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First Steps are Always Hard
A sermon by
Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Fourth in a series on “The Mirror Stories of Jesus”
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Have you watched a little child learn how to walk? Have
you done it lately? God builds them close to the ground so it won’t hurt when
they fall. And they fall a lot because first steps are always hard. Sometimes
that happens later in life. Because of trauma or accident, a person winds up
having to learn how to walk all over again. And those steps, too, are hard.
When Jesus called his disciples, he discovered, as he
already knew, they just didn’t know a whole lot. And teaching them the basics
of what it meant to be a follower, what it meant to be spiritual, what it meant
to use their spiritual resources -- it was like teaching somebody how to walk.
And so, one of the things he tried to do was teach them how to pray. He knew
that if he could teach them how to pray, they were on the way, but first steps
are hard. And that’s the background of our scripture for this morning.
Verse 1 of chapter 18 in Luke:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always
pray and not give up. He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither
feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept
coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.' "For some
time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God
or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that
she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' "
And the Lord said, "Listen up, you guys (to what the
unjust judge says). And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones,
who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he
will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes,
will he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18: 1-8, NIV)
This is the word of the Lord.
Jesus must have had some real
concern as he watched, as I think he probably did, this widow as the widow tried
her best to find her way in life. Jesus understood that the judge had a heart
of stone and minus compassion. So when the widow got on his docket, Jesus knew
and all of her friends knew, he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. He
would throw the case out of court, be done with it and head for the golf
course. And that is exactly what happened; he ignored her pleas and headed for
the first tee.
Be
tender in your understanding of what this widow was going through. She probably
had no education for women weren’t allowed in schools in those days. She had no
job, no training, no power, no status. If her parents were no longer alive she
had no family support and, if she had no brother or brother-in-law, she was
alone. She was one step from being a street-person.
She did have something going for her. Her husband
had put away some funds, had invested them. Unfortunately, the person he
invested them with decided that he wouldn’t give them up. He’d keep them. And
he knew that judge and perhaps, hm, perhaps he even got a little bit of, uh --
well Bill Hybels in his book, Too Busy Not to Pray, suggests that
the license plate of the judge read “Kickback,” and maybe, maybe the adversary
had some doings with the judge. Then something unusual and utterly remarkable
happened. The widow did not give up. She kept at it. She kept pestering him.
Once or twice she made him late for his tee-off time. Finally, he had had
enough of the nuisance of this woman. And he said, “I’ll give her what she
wants just to get her off my back. I will force that guy to give her what she
deserves; he’s a crook anyway.”
Maybe on that day he birdied the first hole, who
knows. Anyway, she got what she needed.
Now, there are those who misinterpret this parable
completely. And they think that the judge is like God or God is like the
judge. Nonsense.
Turn in your Bible to Luke 11th
chapter, 11th verse, just a few pages back. Here’s what Jesus says
about his father in heaven and ours:
"Which of you fathers,
if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an
egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children, how much more
This is a favorite
saying of Jesus,
“how much more will
your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke
11:11-13)
The Holy Spirit. That means that if you’re a
believer and you’re a follower of Christ, you have a resource other people don’t
have. You have a spiritual resource, you have the very presence of God living
within you. And Paul says in Romans 8 that the Holy Spirit is bearing witness
with our spirits that we’re his children and he’s praying with us and for us.
When you pray, you are joining what’s already happening. Isn’t that neat, that
the Holy Spirit is already praying in your behalf and trying to prompt you on
what you ought to be praying for? Jesus, therefore, is trying to get his
disciples to be persistent in their praying because every time they do, they’re
hooked up with the very spirit of God. It’s like plugging in.
Hybels begins his book with an arresting phrase.
In that book, Too Busy Not to Pray, a book we’re using in our
small groups around the church right now, he begins by saying prayer is an
unnatural activity. And, having said that, you will realize why it is so
difficult to pray and to get started praying. Or, if you quit, to get started
again. It’s just not something natural. Well, come to think about it, there
are a lot of things in life like that.
Many things are natural: we talk, we walk, we
breathe, we eat. But it is not a natural part of birth to learn how to learn
how to write, to learn how to read, to learn arithmetic. The three R’s have to
be taught, they have to be learned. Driving a car is an unnatural activity.
And, if you doubt me, just take a trip down Interstate 95.
Learning to pray is an unnatural activity like
reading and writing and ‘rithmetic. It needs to be learned and it needs
persistence. Did you learn how to write the first time you had a pencil in your
hand? Or, how to spell, the first time you tired? How to add, the first time
you were given a column a figures? Of course not. Then, why do you think you
can snap your fingers and, immediately, be an expert at praying? You can’t.
Neither can I.
What Jesus is asking of his disciples is the same
kind of dogged persistence that the widow had in order to get her rights.
Prayer, however, is worth it because it puts you in touch with a whole different
source of power and joy and life and direction and guidance. It puts you in
touch with forgiveness, and pardon, and overcoming.
An ancient thinker once used the illustration of
people in a cave. He said, “Imagine a dark cave in which a group of people have
lived all of their lives. They know no other world. In the cave there is fire
burning which supplies light and warmth. As the flames rise they cast shadows
on the walls of the cave and the flicker happens. For those living in the cave,
the world of flickering shadows is all they know about. Their grasp of reality
is limited to the cave, to the flickering shadows. They just don’t know any
better. Now imagine that one of the group discovers a secret way out and opens
his eyes to a whole new world, a world of sunlight, of dawn and sunset, of
running streams and green forests. Imagine what he must have felt. He went
back to tell about it but they wouldn’t believe him, said he was crazy gone mad
and they stayed with their flickering shadows.
When Jesus came to the disciples with the parable
of the persistent widow, here’s what he was doing: he was saying “ keep at it
and don’t be satisfied with the flickering shadows.” You were meant for more
than a cave. You were meant to begin to see things God’s way -- the beauty, the
joy, the life, the love.
There is another thing about prayer being an
unnatural activity. If you don’t do it for a while you tend to lose a little
bit of the excitement and thrill of it. And it’s going to be a little bit
awkward. It’s like playing the piano. When you haven’t done it for a long time
and you’re down at the keyboard again, it’s awkward, it doesn’t sound very good,
and it’s not easy. But if you’ll stay at it, it will come back.
Listen to me. Some of you have gone back in the
cave. You haven’t been praying. It’s been put on the shelf, filed away in the
one-of-these-days-I’ll-get-to-it-again. How about today? How about today
getting to it again?
Now Jesus told another story about two sons. It’s
found in Matthew 21:28 and I won’t ask you to turn but it’s about two sons , one
of whom – well, it was harvest time in the vineyard and he went to one son and
he said, “Son, they’re short of help there. Will you go and help the harvest?
You go and work.” And the son said, “No. I’m not. I’m a son; I’m not a
laborer.” Went to the other son. He was busy, instant-messaging, and he said,
“Sure, I’ll go.” But he forgot about it immediately. Then Jesus asked, “Which
one of these are you.” And then he explained that the one who said he wouldn’t,
did and the one who said he would, didn’t. And the answer came back – the one
who did it.
Listen to me again. It is important how you
respond to Jesus’ appeal to pray. And for you to sit there today and to simply
say, “Yeah, I ought to do that” – that’s good but the important thing is to do
it. Right now, in your mind’s eye, is it possible that you could say, “Um. You
know, that preacher’s right. I need to get to it and I need to be persistent
until it comes to me or it comes back to me”?
There’s one more factor, of course, and that is
that the enemy of this whole enterprise of prayer is the devil. And if he can
keep you from relating to God and having a moving, loving relationship with God,
he’s won. He’s got you. I don’t care how many church meetings you go to or how
patriotic you are, if the devil can keep you from praying, he’s won. But the
Lord God has a strategy all of his own. He has put into us a hunger for
something more than the cave, more than the flickering shadow. He’s put into us
a hunger for the real thing, God himself.
One of the greatest thinkers of the middle ages
once wrote a prayer, “Lord, give me what you have made me to want. Grant me
what you have made me long for.” God has built into us a hunger for something
that the world can’t give us. The devil offers us an escape hatch. Jesus
offers the incubator of life. The escape hatch turns out to be the cave. The
incubator of life turns out to be the glory of eternity.
Paul, the apostle, discovered this to the
Christians at the Roman colony of Philippi. We know his letter as Philippians.
He listed all of the achievements he had enjoyed in his lifetime and they were
many. Boy, on his dossier, it was impressive, and you know what he said. He
said, “I count all of these trivial.” In comparison to what he had discovered
in Christ -- the translation says trivial but it is really a stronger word, it’s
closer to trash. I consider all of this, let me use the phrase of the morning,
I consider this “the cave.” I, said Paul, have discovered the Lord Christ, and
whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of knowing the
surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord.
How’s your prayer life? How’s the pulse beat, the
blood pressure, the temperature of your prayer life? It’s not, it’s not an
elective if you want to have a living, beautiful, vibrant, moving, guiding,
throbbing relationship with the Lord Christ, you have to pray.
Joni Erikson, who has more than big time physical
problems of her own, tells of Diane. Every morning Connie, who takes care of
Diane, opens the door to see if Diane is ready, ready to begin the long routine
of bathing, and then of going through the exercising of her almost totally
paralyzed body. The sun’s rays slant through the blinds giving the room a very
soft glow. “Are you ready to get up yet?” asks Connie. From beneath the
covers, the muffled words, “No, not yet.” Connie understands and she shuts the
door. The story is the same every single day, every day. The dawn comes up, it
comes through the blinds, it creates the wonderful soft glow in the room. The
door opens. Connie says, “Are you ready yet?” The soft muffled words, “No, I’m
not ready yet.” Connie shuts the door. Diane turns her head ever so slightly
for she can’t turn it much. She looks at the wall. There’s a tack board there
and her eyes scan every thumbtack-ed card and list, every photo, every torn
piece of paper that has been attached to the corkboard. And, if you would
listen very carefully, you would hear a soft murmur. Diane is praying and she
prays for a couple of hours. Some would look at Diane, stiff and motionless,
and shake their heads. She has to be fed everything, pushed everywhere. Her
disease takes a little more from her every year. Her fingers are curled and
rigid, her voice but a whisper. But Diane believes with all of her heart that
Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said, “if you have a faith like a
mustard seed, you can move mountains.” And in those early hours of her day
almost totally helpless Diane becomes a mountain mover through her prayers. She
prays for missionaries who write back to say, “Thank you for praying; this
happened.” She prays for teenagers who are depressed, for college students who
can’t find their way, for pregnant mothers who didn’t intend to get that way,
for little children that have been abandoned, for the nursing home down the
street that has some people in there who have never had a visit from anybody.
She prays. The widow with her persistence is like Diane with her daily habit.
If you were in her shoes or on her bed, what would you be doing and what could
possibly be your purpose in life. She’s found it. Connie keeps track of all of
the prayers that are answered and they’re in a volume now.
You are not paralyzed. You don’t have to wait for
Connie. You walked into this place. Can it be that the Lord God himself is
moving within your heart, pleading for you to learn how to pray? First steps
are hard but keep at it. And all of a sudden, the breakthrough, the
breakthrough, and you know that what Jesus was talking about is right on target.
One more word. Some of you have
no relationship with the Lord God. You’ve never prayed the first prayer, “Lord
Jesus, I surrender my life to you. Come into my heart.” Why not today?
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