The Fullness of Joy: God Cleanses Us of our Fences

 May 5 2024

Luke 14:25-33

         Spring is not only a wonderful time of flowers and trees bursting into life but it is also a time to get at cleaning the house. As I was helping Jennifer clean the house the other day, I had several thoughts. The first is that no matter how often we clean and dust everything the dirt just keeps coming.I consider myself a rather cleanly person so I am baffled at just how much dirt you can find in a house. I mean, it is not like I am intentionally bringing dirt into the house and sprinkling it around. I guess I will just have to blame the dog for the continual flow of dust into our house.The second thought I had as I worked at washing down the entertainment center, is that after you begin cleaning you suddenly see dust and dirt everywhere. It amazes me that I can turn a blind eye to how bad everything has gotten and then when I intentionally look for it, I then can see dust everywhere. And yes, I really am hoping that this ability to see the dust and dirt around me goes away as fast as it came.

         Well, just as our homes always end up getting dusty and dirty, the truth is that our spiritual lives end up just like our homes, a little dusty and dirty as time rolls on. Now it might be a little surprising for us to find out that it is inevitable that our spiritual lives also stand in need of a spring cleaning. But listen to what James tells us at the end of the first chapter where he implores us, “…to keep ourselves unstained, or without pollution by the world.” James is clearly telling us that we have to work at keeping the dirt and dust of this world from settling in so that the ways of the world become a permanent stain on a life that seeks after an unblemished record. What we must also wonder is just how all that the world throws at us impacts the fullness of the joy that Jesus promises to us. This promise of Jesus is found in the fifteenth chapter of John where Jesus says to us, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full to overflowing.” You see, Jesus desires that we have the most amazingly joyful life. He wants us to be certain that we know that the God we worship, is the one who loves us best, the one who wants the very best for all of us. This is what we have been discovering in this series of messages entitled, “The Fullness of Joy.”. Today we are going to consider the importance of allowing God to clean us up. Why we should even care about cleaning up our act? The answer is that we need to keep clean to keep bearing fruit. This is what Jesus teaches us in the fifteenth chapter of John, “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit my Father takes away. Every branch that does bear fruit he cleans so that it might bear more fruit.” Either we allow God to keep us clean and bear more and more fruit or we allow the pollution of the world to slowly but surely keep us from bearing any fruit at all.So, this is why we need to lean in to what Jesus says especially when he gives us a clue as to how God cleanses us. After Jesus speaks of the necessity of being cleansed by God, he tells his disciples, “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoke to you”. Here, it is important that we understand that what Jesus speaks of is a singular word not the fullness of all that he has taught to us. This clue should make us think back to another important teaching of Jesus that we know as the parable of the sower. As found in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, Jesus there speaks about the seed of the sower being like the word of the kingdom. This word of the kingdom is what the people of Israel were to hear every morning when they prayed what they called the Shema, which is Hebrew for, “hear”. Every morning the people of Israel were to wake up and hear, and what is it that they were to hear? They were to hear the word spoken by God to, “Love”. They were to love God with all of their heart. They were to love God with all of their soul. They were to love God with everything that he had given to them, what they knew as their power or strength. Every morning God called out, do you hear my word, this word called love?

         This word of God calling us to love, this is the word that the disciples had heard spoken to them from the mouth of Jesus. This, Jesus tells us is how the disciples were now clean. So, when we are told that the Father cleanses the vine so that we might be able to bear more fruit we now know that this happens through this prayer to love God. You see, the Father cleanses us by calling out to us every morning, asking us to hear once again his word, love. We need to allow God to cleanses us daily, I mean it kind of makes sense that we cannot clean ourselves up every spring as we do with our homes. No, every morning we need to hear God whisper to us, to love him with all that we are and all that we have.

We listen because God in his mercy, loved us and gave us life and we, in turn, hear his word, and we love God by taking this life he gave us, and we work with God by offering mercy to others. You see, the way our lives become more and more cleansed of the pollution of this world is by loving God more and more every day. When we do so we should begin to realize that the only power that sin has in our lives is the power that we give to that sin by yielding our lives in service to sin. But as we come every morning to hear the still, small voice of God whisper to us to go out and love and we love as he asks us to, then sin and the influence of this world is scrubbed away.

         What may surprise us is that this cleansing by the word, this is what Jesus is speaking about in todays scripture. What makes this hard for us to see is that Jesus is speaking to the crowds who only desired the power which Jesus seemed to possess to serve their own ends and, I believe, that Jesus was well aware of this. So, to thin the herd, Jesus tells them just what they were in for if they were serious about following him about. What is interesting about what Jesus told the crowd that day was that his teaching followed a a very familiar pattern. This pattern that we need to be aware of is found when Jesus speaks about the need for those who follow him, to pick up and carry their cross. This is often the way Jesus illustrates just what is meant to love God with all of one’s soul or life. When we hear Jesus speak this way then there is a very good chance that he is referring to the Shema, the morning prayer of the people of God.  Knowing that Jesus is using this prayer as his framework for his teaching is so helpful for us in figuring out just what Jesus means when he says in todays scripture that we should just go and hate on everybody that’s important to us. I’m pretty sure this is one of those times that the disciples looked at each other and scratched their heads. I mean, try and hear what Jesus is saying with fresh ears: If anyone comes to me and does not hate themselves, and hates their father, and hates their mother, and hates their wife, and hates their children, and hates their brothers and hates their sisters, yes, and you have to hate even your own life; if you cannot hate every person and every relation you might have and top it off by hating yourself, then don’t even bother trying to be my disciples.” I can imagine that when Jesus begins to tell everybody who wanted to tag along with him that they needed to tell everyone in their family to take a back seat this is when the crowd began to slowly dwindle away. Geez, Jesus don’t you know that haters are just going to hate, hate hate! I also imagine that the disciples, upon hearing this probably looked down at their feet and began kicking the dirt. This following Jesus demands a lot. Yet, just what is it that is really being demanded here by Jesus? You see, when we understand that Jesus is using the Shema, then we can also know that what Jesus is saying when he says go forth and pretty much hate everyone is that this is the flip side to God saying that we are to love him with all of our heart. God demands whole hearted devotion and he rightly deserves to be so loved. So what we must figure out is just what is it about the love of our families which might affect our whole hearted love of God? Well, what we also know is that God desires to give everyone the very best experience of life in the age to come and that this experience is for everyone, as we said earlier, there is no second class with God. So what I believe Jesus wants us to discover today is, just where does our need for a second class come from? The answer that Jesus points us to is that this need for second class begins within our families. It is easy for not just football teams but families as well, to get an, us-against-the-world, mindset. What becomes clear is that what needs cleansed out of our lives are all of the fences that we have built, the ones that mark off who is with us and who is against us, and this usually begins with family. Yet if we want the world to know us as being the people of God then when we give our families a special status above those who have not made it inside our little fences our lives end up telling the world that our God plays favorites, that he is a God who cannot be considered to be a just God, therefore he is a  judge who will not judge fairly and he simply cannot be a God who has any answer to the evil of this world which messes up our lives. Can you understand why God pleads for us to allow him to cleanse us of our fences?

Are you beginning to see, I hope, that we must love God in our hearts before we do anything else. This is the only way that we will have lives that are rightly ordered.What is so fascinating is that those in the crowds were the very people commanded by God to pray the Shema, this call to hear the word, love, spoken by God every morning. Yet, they never considered that when love of family became a fence which kept them from loving the stranger, they ceased to love God by their actions because they had portrayed God in a way that kept that stranger from loving God. This is why when God says to hear his call to love him it means that we love him enough to let him cleanse us of our fences.

What has to be understood is that when love God with all of our heart, this means that God has become for us our greatest treasure. We hear this in the one-hundredth and nineteenth Psalm, where we are told that the psalmist treasured God’s word in his heart do that he would not sin against God.  As we continue to ponder this theme of treasures, how can we not but help hear Jesus say to us the teaching found in the sixth chapter of Matthew, “…lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” You see, what Jesus instructs us to do is to treasure God and trust his ways. God is worthy to be treasured  because he desires for all of us to experience the very best life.  We can never forget that the very best life is only when no one lives a second class life. Only as our lives proclaim that there is a God who is bringing forth the very best for all people can we know ourselves as being clothed with the righteousness of God. You see, the way we tell this story is not just through words, but it is also told through our bearing fruit for the kingdom, letting our lives be a foretaste of the greater things that are to come. This is why we say that we are to not only desire the very best that is ahead but we also are to inspire others to join us in this very best life by living lives which are filled with the goodness that we long for. As we find in the fifth chapter of Galatians, “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” When we love God with all of our heart and everyday and we ask him to cleanse us of our fences, God will take those fences and he will build bridges. Do you see why to love God first, means that those we fenced off in second place can now find the God who cleanses us of our fences so that no one ever has to give a second thought to being second class ever again. Only when the fences are cleansed from our lives can we experience the very best life which is always a life together. Our love now compels us to share this heavenly treasure, our God who loves us best, with all we meet. How wonderful to help others to trade in their earthly treasures, this second best experience, for something infinitely greater, the very best experience of life in the age to come.

         When we figure out that Jesus is speaking about what it means to love God, first with our hearts, then it follows that he is going to speak to how we are to love God with our very souls and with all that God has graciously given to us. So when Jesus says, “…therefore, anyone who does not renounce all that they have cannot be my disciple”, we know that Jesus is saying that we can no longer consider that what we have been given is just for us and ours. Now when the love of God cleanses our fences, we cross the bridges that God builds to touch a suffering world with his mercy. So we might say that the way we are to love God with what has been given to us is for us to take those resources and use them in building a joyful house of prayer for all people because this is shape of the future to come. In prayer we hear the wish of our Heavenly Father that all of his creation become a home where all can people can be known by God and know God and there experience endless, unspeakable, joy full of glory. 

         At last we come to loving God with our whole self. When God has cleansed us of our fences, our life becomes about bridges which lead us up to ever greater life, life together with God and one another. This greater life is marked by a greater love which Jesus tells us, moves us to lay down our life for our friends. Cleansed of our fences, we realize that life is not about building a legacy to bring honor to ourselves but instead life is about having a life that God honors. Jesus says in the twelfth chapter of John, “Whoever loves his life loses is. Whoever hates his life in this world keeps it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me. Where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.” When we love God, and we let God cleanse us of our fences, then even our very lives can become a bridge to love others in order to lead others through death to life, just as Jesus did for us upon the cross.So let us the enter into the joy of our Master and hear the words, “Well done good and faithful servant.”  Amen!