Lent2: Rehab: Intervention

• Second Sunday of Lent

with Mark 8:31-38

www.FirstChurchBville.com    @FirstUMCBville   @kerrfunk

This sermon was broadcast on Facebook Live 2/25/18 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCWV/ and can also be found by itself at https://youtu.be/6xrTlMF2AI8

#rehab #intervention #umcgbod #lent

• Lent is a 40 day season of spiritual preparation before the Easter celebration.

This season we’ll be following the lectionary and the denomination’s suggestion for a sermon series called REHAB. Why REHAB? As a part of our spiritual preparation before the Easter celebration. Last week talked about the need to follow Jesus into the wilderness of rehab, open to the possibility that in the prayer, fasting, self-denial of the desert, and even in the face of pain, discomfort, and suffering, God can be working in us, God may in fact need the focus of the desert for us to be positioned for healing.

• I’ve participated in a 12-step program for a few years – this’ll come up more than once in a series called “rehab”, so bear with me. “You can’t get better unless you admit that you have a problem,” and part of recovery is rigorous honesty with self. Sometimes you need to talk to your sponsor, to interrupt your stinking thinking.

Sometimes you need intervention, which quite literally means “coming between”.

• Today’s scripture readings include intervention stories, interrupt-my-thinking stories.
Isaiah 64 is practically a plea to God to break into the fabric of our lives because we’re messed up and we need saved! And after gaining the disciples’ trust Jesus tells them the plan which includes walking into the fire, Peter thinks he knows better, Peter tries to tell Jesus otherwise, and Jesus interrupts Peter’s thinking. Get behind me, Satan! Whoa!

Peter’s thinking of self-preservation, in the guise of thinking about Jesus’ safety.
Trying to preserve self we deny need for savior and decline savior’s ability to save.

Jesus: if you’re not with me you’re against me, and I want you with me! To follow me is to embrace self-denial, to pick up cross. You cannot follow me AND set the course for your recovery: you set the course for your recovery BY following me, letting ME and the Holy Spirit identify your stinking thinking and then letting me and the HS set the course for your recovery.

• Recovery is not easy. It is relinquishing control,
BUT/AND it is putting self in the hands of who?
of the one who knows you best, loves you best, literally died for you.

& if we cannot / will not / do not admit that we are stuck in sin we will DIE in sin.

• THE GOOD NEWS is that when we are in Christ, pain and suffering and even death no longer have dominion over us. Jesus took that stuff to the cross and to the tomb – it wasn’t easy for him and it isn’t easy for us but it is through that love that we emerge in recovery.

• And again, we do not go alone. Christ goes before us, and Holy Spirit goes with us in our caregivers and fellow disciples in recovery.

• Woman walking down the road, fell into a pit. Could not get out. Called out for help. [some people pass by and offer advice, even prayer]. Another woman comes along and jumps down into pit. Why?! Now we’re both stuck here! No, says second woman. I know how to get out, see I’ve been in this pit before.

• So it is with Christ, and so recovery. Through intervention we get rid of stinking thinking and get in position for God to work in us.

• What thinking might you be clinging to that comes between you and Lord?
Pray for interrupted thinking, plus courage to pick up cross and follow Jesus.

• May God use this time of Lent to shape us into disciples and witnesses to God’s kingdom.

• Hymn 373 Nothing Between My Soul and My Savior

Mark 8:31-38 (HCSB)       

³¹ Then Jesus began to teach the disciples that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, be killed, and rise after three days. ³² He was openly talking about this. So Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.

³³ But turning around and looking at His disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind Me, Satan, because you’re not thinking about God’s concerns, but man’s!”

³⁴ Summoning the crowd along with His disciples, Jesus said to them, “If anyone wants to be My follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me and the gospel will save it. ³⁶ For what does it benefit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his life? ³⁷ What can a man give in exchange for his life? ³⁸ For whoever is ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” ò