3/15/53

Someone Believes In You

Scripture: Read Matthew 4: 16-25

When Jesus was here on earth, he saw the best in any person he met. If there were any good at all, no matter how deeply buried, no matter how covered with wrong or hidden by the callousness of indifference, he saw it. And he made it real to those who yielded him any chance.

He saw the best in Mary Magdalene; remember? He saw it in Zacchaeus and in Matthew - those corrupt politicians. He saw it in the woman of Samaria, five-times married, and an obvious failure at true home-making. He even saw it in a thief on a cross.

How different it is with most of us, so much of the time! It is so easy for us to believe the worst in a person -- even to spend time looking for evil. Some cynic has said that some folks will believe anything -- just so long as it is whispered to them.

But Jesus always saw the best in a person. He was no simple optimist, for he could appraise the sinfulness of one’s heart with complete honesty. But he knew the good that resides there as well.

Have you asked yourself: “What do I see?” For instance, let us suppose you are seated in a hotel lobby waiting to keep an appointment, or in a railway station a few minutes before your next train, or at an airport waiting for your flight to be called. Some complete stranger comes in and sits down opposite you. What do you see? How do you look at that person? Do you see him with adversely critical eyes, taking in shoes that need a shine, hair untidy, suitcase scuffed? Or do you look at that person with friendly interest and think that, despite some unfavorable external evidence, he may be quite decent and perhaps a potential friend?

What do you see? Someone with neat coat, chic hat, new gloves and confident air. -- Do you see someone who is thoughtless and haughty, who certainly knows how to look out for “number one?” Or do you look at that person as one who may be so much in love with life that a whole community calls her friend?

What we see in a person does not always reveal an understanding of what they are. It may show rather what we are!

The famous English writer, Thomas Carlyle, looked at his own nation and wrote, “England has a population of forty million people --- mainly fools.” Maybe he’d had a bad breakfast. Or perhaps there was a witch hunt on. But that written comment tells the reader something about Carlyle, doesn’t it?

David Livingstone, the great explorer-missionary, looked at Africa. Many others were looking at Africa and seeing there a continent of savage jungle, and of subhuman beings good only for slavery to the so-called “better classes.” Livingstone saw there “an unhappy people to whom (he said) I must dedicate my life.” What a difference in people is revealed by their own outlook. What you and I see may as easily be a revelation of ourselves as of the person at whom we have looked.

But Jesus always saw the best in a person. We don’t always expect this. For we remember that he appeared to be an inflexible opponent of those who do wrong, of those who are haughty and self-seeking. We know, of course, that he looked deep into the lives of men, that he recognized Peter’s impetuosity, Judas’ disloyalty, the bad record of the woman who seemed about to be stoned.

And because he is an opponent of the sin in people’s lives we take it for granted that he will condemn us for every sordid, ugly or shameful thing we have ever thought or done. But the wonder of Christ’s love is this: that though every man’s life stands starkly revealed to his penetrating gaze, he nevertheless loves us; and he believes in us!

One of the lessons we have to learn, and repeatedly relearn, is that God loves not only those who in our eyes seem deserving of his love. The truth is that God loves all people, good and bad, stubborn, willful or weak. He loves us all.

The story used to go about, in a village of a couple of generations ago, that one of the neighborhood swains took one of the village belles out for a buggy ride on an evening that was chilly, but not too chilly for romance. It seems that, as the evening wore one, the girl was not averse to more attention than she was getting, and may have thought to arouse a little ardor by a bit of feminine complaining. She finally whimpered, “Nobody loves me, my hands are so cold.” Whereupon her gallant escort, his hands well gloved and fully occupied (of course) with the reins, assured her: “Why Daisy, your mother loves you; and God loves you; and you can sit on your hands.”

It may very well have been an evasive tactic on his part. But from a practical standpoint, he knew his theology! Whether he, or any of the other boys, loved the gal or not, God does -- and not just as a joke!

God loves us all -- the good and the bad; the sinner and the saint; men and women; children and adults; Africans, Russians, Chinese, the Dutch, the Polish and the Italians; the humble and the proud; the scheming, the innocent and the gullible -- God loves us all. No matter what we have done, or how far we have wandered, He loves us with an everlasting love.

More remarkable, God has faith is us! The reason God believes in you, whether others do or not, is that He sees you differently. If I look at you, with some accurate understanding, I may see you more or less as you are. God sees the possible you; He sees what can be.

An advertising slogan has really grasped a truth when it admonishes, “Believe in yourself!” Well, most people do. No matter how we may have failed, at this or that point, we believe deeply that we can be better than we are. So does God!

That great wizard with plant development, Luther Burbank, used to say, “Every weed is a potential flower.” God must be saying, “Every man, every woman, every child is a potential saint.”

We hear enough about the depravity of mankind. The news media are so full of it that one wonders if anything but evil is “news.” It has been thundered from the political rostrum and expounded from the pulpit. It may seem that some politician wants you to believe that the other fellow is a villain; some preacher wants you to admit that you are a sinner; and some teacher doesn’t care whether you are a sinner or not so long as you acquire some knowledge!

If you have such a feeling about today’s picture, look at the other side. See that the teacher trusts you to have more sense and capacity for good accomplishment than you had supposed you possessed; that the politician really believes in good government and justice; that the preacher announces God’s salvation in that God believes in you and in every living soul.

Despite the wrong turnings that mess up our lives --- our laziness or stubbornness or conceit --- all of which Christ knows even better than we, He still says, “Go and sin no more” because he knows we have the capacity to do better.

Christ has the power to forgive our sins, not so we will have a greater zest for some more sinning, but so we can lead new lives of usefulness and purity and strength.

Let us be honest with ourselves, and straight in our thinking; if we are really to find God, and his will for us, it will be when we are ready to forsake the wrong we do --- to “go and sin no more.” But Christ came “not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” [John 3: 17].

When people came to Jesus, conscious that they had failed, he did not heap on condemnation but rather added commendation to encourage their better selves.

Two thieves died with him on Golgotha’s hill. One seemed an impenitent sufferer, the same old sour-soul that had made him a destroyer and plunderer. The other, with a feeling of fairness for an innocent sufferer, and of penitence for his own wrong, asked Jesus for a merciful remembrance. Like the thieves, Jesus was in an agony of physical suffering. He could have ignored the comments, or could have cried out “Why do you trouble me? Can’t you pay for your own sins and let another alone?” But his word was one of confidence: “Today thou shalt be with me in paradise.” [Luke 23: 39-43].

In no place in the Bible can one find that Jesus ever denounced any who came to him conscious of their failure and of their need of him. It is not that he fails to recognize the enormity of our failures, or that he shuts his eyes to them, but that he believes in us and just knows we can do better. And with that kind of friend we will to do better! His faith forms our faith and we are transformed.

Does not God see in us something that no one else sees? He looks through the shabbiness, or the haughtiness or the bluff that others may see; he looks through the fog of our failures, and (wonder of wonders!) he sees a splendid, good, useful life!

The great sculptor, Michelangelo, once bought a piece of marble that no one else would buy. It appeared to be a rather ugly piece of stone. He was asked why he had bought a piece of stone that appeared so inferior. And he answered: “Because there is an angel in there and I’ve got to set it free.” So he went to work with his chisel and hammer. And out of that piece of stone, he carved a magnificent statue of an angel.

God looks into each life, be it like a block of marble, a block of wood, or just a block, and says, “there’s one of my own family in there,” and he wants to set it free.

A story is told of a man who, while visiting in another’s house, saw a piece of stone on a small table -- just an ordinary, irregular, somewhat ugly piece of rock. It was quartz. He asked his host why he kept so ordinary a stone around, and especially why he kept it in the house, on a table. And he was told, “O, it isn’t ordinary. Come with me.” They went outside where the suns rays fell upon the stone, and it became a thing of sparkling beauty, flashing and gleaming as if it were alive with some kind of fire.

What beauty and splendor God has brought into lusterless and even tarnished lives through the centuries! To Augustine, when he turned away from a life of extraordinary sensuality and dedicated his amazing intellect to the church. What beauty is born to any life that opens the door to God’s goodness.

Isn’t it what we need - to live as we were supposed to live, as God alone has envisioned our lives? Let the power of his grace and the purifying fire of His love bring us to the new life that only he can provide. Let Him make us what we were meant to be. There is a strength of character, a power for right that he recognizes, though we may never have glimpsed it.

I may have repeated before, Leslie Weatherhead’s story of a beggar who sat each day across the street from an artist’s studio. Looking about for a subject for his next picture, the artist decided to sketch the beggar, whom he could see every day. And one day he called across the street asking him to come up.

The fellow from the street saw the picture and asked, “Who is it?”

Then he began to see, and he asked, incredulously, “Is it me? Could it be me?” “That’s the man as I see him,” said the artist. Then the beggar made a magnificent response. “If that’s the man you see, then that’s the man I’ll be!”

Jesus Christ had a way of transforming the lives of people who surrounded him. And his spirit still does that. Most of the disciples who followed him were people of utter mediocrity. They were a bunch of perfect nobodies. Then Christ found them and made them world-changers! He saw in them greatness that no one else could see, and that they themselves had never seen. He called it forth -- and the world has been different ever since!

The simple truth is that God is amply ready to transform any life that is opened to him. He never commits Himself to those who are triflers -- to those who would have God as the servant of their desires --- whose religion is a mere convenience.

But when we admit the emptiness of our lives without Him, and the wrongness of life apart from him, when we know our need and the failure of our best resolves without Him, then God comes flooding in, just as Christ promised, with power and splendor. And life is no more drab, but shining.

There is a story told that King Edward the 7th of England once went for a walk with his queen, some distance from the summer palace. Unfortunately the queen stumbled and fell, spraining her ankle rather seriously. Leaning heavily on her husband she managed to go a little farther until, after dusk, they reached a little cottage, only to find that the cottager had gone to bed. The king knocked roundly on the door until a sleepy voice called “Who’s there?” The king answered, “It is Edward, the king. Let me in.” The man shouted back, “Enough of your pranks now, be off and let a man get his sleep.”

The king stood hesitant, and a little nonplused. He wasn’t used to that kind of reply, and was not sure what to do. But help had to be found, for the queen’s ankle was very badly swollen and it was now quite dark outside. So the king again beat upon the door.

Again the cottager called out, “What do you want?” “I tell you, it is the king. It is Edward, your king. Let me in!”

Then the man was really angry; “I’ll teach you to fool around, disturbing an honest man’s sleep!” He threw open the door ready to pitch the joker from his doorstep, only to see that it was indeed the king! He invited his visitors in and sent for help to care for the queen’s ankle.

Years later, the cottager would sit telling the story again for some visitor or for one of his grandchildren. And the story always ended the same way: “And to think; to think; that I almost didn’t let him in! To think that I almost didn’t let him in!”

“The king of life, our shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never.” He stands and knocks at the door of each life -- yours, mine, each other life. He assures us of his care, and that God cares for you. And it makes all the difference on earth or in heaven!

Amen

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, March 15, 1953

Boy Scout Winter Camp Field Service, November 25, 1956

Wisconsin Rapids, July 25, 1965

Wood County Infirmary, September 8, 1965