I recently read the memoir of Marty Sklar. You may not know
who Marty Sklar is, but a good many of you have probably visited a place that
he helped design and create – Walt Disney World. For the better part of his 54
year career at Disney, Marty Sklar was the head of the Imagineering team – the
team behind the creation of Disney’s theme parks, resorts, and attractions. As
a young man, he was invited to join the staff at Disney just prior to the
opening of Disneyland . Though Walt Disney only
lived to see one theme park opened in his lifetime, Marty Sklar is the only
person who had a hand in the opening of all eleven of Disney’s theme parks
around the world to date. Yet, you won’t find a Sklar-Land, Sklar-World, or any
other reference to him when you visit a Disney park. And Marty Sklar never
seemed to mind that. As the head of Imagineering, he often told his staff to
keep one thing in mind: There is only one name on the gate, and it is none of ours
– it is Walt Disney’s – and together the Imagineers could make that name great
or mediocre in the entertainment world.[1]
As I thought about what a great privilege Marty Sklar had
been given to join in the work of Walt Disney, I also thought about the even
greater privilege that has been given to every Christian. We have been invited
to join in the work of the greatest name of all – the name above all names (Php
2:9), the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16), Jesus Christ. When He
called you to believe in Him and know Him, He was calling you to serve Him, to
join Him in His work in the world. His mission did not end at the Cross. It
continues on today and reaches to every tribe and nation of earth, transforming
lives as His message of redemption goes forth through those who join Him in His
mission. His work in the world is being done through us. We are in the service
of the King for the sake of His Kingdom. There is only one name on the door of
this Kingdom, and it isn’t any one of ours. It is the name of Jesus, and we have
been invited to join in His work to make His name glorious in all the earth.
In our text today, we find Jesus once again inviting His
disciples to join Him in His work. Let’s remind ourselves of the context. As
Chapter 11 begins, Jesus receives word that His dear friend Lazarus is sick.
But Jesus did not go to Lazarus right away. He delayed going to Him until this
point in verse 7. But He does not plan to go alone. He could, but He doesn’t.
He desires to involve others in the mission. He says in verse 7, “Let us
go to Judea again.” That is an invitation to
be part of His work.
Jesus is still doing this today. We need to understand that
God does not need our help! The Lord Jesus is perfectly able to do all He
desires to do in the world without any of our involvement. But He will not do
it that way. Because He loves us, He has determined to use us in His work. Every
morning that we wake up alive, Jesus is calling out to us, as if to say, “Let
us go do this thing together.” I believe that our text today has relevant
application to what it means to join Jesus in His mission. There are at least
four essentials for us as we join Jesus in His work that we find here in these
verses.
I. We must not be deterred by risk (vv7-8).
Let us be clear right off the bat – serving King Jesus is
not safe. Now, to be perfectly clear, serving Him is safer ultimately and eternally than not serving Him. But if you think that because you are serving
Jesus that no harm can come your way, you are mistaken. I can point you to thousands
of people throughout Church History who were exactly where God wanted them to
be, doing exactly what God had called them to do, who were severely harmed and
even killed in the line of duty, beginning with the Lord Jesus Himself. We
would do well to remember the words of C. S. Lewis in his marvelous little work
of fantasy, The Lion, the Witch, and theWardrobe. As Mr. Beaver tells the children about Aslan, the great lion who
represents Jesus in the story, the children ask the question: “Is he quite safe?
I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” And the response they
receive from Mr. Beaver is, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he
isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”[2] So
it is with the Lord Jesus, whom Aslan represents. Following Him and serving Him
is by no means safe. But He is good. And He is the King. Better to embrace the
risks on behalf of Good King Jesus than to not do so.
What do we mean by risk? A risk is an action that exposes
you to the possibility of loss, injury, or death.[3] By
nature, risk is something that we are averse to. We don’t like the idea of
loss, injury, or death, so we are prone to avoid it whenever possible. So were
the disciples. Notice their response to the invitation of Jesus. When He says
“Let us go to Judea again,” they say, “Rabbi,
the Jews were just now seeking to stone You, and are You going there again?” They
are remembering what happened earlier in Chapter 10 after the Feast of
Dedication. There, when Jesus made a clear and bold claim to be God, the people
tried to stone him to death. Two things I want you to notice about their
response: (1) They are exaggerating things a bit. “Just now” is a bit of an
overstatement. It has been two to three months. Risk-averse people always tend
to exaggerate things when they are trying to slide out of it. And thus (2)
notice that they are trying to slide out of it. Jesus said “Let us go.” They
said, “Are You going there again?” Simple answer: No, He is not going there again; We
are going there again. He has no plans to go there without them, and He
isn’t going to let them slide out of this.
When we try to slide out of risk, we are unwittingly
exposing a little hypocrisy within ourselves. Think about it. If we were to
avoid all risk, we would never get in an automobile, because we never know when
a terrible accident might occur. We would never board an airplane, because
planes can crash, they can get hijacked, we have even learned recently that
they can disappear completely in mid-air. We would be very careful about what
we eat and drink, because we don’t know that we might not get food poisoning.
We would want to go to the doctor more often, or maybe just check in
permanently to a hospital, but then again, we never know when a staph-infection
might occur. If we wanted to completely risk-proof ourselves, we might never
get out of bed. But then again, as we saw in the news not long ago, we never
know when a sinkhole might open up and swallow our whole house. The thing is,
we take risks every day. We like to pick and choose them though. But is it not
hypocritical for us to willingly take risks on a regular basis, and yet refuse
to take them when we are invited to join King Jesus on His mission?
This comes up every time we plan to do something in service
to King Jesus. Someone will say, “Is it safe to go to South Asia or the Middle East ? Is it safe to be a part of the night club
ministry?” Well, in point of fact, it is not safe. But neither is it always
safe to go to the grocery store. Might the trip to Judea
go badly for Jesus and His disciples? Yes. In fact, it will end in Jesus’ death
and the scattering of the disciples. But never is a risk more worth taking than
we are gloriously and graciously invited to join King Jesus in His work. When
you join Jesus in His work, is there risk? Certainly. Will you always be safe?
By no means. Could you get sick, injured, persecuted, or killed? Yes. Then why
would you would take Him up on this invitation? Because those things could
happen to you every day as you do things far less significant than journeying
with Jesus in His mission. So, what the disciples had to learn, and what we
have to learn, is that it is essential for us to not be deterred by risk. He is worth all the risk that is involved
when we join Him in His work. That’s the first essential we see in this
passage. Now, here is the second …
II. We must walk in the Light and work in the day (vv9-10).
Recently, a number of you experienced a rather unexpected,
prolonged power outage due to the ice storm. Times like that remind us that we
often take for granted our dependency on electricity. I can’t tell you the
number of times I tried to turn on a light switch or the television while the
power was out. We are used to having light any time we need it. One of the most
difficult adjustments to make for our mission teams when we travel abroad is
the unreliable availability of power in many parts of the world. In Kathmandu,
the capital city of Nepal ,
for example, power is out every day for 8-12 hours, and you never know which
hours those might be. If it occurs in the nighttime hours, there is nothing to
do but sit around in the dark. The same is true for much of the world today,
and what we often forget is that for the
entire world, this was the way it always was until the last hundred years
or so. We might wonder how people functioned when there were no lights after
sundown. Well, they walked while they had light, and they worked in the
daylight hours. At night, they went home and went to bed.
Jesus says this as a general truth in verse 9. “Are there
not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble
because he sees the light of this world.” In both the Jewish and Roman cultures
of the first century, a twenty-four hour day was divided into the time of
daylight and the time of darkness. Everyone knew this. They worked in daytime
and walked while there was light, because after dark, they could not work, and
traveling would be exceedingly difficult. On the surface, it might seem like
this has absolutely nothing to do with the point of the text, but in point of
fact, it is an essential for joining Jesus in His work. You see, Jesus knew
that His life was in His Father’s hands. He would not die before the
predetermined time set by His Father. As long as that time had not yet come, it
was in a sense “daytime,” time for Him to work. When the time came for His
death, it would be “nighttime.” But it was not dark yet, metaphorically
speaking. He had to maximize how He spent the limited time He had been granted
by the Father, and work while He could. The enemies of Jesus down in Judea could not shorten His life by one minute from what
His Father had planned, and the cautious reserve of His disciples could not
lengthen His life one minute beyond that plan. They need not worry what will
happen to Jesus in Judea when He returns, because nothing will happen to Him
unless and until the Father has ordained it.
Now, in saying this, Jesus is also encouraging His followers
that the same is true for them. And it is true of us. Did you know that God
already knows how long you will live? You do not know, but He does. He knew
what your last day of life would be before you had your first day of life.
Psalm 139:16 says, “In Your book were all written the days that were ordained
for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” So, in the same sense that Jesus could serve
the Lord without fear, knowing that He would die until the Father’s
predetermined hour came, His followers can as well. The disciples do not have
to fear Judea . You do not have to fear what
Jesus is calling you to do. When that last day that has been written in God’s
book for your life comes, it won’t matter where you are, what you are doing, or
how you go. You cannot die a moment too soon or a moment too late, for God has
already ordained the number of your days. Since you don’t know how many of them
you have left, it is imperative to join Jesus in His work and make the most of
each day that comes along. We have daylight left in our lives! Let’s not waste
it sitting around as if we were in darkness. Let’s walk in the Light and do the
work of the Lord. Jesus is the Light of the World, and as long as we walk with
Him, we can join Him in His work. Let’s not worry that something could happen
to us. Let’s not make excuses about why we cannot do it. Let’s use the rest of
our days to labor for Him as He has invited us.
Now notice the third essential for joining Jesus in His
work.
III. Do what He calls you to do, and trust Him to do what He
alone can do (vv11-14).
In Exodus 3, God speaks to Moses through the burning bush
invites him to join in His work. He says, “I have come down to deliver them
from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good
and spacious land.” Notice the first thing that Moses says to God in response.
He says, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the
sons of Israel out of Egypt ?”
You see, Moses misunderstood God. God had not said a word about Moses doing anything. God said He had come down to do this. He was
merely inviting Moses to be a part of the work He was going to do. So, the Lord
speaks again to Moses and says, “Certainly I will be with you.” You see, Moses
knew that He could not do all that was necessary to bring the people out of
bondage. What he did not know was that God never expected him to do more than
was possible for him. Moses was to do what God called him to do, and to trust
God to do what only God can do.
In our text in John 11, Jesus has invited His disciples to
join Him in His work. He says, “Let us go to Judea
again.” But then notice how in verse 11, He changes the subject from us to I. He says, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I go, so that I may awaken him out of
sleep.” Jesus was using the language of sleep to describe Lazarus’ condition,
as the Bible often does to speak of the death of the righteous. But the
disciples didn’t get it. They thought Jesus meant, you know, sleep. So they again try to wiggle out
of the invitation by saying, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.”
In other words, “Let’s just leave him alone for now. After all he’s been
through, he needs his rest. Let’s don’t disturb him. He will wake up feeling
like a million bucks again soon.” So Jesus responds, and the Bible says He told
them plainly, “Lazarus is dead.”
Dead? That’s a whole different
issue from sleep! I mean, if he is just asleep, you know, we could wake him up.
But he’s dead! There is nothing we can do to help a man if he is dead! If you
have seen the movie “The Princess Bride,” you will remember that scene where
the hero Westley is believed to be dead, and so his friends bring him to
Miracle Max to see what can be done for him. Miracle Max, played by Billy
Crystal, says, “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead.
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is
slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one
thing you can do. … Go through his clothes and look for loose change.” Well,
for Lazarus, you see, he was all dead.
There was absolutely nothing that any of the disciples could do for him. Even
if they could have recruited Miracle Max, all he could do for Lazarus would be
to search his clothes for loose change. He was DEAD. But Jesus never called or
expected the disciples to bring Lazarus back from the dead. He said that was
what He was going to do. They didn’t
have to do that. What was their part? To go to Judea
with Him. That they could do.
Friends, the invitation to join
Jesus in His mission often strikes us as intimidating – even terrifying! After
all, the lost souls with whom we have been commissioned to share the good news
of Jesus are as dead spiritually as Lazarus was physically. When someone comes
to believe in Jesus, it is as though they were being raised from death to new
life. Who among us can do that? There is not a single one of us who can! But He
did not ask us to raise the dead. He did not ask us to save anyone. Jesus does
not ask us to do anything more than follow Him, live for Him, love Him, love
others, and speak the truth in love about Him. That, we can do, and all the
more when we consider that His Spirit indwells and empowers us. We do not even
have to do it in our own strength. He fills us with His own supernatural and
divine power to do what He has called us to do. But the miracle part, the
raising of the dead and the saving of souls, well, that is His part. He didn’t
call us to do His job. He called us to join Him as He does it. We do what He
calls us to do, and we trust Him to do what only He can do. That is essential
if you are going to join Jesus in His work.
Now, we come to the fourth and
final essential. If you are going to join Jesus in His work, …
IV. Maturing faith and obedience at
all costs are necessary (vv15-16).
Perhaps you think that you have not
grown in your faith enough to really serve the Lord. Maybe you think you are
too new in the Christian life, too inexperienced, or maybe you think you are
not quite “holy enough” to be involved in Jesus’ work. Well, here is the good
news. He is not inviting perfect people to join Him in the work. That’s good
news because none of us are. The disciples were far from perfect when Jesus
invited them to go with Him to Judea . If Jesus
was determined to only use perfect people, He wouldn’t be able to find anyone
to invite to join His mission. He does not expect you to be perfect, or for you
to be a well-seasoned veteran, or for you to be “fully mature” as a Christian
to take part in His work. But you must be open to being stretched in your
faith, and allowing Him to grow you and continue the process of maturing you as
you serve Him.
Notice in verses 14 and 15, Jesus
says (quite puzzlingly), “Lazarus is dead and I am glad.” Wait, what? He is
glad Lazarus is dead? No, keep reading. “Lazarus is dead and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there.”
His delay in going to Lazarus is now going to benefit to the disciples – He is
not glad for His own sake, or for poor Lazarus’ sake, but for the sake of His
disciples. Why? He says, “I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so
that you may believe.” Now, they already believed in Him, so He isn’t talking
about initial faith. He is talking
about them advancing in their faith. As they join Him in His work, their weak
and imperfect faith will be strengthened and matured by what they see and
experience. And the same is true for us. You might think you need to attain to
a certain level of spiritual maturity before you can serve the Lord, but I am
telling you from experience that you cannot
progress beyond a certain level of immaturity
until you join Him in His work. You will see and experience things
as you serve Him that will stretch and strengthen your faith in Him to a degree
you never thought possible! Jesus
invites His disciples, and all of us, to join Him in His work so that our faith
might be strengthened as we engage the mission with Him.
We see a surprising example of this
kind of maturing faith in one of the disciples. When you think of Thomas, what
comes to mind? Doubting Thomas,
right? We always tend to associate him with that post-resurrection encounter
where he refused to believe that Jesus was risen unless He could see with his
own eyes and touch with his own hands. It is unfortunate that Thomas gets such
a bad rap. When we see him here, we don’t find a skeptical doubter. We find a
person who is committed to joining Jesus in His work and obeying Him at all
costs. It is Thomas who says in verse 16, “Let us also go, so that we may die
with Him.” He is the first to respond to the invitation.
Now, in fairness, we need to admit
that we don’t have an audio recording of this statement. More than a few have
come away from this assuming that Thomas is being overly pessimistic about
future prospects. In my mind, I can hear him saying this kind of like Pooh’s
friend Eeyore: “Well … come on … we might as well go … and die with Him.” But
is it not also possible that Thomas could have spoken these words with
confident faith, like a warrior enjoining others to march with him into battle?
“Let us also go! Let us go and die with Him!” How exactly he said it, we will
never know. Probably somewhere between those two views. But even assuming the
worst of ole’ Thomas, let’s give credit where it is due. Even if he is being
pessimistic about the whole venture, he does not let that stand in the way of
his obedience to the Lord Jesus’ invitation. Thomas is wise enough to know that
it is better to journey with Jesus, even if the path leads into the valley of
shadow of death, than to take the ultimate risk of journeying without Him. The
cost of discipleship is high. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship can be summed up in one word: “Suffering.”
It will mean doing things that are not comfortable, popular, or safe. It could
mean death. But the cost of discipleship is not nearly so high as the cost of
“undiscipleship.” A stubborn, disobedient spirit that refuses to follow Jesus
is a mark of unbelief, and the consequence of unbelief is dying in one’s sins
and entering hell for eternity. Better to go with Jesus and face death and find
heaven, than to go it alone apart from Him and find hell.
Thomas wasn’t excited about what
might lie ahead. For all we know, he was reluctant and afraid. But, he was
willing to obey the Lord at all costs, and that is a mark of maturing faith.
Jesus might call you to join Him in His work in a dangerous place, doing a
risky thing. He doesn’t expect you to always be jovial about that. It is a fool
who rushes headlong into danger without considering the possible outcomes. If
you are timid and terrified, it is perfectly understandable. Jesus already
knows it, so you might as well be honest with Him about it. But we must not
allow our timidity and trepidation to become a barrier to obedience. A
willingness to obey Him at all costs – even when the cost is frighteningly high
– is a mark of a maturing faith. Those two things, maturing faith and obedience
at all costs, are absolutely necessary essentials if we are going to join Jesus
in His work.
There is no greater privilege in
the universe than for the Lord Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, to
invite us to join Him in His work. We don’t deserve that privilege. We have
done nothing to earn it. Frankly, He doesn’t even need us. He could probably do
His work better without us. But He has sovereignly and graciously determined to
do His work with us, and through us. When He called you to follow Him – to
trust in Him for salvation – He was calling you to join Him in His work of
extending His Kingdom to all nations. There is no higher calling than this, no
greater privilege. If you would join Him in His work, you must know: there will
be risk, but do not be deterred by it. Walk in the light and work while it is
day, for your life will not come to an end a moment before or after the Lord
has already determined it to. While you have life, use it to glorify Him. Do
what He has called you to do, and trust Him to do what only He can do. And
continue growing into maturity in your faith. That process continues even as you
journey with Him into His work. As you mature in the faith, your desire to obey
Him at all costs becomes greater and greater, leading you to say with Thomas,
“Even if joining Jesus in His work leads to death, let us do it.” It’s not like
you are going to avoid death by disobeying Him. Let there be no regrets of
things left undone for Him when you stand before Him.
