Choose Wisely, Choose To Put God and His Kingdom First.
27 July 2014
I Kings 3:5-12; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Bit stingy of God just to give Solomon one wish! Doesn’t God know it’s traditional to grant people three wishes? Getting three wishes is easy! If you had three wishes I wonder what you would wish for? I think with 3 you might feel you could ask for something indulgent for yourself as well as be kind towards others, but one wish? That would be hard. I might want to say can I win the lottery but I think I would feel very selfish and think I ought to be wishing for world peace. So full credit to Solomon that he asked to be wise, so he could govern his kingdom in a good way. He wasn’t selfish, but God centred.
As well as the one wish that Solomon had, in our Gospel reading, we have lots of parables; parables being stories that make one point. The parables of the treasure in the field and the pearl ask us to put God and His kingdom first; to let that be the most important thing in our life. Let everything else we do or say flow out from our relationship with God. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness and all these things will be added unto you’ familiar words that we often sing.
But making God priority can mean making hard choices. Solomon did not have it easy. He frequently had difficult decisions to make, (for eg, the 2 mums who both said a baby was theirs and his suggestion of cutting the baby in half drew forth the real Mum). Putting God first doesn’t mean things will be straightforward and that how to move forward in your life will just neatly plop into your mind; we will often have hard choices to wrestle with and will need to discern God’s will and the way forward and not expect magic answers.
As well as having hard choices to make, the parables tell us, we will need the guts to take risks even though we cannot see what is going to happen. We have to act just with faith. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Harry Potter. I think I must be the only person in the world who can’t get into it (I am the one who took the youth group to see one of the films and fell asleep!) but I do know that Harry knew he was called to be a magician and really pursued his dream, but imagine when he was at the station looking for platform 9 3/4 and found he had to walk through a brick wall to get there. Walk through a brick wall? No thank you very much I think I’ll just perhaps stay at home instead. God calls us to make decisions that will take guts, both in our personal circumstances, in the life of this church and as we contribute to the wider world. What are the brick walls we each are confronted with today?
As you know, pearls are made when a little bit of grit gets into the oyster’s shell and irritates it. So the oyster covers the grit with a film so that it is made smooth and a pearl is created. Not all oysters produce pearls and pearls can vary in size from being really tiny to the giant ones we see on luscious jewellery. We all have irritants, we all have things, people that come into our lives that are tough to deal with, that worry or confuse us, that challenge or annoy us. Usually we just want to get rid of the irritant! But, maybe it is how we deal with those things; how we live with them, think about them, that allow those irritants to help us be better people, better Christians, to form our own pearls. In the parable of the good and bad fish, it is left for God to judge who and what are good and bad, not us; our task is to live our life as best we can.
You see Solomon didn’t ask to be different to who he was, he didn’t ask to have different circumstances. He was king but he didn’t ask not to be, he simply asked to be the best king he could be, to be the best Solomon he could be. Can we ask God to help us be the best we can be? The best Susie, the best Edwina, the best Peter, the best John. That is what God wants for us.
And the good news is 2 fold: firstly, that there is absolutely nothing that can happen to us in this world that can separate us from the love of God. Nothing you do, no circumstances you find yourself in can separate you from God. He is always there with you, with us. Sometimes it might be hard to see him but he is always there. I was shocked at the Confirmation classes to find that our Brian, who was helping me lead, had never come across the Where’s Wally books. I hope you all have; basically they are very very intricate pictures full of tiny people and detail and you have to find Wally. We spent a happy 10 minutes in the class looking for him on one of the pictures. The point I was trying to make is that God is always there, Jesus is always there. You might not feel his presence and it might take a lot of careful looking to find him but he is always there. Nothing can take him away from us.
And the second piece of good news is that in God’s economy it doesn’t take much to make a big difference. The Kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed, like a tiny bit of yeast but the seed when planted and the yeast when mixed with flour, etc, makes a huge difference. So although sometimes we will be doing great important things or have huge decisions to make, most of our time is spent making tiny choices for God, like not biting back when someone snaps at us, signing a petition to get the Government to look at issues, or looking out for a lonely person and greeting them even if you are in a rush or coming to support church even though you’d rather have a lie in. Little things make a huge, huge difference.
So choose wisely, choose to put God first. And pray to be the best person you can be. Be faithful in both little and big ways even if it is hard and know that God is faithful and will stick with us through thick and thin. We do it because God is important, because we are each important, but as we do it, we make such a difference to our world. And that all encompassing, never ending love of God is a message that our world more than ever needs to hear. Let us do our bit to spread it.
Susie Walker. Youth Leader.