“How Well Do You Know God

“How Well Do You Know God?”

Text: Jeremiah 31:27-34

© October 21, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

Over in England, in the town of Ipswich, they were having a real traffic problem. People were driving too fast, cars were getting into accidents with each other, and pedestrians were getting hit as they were trying to cross the streets. And so leaders in Ipswich tried to solve that problem in the same way that most communities would try to solve that problem: they put up lots and lots of signs telling people what they should and shouldn’t do. They put up more signs to remind people what the speed limits were, they put up signs telling motorists to be on the lookout for pedestrians, they put up flashing lights as warnings to tell drivers to be more careful. But guess what? Even though the town of Ipswich did all that, the number of accidents continued to go up.

Finally, with the town desperate to solve their traffic problem, and with all those extra signs and warnings that they had put up obviously not working, the local leaders decided that they needed to try something different, something new. And so they reluctantly took the advice of a traffic planner by the name of Hans Monderman. You see, his advice was for the town was for them to take down virtually all of the speed limit signs and other warning signs along the roads and to eliminate almost all of the traffic lights. At first the local leaders wondered: if we take his advice and do that, won’t we end up with even more traffic problems than we already have?

But the town of Ipswich went ahead and did what Hans Monderman advised them to do, and to their great surprise, it worked! Almost immediately the number of accidents dropped dramatically and the number of pedestrians who were getting hit fell to almost zero. It seemed that the key to that success was that instead of people just glancing at signs and deciding to obey some of them and to ignore others, without there being any signs the people were forced to think about what they ought to be doing. And the result was that all of a sudden drivers were making more eye contact with other drivers and with pedestrians, and they started acting the way that they should have been acting all along.[1]

To a large degree, that same kind of problem was at the heart of the reading that we just listened to from the prophet Jeremiah. No, the people of Israel weren’t having traffic problems. Instead, their problem, as Jeremiah saw it, was that the people were treating the Ten Commandments and the rest of the laws that God had given to them as nothing more than a bunch of traffic signs telling them what they should and shouldn’t do, traffic signs that the people believed they had the right to obey or disobey at their leisure. And the result of the people doing that was chaos.

And so here in this passage from the Bible, Jeremiah speaks of a day that will come when God’s law won’t be just “out there” for people to ignore. Instead, Jeremiah speaks of a day that will come when God will do something new, something different – a day that will come when God’s law will be put inside us, and we’ll have the ability to know in no uncertain terms what it is that God wants us to be doing.

And as Christians we believe that God brought about that new covenant, that new way of us being in relationship with God, when God sent Jesus into the world. Because as we come to faith in Jesus, God pours out the Holy Spirit upon us, and the Holy Spirit is what comes inside us and guides us so that our faith isn’t just a matter of knowing certain things about God. Instead, when the Holy Spirit comes inside us and guides us, our faith becomes a matter of knowing God firsthand, and our faith becomes a matter of us understanding what it is that we should be doing with our lives.

And when that happens, we come to see that the Christian faith isn’t what so many people think it is. When the Holy Spirit comes inside us and guides us, we come to see that the Christian faith isn’t just a matter of creating lists of things we’re supposed to and not supposed to do. No, when the Holy Spirit comes inside us and guides us, we come to see that the Christian faith is a matter of shaping our lives in such a way so that in everything we do, we show our love for God.

One day a Jewish rabbi told his followers this story. He said to them, “I have learned what it means to love someone from a conversation between two villagers that I just overheard. The first man said: ‘Tell me, Ivan, do you love me?’ The second man said: ‘I love you deeply.’ The first man then said: ‘Do you know, then, my friend, what causes me pain?’ The second said: ‘How can I know that? How can I know what causes you pain?’ The first man ended by saying: ‘If you do not know what causes me pain, how can you say that you truly love me?’”[2]

How well do you know God? Do you know God so well that you love God? If so, if you say that you love God, do you know what causes God pain? If you say that you love God, are you aware, deep inside of you, what are the things that we say and do that cause God to weep and grieve? If you say that you love God, do you strive with all your being to avoid causing God pain?

The good news is that we worship and serve a God who is not just some historical figure, who is not just some God that we’re invited to learn about and remember. No, the God that we worship and serve, the God who has been most fully revealed to us through the person of Jesus Christ, is a God who is alive and present even now, a God who yearns to dwell within us by the power of the Holy Spirit to help us to become the people that God has created us to be.

And so this morning as we share in the sacrament of communion, we’re being invited to be united with God in a most special way. This morning as we share in the sacrament of communion, as we take the bread and the cup, we’re being invited to allow Christ inside us, to come into our lives in a powerful way to show us and teach us God’s ways. And most of all, this morning as we share in the sacrament of communion, we’re being invited to come to know God even more deeply than we’ve known God in the past, so that we might come to see more clearly the love that God has for us and the love that God wants us to have in our lives.