This past Sunday (as I do every Sunday Afternoon), I tuned to NRB in order to watch Dr. Tony Evans. In this particular show, Dr. Evans was preaching from John 11 explaining how to handle your situation when God "delays" your healing. And, in watching this, I initially wondered (as I often have when I hear messages like this) does God really show up late? If God has designed how the earth (and everything else for that matter) is to operate determining what will happen at the time it happens, then how is it possible for Him to delay at anything? When God does not act when we desire, is it that He is somehow "late" in answering our wants or is the situation exposing a sin of impatience within us? In short, when we say God is "late", are we trying to put God in our time frame when we are supposed to be subjective to His?
But after thinking this, I realized that there was a bigger problem in the delivery of this message. And that problem was: Is God "delaying your blessing" the true meaning of this story? Is the Lazarus account designed to encourage us while we wait for God to give us our "breakthrough", or is the story's message MUCH bigger than that?
It often surprises me how sermons will go off of the deep end when we don't take into account the primary purpose of Scripture. We must remember that, in the story of Lazarus, God the Father and God the Son had a bigger purpose in mind in raising Lazarus than most sermons (like the one mentioned above) would indicate. The primary message in this passage is that Christ is the true resurrection and, by believing in Him, we too will be resurrected (like Lazarus) on the last day to enjoy eternal life with Him.
But when we take a passage with such a powerful message and dumb it down to say that "You can expect great things if God is somehow late in delivering your breakthrough", we miss the true essence of what Christ is showing us through this event. This is why I believe that we need to start seeing stories like Lazarus for what they are: REAL stories with a Christo-centric theme and not some fable where God is trying to teach us some moral lesson or principle for our lives. The events of Scripture are not to be confused with Romeo and Juliet or Dr. Seus. Neither is its purpose to tell us how to live our "Best Life Now" or to give us the "8 steps to create the life we want". But it is to show our LORD and Savior and what He has done to accomplish our salvation (John 5:39-40). And when we prepare and preach our messages with this in mind, then we will truly see the breakthroughs we are hoping God will give the people we minister to.
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People have grown accustomed to the assumption that the textual message is not good enough for today's world. There has to be a deeper or (for another camp using the same premise) more relevant message for today. So let's dig and search and wreck the text until we find something that will satisfy my itch.
Until we find fullness of joy in the self-revelation of God, we will never marvel at his person and works. We will continue to waste our time on the cotton candy "breakthroughs".
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