GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS
Text: Mark 10:17-22

I can’t remember when the hymn Great Is Thy Faithfulness became a song of the heart for me. But it slipped right in.

Great is thy faithfulness!
Great is thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed thy hand hath provided;
Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me

I

The song is taken from some key verses in the book of the Bible called Lamentations. We rarely read from it. Its title is hardly inviting. For centuries in the Jewish community it was named by its first word Ekhah which means "How." Here are its first lines:

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the cities
has become a slave.

The book is about the fall of the nation and the destruction of Jerusalem. How, it asks, are we to "faith" it when the worst has happened?

What we do, or try to do, is to recall the goodness and mercy of God and hope in it again. "But this I call to mind," the writer says, "and therefore I have hope":

The steadfast love of God never ceases,
God’s mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
"The Lord is my portion [my "enough," my "sufficiency"]:
Therefore I will hope
[I choose to hope] in God."

Sometimes we forget our lives are finally in better hands than ours, God’s hands. Sometimes we forget what we need to recall:

The steadfast love of God never ceases
God’s mercies never come to an end
They are new every morning
great is thy faithfulness.

(Gospel song of The House of Prayer For All People Gospel Shout: "You can’t make me doubt him. I know too much about him!")

II

Jesus lived with the deepest sense of God as his sufficiency, his "enough." He called God Abba, the Aramaic word for Daddy or Poppa, and used that name every time he prayed. God was that near, that intimate, that trustworthy.

He taught his disciples to live the same way. Don’t be so anxious, he said. Look at the birds, consider the lilies. God takes care of them; how much more will God take care of you. "His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me."

And he taught us who trust in God to live generously on this earth, making purses that do not wear out with all they’re carrying but purses that last forever because they are always generous with others. Not purses by Prada, kingdom of God purses.

It seems an odd fact of life that the more we have, the less we trust in God and the less we feel we can be generous with others. Don’t ask me why it works that way, but it works that way with me.

I carry in my Bible an old beat-up five-dollar bill. It came from our weekly Agape meal for the homeless community of Fort Worth. The meal was free, but we always had an offering plate as part of our weekly worship. One day a homeless fellow stuffed a five-dollar bill in my hand. "This is to keep the meal going," he said. Later I traded one of my newer, crisper five-dollar bills for his, put mine in the plate and kept his. It’s a reminder of his trust in God and his generosity. How often have I tried to find less than a five when the offering plate was passed, I who buy three-dollar lattes and five-dollar bags of popcorn at the movies.

III

I meet myself in the text for today. Jesus was setting out on a missionary journey. A man ran up and knelt before him. Ran and knelt. We note the eagerness in his running and the deep willingness of his kneeling.

"Good Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

Jesus answers startlingly: "Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God alone." It was a stunning act of spiritual humility. "I kneel too," Jesus was saying. "I am only a vessel of God, good only as God’s goodness is in me."

Then Jesus began to answer. You know the commandments - - and he listed the practical side of the tablets, the "neighbor" side of the commandments: Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and your mother.

The man said, "Teacher, I have observed these from my youth."

The text says, "Jesus, looking at the man, loved him." We should slow down at this sentence. Jesus saw the man’s desire for goodness, the sincerity of his spiritual quests, and he loved him.

As he sees your desire for goodness, your spiritual sincerity - - else you would not be here - - and loves you.

Then looking at the man he loved, Jesus said, "You lack one thing. Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

The text says that the man’s face fell, his countenance fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

What is his sadness but the sadness of holding on to what we know we must sooner or later let go of?

We are not always ready to receive the answer to the prayer we are praying.

Our prayers exceed our capacities, else we would not need to pray.

Augustine looked back on his earlier life and remembered praying to God, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!"

Jesus did not ask of everyone what he asked of this man. Some left their nets, others their tax collector’s desk; some left their sins, some their sickness, some their families. But for all these there was some "letting go." Maybe it’s a letting go of the one thing in your life that is your God-substitute, that which is causing you to break the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. The thing you’re sure you cannot live without. But you can.

IV

This passage is, at its deepest, not about riches. It is about discipleship. What we do, how do we live when Jesus calls us by name and says, "Come, follow me."

Dallas Willard talks about discipleship as apprenticeship. A disciple, or apprentice, he says,

"As a disciple of Jesus," Willard says, "I am by choice and by grace, learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God."¹

Isn’t that what we’re about in this place? By choice and by grace learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God!

Some days we get close. Other days we fail. Anne Lamott says she is trying to be a follower of Jesus but some days her actions make Jesus want to drink gin straight from a cat dish. But we’re on the road. We are an apprentice learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God. There are days I’m sure I will not make it as a disciple of Jesus. I can’t be good enough. And Jesus says, No one is good but God. Trust in him and keep walking.

And the church? We try to set up those "appropriate conditions" where we can be with Jesus and learn from him. I know no better description of church: We’re the "appropriate conditions department" where we and others can be with Jesus and learn from him.

VI

Today kicks off our annual stewardship campaign. Our budget is our planning tool for how best to be God’s people in this place.

Every year we write and propose what I call a "membership budget," that is a worthy budget which we can subscribe if most of our members do their part. For this year our proposed budget is $1,960,000. This is our "membership budget."

But our leaders have challenged us this year to reach a milestone mark of $2,000,000. If we reach it we will reach our long-term goal of giving 10% of our budget to outside missions, and we will have another $16,000 to invest in new ministry and mission initiatives.

I thought to myself as I wrote this sermon: "We’ve written a membership budget, but what God is writing is a discipleship budget."

Finally the church is not a membership organization; it is a discipleship organization.

What would our finances look like if we lived into that, being a discipleship organization? What would a discipleship budget look like? What would your gift be if it were a discipleship pledge?"

I think it would mean that we would surprise ourselves every year about how much we could do.

So would you from your own discipleship help us write a discipleship budget? One that comes not from our best estimation of what you might do, but from the deepest places of your hearts - - what Jesus is calling you to do.

What Jesus brings is not a new legalism, but a liberation – a liberation that looks like trust in the faithfulness of God and looks like a generosity of self in a world of need.

"What is the commandment that leads to life?" Jesus was asked. You already know, Jesus answered. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as you love your own dear self."