief stop in our parallel passage in Matthew 6 is appropriate.
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
During the Reformation, Calvin would accuse the Papists of idolatry towards the saints and the Lord's Mother and their defense was that they only "worshipped" God the honor they gave to the saints they defended by saying it was only "service". To which the intrepid Reformer replied, "It is a smaller thing to worship someone than to serve them. Many worship God but will not serve Him. The smaller thing, worship, is included in the larger thing, service." And on that reasoning I am going to accuse us all of idolatry. You cannot worship God and worship this world. You cannot worship or serve God if you also worship or serve riches or wealth or health or life or peace or food or safety or freedom or any other created thing.
24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds?
The ravens make us look like fools. And that is what we are. Fools and sinners. The birds don't work at any of the things that we do. And which of us doesn't envy their freedom? "I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot chain." All of our work, doesn't get us anything that we wouldn't have without it. In fact, if we do provide more food for ourselves than God would have given us without our works, and our kingdom, and our righteousness, we find that not only have we made ourselves slaves to the getting of the food, but slaves after the fact, whether because we exercise the extra food off, or we resist the temptation to eat all the things in our barns, or because we have to maintain or improve our barns like the guy at the beginning of the story. Our works only make us slaves, only make us beholden to the God in the Belly.
25 And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 26 If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 28 If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith?
If Christ used the birds of the air to condemn our works, He uses the lilies of the field to condemn our righteousness and our sanctification. What does He say? Which of you can make yourself grow a foot? And then He claims that this is the least. What are you comparing a grown man getting a foot taller to that that is "the least"? I don't think it is a stretch here to say that He is making a spiritual point now. If we can't even make ourselves taller, then we can't "grow in Christ". One is at least in the category of things that people might could do, growing in Christ is not even a task for angels, but only the Lord Himself can do anything in this field. The lilies have no works, yet they grow in the way that they were made to grow. If you are in Christ then you will grow, if His seed is in you then that seed will grow. Nothing we do is going to have any affect on that one way or another. Which is good news because I have a pretty good idea which way we would affect it if we could. To drive the point home, He says that they don't spin, they don't make clothes for themselves, like Adam and Eve did after they sinned. Throughout Scripture clothes are a sign of righteousness, whether Adam's poor attempt to cover his sin or the skin of his Substitute that God clothed him in, or Aaron's vestments or the filthy rags of our righteousness, or the linen clean and white without spot or wrinkle which is Christ's righteousness covering us. Without getting into the soteriology and eternal destiny of grass, the Lord's provision of righteousness for the most insignificant is greater than the righteousness which all of Solomon's works could provide for him. If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O ye of little faith?
29 “And do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind. 30 For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.
And there is God's Law with the screws tightened down as much as they can ever be tightened. He no longer says don't worry about what you will eat or drink or your future or your freedom or your health or peace or safety, but He says, "Don't even seek them." Thou shalt not seek any of the things that the gentiles, the nations of the world seek. Thou shalt not be anxious, for all anxiety is unbelief, is gross idolatry and atheism. The only way to obtain any of these things is by seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, seeking His kingdom and His righteousness ONLY, to the absolute exclusion of any kingdom or righteousness of our own. You may be sitting there thinking that I have pretty well excluded anything that you can do that seems like it might qualify as seeking God's kingdom and His righteousness. I have tried to make most of the things I have talked about today into seeking God's kingdom and I have failed pretty absolutely. I usually assume that anything that I can't do is humanly impossible so it's fair to say that if you haven't failed already you will. A great thing to do right now would be to tell you what to do to seek God's kingdom and His righteousness, since that is what is required of us. It would be nice to know what qualifies as being "rich toward God" since everything else is worthless. But I can't tell you. Cause I don't know. Jesus has cranked our Law problem up to 11 and we have no solution.
32 “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
The Father's Good Pleasure is the whole of the Gospel, start to finish, front to back, cover to cover. We are a fearful Little Flock. The Law and the wolves are at our door. We have no righteousness nor any method for obtaining righteousness. The protections that we once thought we had are evaporating like mist in the hot sunlight of reality. We are not only the refuse of humanity but unrepentant idolaters. Our only hope is the one that we ought to really fear, the one who when He is done killing us can cast us into Hell, as Christ warns us at the beginning of our chapter. And none of that matters. All of reality, all of the Universe, physical, social, moral, spiritual whatever joins together in telling the Little Flock, "NO." But there is a Father who reserves to Himself the right, the power, the freedom to say, "Yes." He doesn't need a reason. He doesn't give an explanation. He gives us the whole kingdom, everything just cause He wants to. Protocol be damned.
The Father has prepared food for you. The body and blood of Christ. He has prepared clothes for you. The righteousness of the Perfect Messiah. He has prepared the whole kingdom for you. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? The table is set. All you are called to do is eat.
