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Scripture Passage – 2 Corinthians 5:7
Description – The second sermon in a three part series on “Walking With and Just Not For God.”
For an audio link to this sermon in its entirety click on this link 82111sermon
One of the things said about Walt Disney was that while he did not live to see the opening of Disney World in Florida, he did it “see” it. He “saw” it because he had seen it in his mind, he had envisioned it years before.
They called Walt Disney a visionary.
Visionaries are not always liked. They are often mocked because they see things not as they are but as they could be.
When I think of things like the telephone, now morphed into cell phones; when I think about the computer, morphed first into a desktop that has changed the way we work, then to laptops, and now to what are called tablets, and even smartphones, the initial visions offered were mocked and thought to be impractical.
And yet… millions and millions of people have enjoyed Disneyland for over 50 years and Disney World for 40! And they now can visit that famous mouse in Paris and Tokyo and soon, Shanghai! And we can communicate and work over vast distances now in ways that were once the purview of science fiction writers!
In this second sermon of the series,” Walk! Don’t Run!” we are moving to the New Testament and 2 Corinthians 5:7 which says “For we live by believing and not by seeing.”
Walking by faith requires us to be visionary like Walt Disney. It requires us to “see” with eyes of faith.
To believe in God, to trust in God, to believe and practice the Christian faith, is to take a great risk and to be very courageous. We live for something that we cannot see… right now. There is more to life than what we experience with our senses.
This is where we need to see that the ‘walk’ of our faith is vitally important. For it is in the ‘walking,’ which I call the experience of faith, that we truly experience the Lord.
How then do we walk by faith and not by sight?
To live and walk by faith requires a constant action of choosing to live and walk confidently, hopefully, and expectantly in the Lord.
Walking confidently in Christ is the alternative to walking with bitterness, resentment, and just the plain ol’ grumps.
To live hopefully is to live in the reality that God’s will, WILL be done one day. There will be a renewal and end to things that are wrong on this earth.
We live ‘hopefully’ in the light of God’s presence today and His coming tomorrow. We live hopefully in the power of the gospel to change our lives and the lives of others.
In Psalm 5:3 we read, “Listen to my voice in the morning, Lord. Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly.
We live in an age of great expectations (though Charles Dickens though so 150 years as well!)
I googled ‘great expectations’ and found that there is a dating website named ‘Great Expectations’ (and what expectations they probably are!)and a blog post of seven years ago by a man named Seth Godin who writes some interesting and insightful things.
This particular blog post was interestingly entitled “The Curse of Great Expectations.”
He begins with writing about benchmarking and how beneficially it is in many areas of life. But he goes on to say this:
“…benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.
But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It’s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.”
(Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/05/the_curse_of_gr.html)
I suggest this morning that perhaps our expectations are the greatest reasons we struggle with our walk with God.
Our expectations must be rooted in the belief that God will ultimately bring about what is good and right and just in His time and way and not ours.
Walking by faith and not by sight is often a walk in the dark because, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, we see things through a glass darkly right now. We don’t see the whole way to the end. In fact, we sometimes can’t see the next step!
Believing and trusting in God brings a greater hope and fulfillment to our lives more than just getting by. I really think that we are perhaps in the very beginnings of a profound revival and even awakening because I think we have come to the end of our consumerist way of life! Now we still need jobs and we need people to make things, but has anyone considered that we are where we are because have so much stuff that we are stuffed? And what has it brought us?
Be encouraged today no matter what we are experiencing today.
We are not home yet.
There is more to life than what. We. See.
Let us keep walking by faith in a God who has forgiven us and who sees the entire road that we must walk with and in Him.
Amen.
