Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

James 5:7-8 and Mark 8:14-21

It seems to me there are two opposite and equal errors when it comes to miracles.  One is to believe that God no longer performs instantaneous miracles.  The other is to believe that miracles are the only way God works. 

I am thinking about my own first encounter with Jesus when I was in college.  When I first prayed and asked Jesus to guide my life, God performed two dramatic, immediate changes in my life.  The first was entirely internal, not obvious to anyone other than me.  The Bible suddenly came alive.  To be honest, before I met Jesus, I had found the Bible boring, obscure, and irrelevant.  Now, I actually enjoyed reading it.  It seemed that God was speaking to me directly from scripture. 

The second miracle, however, was noticeable to my friends.  God changed my vocabulary.  Before I met Jesus, I had a reputation for being extremely foulmouthed on our college gymnastics team.  I considered this a normal part of being an athlete.  However, when I began following Jesus, the Holy Spirit painlessly removed any desire to cuss.  Overnight it changed.  I had not realized how dramatic the shift was until some teammates asked me what had happened.  Some of them told me my language had been offensive but now they enjoyed being around me when I was not using such foul language.

When I experienced these two miracles, I naively assumed all of following Christ would be this easy.  I thought I would simply read my Bible, pray and let the Holy Spirit transform me.  It did not take long before I realized that most of my unhealthy patterns, persistent sins, and bad habits would not disappear so easily.  When it came to me personality flaws and deeply ingrained unhealthy habits, no matter how much I prayed for God to take them away, they remained.  Thus began my discovery that walking with Jesus would be a lifetime process. 

Now, if Jesus can immediately, miraculously transform us, why doesn’t he do it that way all the time?  Why must we learn to use spiritual apps?  Let’s explore another spiritual app this weekend: the app of patience.  John Ortberg calls it the practice of “slowing.” 

Just to review the theme of this summer series.  We are reviewing and learning various ways that we can grow into the person we’ve always wanted to be.  We want to be loving, joyful, peaceful, and patient.  But we too often find ourselves rushing, speaking harshly, hurting those we love.  How do we become the person we want to be? 

Think of the apps on a smart phone.  We download an app such as a GPS so that when we need help finding a location we can get directions.  Just as there are practical apps for the phone, so there are practical apps for the spiritual life.  This weekend we are looking at the spiritual app of “slowing” or patience. 

Read Mark 8:14-21

A prosperous executive decided to buy a small plane so that he could fly from city to city on his own schedule.  He enjoyed flying so much that after a few years he decided to also purchase a pontoon plane to fly directly to his summer cabin on a lake.

On his first flight to the lake in his new plane he forgot and headed for the small, airport landing strip just as he had always done.  Luckily his wife was with him.  When the plane was just a few feet off the ground, she screamed, “Wait!  Pull up!  You can’t land on the runway.  This plane has pontoons instead of tires!”

At the last minute the man lifted the plane back up into the sky, circled over the lake, and came in for a safe landing on the water.  As he shut the engine off, he turned to his wife and said, “I don’t know what I was thinking.  That is one of the stupidest things I have ever done!”  Then he opened the door and stepped out into the lake.

Most of us find it extremely difficult to break our familiar patterns.  This can be a real problem when our habits of rushing keep us from being the loving person we most want to be.  We want to listen, but find ourselves interrupting and finishing other’s sentences.  We want to enjoy family time with the children, but feel the need to rush the activity in order to get back to work.  Here is the sad truth: We are addicted to hurry.  

Jesus frequently used the spiritual app of patience to teach his followers the ways of God.  In today’s story, for instance, we see Jesus practicing amazing patience with them.  The disciples had seen Jesus multiply a few loaves of bread in order to feed a crowd of five thousand.  In case they missed the point, Jesus repeated the miracle with a crowd of four thousand people.  Yet as soon as Jesus tries to teach them about the leaven of the Pharisees, they get confused and worry that he must be implying that they did not bring enough bread because they had only one loaf in the boat.  I wonder if there was a touch of frustration in Jesus voice as he asked them, “Do you still not understand?”  Of course, he was not talking about physical bread.  If he could feed five thousand with a few loaves, he could easily feed thirteen with one loaf.  Yet, he is willing to review with them what they had seen and heard so that he could turn it into a teachable moment.

Jesus reviews the numbers with them.  “When we fed the five thousand with five loaves, how many baskets of leftovers were there?”  They answered, “Twelve.”  Jesus continued his review of what they had seen with their own eyes.  “When I fed the four thousand with seven loaves, how much was leftover?”  They answered that there were seven baskets of leftovers.  The disciples saw those miracles, and yet they still doubted.  If Jesus could miraculously multiply the loaves, why not do a miracle on their brains to change the disciples’ thinking?  Answer: the most important truths take patience to learn. 

We see this idea all the way through the Bible.  For instance, God taught the Israelites patience as they entered the Promised Land.  God promised the army of Israel that if they stayed in step with the Lord they would see amazing answers to prayer and miraculous victories.  God promised to send pestilence ahead of their army so that the enemy would be in a weakened condition.  God promised to confuse their enemies before the Israelites ever raised their weapons.  Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it?  All they have to do is march forward with confidence and watch God give them the victory.  Instantaneous, miraculous victories.  Then comes the shock.  God said, “I will not drive them out from before you in one year….  Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.”  (Exodus 23:29-30)

Little by little?  Possess the land over a process of years?  Why not give them total victory in one year?  There is a hint of practicalities in the text.  God says that if all their enemies disappeared over night, then too much of the land would “become desolate and the wild animals would multiply” against them (Exodus 23:29).  God knew that the Israelites would need to go through an entire culture shift to change from being nomad herders into settled farmers.  It would take time for them to learn the daily disciplines of farming.  God was concerned not only for the generation that must battle for the land, but also for the next generation that would inherit the land.

This is the Bible lesson about the dangers of inheritance.  What happens when a person inherits prosperity without having learned the disciplined life for managing such resources?  Most of the time, inherited wealth is wasted.  More often than not inherited wealth destroys the recipients.  Winning the lottery and becoming an instant millionaire is not a blessing.  Easy wealth ruins more than it helps.

Could this be a key to why God works occasionally in instant miracles but most of the time through a lengthy, disciplined process?  While we might wish that all our lessons in life would be easy, there are some benefits from learning things through the ongoing process of struggle.

A few years ago I performed my sister-in-law’s funeral.  In the sharing of her life we recalled how she taught for several years in a prison.  Virginia took great pride in her ability to help prisoners who had dropped out of school earn their high school equivalency diplomas.  She was particularly good at teaching basic math.  I used to be mystified that she was so good at teaching a subject in which she herself did so poorly. 

We laughed at the funeral as we recalled how Virginia was once playing the dice game Yahtzee with our children.  She rolled the five dice for her third time and came up with four fives and a three.  Excited that she had surpassed the required number of fives, she carefully counted the total of the four fives.  She pointed to the first three dice and said out loud, “Five, ten, fifteen.”  Then she leaned down close to the other dice showing a five and pointed to each of the dots as she completed her count.  “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!”

She could count by fives up to fifteen, but four times five was beyond her memory.  It was because she struggled herself so much with math that she was able to work with others who needed math tutoring.  Because she had worked hard to learn basic math, she knew how to explain it to those who had difficulties with the subject.  

Why does God usually work through the slow process of spiritual apps as opposed to simply working through instantaneous miracles?  Here is the truth: what we learn slowly through painful lessons, usually develops into a ministry opportunity to others. 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

What ever happened to old Humpty Dumpty?  Years ago a fellow pastor wrote a parable about the recovery of Humpty Dumpty.  According to this imaginative account the king found Humpty Dumpty lying broken in a back alley.  For nearly a year the king pleaded with Humpty to let him try to repair him by putting together the broken pieces of Humpty’s life.  For nearly a year Humpty refused, announcing his various reasons for simply accepting his condition.  Then one day something inside Humpty Dumpty changed.  He was willing to let the king give it a shot.

The king took weeks picking up the broken pieces and carefully reassembling Humpty Dumpty.  It was a slow painstaking task.  Then came the moment when the king lifted Humpty Dumpty to his feet.  Humpty needed a great deal of support.  His first steps were quite wobbly.  But the king held him under the arms.

Over the next months the king assisted Humpty Dumpty with a slow regimen of daily walks.  At first they only walked a few feet.  Each day they walked a little farther.  Finally, they reached the point where the king and Humpty were taking long leisurely walks along beautiful beaches and green mountain pastures.  They enjoyed each other’s company immensely.  Humpty’s walk with the king became the highlight of each day.  They became best friends.

Then one day as the two were walking, they overheard someone ask the question, “Who are those two men?  I see them together all the time”  The answer was given, “I don’t know who the second one is, but the one on the left is old Humpty Dumpty.  Remember the guy who had a great fall?  That’s him all right.  You know, as much as the two look alike and walk in stride with each other, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other one is Humpty’s brother!”[1]

Isn’t it the life you’ve always wanted actually the life Jesus led?  When Jesus invites us into recovery from our addiction to a rushed pace of life, he takes us for long walks and casual conversations.  In the process we discover that what was actually happening was our inner transformation into someone who patiently listens instead of interrupting.  Was we grow in patience we begin to enjoy slowing down to spend time with the children.  We realize that living peacefully is better than living stressed out.  In other words, we become more and more like Jesus.

Isn’t that a miracle?

[1] Vic Pentz, “Humpty Dumpty Revisited,” The Wittenburg Door June 1972.