Changed in the Presence of God
Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing is to do in the moment. We teach our kids table manners and when they ask why do we need to keep our elbows (or even knees!) off the table or pass the salt and pepper together, or something, we have to remind them: You never know when the Queen might come to visit. This is not an Anglican royalty thing by the way. No, hospitality is important. And because of that, practicing to be hospitable is important. You don’t want to be fumbling over the details, trying to remember the right way to behave when the Queen comes to visit. You want to be able to be present, to offer what you can, and to receive whatever wisdom or even favor you can. And you can’t do that when your knees are peaking over the top of the table. You don’t want the queen saying “Good heavens” or something from your atrocious posture. Being ready to be hospitable helps you to be ready to be present. That readiness helps you focus on important things and keep less important things from being a distraction, especially when you are surprised by a visit from someone important.
And someone important could indeed show up. If it can happen to Abraham in the countryside, or Mary and Martha, it could happen to you.
When the Lord shows up, there is work to do. Our Genesis account shows the Lord arriving at Abraham’s house under a tree in the form of three men. Abraham knew it was the Lord. He had a similar reaction to Peter at the Mount of Transfiguration: to get busy being hospitable. There Peter wants to set up three tents. Here Abraham rushes to prepare a meal. And Martha does the same. And so do we. Preparing for worship requires coordinating a lot of details. The details have their time and place. But we can’t confuse our preparation for the encounter with the encounter itself. And we definitely don’t want to focus so much on the preparations that we miss the encounter entirely. And that’s because when God shows up to meet with you he can change your life. And this can happen in multiple ways for different people at different times. We see that today in our passages. Abraham got busy being hospitable because, first, the LORD is here and, second, because the Lord is here, my life may very well change. And for Abraham that day, it did. You may have had a time when you felt like life was passing you by. Abraham did even more. God promised him offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky. And decade after painful decade, all hope of that promise would have been reasonably lost. But here and elsewhere in Abraham’s story, Abraham believed in the promises of God. And when God showed up in the twilight of Abraham’s and Sarah’s lives, he had hope that this could be the moment when the promise of offspring could be fulfilled. Remember, when God shows up, he can change your life.
He also certainly changed the life of the Apostle Paul. An effective persecutor of the church became it’s most cherished defender, writing so many of the books in the New Testament. In our passage in his letter to the Colossians, Paul’s new life is on display. In verse 24 we see him suffering for the sake of the church instead of persecuting it. He’s a minister rather than a leader of the persecutors. He sees the gospel as the mystery hidden for ages and generations, not a foolish superstition and blasphemy. Instead of persecuting Jewish believers for preaching the gospel, he preaches the gospel, even and mainly to the Gentiles. After meeting Jesus Christ, God himself, on the Damascus road, Paul’s blindness was revealed to him and he experienced rebirth and new sight and indeed a whole new life.
But the change in his life is not the good news itself. The gospel is not that you can have a changed life. It’s one of the effects of the gospel, it’s a secondary piece of the gospel, but it’s not the gospel itself. The good news is not mainly about us, it’s about God. We see a presentation of the gospel in verse 21:
21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
The good news is that Jesus died and reconciled us to God. He reconciled sinners who were going to Hell with a righteous God by his sacrificial death. That is the news. That is the thing that changes lives. The love of God for us, not our own goodness is the heart of the gospel. The dance of faith and works always begins with faith. God showed his love for us by his sacrificial death that reconciles us with God. And a benefit of that news is that it awakens faith and that faith gives us a new perspective, new priorities, and changes us, bringing us a new life.
I’m at a weird time of life where the most cliche cliches seem helpful and meaningful, where I’m finally living enough life to see the truth in them. The one I have in mind right now is “Change is hard.” If I rolled my eyes just a little for every time I’ve heard that cliche in the last two years, including out of my own mouth, my eyes would have rotated backwards all the way around several times. And I bring this up because we have to acknowledge that the change of a changed life is good, but it’s also hard. C.S. Lewis puts it this way in Mere Christianity:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
Not every change is easy, but if the Lord is performing the change, if it’s a change in the context of faith that comes from trusting in Jesus’ reconciling love for us on the cross, it will be a good change, more of a transformation than you thought or could even imagine.
The changed heart that comes from believing and trusting in the love of Jesus leads to a changed life. Sometimes instantly. Sometimes over years. Some remodels take longer than others, as some of us know well. But in the end, God will accomplish his work. As Paul tells us in Phil. 1:6, “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it…” And one of the marks of that life undergoing a beautiful transformation into God’s design is something we see in the moment of hospitality, when God shows up, when Jesus visits Mary and Martha. When we see Jesus for who he really is, and he shows up, we do what Mary does. We sit at his feet and glory at his presence. We have to remember that when God shows up, he shows up to share himself with us. And that’s no small gift. Jean Calvin tells us that if God were to withdraw to the very smallest degree from the world, all life would perish. So when that God draws near, it is a precious moment and a special gift, and when it happens we would do well to put down the laundry and the logistics and rest in his presence. When the source of all life and peace shows up, you pay attention and worship and wait to see what he will do.
And that’s a good reminder of why we’re here. God is worthy to be praised by happy voices at all times, in all places. And so we gather and look at his love for us on the Cross and wait in hopeful anticipation of the new life he is making for us. So let us not lose hope, or grow weary as we wait for change, but let us look to Jesus and sit at his feet and the change will happen in his good timing.
