Two Things That Change Life
From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Dick Foth
Date: January 31, 2010
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Transcript
Good evening, my name is Dick Foth. I’m from Fort Collins, Colorado. I used to be from here, I flew in to get away from the snow. It is wonderful to be back at NCC. This was our home congregation for 14 years before leaving a year and a half ago to go west. I’m delighted to be back.
If I could give you a gift, and I say this a lot when I go places and speak, if I could give you a gift, I’d give you the gift of perspective. There is a lot of difference between standing here and talking to you and standing here and talking to you. It’s only a few feet but it is a big difference. I think the difference is between older guys like me and younger folks like most of you, we see difference in music choice and in style. We have four kids, they are all adults, but our youngest son is in his mid-thirties, and we were visiting a while back and he said, “Dad, you’ve got to do something about those jeans.” He said, “Those are old man jeans!” I said, “What do you mean old man jeans? I get those at Target for $16 bucks! Wrangler, those are good jeans.” He said, “No, no, we gotta help you.” So he takes me to some place nice and the on-sale jeans are like two and a half times what I’m paying for these, and he said, “These are good. These are Lucky brand jeans.” So I get some, but I said, “They look used.” So, I’m walking out of the store and he said, “Dad, I’m not trying to make you young, I’m just trying to make you presentable.”
Anyway, perspective, what I’d like to do is take another run at Bethlehem. I know Christmas is over, but Christmas is never over. I would like to look back for a just a moment at Bethlehem and I’d like to look at it from John’s prologue. John Chapter 1, I’m going to read the first 14 verses of John, and those of you who have read Scripture for some time know this, those of you who haven’t, you might not know this. There are four fellows who wrote about Jesus – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew, Mark and Luke kind of have one view, they tell you the facts, but John comes along and he has an agenda. He wants you to believe. That’s his whole deal. He says it at the end of the book, he references it at the front end of his gospel. He wants us to believe that Jesus is who He claims to be. When you read it, you get this sense, listen to how it reads. John 1:1-14
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
6There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. [Here’s the piece I want to focus on tonight]
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
A couple of things I find fascinating about this particular passage is first of all, there is all the evidence that this was a hymn, that this was sung in the early church in those first several decades, they sang this. Can you imagine if we came here and sang this every Sunday, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and Word was God and in Him there was life and that life was the light of men? And what if John came and told us about Him and some of us accepted and some rejected. If we sang that every Sunday, I might get the idea that this Jesus showing up business was intentional, like there was something powerful about it. So when I look at it, I’m captured by that.
The other piece is that when John writes this, he is an old man. He is probably in his mid-eighties when he writes this. When Jesus called him, he might have been a teenager or early twenties, he was a commercial fisherman, and he was a stud, ya know, he is hauling fish nets in so he’s got biceps and triceps, you body builders know what I’m talking about. I don’t have those but I know what I’m talking about. But the fact is that he was a young guy and he fished all night and watched the sun come up and maybe he had that picture in mind when the Holy Spirit was moving on him when he said that life came into the world and it was the light of men. Every day, in his growing up years, he watched the sun come up, but now he is an old man. He is at Ephesus and Turkey and he wants people to understand who this Jesus is. He doesn’t go back to Bethlehem like Matthew and Luke do, he reaches all the way back and says in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. There is something in this prologue for everybody. If you are a poet or philosopher, you’ve got to love that! You could paint that, you could think about that, you could try to get your mind around that. If you are a scientist, you’ve got to love the part – all things were made through Him, without Him nothing was made. You don’t have to buy it, but at least you’ve got to grapple with it. If you are in advertising or marketing, you’ve got to love John the Baptist. He is saying, ‘He’s coming, watch this, it’s a big thing, you need to watch.’ If you are a counselor or psychologist or psychiatrist, here comes the Creator of the universe to claim his own and we reject Him. You’ve got all kinds of work with that whole rejection piece. If you are a kid, you’ve got to love it that He gives you authority! Kids with power is an oxymoron. But here is a kingdom comprised of kids who have power. Then you come to this part, where it says the Word became flesh, incarnate, and made his dwelling among us, literally camped out. But I ask the question when I get there – so what? I would submit to you that the answer to the so what is that He came full of grace and truth. That grace and truth shows up with skin on it.
Well, I’ve blown by that before. I’ve focused on the incarnation, here is God who comes in my shape so I can understand Him and I get that, but the grace and truth piece, I have to admit, I’ve blown by. Those are nice qualities. But it says here that that’s the whole deal. We saw his glory, we beheld Him full of grace and truth. I ask myself, why those two things? Why grace and truth? I just toss this out for your consideration. I would suggest that no relationship works without those two things. No relationship can work without grace and truth. No friendship, no marriage, no business, nothing works without those. I would go further and say that I don’t work without them. I need in my life grace and truth because that is the essence of God’s favor and God’s reality.
If I could characterize grace, I would say grace is the delivery system for truth. It is the context in which truth comes. And truth is life itself. Jesus says later, “You shall know the truth, if you continue in my teaching, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” It will unlock your door. Truth gives you life. When I watched, two weeks ago, the first shots and listen to the first reports about the earthquake in Haiti, there was this poignant, tragic comment. C130s and circling over Haiti, they are full of supplies, they have plasma, they have water and they have food but they can’t land because the airport is jammed up. They can’t bring them in by sea because the harbor doesn’t work. We have the delivery system but we can’t get life to you. In Jesus, you get both things, you get the delivery system and you get life all at the same time. For me, that is critical. I don’t think we are talking about balance here, like we need a little bit of grace and a little bit of truth. I think we need all of grace and all of truth. We need both barrels. I don’t know exactly how that works, I just know that it does work.
Grace and truth connect in unique ways. Grace is the context, truth is the contents. I would suggest that it is also cause and effect. When I tell the truth, like for the first time about anything that really counts, like this, “God, this is Foth, I’d just like to tell you that I am not You, I am human and I need You.” And He says, “I’m glad to hear you come to that conclusion, that’s good, here’s my grace.” I would submit that truth triggers grace in ways that I can’t imagine. When I tell the truth about me and I grapple with the truth about God, grace humbles me, if you will, like walking into the surf on the Pacific Ocean. It turns me over, end over end and washes me and does all those things. If you just go with grace, your life is sloppy. If you just go with truth, you break your teeth on it. You need both things. You need grace and truth together. And you see it best walked out in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
When I look at Bethlehem, it is very clear to see, when you read the text, that God is up to something. God is up to something. I love that film, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. How many of you saw that? It’s the story about Narnia, the special land where Aslan is king and he is the lion, but the evil forces have taken it over and it’s all frozen over. C.S. Lewis says is was always winter but never Christmas. But these kids come in through this wardrobe and they end up in this land and there is ice all over the place and they end up going to the lodge of the beavers who know about Aslan and they are telling them about Aslan and this beaver in this one clip looks at the kids and says, ‘Aslan is on the move.’ When you look at Bethlehem, I would submit to you that Aslan is on the move; that something big is happening there. If I were to make a metaphor for what I think Bethlehem is in my life, it would be D-day, World War II in Europe. On June 6, 1944, the allied forces, Canadian, British and U.S. forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on the English Channel north of France. 60,000 men landed in that day, and in the months to follow, 800,000 would go through those beaches. But on that day, thousands died on the beach, and in the months that followed as they fought their way across Normandy, horrific things happened. It was the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime that had controlled most of Europe. It was enemy territory that they had taken. And on that day, when Dwight David Eisenhower said, ‘Let’s go,’ when those boys landed on the beach, it was the beginning of the end for the enemy. Listen to how Andy Rooney says it, he was a young war correspondent who landed on the beach three days after D-day, listen to what he says. “There have been only a handful of days since the beginning of time on which the direction the world was taking has been changed for the better in one 24-hour period by an act of man. June 6, 1944 was one of them. What the Americans, the Canadians and the British were trying to do was to get back a whole continent that had been taken from its rightful owners and whose citizens had been taken captive by Adolph Hitler’s German army. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.”
If you are young and not really clear what D-day was, let me tell you it was a day unlike any other. I landed on Utah Beach several days after the first assault waves went in on the morning of June 6. I’m uncertain of the day when I came in, row on row of dead American soldiers were laid out on the sand just above the high-tide mark where the beach turned into weedy clumps of grass. They were covered with drab blankets just their feet sticking out at the boot, their G.I. boots sticking out. I remember their boots, all the same, on very different boys. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.
When I look at Bethlehem, it was the most monumentally unselfish thing that God did for us. I look at grace and truth and I say, ‘Ok, that’s the so what,’ and then I ask this question – if that’s the so what, if that’s the place where God threw down the gauntlet and said ‘enough already, the enemy has enough territory, I’m taking it back,’ if that’s the start, what’s the now what? I would say the now what is change. If I embrace grace and truth, I can expect change. Everything starts to change. Spring is upon us in the frozen land of Narnia and I don’t mean my circumstances change, I mean I start to change. Like the song we just sang, from the inside out. Now, I believe God is unchangeable but we are designed to change.
I have a friend who lives in this town. He is an old Montana rancher and he’s been here about 35 year. He was talking to me a while back and he said, “Dick, I was having this conversation with God and God said, ‘Fred, one of us has got to change.’ I love that. We are designed for change. You’re sitting here and your heart will beat 103,000 times plus in the next 24 hours. You will take 23,000 plus breaths in the next 24 hours. In the next 7 years, all your bones will be replaced because they are living things. They aren’t just hollow, some of you are medical type people and you know what I’m saying. I read it on Google so it must be true! But the point is that we are changing physically as we speak but God designed us to be changed by grace and truth in ways that are profound and in ways that go beyond my understanding.
Some years ago, Western Electric did an experiment. They wanted to see whether by changing the lighting in a room that people’s behavior would change or productivity would increase. They went to a place called Hawthorne and they did it and they dimmed the light or turned up the lights and productivity increased. They came and painted the walls and productivity increased. They changed the lights and productivity increased. They came back and painted the wall the same color it was before they changed it and productivity went up. It’s called the Hawthorne effect. We respond to change in a lot of ways. But this isn’t just change for change sake, this is change that goes somewhere. My problem with change is that I want you to do it. I don’t want to change, I want you to change. Some of you hear are married and you remember what you said to yourself, like there are two or three things he does that really bother me but that’ll change, we’ll get that fixed, and he said there are a couple things she does but we’ll get that changed. I have a question for you – how’s it going? No, no. It isn’t because somebody does something like that that changes us, it has to be a transforming something. I have to come to a different understanding of truth and grace in my life. What happens when grace and truth hits me and tumbles me over and over, I like that idea of being tumbled by grace, is I become real.
The average age of this congregation is 28. The average age of Fort Collins, Colorado where I live is 29. I talk to a lot of young people. I ask them this question – what do you want out of life? The response often time is that they just want to know what’s real, just give me some people who are authentic, that you can slice them anywhere and they are the same. I’ve had enough smoke and mirrors, I’ve had enough information coming through my stuff, my cell phones, my ipods, I mean, some of you are getting the ball scores while I’m talking, or you’re texting. We are getting all kinds of messages, but just give me something that’s real.
Any of you know the story of the Velveteen Rabbit? I think kids’ stories are written for adults. The Velveteen Rabbit is lying on the nursery floor with the old skin horse, and he says to the old skin horse, ‘What does it mean to be real? Is it like having a buzzer or a stick-out handle?’ The old skin horse says, ‘No.’ The Velveteen Rabbit says, ‘Well does it hurt?’ and the old skin horse says, ‘Well, sometimes. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who have sharp edges or have to be carefully kept.’ ‘Well, does it happen all at once or does it take a long, long time?’ The horse says, ‘It takes a long time. To become real, you become real when you are loved by a child, really loved for a long, long time. But when you’ve been loved for a long time like that, most of your hair gets rubbed off and you get loose in the joints and your eyes fall out and you get real shabby. But when you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’
Grace and truth operative in our lives makes us more real every day, more solid every day, more authentic every day because we are understanding the truth about God and understanding the truth about us. And it is being washed in grace so I can handle it. That’s just how it is.
When I read Romans the 12th Chapter and the first two verses, I’m not going to read them, just reference them, there is this great verse, Paul takes this idea and says it this way. Don’t let the world, don’t be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Three words there, conformed, transformed and renew. Conformed in the word schema from which we get schematic. It’s the sketch of something. He says don’t let the world with all of it’s information and all of it’s affect and so forth shape you like it is. He says that doesn’t go anywhere, it is only skin deep, it is not transformative. But be transformed, a different word. The word from which we get metamorphosis, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. Be transformed from the inside outside. A substantive change, by the renewing of your mind. Two words for new in the New Testament, one means brand new, just made. The other one means new in character, and that’s what this word is in Romans, new in character. When grace and truth get us, if you will, when they wash us, we are transformed from the inside out, bit by bit, a little at a time. Sometimes we don’t even recognize that we are being transformed.
I went to a 40th reunion of a church we helped plant at the University of Illinois back in 1966. I was just a young guy, around 24 years old, and nobody wants a Senior Pastor who is 24 years old, unless you are 18. So, 40 years later I go back and I walk in and this middle-aged guy comes over to me and he hugs me and whispers in my ear and he said, “I just drove five hours to say thank you. I looked at him and I remembered who he was. He was a doper guy, a guy back during the hippy days, some of you don’t remember that, guys with flowers in their hair, hitchhiking with guitars on their backs and taking LSD and all kinds of stuff, and this guy was sitting on the floor of the church, barefoot, wearing overalls, and I didn’t care about the bare feet or the overalls or the hair, but here he is now, 40 years later, and the had walked into a community where grace and truth worked, and his life was transformed. He is now a pediatrician in the Midwestern states, loving Jesus, helping kids.
Change happens. I’m not suggesting you change. That’s not my thought here tonight. My thought is that when you embrace grace and truth, when I embrace grace and truth, change happens on the backstrokes. Change is the outcome of the right kind of input. The right kind of input, according to Jesus is when we receive Him, we get grace and truth, and powerful stuff happens. I like that passage in I Corinthians where it says, remember what you were when you were called. Some of us sitting here tonight, you might be thinking that five years ago, you couldn’t have imagined yourself sitting here. Some of you say that three years ago, this wouldn’t have been on my radar screen. Some of you are saying last year wasn’t such a hot year, and then grace and truth came busting into your life and here you are. What’s happened in your life has radically transformed you and changed you.
At Bethlehem, it’s D-day. Jesus comes breaking into my life in ways that are transformative and all through my life He has taken the territory and He is showing me Himself, and that’s how it works.
I want to close with this story. These many years ago, some of you have heard me tell this story, but I like this story so I’m going to tell it again. Many years ago when I was that young pastor at the University, I was sitting in my office one day and the telephone rang and it was a young man, and the young man said, ‘I’m a member of such-and-such fraternity,’ it was like the raunchiest fraternity at the University. They’d been put on probation for doing some junk, and he said, ‘Some guys came through here a few weeks ago and they told us about this Jesus person, and we believed and we are trying to follow us but we don’t have anybody to teach us, would you come and teach us?’ I said, ‘Ok’ and I went over there. It was a wonderful time. It was back when there was great unrest on campus. About eight months later, my telephone rings again, and it is an older guy. The older guy says, ‘I believe you know my son, John, from such-and-such fraternity.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know John.’ He said, ‘He has radically changed in the last eight months. He is like a different kids.’ He said, ‘He says it is God.’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ He said, ‘What do you say?’ I said, ‘I say it is God.’ And he says, ‘I want to talk to you.’ And he has this edge in his voice, and I’m going ‘Oh, man.’ But he said, ‘I’d like you to come to my house for dinner.’ Well, when you put food in the equation! For me food chases fear out the door, so I’m going to his house for dinner. What I haven’t told you about him was that he was a full professor of Journalism at the University. He had won the Pulitzer Prize a few years before for some stuff he wrote. He was a political cartoonist for a major eastern seaboard newspaper, and he was a Harvard fellow. That means he’s real smart. Some of you know this about me, that when I was younger, like from age 5 up into my late 20’s, I stuttered, sometimes severely. It was like the Lord said, ‘Why don’t we take the stuttering young guy and put him over here with the Pulitzer Prize winning author and see how that goes!’ Scripture says He takes the lesser things to confound the wise. So I’m scared out of my mind, but I go over and we have a lovely dinner and we come out and sit in the front room. He is sitting there, his wife is sitting there, and the young man is over there. The older man has a lot of anger towards the young man’s generation because they were taking over campuses and spitting all over everything this guy stood for, all of his core values, they were stomping on them. But this man looks at me and he said, ‘He says it’s God, tell me about this God.’ I said, ‘He is the God who is, He is I Am, I Am the God who creates, I Am the God who redeems, I Am the God who provides, I Am the God who heals, I Am the God who knows you and wants you, I Am the Good Shepherd, I Am the Way, I Am the Truth, I Am the Life, I Am Living Water, I Am Living Bread, I Am the Resurrection, I Am the Life, I Am the Beginning, that God.’ I talked to him about 20 minutes, and I knew I wanted to ask him the question, like would you like to know this God, but I was so nervous. Finally, I said, ‘Would you like to know Him?’ And he looked at me, didn’t bat an eye, and said, ‘Yes I would.’ He said, ‘How do I do that?’ I said, ‘Scripture says you just ask.’ I said, ‘Would you like me to help you ask Him?’ He said, ‘Yes I would.’ I said, ‘I’m going to say some phrases I think you feel and you follow me out loud.’ So here’s the stuttering guy and the Pulitzer Prize winning author, and I said, ‘Dear God, this is Jeff, You know me like the back of your hand, You know my boy John, You’ve totally changed him, I need what he has. If You can change my boy, You can change me. Take away my anger, give me a new heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus, make me new, God, Amen.’ I opened my eyes and I turned and looked at him, and he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at his boy and tears were streaming down his face and he got up and started toward his son and they met right in front of me and threw their arms around each other and wept. I’m watching and pretty soon, he pushes his boy away and he says, ‘Dick, do you understand what’s happening here tonight?’ I said, ‘I think I do but why don’t you tell me.’ Then the Pulitzer Prize winning author came out and he said, ‘I believe that 2,000 years ago, God gave his Son to me, but tonight, my son gave me God.’ I start bawling. That man went to be with Jesus about 15 years ago and tonight his son is a counselor helping people know Jesus in a large city.
It’s a long way from the Pulitzer Prize to heaven and it’s a long way from a raunchy fraternity house at a university to being somebody who encourages people toward Jesus, but when Jesus busts into our lives full of grace and truth, all bets are off. When we embrace his grace and truth, anything can happen. I would suggest it’s all good. Bow your heads with me tonight. Just in this moment, I want to ask a question of you. Some of you have followed Jesus a long time, but you say tonight that there’s an area in your life where you need to let the truth work. I’ve been blocking it off and haven’t’ wanted to look at it but I need his truth to help me in this area of my life. I’m not going to ask you to raise your hand or come forward, but if you want, I’d like to include you in closing prayer. If you want, just lift your head and look at me and put your head back down. Thank you. I see you. Yes. Some of you say you’ve known God’s grace and I’ve got to tell you that I’ve got a 4-inch pipe of grace coming into my life but I’ve only got a half inch going out. I need to give people the grace that I’ve been afforded by God, and I need to do that. If that’s your place, just look at me. I see you.
Lord Jesus, here we are. You know us better than we know ourselves. Thank You that your grace and truth are inseparable. Thank You that You put that together in the person of Jesus. So as we walk with Him and follow Him and as we allow his Spirit to work in our lives, for my friends who need the truth-life, thank You for doing that this evening. We trust You for it, even as they walk out of here. And for those who have received so much and they haven’t expressed it the way it has been expressed to them, but they want to, thank You for doing that, turning that switch and opening that area to allow it to flow. Bless my friends here Lord, our extended family here at National Community Church. Thank You for the privilege of being here tonight. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
