Seek God's will, ahead even of our own best intentions.

When I was a little kid I made a mess in the kitchen.  I must have been about 7 or 8 years old, making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. I dropped some grape jelly on the kitchen floor and it left a stain.  My mom was resting. I was old enough to know I needed to take responsibility for my actions and clean up my own mess.  And so I did.  Did I ever!

I started with an all-purpose cleaner called Janitor in a Drum.  Then I went around the house, under every sink, and found every type of cleaner we had.  I figured the more I put on there the better, expecting them to work even better together than they would alone.  I can still hear in my mind what I was thinking at the time, “The combined forces of Janitor in a Drum, Mr. Clean and Formula 409 together for the first time!”  I supposed after this job we’d be ready to take on Godzilla or something.  I’m lucky I didn’t generate toxic fumes or get a chemical burn.

Well, they worked.  Boy did they work.  I scrubbed the spot a little, let it sit, then scrubbed it some more.  As I rinsed and wiped it all up, I found out just how well they’d worked.  Instead of a faintly purple spot on the floor, my mother’s dark red kitchen floor had a nice bright pink spot right in the middle of it.

I remember having to confess my error to my mother.  She looked at me with her loving eye and said, “Get behind me Satan!”

No, she didn’t say that. But she wasn’t pleased. They must have replaced the vinyl tile eventually, but for a long time I had to pass that pink spot and remember how foolish I’d been.

You see, I convinced myself that I knew the right thing to do – but I didn’t, did I?  And in my zeal, I just made things worse.  Ruined them, to tell the truth.  Had I asked my parents first, it would have worked out a whole lot better. If a little kid might act wrongly without the perspective of an adult, how much less perspective do we have than God? Because even in our most sincere and best intentions, if we supplant God’s will with our own will, we hinder God’s plan. 

Now it’s one thing to understand that sin is sin, when it’s obvious we’re acting contrary to God’s will.  But even when we’re doing what we think is right, if it’s contrary to God’s will, it’s a problem.

Here Peter has the absolute best of intentions.  He has heard Christ describe the horrific events that are going to unfold in Jerusalem.  Jesus says he’s going to suffer – and suffer terribly.  He’s going to die.  Die; and even in 1st century Palestine they knew that dead meant dead.  They had no more expectation of people being raised from the dead than you or I do, so small wonder Peter doesn’t grasp what Jesus has said about the Resurrection.  He’s just worried about his Lord. His friend. 

He loves Jesus. He wants to see Christ’s ministry and message prosper. His mind tells him rationally that this is not good.  It doesn’t make sense to allow this dynamic and wonderful Jesus to come to any harm, much less torture and death. So he reacts naturally in accordance with all the data he’s received.  His instincts are for preservation and protection of Jesus.

Now, he might have been able to rationally set that aside in favor of the obedience he knows he should show Jesus.  But he can’t.  His heart, his feelings, explode in a loud NO! 

But, his mind is set on human considerations, not God’s divine plan. When Jesus rebukes him with, “Get behind me Satan,” it’s because Peter is doing exactly what Satan tried to do when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness. In each of his three offers, Satan tempted Jesus to do very natural things that would benefit him in some way – except they are contrary to God’s plan. Jesus faces such temptations all day every day, but he will never choose the worldly at the expense of the divine.

That’s a radical idea, that there is a divine will for everything and for each of us in particular. And it’s true.

With that in mind, we look at Christ’s instructions to his disciples that put them on the very same path Jesus is on, and he invites us onto that path as well.

1.     Deny yourself. Make that personal commitment that while we are doing our level best to understand the world around us and make the very best decisions we can day by day, we do so under the mantle of putting Christ first, ahead of ourselves.

2.     Take up your cross. Whatever the burdens are of following Christ we will bear them and bear any difficult consequences for His sake. The example of the early church and all the suffering they endured.

3.     Follow Jesus. Put his will ahead of our own. This requires constant discernment and perseverance.

With that in mind, these exhortations by Paul come into sharp focus as the basis for how we are to live according to Christ’s will and example.

Pure love is God’s love, so the extent to which we are truly following Jesus will shape how genuine our love of people actually is. We will hold on to what is good and hate, discard, what is evil.

Do you see the trap here? We would be most tempted to take this list from Paul and make it into our own pet project. Then, like our other projects, we would want to have ownership of it, a tool to be put into our bag to help us be good people to make our lives better.

Let’s go back to the jelly. I’m certain my parents would have preferred that I would have told them about my little accident and let them deal with it or show me how to deal with it. But ultimately their goal was to raise me up to make my own decisions. So the correction was not to give me another item on my do and don’t do list. It was to help me gain some wisdom so that I could handle things as an adult.

We get in alignment with Jesus and we learn what life, true life, looks like. Jesus showed us what this looked like all the way to the cross. Paul gives us these markers of the Godly life as signposts pointing to Jesus.

Keeping our eyes on Christ gives us that homing beacon which enables us to persevere in grace despite all the provocations life offers.

AMEN