Sermon Notes: Making Room for God... by Obedience

Due to time, I haven't prepared the usual script, hopefully the bullet points make enough sense..

A Modern Parable

• Tommy the world famous tight rope walker. He did amazing stunts.
• Tommy had fallen off in practices and in performances years ago, but not recently.
• One day, the unthinkable happened… but the curious thing was that he enjoyed it.
• He started to do it for the paying crowds
• But the crowds weren’t fools, word got out and they stopped coming to see the show, they didn’t want to pay to see for something they could do.
• Tommy’s act became financially unviable, and folded
• He signed on the dole.
• When Tommy was different, it got the world’s attention, when he was just like them, they lost interest.
• How many of us are like Tommy in our Christian lives? Never tried to live differently, or used to try, but don’t any more.
• Titus 2:11-14 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. 

• Today, I felt compelled to speak about making room for God by obedience
• What does the title provoke in you? Excitement? Cynicism? Resentment? Fear? Apathy? Guilt?
• Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans says that his whole life mission is to bring the Gentiles into the “obedience of faith for the sake of his name”
• At the end of the same letter, he says: “For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed”
• In the Great Commission, (Matt 28), Jesus told his followers to teach not just for understanding, but for obedience.
• As I speak, my aim is not just to help you understand, but obey
• As you listen, your aim should not just be understanding, but obedience.
• Anything less and we are fooling around and there’s nothing for the world to see.
• People don’t need to see their banal little lives reflected back at them when they look at Christians, they want to see something worth living and dying for.
• If you have a bible in any kind of format, please turn to John 14:23 

• Making room for God is not like making room for your dog on the sofa, it’s making room for a King of the universe.
• Of course we never mean it like that, but how often does our making room for God feel like giving him the leftovers of our time or our emotional energy if we have any rather than finding out what the king requires of us?
• This verse is stunning because God is willing to stoop to our level.
• One of Jesus’ disciples asks a question.
• With a verse like this you would expect a question like: what are the benefits of being a Christian? What are the terms and conditions of discipleship?
• Previous verse says: Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”
• Judas is a bit confused Jesus is going and they can’t follow, but then he says he is coming back but when he comes back, he will not be seen by the world but will be seen by them so is he coming back wearing a hoodie or an invisibility cloak?
• Jesus is talking about returning not in bodily form, but through the Holy Spirit who is God and who dwells in the hearts of all those who humble themselves to receive him.
• In a mystery that only God will truly understand heart to heart, soul to soul, life to life.

• Much has been penned by many about love languages in recent years. Learning how to give and receive love is key to harmonious relationships.
• Fundamentally, we show love to God by obedience, everything we do should flow from that motivation as a response to his great kindness to us.
• The call to all. If anyone…
• Loves me “agape” is used here - deep sacrificial love.
• The love God shows to us is the love he desires to see us show to him… He wants his love to be reciprocated – like for like.  Tension and difficulty comes when love is not reciprocated to the same level in the other.
• High school crush analogy - unrequited love.
• Jesus has loved the world to death, through death and out the other side to new and eternal life and by the Spirit, he wants to cultivate that same kind of love in his people where we say I die to myself, my agenda, my dreams and plans and move by the power of God into a new kind of life – God’s eternal life where God’s ambitions, dreams and plans become my own.
• Hebrew 5:7-8: During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Christ, by his obedience
• No disciple is greater than his master, if Jesus had to do it, then those who call themselves Christians must follow in his footsteps.
• Christ’s obedience to the Father opened up the gates of Heaven for all to enter in. No one but he could do that.
• But God in his wisdom has decreed that it is by our obedience to Christ and the power of the Spirit that brings people through those open gates.
• You are here today, because someone was obedient to Jesus on your behalf, before you realised it.
• Those who love Jesus sacrificially will obey his commands, because they have a new nature, appetite and power for obedience put in there by the Holy Spirit.
• They will walk the tightrope. They won’t do it perfectly, that’s why God’s mercy and patience is so great, but they will do it increasingly through the seasons of life.

What does it mean to keep Jesus’ words?

• Words are living things, that my sound strange, but they have the power to multiply themselves.
• Words both good and bad get passed from one person to another, if the messages they bring take root, then eventually, they will get passed on to another. Words become scripts that get passed from generation to generation in families and societies for better or worse.
• We enact the words and the scripts that are passed on to us by our family and by our culture
• When Jesus told his disciples to keep his word, he didn’t mean in a jar in a cupboard, he meant out in the open. His words are living and active
• We can treat God’s words like a vacuum cleaner: most of the time it is hidden away under the stairs, but is brought out when we’ve made a mess of things.
• Jesus didn’t only mean for his words to be used as part of our crisis management, he meant for them to change the world.
• It’s so easy to fall into negative and passive modes of obedience.  Judging our spiritual progress by the sins we are not committing
• No good human relationship functions like this, but we seem to think that God will be ok with it.
• Jesus seeks an active and positive obedience the kind that says “Master, what do you want from me today”
• Like the way that not going to the gym for six months leaves us sluggish and self-loathing, we often lack spiritual vitality, not because life is hard, but because have given up doing the things that give us spiritual life – namely obedience to what God says.
• In another story Jesus told, he talked about how the cares of this life and the deceitfulness of riches can be like weeds that choke the life out of the words God plants in us.
• The cares of this life are all the good things of life that we need, but which we come to obsess over.  We take our eyes off Jesus and put them on these things
• The deceitfulness of wealth is not just rampant materialism, it’s the belief that money can give you the life that you need.
• Most of us in here aren’t rampant materialists, but we can be taken captive by thinking that good money management is the key to a successful life. Money management is important, but faithfulness to Jesus is more-so.
• Jesus says seek first to do as I say and I will ensure you have everything you need.

• Jesus isn’t Lord Sugar. He’s not standing there with arms folded waiting to be impressed and cajoled into liking us.
• This isn’t a job interview it is an invitation
• At the cross, Jesus has invited us into his life and he desires that we invite him into ours.
• He doesn’t care if our lives are worthy or perfect enough.
• He has all the resources we have none,
• Jesus didn't die so we could live like Christians on Sunday and atheists on Monday
• He isn't worried about what is out of your control, only what is in it.
• He’s isn’t bothered by our perfection or lack of it.
• Some of us need to stop whinging about what Church isn’t or Christians aren’t and get on with what God has asked of us.
• Stop using other people’s faults as an excuse for our own laziness / apathy / disobedience.
• Some of us need to move from negative and passive forms of obedience to positive and active ones.
• Some of us need to make room for God in more than just the nooks and crannies of our lives, but give him access to the master bedroom as it were.
• Some of us haven’t felt alive in God for a while, for the simple reason that we haven’t pursued the vitality of obedience.