Maybe...

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see everybody who's here with us. Hello to everyone on Zoom. It's nice to be starting to make the corner into springtime, although I understand we've got a little bit of snow coming our way. Dare I say, the last snow of the winter? We'll see. Plenty of wishful thinking out there. Maybe so, maybe not. I'd like to start today with a story. This was attributed to a man named Alan Watts, although there's some question about whether or not he actually wrote it. But it's the story of the Chinese farmer.

Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate, and they said, We're sorry to hear your horse ran away.

This is most unfortunate. And the farmer said, maybe. The next day, the horse came back, bringing seven wild horses with it. And in the evening, everybody came back and said, Oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses. Again, the farmer said, maybe. The following day, his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and he broke his leg. And the neighbors then said, Oh, dear, that's too bad. And the farmer responded, maybe. The next day, the conscription officers came, and they came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.

And again, all the neighbors came around and said, isn't that great? And again, he said, maybe. Interesting little parable. And of course, the moral of this story is that as human beings, we're very quick to take whatever circumstance of the moment and draw a conclusion as to whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that's happened to us. And as we've heard, and even in the sermon at last week, whether something is a blessing or a calamity, long-term is not something we can always recognize immediately when it happens.

And if we're honest about it, when these things happen to us, what is it that happens to our frame of mind? So often, our frame of mind is reliant on exactly what might have happened at that one point in time, and our viewpoint towards life and even towards God can be steered entirely and dictated moment by moment by the outcome of individual events. I've titled today's sermon with simply one word. Maybe. You can put a different title on it if you'd like. This brings to mind some serious events that happen to some biblical personalities, one that we think of at this time of year.

We consider the children of Israel coming out of Egypt. The bones that they brought with them out of Egypt are the bones of Joseph. And if you think of Joseph's life, there's a whole lot of maybe that happened in his life if you think of how it unfolded. His brothers threw him in a pit and argued about whether they should kill him or sell him. Was that a bad thing? Maybe. He ended up after that in Potiphar's house, a rich man where he had a pretty good life even though he was an indentured servant.

Again, there was a maybe as he was falsely accused, and he was sent to prison. In prison, God gave him the opportunity to befriend very powerful people, and things were looking up. Perhaps, maybe, until he was forgotten by those friends. And then eventually he was brought to prominence in Egypt, and he was able to bring his entire family, in a time of famine, to Egypt. There's a punchline at the end of all of this that I want to focus on for a moment as we go into our message for today, and it's in Genesis 50, verse 20.

Genesis 50, verse 20, as we consider the maybes in life. I love the message of this verse and the way that it can speak to all of us as we hit some of these events that we encounter from time to time in life. In this case, it's Joseph talking to his brothers. After an incredibly emotional time, they're scared to death as they find out who he is and reflect fully on what they did to him.

And he says, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. To bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive. Their sinfulness, their retribution against their brother, all of the things that happened to him back and forth, God meant it, ultimately, for good. You know, there's so many moments of maybe in our lives, aren't there? Great things that happen to them. Sometimes we call them blessings, other things that we call trials, others that we might simply call being forgotten, ignored, living obscurity for a while. But actually, all of them have a common purpose.

All of them have a common purpose if God is working in our lives as he is in ours. Turn with me, if you will, to 2 Corinthians 12, verse 9. And this is where I'd like to center as we move into the main part of the message today, 2 Corinthians 12, verse 9, as we consider the many maybes that happen in our lives.

Here, Paul, in the context of all the incredible gifts that he was given by God, as well as some of the crushing physical trials and one specific malady that he had, said that this is what God told him. My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness. This really sums up all of the answers to these maybes that happen over the course of our lives.

The ultimate goal of all of these things as we go through the trials and the triumphs of our lives is to understand the sufficiency of God's grace for us. I'm going to spend the rest of this message focusing on that element of sufficiency. Just a quick comment. I think we all understand when we think about grace, especially as we look at this time of year, as we look forward to the Passover, we understand that the grace of God is bound up in the sacrifice that Jesus Christ gave for us.

The forgiveness for our sins, the fact that through him we live a new life and we can be accepted by him and come sinless boldly right before the throne. It's called the throne of grace. And that we need to learn over the course of our lives is sufficient. So what is sufficiency? What is it? There's a Greek word that's used and that's translated sufficiency. It's also translated contentment, interestingly enough, because the idea of contentment within the Bible carries with it this idea of, it's enough.

It's what I need. It comes from a Greek word, archaeo, and it's different grammatical derivatives, and it talks about an internal satisfaction that doesn't demand changes in external circumstances. So it's something that happens inside of us, and it's not reliant on the good, the bad, those cycles of life that happen to us over the course of time. Contentment, or sufficiency, is more than inward satisfaction. Contentment is a habit or a permanent state of mind, as one commentator wrote, while satisfaction has to do with a particular occurrence or object.

So as we think of godly contentment or sufficiency, it doesn't depend on the things that are happening around us or to us. It depends on what's happening inside of us. One last snippet that I'll read from another commentary is that the word means sufficiency, talking again about the Greek word archaeo. And it's that disposition of mind in which one is, through grace, independent of outward circumstances, so as not to be moved by envy, anxiety, and discontent. So, contentment or sufficiency. Let's look at a few scriptures that demonstrate this, and where this word is used, just to fill this out, so we're not just relying on definitions that people might set out there, but seeing how it's used within the scriptures.

We'll turn first to Philippians 4, another writing of Paul in verses 11 and 12. Paul, again in this section, is reflecting on things that have happened to him in his life and how he's responded.

Philippians 4 verses 11 and 12. Here Paul says, Not that I speak in regard to need, for I've learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. There's that word, archaeo. I know how to be abased, I know how to abound, everywhere, and in all things, I've learned both to be full and to be hungry, to abound, and to suffer need. And underlying all of that was this idea of contentment. The thing that he came to was that it didn't matter how much was around him, whether it was plenty, whether it was pain, whether it was good or bad, but that inner contentment that he found with God and understanding what God was doing with him and through him was what governed his life. Let's look at Hebrews 13 verse 5. Considering, again, one of the things as human beings, as we see things going on around us, it's easy for us to become envious. It's easy for us to see what other people have that we don't, especially in a world that we live in today that's very much focused on outward shows of what we do and don't have materially. Hebrews 13, 5. Here we're instructed by the writers of Hebrews, writer of Hebrews, let your conduct be without covetousness, be content with such things as you have, for he himself has said, I will never leave you or forsake you. So what's embedded in this is that underlying driver of contentment is God's promise that he's not going to leave or forsake us. And if we're grounded in that promise, then those transitory things that are happening to us at one point of time or another, the things that we might see other people have that we wish we had, become less important as we're grounded in that understanding of God being with us and not forsaking us. Let's look at 1 Timothy 6, verses 6 through 8, again reflecting on what contentment or sufficiency means as the Bible defines it. 1 Timothy 6, starting in verse 6.

Here we read, now godliness with contentment is great gain. If we brought nothing into this world, it's certain we can carry nothing out. If all heard the old joke about the hearse, they don't strap a U-Haul to the back of a hearse. You can't carry anything out of this world. And having food and clothing with these, we shall be content. Again, divorced from the things that we have, separated from the physical gain that we have and the physical things that we have around us. And lastly, it speaks to the anxieties that we feel. Because as we get bound up too much, and mired down in the things that we see around us in the world, it can be easy to become anxious. Even though the word contentment or archaeo is not used in this passage, Matthew 6, verses 33 and 34, very much carries the same theme forward. Many of you probably recognize these words. Matthew 6, verses 33 and 34, part of the Sermon on the Mount.

Where Jesus said, So as we see across this array of scriptures, we think about what is it that godly contentment or sufficiency really means as we face the different maybes from moment to moment in our lives. Contentment is an attitude of sufficiency of God's hand in our lives. We realize that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the grace that we're given through it, the acceptance and the access to God Himself, is enough for us to be content. It isn't reliant on the maybe of the moment, whether that might be good one moment or bad another. It's not reliant on our standing relative to other people in whatever measure we might pull out at any point in time. It demonstrates a trust in how God provides that cuts through our anxiousness about what it is that's coming next. So probably a natural next question is, how do we gain contentment? How is it that we gain contentment? I found it interesting, as I was reading through verses and preparing for this message, you know, there are a lot of things we read part of 1 Corinthians 12 in the first message, talking about spiritual gifts. There are several other passages in the Bible that talk about spiritual gifts. Contentment or sufficiency is not a spiritual gift. It's not listed anywhere in the Bible as a gift of the Spirit. It's also not listed in Galatians 5, verses 22 and 23 as one of the fruits of the Spirit. So it's not something like gifts or like the fruit of the Spirit that's either granted uniquely to individuals, like spiritual gifts. It's not an intrinsic element, per se, as a fruit of the Spirit that's defined in Galatians 5, verses 22 and 23. So how do we get it? How does it come to us? Let's turn back to Philippians 4 again.

I want to emphasize something different in this passage that we read a little bit earlier, verses 10 through 13 of Philippians 4. Here Paul again was talking about his situation. He said, Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am to be content. I know how to be abased, I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things, I have learned, both to be full and to be hungry, to abound and to suffer need, and I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. So what Paul makes very clear in this passage is godly contentment. This understanding of the sufficiency of the grace of God is something we learn. It's not imparted to us. It's not granted to us when we come out of the waters of baptism as a gift of the Holy Spirit. It's something that we have to learn through all of the things that go on in our lives. Now, we think of this whole concept of maybe. Paul's another person who had all kinds of maybes in his life, didn't he? We think about how his life unfolded and what you would think about those ups and those downs from moment to moment. We see him first when he's going nuts and persecuting and killing Christians.

People are running in terror from him, and then he's struck down by God. He doesn't know what happened. Finally, the scales fall from his eyes, and he's called, and he's taught personally by Jesus Christ. The only person in the history of mankind that's revealed to us in the Bible is having been taught personally by Jesus Christ after he had ascended up into heaven. You think he's going to take the world by storm at that point? What happens? People are so afraid of him because of all the things that he did. He goes back to Tarsus, and he lives in this obscurity for about 11 years, depending on the account and the timeline you believe in. Then Barnabas goes, and he pulls him out of obscurity, and he starts to travel and preach God's word. But then he suffers horrible physical things. He's beaten within an inch of his life. Some people would say he was actually killed and resurrected. The Bible's not 100% clear on that. It tells us only that he was left for dead. Then, ultimately, he's taken prisoner. That sounds pretty bad, but then he appears before all these Roman rulers. He's prophesied even in the Bible that he would appear before Caesar himself.

Then, after all that, he's martyred, and he's killed. All of these maybe moments in his life. Is it good? Is it bad? Where is it that he's going?

What is the underlying thing that happened through all of those experiences as he reflects back in Philippians 4? It's that he learned. He learned that single lesson to be content. To understand that through all of these things that were happening in his life, that there was a single thrust, and that was to understand the sufficiency of the grace of God. What underlies everything that we approach in life. Let's turn to 2 Corinthians 12.

This is the longer form of the scripture that we read to start the message today. We'll read verses 7 through 10. Let's get a little more of the context around what Paul was saying when he was talking about the sufficiency of God's grace. 2 Corinthians 12, verses 7 through 10. Lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. So what he's talking about here is all of the incredible experiences he had when you think of being taught directly by Jesus Christ. It talks about him actually having visions of things that were in heaven that he could not repeat, things that no man had revealed to him, but so that he wouldn't exalt himself. He said that's why this physical infirmity was given to him. It's not completely clear to us. Many people speculate it was some type of an eye ailment, maybe something that was really unsightly, like an oozing sore coming out of his eye, but we're not certain. Then he says in verse 8, Concerning this thing, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me, and this is where the answer came to him. God said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. And therefore, Paul says, Most gladly I'll boast in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. So I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I'm weak, then I am strong. And so what he's saying is that the center of all of those maybes, all of those inflection points in his life, all of those ups and downs, when he thought things were going to go well, when he thought they weren't, none of those were forever. And what he realized at the end of the day was God was teaching him a singular thing at the end of the day. One single overriding principle which applies to us as well, which is that his grace, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and everything that comes along with it, is enough.

None of the other externalities at the end of the day mattered or made a difference.

So, contentment is a learned behavior. It's something that God is teaching us over the course of our lifetimes. And hopefully as we reflect back, as we tend to do at this time of year, as we go into the Passover, it's something that we can look back on in our lives. You know, we talk often about trials. Sometimes we'll say that God is giving us a certain trial to teach us a very specific lesson, and that might very well be so. But there's one commonality to all the trials that we go through, as well as all of the good times that we go through, as well as everything else that happens in our life. And that is that we are to be learning the sufficiency of God's grace.

That underlying everything, God is slowly knocking out and chiseling away, and taking away all of those different things that we might stand on, all those different foundations that we might have built our lives on, so we can come down to a singular conclusion at the end of the entire process. Which is the foundation of God and his grace is all that we need to have a sufficient spiritual Christian life. So let's lastly think a little bit about what it is in life that can work against this idea of contentment or sufficiency. What are the things that can come into our lives and can get into the way of that? You know, it's easy to think it's the times of plenty we need to watch out for, right? And we can see plenty of religious traditions that are out there that are focused around asceticism. You know, we have the monastic movement where people move out into these faraway places. I don't know if you've ever looked at some of these images. They're incredible. Some of these buildings that are built on the side of cliffs, on the top of these mountains, where you can hardly get to them except by steps that have been carved into stone over countless number of years. As people have moved away into the wilderness to live lives, depriving themselves of all physical things, is that what God is asking of us? We visited a place once. There was a movement called the Stylights. I forget the guy's name now, but he lived on a pillar for decades. This would have been back in the Middle Ages or before. He literally lived on this pillar, which was like 10-15 feet tall, and he would have food handed up to him. We won't go through the details of how he might have lived the rest of his daily life up there. Let's just say it was probably a pretty basic existence. Is that what God is asking us in order for us to understand that his grace is sufficient? Let's look at Luke 12. Certainly, not being distracted by the times of plenty and the good things that God gives us is part of the picture. We'll see that here demonstrated in Luke 12. We'll read verses 13-21.

Here Jesus Christ teaching the multitudes, and one of them from the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. So you can imagine all these people coming up to Jesus Christ. They at least understood that he was a great teacher, and they wanted him to intervene in their lives. And Jesus said to him, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you? And so he said to them, take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses. And then he spoke a parable to them, saying, the ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully, and he thought in himself, saying, what shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops? And so he said, I know what I'll do. I'll pull down my barns, and I'll build bigger ones. And there I'll store my crops and my goods, and I'll say to my soul, soul? What else do you call your soul but soul?

You have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul would be required of you, and then whose will those things be which you have provided? So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God. And so this stands for the proposition that I think we all understand, but also have to remind ourselves of, in the society that we live in, that, let's face it, has all kinds of plenty. We live better in a middle-class situation today than most kings lived, going back a few centuries. And we take some of those things for granted, and it's easy for us to forget God when we're not reliant in a more tangible way for our day-to-day existence on being able to find food and having shelter for that day. And so we know clearly that one of the things we do need to watch for is making sure that the plenty and the good times in our lives don't drive us towards forgetting about God. And again, the sufficiency of His grace and what He gives us. But there's a deeper root here in how our plenty is approached, as well as how we act when we don't have a lot. And that's part of the key in understanding the maybe in this perspective of God's hand in our lives. It can be just as easy to blame God when we don't have things, as it can be to forget God when we do have things. And we have to equally watch out for that. So let's look at Philippians 4 again. We'll go back to 11 and 12. I spent a fair amount of time there. I want to look at one other element that Paul lays out here as he's talking to the Philippians there, writing to them in Philippians 4.

Here, starting in verse 11, Paul says, Not that I speak in regard to need, for I've learned in whatever state I'm in to be content. To be abased, I know how to be abased, I know how to abound. He's saying, I can understand and rely on God's sufficiency, whether I have a lot around me or whether I have a little around me. And that's really what's at the core of sufficiency. It functions regardless of whatever is around. It doesn't depend on whether it's plenty or whether it's little. And in all things, I've learned to be full and to be hungry. I think Paul recognized the dangers on both sides and how his relationship to God, if he didn't understand the sufficiency of God and his grace, could be impacted by either type of circumstances. And in the end, he says, again, both to abound and to suffer need, regardless of what the circumstance is. And so the learning was to not lose sight of God, whether it's in the highs or the lows of that maybe cycle that we go through. And governing our emotions during those swings back and forth can be a very challenging thing, can't it? Because as human beings, whenever something happens to us, there is a tendency to say, oh, everything is awful when something bad happens and we have a hard time finding any good. Or when something good happens, we can forget everything else and not have a care in the world. Underlying all of that has to be that understanding of the sufficiency that's in God. I'd like to look at one other aspect of this as well, which might be counterintuitive to start. I'm going to go to 1 Corinthians 13. This is the love chapter. It might seem like an odd place to go in talking about this topic. But I think as we reflect on it, we know that ultimately the outgrowth of God's grace living within us and us having that understanding is the outgrowth of how we treat other people, how we live our lives day to day, the things that we do. Because we're not called just to think, to theorize, to have things happen in our heads, but we're called to be active as Christians. James is an entire book in the Bible that's written about that. And Paul points out something even more important in 1 Corinthians 13 verses 1 through 3, his preamble, if you will, to the love chapter. Here he says, Because though I speak with tongues of men, of angels, if I don't have love, if I don't put God's way into action in my life, I become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, just making noise in the background. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could even remove mountains, if I don't have love, I'm nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, if I do not have love, it profits me nothing.

So what's interesting here is, again, as we're thinking about this idea of sufficiency, what Paul's laying out is we can have even powerful spiritual gifts. But if they've not taught us fundamentally the sufficiency of God's grace in our lives, it's not enough.

And let's face it, we go through cycles sometimes. We're in a state of the world today where I look on my Facebook page, I look at things that some of my friends comment about, I look at some of the things that they theorize about or think that they know. And we're in this phase where a lot of people think they know what's going to happen and how things are going to turn out, and they might invest a lot of emotional energy into whatever it is. Political philosophies, prophetic interpretations, what's happening economically, what's happening geopolitically. And the fact is, those things, if we read 1 Corinthians 13, verses 1 through 3, they might all be interesting, might even be things that God's given us insight into, but they need to work themselves out in a one singular direction. And that is to help us understand the sufficiency of God's grace in our lives. And if that's not what it's doing, we have to question whether we're over-invested in it and whether we're spending too much time in it and getting caught up in something that's actually distracting us from the heart of what it is that God wants to do in our lives. So enemies of contentment, they can be many. Many things can get in the way. Having physical plenty, having physical want can both get in the way of that idea of godly contentment or sufficiency. And even having too narrow a focus on things that God might even even given us as abilities and blessings can also be distractions from that sufficiency that is in God's grace. So as we wrap up the message today, as we think about these maybes that happen in our lives, as we saw illustrated in the story of the Chinese farmer, human life is full of all kinds of different events. In the moment when they happen, we quickly interpret them. This one's good, this one's bad. But the fact is, until God's done working, we don't really know what direction things are going to take. What we do know is what Paul laid out, though, in Romans 8. And when you think of all of what we just read of Paul's writings, I think it gives us a better understanding, too, of Romans 8, 28, where it says, All things work together for good, for those who love God, for people who are called according to His purpose. Because we understand that at the end of the day, everything that He's doing in our lives is there to build that understanding of the sufficiency of His grace, to knock away all of those other little foundations that we might try to stand on from time to time so that we realize that there's only one thing that we can and should count on in our lives. His ultimate goal in our lives is that we learn that sufficiency and that it transcends all of the maybe moments in our lives. Godly contentment is a learned behavior, and it is the ultimate goal of all of those maybes that happen in our Christian lives. So as we move into the coming week, as we move forward towards the Passover, I wish all of us increasing levels of contentment as we focus on the sufficiency of God's grace in our lives.