S3:E21 – God’s Friends Getting Stuff Done

Podcast | Matthew Clark

God's Friends Getting Stuff Done

by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

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Did I ever tell you about the time I was stranded in the middle of Kansas with two flat tires? If I have, it’s a story worth retelling. It was in the middle of my yearly Fall House Concert tour, and I had enjoyed several days with friends in the Kansas City area, sharing songs and stories. Now, I was headed across the pancake plains of Kansas toward Denver to pick up the tour again in Colorado for a few weeks. There’s something beautifully calming about those vast treeless vistas and I was driving along quite contentedly, enjoying the journey, when several dash lights began to flash.

I’d never seen these particular hieroglyphs appear, and I had no idea what they were warning me about. But their frantic flashing yellow quickly convinced me to pull over and have a look around my van. Once I’d parked on the graveled shoulder of the road, I saw the problem. The rear double tires on the passenger side of Vandalf, my touring van, were goners. The outside tire was flimsy as a deflated balloon. Losing the outer tire had transferred all the weight of that side of the van onto the remaining inner tire, which caused it to almost instantly wear down. The tread was completely stripped, and it was bald as it could be. Had I ignored the dash warnings, that tire surely would have blown within another mile or two down the road and that entire side of the van would have collapsed on the rims, causing some serious damage and likely a dangerous accident.

Let me stop here and say that one way God provides for people is through incomprehensibly complex networks of decision-making that are embedded into everyday life over time. Some engineers detected the realities of force, momentum, friction, and the properties of rubber, asphalt, whatever the heck brakes are made out of and designed systems based on the interactions of those things to create safety mechanisms. That’s human attentiveness to the logic embedded into Creation by Jesus being used wisely for good, whether those doing that work were Christians or not.

Because God created a world in which potential (untapped potency) and rationale (intelligible inner workings) could be combined through wisdom (decision-making based on God’s Logos) to realize plans, we have everything from ceiling fans to stop lights, penicillin to parking brakes, orchards to apple pies. This whole cosmos was thoughtfully crafted through Jesus, the Logos; and one of its characteristics is that wise participation in this cosmos is possible; because the patterns of right relationship among all things is available and discernible. This is one way God preemptively answers our prayer for safety as we pull out of the driveway toward a day of driving across Kansas.

Maybe you could call this something like residual provision; it’s just built into the cosmos. Or maybe it falls into the category of prevenient grace, which means grace that pre-vents. Do you hear the word ventilate in there? The embeddedness of the Logos in Creation, pre-ventilates – it is God’s before-breathing of graceful provision into the very stuff of created reality.

But let’s go back to my flat tire situation, and I’ll show you another more direct kind of provision that I experienced.

So, there I was on the side of the road with two flat tires in the middle of nowhere. Maybe to assuage my anxiety, I made a silly little video of the flat tires and posted it online. I didn’t explicitly ask for help, but within a few minutes I got a message from a thousand miles away asking if I was okay, saying some friends were praying for me, and to update them.

I got a tow truck, made into town, got the tires replaced and, by the end of a long day, I was back on the road. I updated my praying friends, who had asked about the cost of the whole ordeal. I told them around $600 I hadn’t planned on parting with. Within a couple of hours, I saw a notification on my phone that they’d sent me the full amount.

Let’s stop here and note another way in which God provides through prayer, even if that prayer lamely took the form of an instagram appeal to work out my own worry. Imagine with me for a minute, God, who sees me stranded on the roadside, saying to whichever of his friends may be listening around planet earth, “Can anybody help my son, Matthew? He’s stuck in Kansas with two flat tires.” Now imagine the ears of some listening child of God pricking up, as they hear God’s question. And they respond, “Sure, how can I help?” And then the Lord says, “Be creative, do what you can.” It seems to me that something like that actually took place that day. And it seems to me this is constantly taking place. God is paying attention to folk’s lives and prayers, and he is inviting us to join him in his work of care and provision for people. The Lord has a big network to say the least, and for those who are tuned in, he often broadcasts opportunities for us to jump onboard in some little way with the work of realizing his Kingdom here on earth. That’s really all obedience is; choosing to live God’s life with him.

Of course, those impressive stories don’t happen every day. On a basic level we are called by God to be wise. I can’t lay back, do nothing, call it faith, and expect bags of cash to show up. Sure, God can provide through miraculous generosity, but our baseline call is to wise, personal responsibility, through which God will provide the normative fruit of right-living.

But, since we are made in the image of Three-Personed God, our provision will follow that rationale, in other words, life is fundamentally collaborative. It is not good for a human to be alone, and God gets things done in this world by deliberately involving us in his work.

Just this morning I was noticing how Luke’s gospel got written. Of course, I don’t know how it happened exactly, but just imagine Luke’s context for a minute. It’s been 30 or so years since Jesus ascended, the Gospel has spread, the church has grown, but the generation that had direct contact with Jesus while he was on earth is aging. Generally, the believers are further out from the original events both geographically and time-wise. Some folks are beginning to wonder whether the story they’ve committed themselves to is reliable. They could use some help to maintain confidence in Christ, and Luke sees an opportunity and has an idea: What if someone put together a detailed historical account from the birth of Christ up to that moment? That could be helpful. The community around him agrees it’s a good idea for a project, and they begin brainstorming how to pull it off.

Well, someone who doesn’t mind traveling, is organized and good with people, and possibly has a few years to dedicate to it could get it done. They’d need to go find all the eyewitnesses. It’d be a lot of work to gather, compile, and edit all the relevant research, and assemble it. Luke says, “I’ll go, but, if I’m going to dedicate myself fully to the task, I need help.”

Voices mingle as the various needs are discussed. There’ll be travel, lodging, meals, and so forth. The cost will be substantial. The concerns are made known, and someone stands up in the assembly, one called Theophilus. Theophilus, likely a Roman convert, says, “I can’t go, but I can help. I’ll foot the bill. This is a good project, Luke’s a good man for the job, and I’d be happy to finance it.”

Maybe a few others follow suit and things get rolling; Luke sets out and now we have the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, which are really one continuous narrative. Why? Because some listening praying folks picked up on a need and figured out how to pull it off by supporting each other with their gifts. God invited them into his project of redemption; they were tuned in, and they responded.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that Theophilus could be a nickname for someone who I could imagine was too humble to have his real name published. “Theo-Philus” is a name that literally means “Lover of God” or “God-Friend”. What is one of the main ways God gets things done in this world? Through his friends. When we are listening and responsive, picking up on needs and creatively engaging, God makes a place for us in his most beautiful, eternal redemptive work.

Broadcasting

Lord, is there a song to hear

Seeping to the roots

And threading here beneath the beating

Noise Floor of our boots?

Beneath the stomping heartbeat

A silence made for prayer?

A quietness like untilled earth,

A music buried there?

Lord, is there a frequency

A rhythmic arm swung free

Antennaed above a listening field

Broadcasting little seeds,

Each a note of potency

Awaiting soil’s reception

Bending to the hidden song

Attuned to Love’s inflection?

Tongues may plow the marrow

Prayers may fold the furrow down

To lightly burden the rusty barrow

And wheel it into town.

To make some phrase the quiet sang

Break husk and set the table,

Where someone hungry looked for rain

And found the heavens able.

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