The Life That Pleases God

Hebrews 13:7-16

When we were kids, every night after my brother and I climbed into our beds in our shared bedroom, mom and dad would come in and pray with us. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Guard me through the stary night. And wake me safe with sunshine bright. God bless mommy, and daddy too. And make all us kiddies honest and true. Amen.”

Why can I remember every word of that prayer, but I can’t remember why I got up and walked into another room in my house? It isn’t just the repetition. There was a point where they stopped doing that prayer with us every night. As we got older. I also opened my Bible and prayed Psalm 91 every day for years as a teenager. And while I can remember most of it, I can’t remember all of it word for word. I can remember every word of that prayer because we didn’t say it. We sang it.

In her New York Times article In One Ear and Out the Other, Natalie Angier looks at the limited power of human memory. She notices that while we can’t quite seem to remember the birthday of a loved one, or why we came into the room we’re in, we also can’t quite forget every word of the Gilligan’s Island theme song. Or the words to Sponge Bob Square Pants. Why is that? It’s because if you add music to something, you’re more likely to remember it. That’s how the brain is wired to work. Angier writes:

Though scientists used to believe that short- and long-term memories were stored in different parts of the brain, they have discovered that what really distinguishes the lasting from the transient is how strongly the memory is engraved in the brain…. The deeper the memory, the more readily and robustly an ensemble of like-minded neurons will fire.

This process, of memory formation by neuronal entrainment, helps explain why some of life’s offerings weasel in easily and then refuse to be spiked. Music, for example. “The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination,” said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. …

A simple melody with a simple rhythm and repetition can be a tremendous mnemonic device. “It would be a virtually impossible task for young children to memorize a sequence of 26 separate letters if you just gave it to them as a string of information,” Dr. Thaut said. But when the alphabet is set to the tune of the ABC song with its four melodic phrases, preschoolers can learn it with ease.

Most of us agree that singing worship songs in our gatherings is important. But do we realize just how important those songs are to our growth as followers of Christ? The hymns or choruses we sing – which combine Scriptural truths with moving melodies – teach us things that won’t easily be forgotten. That should probably give us pause – pause to reflect on the value of what we have in the hymnals tucked away in our pews; pause to revisit what is being projected on the screens that line the front of our worship auditoriums; pause to remember that God has given us a powerful tool in music and its potent relationship to human memory.[i]

Our ability to remember is important. Living in the past is a bad thing. But remembering the past, and allowing lessons learned and examples to follow is critically important. Jesus understood that when he reshaped the very liturgical, worshipful Passover meal into the sacrament of holy communion. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25).

Remembering what God did yesterday is critical to our ability to hold on to Christ today, to living a life that is pleasing to God. Turn with me to Hebrews 13:7-16.

Remember. Remember your leaders. Not your current leaders, but the ones who have gone before you. Remember they way they trusted God, and the way God transformed them, used them, and was faithful in their lives. Do you remember walking through Hebrews 11 together, as we took each example the loving pastor who wrote Hebrews under the inspiration of the Holy Spirt gave us and dug into their lives – the good AND the bad? Abel. Enoch. Noah. Abraham. Sarah. Moses. Joshua. Our pastor says, “Remember them!”

And we have the privilege of remembering so many more. Mary Magdalene, Peter, John, Paul. Remember them. Remember how God transformed Peter from an impetuous, angry, and cowardly man into a courageous, stalwart leader in the early church. Remember how God transformed Saul, a highly educated, legalistic Pharisee who sought to stamp out Christianity into Paul, the intelligent missionary who took the message of Christ all over the Roman Empire, and possibly beyond.

And we can continue through history. Martin Luther. John Calvin. John and Charles Wesley. Spurgeon and Whitefield. William Wilberforce. Hudson Taylor. Elizabeth Elliot. And right up to today. Who are the people you look back on and try to emulate? Who are the past living and breathing examples of faithfulness to Christ who encourage you? Who were influential in your following Christ in some way? Remember them. Learn from their successes and their failures. Their victories and their defeats.

But don’t worship them. Look at V. 8. Look at Jesus in them. See God’s faithfulness in their lives. The way God transformed them and the way God used them in spite of their flaws, weaknesses, failures, and sin. Recognize that the same God who was faithfully at work in them is faithfully at work in you. There was nothing inherently great about Abraham, or Sarah, or Moses, or Joshua, or Peter, or Paul, or Luther, or Wesley, or any of the others. They were ordinary people, people just like you and I, who placed their faith in an extraordinary God and dared to trust him.

Jesus Christ – the eternal Son, who became incarnate, who lived an obedient human life before God, who offered himself on the cross for you and for me in ultimate obedience to the will of God, who rose from the dead in victory over death and has taken his seat at the right hand of God, who has all authority to cleanse us and bring us into the presence of God – this Jesus Christ who was at work in and through and around those who have gone before NEVER CHANGES! That means he’s at work in and around and through you and me too!

He has been tested. Tested in the lives of Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Joshua and Mary and Peter and Paul and Priscilla and others through the ages and has never been found wanting, and he won’t in your life either. Do you trust him?

That kind of trust begins with remembering, and continues with understanding. A deep understanding that involves not just the mind, but the mind and the heart. The heart – the seat of our will and emotions. The place where all the parts of us come together into a unified whole. Our physical selves, our intellectual and emotional selves, our spiritual selves, and our wills. It’s an understanding less focused on being able to give the right answers on a test and more on actual transformed living empowered by the Holy Spirit. It involves our whole selves, not just our minds. Look at Vv. 9-14.

What’s going on here? Remember, the sermon that is the book of Hebrews was written to a struggling little church dealing with persecution that was getting more intense and severe. And some of them were going to more of a “Jesus and …” kind of faith. They wanted something in this life, something they could see and feel, to anchor to. It’s possible that they were incorporating some of the old Jewish religious rules and rituals, rules and rituals that foreshadowed Jesus Christ and had been fulfilled in Christ and so were no longer necessary. Some of that may have included old Jewish sacrificial meals and things like that.

They were looking for spiritual nourishment and strength outside of, or in addition to, Christ. They hadn’t completely turned their backs on Christ, but in their minds, Christ alone wasn’t enough to get them through what they were facing.

We often do the same thing. Church leadership has become more about spiritual entrepreneurs and hero worship and cults of personality more than shepherding flocks. Worship has become a weekly Christian concert complete with smoke and flashing lights and dramatic sequences. We judge the value of a worship experience by the extent to which our emotions were activated instead of by the extent to which our hearts were transformed by an encounter with God.

Church leaders engage in strategic planning that deals with increasing numbers of people and programs and growing budgets and bigger and better facilities, but not lives transformed by the power of God, and that’s something we can’t measure with our human metrics, because only God can see the heart. We measure success by attendance, buildings, and cash … numbers, instead of transformed lives. We want the slow work of discipleship, which is more akin to the weeding and cultivation and pruning that happens over the years in an orchard or vineyard to be fast and easily measurable.

Jesus wants to turn all of that into a family. HIS family. A group of people who grow in him and through a community in an organic way and who build one another up and hold on to one another through the storms of life, while always making room for more to come in.

We do it in our lives too. Jesus and. Jesus and my bank account. Jesus and my romantic relationship. Jesus and the success of my business. Jesus and my influence. Jesus and my popularity. We are all drawn to “Jesus and …” lives. But Jesus isn’t satisfied with that. With him, it has to be a “Jesus alone” kind of life. Yes, we have bank accounts and romantic relationships and businesses and varying levels of influence. But we don’t get our identity there. We hold loosely to those things.

Jesus is more than enough. He is our all-sufficient Savior and Lord. He has fulfilled what the Old Testament laws and sacrifices foreshadowed. We don’t need “Jesus and …” We just need Jesus. And because he is more than enough, a “Jesus and” approach to life is a stench in his nostrils and he won’t allow it.

And like he did for Gideon – when he kept trimming his army of 32,000 back until it was a laughably small 300 warriors and then told them to take on the Midianites so that there would be no doubt that it was the power of God and not of any man that won the day – God will keep trimming things away until we finally realize, deeply, in our hearts, that Jesus Christ is all we need. And he is more than enough. More than we can imagine.

The God-pleasing life begins with remembering, seeing God’s faithfulness in the past, and remembering leads to understanding deeply in our hearts that Jesus Christ is more than enough and that he fills us to overflowing, just as he did those who went before us. And that leads to actually living a God-pleasing life. Look at Vv. 15-16.

I find it interesting that the two things our pastor mentions as evidence of the “Christ alone” life, the life that pleases God, are worship and love. Remember the role that music plays in our remembering. Authentic worship begins in our hearts – hearts transformed by the faithfulness of God we have witnessed through the ages in the lives of those who have sought and followed Christ and have participated in through Christ’s work for us on the cross – it begins in our hearts and passes through our minds and out through our lips. It involves every part of us … the physical, the mental and emotional, and the spiritual.

And it involves sacrifice. That means it involves our wills. We actively choose to worship God. You’ve heard me say it over and over again. Yes, we can and should worship God alone, privately. Yes, we can and should worship God everywhere. Yes, every part of our lives can and should be an offering of worship to God. Our work and our play, our family lives and the kind of friend we are. Every part of it. But. We are also to worship God together, with our voices raised together in spoken and sung praise. With minds and hearts tuned together to the teaching of God’s word. Giving together from what God has given to each of us … some a little, some more, each according to what God has entrusted to them.

Sam Allberry writes in an article for the Gospel Coalition:

A friend of mine has a little motto thing on the wall of her office, one of these little sayings that someone has printed out prettily and put a frame around. And it says this: “Those who hear not the music, think the dancer is mad.”

It’s true. If you watch a music video and you take away the volume, it looks ridiculous. There’s a lot of strutting. A lot of pouting. You put the sound back on and it does begin to make a bit of sense.

Jesus is our music, but it is unheard by the world. The world sees our worship, our service, our lives, our joy, but to them our behavior is “mad.”[ii]

And as we worship and study and pray and fellowship together, we are to love one another well, meeting the needs of everyone in our midst, and loving our community in sacrificial ways. Ways that cost us … cost us our time, our talent, and our treasure. So that they can know the love we have in Christ. Remembering leads to understanding, and remembering and understanding together lead to transformed living, living marked by sacrificial worship and sacrificial love. When that happens, others begin to hear the music that we are dancing to. THAT is a life worth living. THAT is a life that is pleasing to God. Let’s pray.

[i] Natalie Angier, “In One Ear and Out the Other,” www.nytimes.com (3-17-09)

[ii] Sam Allberry, “Does God Still Love Me If I’m Gay?” The Gospel Coalition (7-25-21)