A number of years ago I was a counselor at a church camp over at Camp Jo-Ota. At that camp we had this great activity that we did which involved a rope maze. The catch to this activity was that the maze didn't have an exit.
Our campers were led, blindfolded, to the maze so that they couldn't see it. The campers were told they always had to keep one hand on the rope, and they couldn’t let go. They had to follow it, and where necessary, decide which direction to go. Essentially, they were going in a big circle.
If you’ve ever worked with teenagers, you know how frustrated they could get in something like this right? So did we…which was why we did it. Because, pretty soon after we got started, the questions started coming. They wanted to know how they were doing, if they were going in the right direction, were they getting close, how many people had finished, and so on. They put pre-conditions on every question they had for help.
The counselors were told that we could give two responses.
- You’ll know when you get to the end
- If you need help, ask.
You want to talk about some frustrated teens!
I won’t comment on whether or not we really enjoyed ourselves in this project. But there was a point when we could let them know how to finish the maze. They would ask for help, without preconditions, or anything else, but just stopping and saying they couldn’t do it and needed help. Then we could let them in on the secret. That’s how they got out of the maze. We’d tell them to take off their blindfold and that they could exit.
How long do you think it took before the first person did that? It took a while before they did, and even longer before the last person finished.
This post starts a new series that I'm doing during Lent 2019 called "Jesus is ____" where we're filling in the blank every Sunday morning and on our special services. What we’ll be filling the blank in with comes from a Facebook post I put up a while back where I asked folks to fill in the blank, and I got a lot of responses. You can see them up in the cross that’s acting as our main symbol for this series.
This message starts by filling in the blank with, "Jesus is My Guide" I got a this response, or a very similar variation on it from a couple of folks, and I was intrigued with the idea of looking at what it means for Jesus to be my guide.
The scripture passage for this message comes from John 10:1-6. It picks up in the middle of this extended discussion that Jesus is having with folks about who he is. Remember, Jesus isn’t at all like what anyone was expecting. He was different. They were expecting a great general and leader, like King David, that would help them to take on and defeat the Romans that were occupying their country.
For some reason, they didn’t at all appreciate what Jesus was doing, because they weren’t understanding. They were questioning him at every turn, and they were trying to find any way that they could to discredit him. All because he wasn’t living up to their standards, even though in many ways he was exceeding anything they could have thought of.
For me, there are two verses that are key to what Jesus is describing.
This raises the first question, are we listening? And not just are we listening, but have we been listening so that we recognize Jesus voice? That’s a challenge. There are a lot of folks that would say that Jesus should just tell them who he is. And to be fair to Jesus he has. The trouble is not in Jesus telling them, because he has told them in numerous ways. The trouble is that they aren’t listening.
This leads to the second verse that I think is key.
It’s really not that we are listening, as much as do we recognize his voice? And to be clear, Jesus isn’t talking about non-believers here. Rather, he is talking about folks who should know, who know who God is, who have faith, and who should recognize Jesus voice in the midst of this.
But they don’t. Instead, they are getting caught up in things that they are expecting, like, was Jesus healing people on the Sabbath?
Go back a second to where we started all of this with my camp kids that were trying to find their way out of a maze that didn’t have an exit.
The Pharisees in Jesus time were a lot like them. They would ask for help, but they would ask for help with preconditions. They thought they knew what to expect, and who was going to do what, and so on and so forth. So when they would ask for help, it was always very specific, and always based on their knowledge and strength.
But, how many of us have reached those points in our lives when we need help, we know we need help, and we’re pretty sure we don’t know what kind of help we need?
I’ve been there.
How comfortable is it to ask for help when you don’t know what kind of help you’re looking for? It’s not is it. Yet, that’s what Jesus is asking of us. He’s asking us not to rely on our strength, that proves itself to have lots of flaws and problems over time, but to rely on his. That means that when we ask for help, we can’t do it with preconditions, with a certainty that we’re almost to the end if only Jesus would tell us how many more feet to go before we get there.
If we’re going to say that Jesus is My Guide, then that means that we have to let him guide. We have to not just listen for his voice, but know his voice, and know that when we hear his voice that his is the one that is leading. Our job isn’t to put preconditions on it, but to have faith.
That can be hard.
That can be really hard.
But we can do it. It doesn’t always mean that it’ll be easy, but he is the one that we can put our trust in, and when everything else seems to be shaky or unstable, he is the one we can trust.
As you go through this week, take some time each day and reflect on how you would fill in the blank of "Jesus is _____" and also take some time to reflect on how you’re listening for Jesus voice, are you putting conditions on it, or are you listening to see how he will guide you forward.
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