We have a hard time listening to God. A phone vibrates, a mind runs off, and even when nothing interrupts we still lose the thread. The wise men of Matthew 2 trusted His word enough to travel months toward a king they couldn’t yet see—can we listen and trust Him when our own picture still looks unfinished?
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This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Yay. Over the last month, we have been exploring the journey of the Wisemen. Now, if you haven’t been following along for the last month, you might say, wait a second, that’s Christmas. Why are you talking about the Wisemen?
Well, because the Wisemen didn’t come at Christmas. The Wisemen came some time later, perhaps even a year, year and a half, two years later. We don’t know precisely when, but we know it was after the Nativity. Jesus and his family were in a house. And so we’re following their story.
Something I’ve loved about this, spending some time in that story, is we kind of tack it on to Christmas. We think, oh, and then here were the Wisemen. Make sure to put them in the Nativity scene, what have you. And we miss how much is going on.
That’s where we’ve looked at. We’ve looked at how they spent time in God’s Word, they boldly engaged with God’s Word, and then listened to God’s Word so they could hear that God was calling them. They boldly gave gifts, and we talked about that last week, how we boldly give to God. Tonight we’re going to go back to the subject of listening.
Maybe there are two different points in this story that I believe speak clearly to listening, and I think that’s because we have a hard time listening. I have a hard time listening.
Do you ever listen to a sermon? Surely not here, but do you ever listen to a sermon and you realize you remember the opening illustration, and somehow you’re midway, there’s another illustration coming up, and you’re really not sure what was said between? You ever had that happen? I know, never here, right? No, it happens, right?
Why? Because we have trouble listening. Our minds run through all kinds of things. Maybe it’s your phone vibrates while you’re sitting here, and you start thinking about that. We’re online so much; we’re so connected. Maybe you go home and you’ve decided to do a Bible reading plan this year. We talked about that a few weeks ago, and you get back to your house and you pull up your electronic Bible.
And there’s no shame in using an electronic Bible. I use an electronic Bible all the time. It’s a perfectly good thing, but one challenge with electronic Bible is many times as I’ve read my printed Bibles, I have never had a notification pop up in the middle of it. But I’m sitting there reading the Bible, and up comes the latest weather report or the latest news or the latest Facebook notification or X notification or signal notification or email or a phone call or text message or a game that you need to play or whatever, right?
How do we listen? Because here’s the thing: even when none of that’s happening, we struggle to listen. I struggle to listen. How do we listen to God? I think that’s the challenge we find here, and part of that listening comes down to trust. The wise men read God’s Word, and they trusted God’s Word.
They trusted they should travel hundreds of miles. We talked over the last few weeks about that journey and how long it took. They trusted that they were going to spend months traveling, and they were going to find something worthwhile. And notably, unlike, say, an earthly king being born, what they weren’t counting on is that they’d received a messenger from another kingdom, and they were going because they were VIP guests to meet the newborn king.
It wasn’t that kind of thing. They’d read God’s Word, and they trusted that God was going to be there in it. And then they went on that journey. There were a lot of things that happened on that journey we don’t know about. What happened on day 30 of maybe 90 plus days, maybe even more, that they were traveling to get to see the baby? All kinds of things. Probably some discouraging things. Maybe the animals they were riding got sick. Maybe some of their companions that were helping haul everything got sick. Maybe the weather was just really bad. Maybe they stopped off in a city and saw something interesting happening and wondered if they should get their attention focused on that instead. Because this was clearly something, and they thought, what is this they’re going to?
All kinds of different things. Makes me think of, have any of you ever watched, and it used to be you could only do this if you saw it in person, years ago, when this was shared with our friends at the nearby Lutheran Church, Emanuel Lutheran, and we did a joint ministry to the college campus. They had the Jesus painter come to their church. Has anyone seen a Jesus painter? A few of you.
So the Jesus painter, he’ll get this giant canvas. I know he’s been at a number of churches in the area. He’ll get this giant canvas, and during the service, he will paint a picture of Jesus. And so that was hanging up back there for a period of time. When Emanuel shut down their college ministry, they took that out.
But it was hanging up there, and if you remember that, or if you’ve seen one elsewhere, maybe you’ve been on YouTube, and you’ve seen sort of that performance painter type person on there. Or I remember someone a number of years ago was going around virally because he could take sand and swirl it into different things.
But you see this thing being formed, whether it’s a painting or it’s sand or something else like that, and at first, it doesn’t look like anything. It might even look like it gets in the way of what you would think should go there. You see some dark lines, and you think, I hope he didn’t miss there, because that looks like where the face should be. And it’s just this streak. What in the world is going to go there?
And then it starts to come together, and what do you know? There’s a face. There’s a landscape made out of sand, but you can’t see it in the moment. And the wise men, in their moment as they’re traveling, as they’re going to see Jesus, as they spent the years before that studying the scriptures, they saw a lot of streaks being put down and sand being rearranged. But they weren’t all that different from us.
They couldn’t see how it was all coming together. And there were probably times as they read the scriptures of the Jews that had been exiled to their land hundreds of years before, they’re reading these scriptures, and they thought, is there really anything to this? We have access to all the wisdom of the world. Is there anything to this?
As they’re traveling and ran into those problems, they probably thought, is there anything to this? They arrive in Jerusalem, and what do they find? They find that the king doesn’t even know about a newborn king being born. Is there anything to this? Does that sound familiar?
Do you ever feel like you’re kind of in that place thinking, God, I can see all kinds of streaks on my canvas, but I can’t see anything that looks particularly good. And you wonder, now what?
I imagine maybe the first person that watched someone painting a painting like that, they hired that person, and then the person said, I’m going to paint a beautiful painting right in front of you, in the midst of an event. It’s going to happen in real time, quickly. And they started to see it, and they thought, I just wasted a bunch of money. This looks like a mess.
And sometimes, as we’re reading God’s word, as we’re trying to follow our God, we kind of wonder, have I wasted my time? Have I wasted my resources? Is there anything to this?
Here’s what the wise men did, though. They trusted. They said, I can’t figure this out, but I’ve heard about this painter, and his paintings come together. We’re going to go see how this one’s fulfilled.
And that’s something they challenge us to do today too, that whatever streaks are on your canvas right now that you’re trying to figure out, God is putting together that painting.
And the challenge that we’re going to explore tonight is, can I listen and trust that He’s going to put the rest of the streaks together, and suddenly it’s not streaks anymore, but it’s a beautiful picture.
Let’s pray that God would help us as we study his word tonight to see that.
Father, would you help us? Because as much as we’d like to, as much as we come in here, and we know the right answers, we know the things that sound faithful to say, all of us have those points where it really just feels like there are big streaks. Those things are scary, God.
Would you help us to see what you’re doing? And when it’s not yet time for us to see, would you help us to trust? Would you remind us that you’re with us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, we see different forms of trust in this story. And one of the things we see, let’s take a look back at verses 7 to 10, we’ve looked at them before, is that you might say, in a weird sense, Herod trusts. He trusts the wise men. He doesn’t send a delegation with them. He sends them off to go and find the newborn king.
And here’s what happens. Matthew 2, verse 7.
So Herod, it wouldn’t have been entirely weird to have a foreign delegation come in. For Herod to say, okay, I’ll send some folks with you. I’ll help you find the king. And everyone would have known exactly what he was doing. He has foreigners coming into his kingdom. He wants to know what they’re up to.
The wise men presume that they’re going to go and find the king, but they don’t. He wants to know what they’re up to. The wise men presumably wouldn’t have flinched if that happened, and they would have known no matter how he phrased it, that was the point, to make sure that they weren’t coming to spy on him, to cause him any trouble.
Now, why does Herod do this? Are we saying that he has the right kind of trust? No. Here, Herod, it would appear, is doing something very savvy politically. He wants the wise men to trust him.
And so what does he say? He looks at them and says, well, they don’t have an army. They’re not a big threat to me. I am going to send them off and ask them to come back and report.
And if I don’t send a group of soldiers with them or anything, they’re going to be more likely to tell me everything they find, because they’re going to think, ah, we have the favor of the king.
And so he’s trying to form a trust with them. And imagine for a moment if that had worked fully. Imagine if, as they arrived, they’d thought, wow, Herod trusts us.
And then we’re going to get to the moment that they’re told not to go back to Herod. And I think, but Herod trusted us. How can we not go back? How can we not go back?
And a lot of times when it comes down to, am I going to hear what God’s doing? Am I going to trust that smear on the canvas is going to turn into something? The place where we fall off the wagon, the place where we miss out on what God is doing, is we start to put our trust in what the human beings around us are going to think, in what the human beings around us are doing for us, and we lose sight of what God is doing.
We think, well, if I trust God in this, people are going to think I’m foolish. If I trust God in this, people are going to say, why aren’t you using more common sense?
And I’m not saying we should be stupid. God doesn’t encourage stupidity. God encourages us to use the brains He’s given us, but He encourages us as we’re doing so to listen to His Word and to listen to Him.
When we pray to Him and we pray for things, to actually pray expectantly, not pray just because we know it’s the thing to do and then move on and forget about it.
Too often we’re putting our trust in the wrong place.
There was a controversy a few months ago. Someone, I don’t know exactly where it started, but someone started the snowball that kept rolling that a lot of the celebrity pastors that people love to buy books from don’t actually write their books.
They hire ghostwriters, and they say, you know, I think people want to hear a book from me on trusting God. So they hire some ghostwriters, and those writers, unknown people, labor for weeks or months putting together a book, and they hand off the manuscript to that pastor who sometimes reads it and sometimes doesn’t.
He puts his name on it, she puts her name on it, it goes on the bookshelves. And then people go to the bookstore, they go onto Amazon, and they say, you know, I know that pastor so-and-so is someone I always trust the opinion of, I’m going to buy this book.
And they’re putting their trust in that name on the cover, but the name on the cover isn’t the one actually organizing the book.
Sort of a related thing that happened last year, sometimes what we do is we look on the back cover of the book, or the little description below on Amazon. You scroll down before you buy your Kindle book, and it has all the different people that are quoted on why you should buy this book.
And there was a book that came out through major evangelical publishing, the major evangelical publishing world was supposed to be wonderful, and then an excerpt was published, and people said, wait a second, this sounds like blasphemy.
But all these great pastors’ quotes are on the back. What did it turn out? Well, those pastors had quotes from the author on their books, and so they knew it was time to give a quote, and they said, well, let me see here, what’s this book about? Oh, it’s about this. Okay, this would be relevant to say about that, and they dashed off a quote and sent it without reading the book.
Several of them admitted that. They apologized for it. You know, I hadn’t actually read the book before I recommended it. But people bought it, people read it because they trusted the quotes.
We often trust the quotes. We get, they pick up the book, and even once we know that the people around us aren’t the ones actually writing the book, even as we read God’s Word and we find out that He—He’s not the ghostwriter, His name is written over everything, and yet we pretend like He’s the ghostwriter, we slap someone else’s name over where we should put our trust, and we trust him or her instead.
And then we’re disappointed because that person isn’t the one writing the book. God is.
Are we going to trust the name on the cover, or are we going to trust the name who’s actually the author? I’ll tell you, is it nice to know a name and recognize it when you’re going to read a book? Well, yeah. But what I would really like to know is about the person who actually wrote it.
Because no matter whose name is on the front, what I really care about is who was it that labored over it. If it’s a book about faith, who was it that was pouring over the scriptures and praying over the scriptures and writing things down? That’s the person I want to know about. How much more so in life should we want to know about the one who authored life itself?
And that’s where we should put our trust. And I think that’s really the first pitfall we run into is we just act as if that’s not really the case.
And the wise men easily could have done it. Yes, they’d read God’s word. Yes, God’s word had told them to go and find this newborn king. But now it’s going to come down to, where the rubber really meets the road, were they going to keep trusting what God said, or were they going to say, but Herod seems like such a nice man. Maybe we should trust him instead.
Maybe we should, you know, he’s shown trust to us. We’re going to feel guilty if we don’t show trust back to him.
I’m not arguing that we should spend our lives in constant cynicism. We have to trust people. That’s how we function.
But it’s relative. Our trust for God should be absolute.
We need to understand the difference. Sometimes you see a book, and it openly acknowledges that the person with the big recognizable name isn’t the main author. Let’s say, you know, Pastor Smith with, and you know when there’s the “with” and there’s this no-name person underneath, that’s the person that really wrote it.
And you say, well, it sounds like they collaborated. And maybe in this case, they actually did collaborate. And you realize, okay, I’m going to trust this book because I do trust that person. But what I really want to know is about the other person.
And sometimes God’s going to bring people into our lives. We’re going to serve with people. That’s how we function as a church, right? We serve together. But we need to understand we serve together with God. God is the one who’s really authoring it. We don’t want to miss that.
As the wise men were challenged to trust God, they could have gotten diverted in several ways with Herod. One, in a moment when we get to that point where they’re going to go a different route, they could have said, well, we’re not going to because we trust Herod.
Another thing they could have done, though, is they could have arrived in Jerusalem and find out, well, it’s not Herod’s baby that’s been born. And we’d still kind of like to meet him, but we have these neat gifts here. And, you know, we’re going to have these neat gifts here and here’s King Herod. Why don’t we give him the gifts? The baby won’t know anyway. We’ll go ahead and curry some favor with the current leader.
Who knows how long it’s going to be before this kid has any importance. And they could have just gotten distracted. And so often that’s what we do. It’s not even that we completely lose sight of where God’s leading us, but we lose sight enough that we start diverting over to other things that really shouldn’t have our attention.
And that’s exactly what they could have done. Yes, we want to give something to the baby. Maybe we’ll hold just a little bit of that frankincense for him, just a little bit. We’ll give the myrrh and we’ll give the gold over to Herod. We’ll have a little vial of frankincense still. We’ll give that, you know, just a little bit. We can give that over here and it’ll be good enough. It’ll be amazing. That’s great. And Herod’s going to love us for it.
And sometimes that’s what we do. We think, well, how should I dedicate my time? How should I dedicate my resources? I’m going to focus on what’s going to get the people around me to be impressed. And I’ll set a little aside for God. A little time, a little money, a little attention, a little study, whatever it might be. It’ll be enough.
What do the wise men do? They remember that the gifts weren’t for Herod. They weren’t just for a king, they were for the king. And so as they encountered Herod, I’m sure they were nice to him and Herod may have said, oh, what you got there? Oh, some gifts for the king that’s been foretold. And they kept them for the king who was foretold because they knew where it was supposed to go.
Contrast this to King Hezekiah, Isaiah 39. At that time, Merodach-Baladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent envoys with letters and a present to Hezekiah for he’d heard that he’d been sick and had recovered.
And Hezekiah welcomed them gladly and he showed them his treasure house, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his old armory, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that he did not show them.
It’s a very interesting story. If you’re not familiar with King Hezekiah or it’s been a while, King Hezekiah becomes sick. He prays to God and God says, I’m going to heal you. He’s not supposed to survive, but God restores him to health.
And in the context of that, he’s still alive when these envoys arrive from what’s then a distant power and a rising power. It’s not really all that important yet, Babylon.
Now, Babylon is ultimately going to be the nation that conquers the people of God and hauls them off. But at this point, there’s just some curiosity from far away.
Why does Hezekiah take them on this tour? Is he just bragging? I don’t think so.
I think what Hezekiah is doing is he says, oh, there’s these people. They’re not from our direct enemy, the Assyrians. They’re just another little power somewhere else in the world. And you know what? It’d be really nice to have some friends.
And so I’m going to show you a picture of Hezekiah and I’m going to show them how many riches I have. Because then if they get more important, they’re going to know I can collaborate with them and be a valuable ally. Maybe I’ll even send some of that as a tribute to them and they’ll protect me if someone else is attacking.
And so here’s Hezekiah, a man who is told he’s going to die. Everything points to him dying. He’s not getting better; he’s getting worse. And he prays to God and God heals him. God’s protected the kingdom against great armies. And Hezekiah says, I might need some military friends in case something bad happens.
I’m going to show these treasures that God has given me during this lifetime, that God has clearly given back to me so that I don’t have to just trust that God’s going to protect me.
And what happens? Well, Babylon takes note of this and eventually, what does Babylon do? They come and they wipe out the very kingdom that Hezekiah passes down to his descendants. And they take all those treasures and they make them their own.
Put the trust in the wrong place.
I think it’s really interesting. Commentators have looked at these kings coming from or these wise men, these magi, as they’re coming from that same basic region, maybe even distant descendants of the Babylonian royalty, possibly.
As they arrive, they come bearing gifts and they know exactly where they’re supposed to be shown. Not to the important king in Jerusalem, not to the Roman authorities, but to a baby. Because they understand who that baby is. And they show it to God.
Isn’t it interesting to think, what if Hezekiah hadn’t shown all that to the Babylonians? He just focused on praising God for giving his land, his people, the resources they needed. And he did that instead. What path would that have set them on?
But he put the trust in the wrong place. And maybe he even did what we often do. He thought, you know, I bet these Babylonian messengers here, you know, I bet God sent them. They’re probably meant to be allies for us. And it’d be really nice to have some allies.
And he talked himself into that. I can totally see him doing that. Why? Because that’s exactly the sort of thing we do.
And when we’re tempted to go down that route, we need to ask ourselves, God, this is where I’m feeling pulled because this feels like a place of security. Is this where you’re calling me? Does this match what your Word says?
And here’s something that I think we can say pretty clearly: God doesn’t, throughout His Word, call His people, their country, to align themselves with the powers that consistently want to destroy them and destroy the worship of the Lord.
But they do it anyway because it feels secure.
And we put our trust in things that feel secure.
The wise men bring their gifts, and then they’re going to be challenged again. Are they going to fall into the trap of trusting Herod or not? And that’s what we see in verse 12.
And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, what do they do? They departed to their own country by another way.
All those streaks on the canvas, they’d seen them come together enough that they actually come and they encounter the Messiah. They encounter God incarnate in the flesh.
So here they are in His presence. He’s still a baby.
And by everything we read about in the Gospels, it’s not as though He chose to glow in the dark or something.
You look at some of the great paintings of the past, and what do they always do? They kind of put a little aura around Jesus, or they actually put a halo over Him or whatever.
You know, how could anyone not know that Jesus was important? He’s glowing, for crying out loud. They haven’t invented nuclear power plants yet. He wasn’t irradiated. That’s not how it was.
Jesus walked the earth as a human being. And we’re told in Isaiah 53 He didn’t even look like someone that should be regarded. He was an average-looking person. That’s what we’re told.
So we look at this average baby.
You don’t get a great discourse out of Him.
They set those gifts there, and then they say, now this king showed us favor, but you know what? We understand that God is directing us to do something different than what would be the natural inclination.
So what are we going to do? We’re going to do it. We’re going to worship the king, and then we’re going to trust Him. We’re going to trust this foreign God that we didn’t grow up knowing, but we’ve read about in this Word, and we’ve become convinced it’s Him.
We’re going to trust Him, and we’re going to listen, and we’re going to go a different route, even though it’s going to cause a diplomatic nightmare back at the embassy.
You know, we’re going to hear about government bureaucrats for years from this. We’re probably going to have to fill out 10 Form 683s just to get through this. But they do it. Why? Because they trust God.
That runs us into the second pitfall that we fall into over and over again. God calls us, and to an extent, we trust Him.
But when it really comes down to a time that we need to respond, we’re not listening.
What are they doing? They trust Him. They’re building up all those streaks on the canvas, and then they’re ready to listen when it starts to come together, and they say, oh, I’m going to listen. I’m going to listen. I’m going to listen. I’m going to listen.
Then they’re ready to listen when it starts to come together, and they say, oh, now we’re seeing more of what you’re doing, God, and we want to respond to it.
Not how it worked for, say, the prophet Jonah, right? Jonah, he hears from God. He’s a prophet of the Lord. He trusts it’s from God. But what does he do? He says, I’m getting out of here. I don’t want anything to do with this.
The Apostle Paul, he grows up studying the scriptures. He becomes an expert in the scriptures. He’s the guy that gets brought on Palestine news network every time there’s something going on that might be religious, and he’s interviewed, and he has all these impressive titles about all the universities he’s from when he does.
He gets off the air in his most recent interview on PNN and says, you know what? I need to go persecute some of those people that call themselves Christians because they’re messing with the way that I think things should be.
And he doesn’t. He trusts God. He knows what God’s saying, but he isn’t listening to God fulfilling His very word. Until what? Until God knocks him down on the ground and blinds him.
And sometimes God will work dramatically to call us to attention after we’ve trusted, but we’re just not willing to listen. He does something dramatic so we say, oh, wow, I haven’t been listening. That’s what Paul does, and Paul goes on to be a great missionary, but may it not be that that’s the way we do it.
May it be like the wise men. Just read His word, study His word with fellow believers, and as we do so, we’re ready to engage. We’re ready to respond. We’re ready to see Him work.
Now, I think what that really comes down to in part is preparing our hearts to really hear how God works because our world says something very different than what we’re used to.
Our world says something very different about what our goals should be than what God does, and so then when God speaks, it doesn’t match what we think we’re looking for.
For Paul, it doesn’t match what he’s looking for. Here’s a man who’s been executed after claiming to be God. That doesn’t match what he’s been looking for in a Messiah, and he wasn’t really paying close enough attention to what God was saying.
He was paying attention to what Paul was saying. He wasn’t paying close enough attention to what God was saying. He was paying attention to what he thought God should say.
It’s what we do, and then we get misled, and we put our trust in the wrong places, and we do the wrong things, and we’re not hearing God as He’s calling us.
What does God say He values? Matthew chapter 5, verse 3.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”
That is not what we count as success, friends.
That’s not what we count as what we should be listening for. We’re looking for strong. We’re looking for powerful. We’re looking for fierce warriors that will defend us. We’re looking for security and everything to be the way that we think it should be.
And in that, we’re like pre-conversion Paul. We’re like fearful running Jonah before he ends up in a fish. We’re more like Herod, really, oftentimes. We can’t hear what God’s doing.
So what do we need? We need a steady diet of His word. We need to be in His word over and over again. I believe that’s why the wise men actually hear what is being said here. They’ve been in His word so much, they realize when God’s working and the Messiah is born.
And then they’re still able to keep hearing as God’s directing them because they’re on a steady diet of the thing that shows God’s priorities, that shows His heart.
And even when we read God’s word, are we really hearing His heart? I think that’s the challenge. Are we actually allowing it to change us, to make us uncomfortable? When it gets in the way of what we’d like to do today or this week, does it make us uncomfortable? Does it confront us or do we push it aside?
When it speaks against the ways that we’re going to advance our career, do we push it aside? When it speaks against the ways that we want to advance our politics, do we push it aside? When it speaks about ways that are very different from how we think we could advance our church, do we push it aside?
Do we hear what God is saying, or do we hear what we want to say?
I was reading a study this week on spicy food, and I love spicy food. Anyone else can get an amen? Spicy food is just the best. Yeah, amen. Spicy food is great.
I did read, though—and I say all that first because I want you spicy food eaters out there to know that I am with you on this—but I did read something really interesting.
Someone wondered, I’m sure they got a grant to study this, wondered does spicy food make people a hothead? Does it make people more aggressive?
And so what did they do? They studied it, and they did a series of tests. For example, they described someone who was acting in a way that could be perceived as aggressive or not, and they had them read about this person before they’d had any spicy food. They had people read about this person after they’d had spicy food.
Well, what do you think? After spicy food, the people were actually more aggressive. They were ready to confront this person.
Now you might say, well, it’s because, if you don’t like spicy food, you’re saying, well, it’s because their tongues were in pain. Their stomachs were burning up.
Their stomachs were burning up. That’s why they—no. After that, then they said, well, let’s make sure this is really the case. They showed pictures of spicy food to people before or after they read the essay, and what did they find? The people were still more aggressive.
It’s the association we have with spicy food actually makes people more likely to be confrontational.
So I was saying in the survey, if you’re going to go into a situation where you know you need to be the peacemaker, where you need to be a calm presence, don’t eat spicy food first.
By the way, who wants to go out for Mexican after church?
They went on and talked about other foods and the influences they have on our emotions and our state of mind, different things you might eat if you’re trying to be calm.
Or it said, maybe you want to eat spicy food when you need to go and you’re going to ask for a raise from your boss and you need to have a little extra courage—eat that spicy food.
But here’s the thing: it said that old cliché, you are what you eat, there’s actually something to it. It really does change who we are as we eat things. It influences us, and we kind of know that.
But do we think about that in terms of what we eat informationally? Are we eating of the food that balances us properly, that puts all the right probiotics in our stomach, that puts our tongue at just the right place where it’s being able to do the things it’s meant to do, but we’re not eradicating it through fire?
Are we building ourselves up so that we can actually look like Jesus?
And a lot of times I think we think we are. We’re reading different famous Christians, we’re sharing them on social media, we’re listening to them on YouTube or on television.
And we need to ask, are they actually feeding us God’s word? Are we actually feeding on God’s word? Are we going to God’s word and making sure that what we’re feeding on is God’s word?
And when we go and read God’s word, are we trying to remold it so that it can be spicier like we’d like? Are we actually hearing what it says? Do we have a steady diet of trusting God?
That’s what the wise men had. They were trusting God over and over again on this journey, so when God really needed them to act, they were ready to act. They were ready to act boldly.
Friends, that’s the challenge for us too. Are we so steadily eating on God’s trust, eating of it, being strengthened by it, that when God calls us, we’re ready to be bold too?
We’re ready to be bold and do what He actually wants us to do and not what makes us feel secure, not what makes us feel like we’re going to get victory, not what makes us feel like we’re going to be important or successful, but what brings glory to God and brings more people into His kingdom.
Let’s pray that that’s the kind of boldness that we’re ready for because that’s what we’ve been eating of.
Would you pray with me? Lord, we come before you as those who too often were eating the wrong diet. We’re not like the wise men that ate of your word, yearning to know truly what it said, not what would affirm what they already believed, but truly would tell them what they should do, what they should be, who you are.
And they responded, and they encountered you and then they were sent boldly through you.
Would you help us to have the same experience? Lord, will you show us those places where we’re letting things that are unhealthy to eat on coming into our lives and we’re not able then to listen to you?
Would you help us to see those places we’re putting our trust in the wrong places? We’re feeding on the wrong kind of trust and not being equipped to do your work.
Would you help us to see those places we’re trusting in ourselves and we’re missing out on doing your work?
Would you help bring us to your words so that we’re feeding on you and your truth and nothing else? I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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