John 17:1-26
May 16, 2010
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
‘Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.’
Have you ever wondered why some prayers seem to get answered and others don’t? Why does God seem to bless some people by answering their prayers constantly, while ignoring others? You’ve certainly noticed this phenomenon among people, haven’t you? There are those who pray a lot and seem to always have prayers answered. Then there are those you’ve met who complain that they’ve prayed and prayed, and nothing happens. Why would God answer some, and not others?
Face it,… there are some people out there who just seem to live charmed lives, while others seem to struggle. Why? Does God cares more about some people than others? Does God have favorites? Why are some people’s prayers answered, while others’ aren’t?
I have a simple answer, but it may not make much sense at first. In fact, once I give you the answer, you might be tempted to tune me out because my answer goes against common Christian wisdom. The simple answer is that God doesn’t have a plan, and because God doesn’t have a plan, some prayers get answered and others don’t.
You may think you’ve understood what I’ve said, but you haven’t. Just because I’ve said that God doesn’t have a plan doesn’t mean that God is capricious or reckless. You see, while God doesn’t have a plan, God does have a purpose, and that makes all the difference. What’s the difference between a purpose and a plan? A plan is fixed and rigid, and really can’t be deviated from very much or things fall apart. For example, if you build a building, and you deviate arbitrarily from the architect’s plan, what happens to the building? It crumbles. Deviation from a plan causes everything being built to fall apart. Apply this to God. If God has a plan for everything, then what happens when we deviate from that plan? Does it cause God’s creation to crumble? Or worse, if God has a plan for everything, then does that mean that our suffering is part of God’s plan? Does God say, “This is my plan: that so-and-so will get cancer, have her dog die, and lose her job all in one year”? If this is the case, then it makes God seem somewhat cruel. Purpose is different from a plan because it says that God sets out a way of living regardless of what happens, and nothing can cause God’s purpose to crumble because God’s purpose is adaptable to anything that life throws at it.
God has a purpose, not a plan, and once you understand God’s purpose you’ll also understand why some people’s prayers are answered and others’ aren’t. Our passage for this morning is a prayer of purpose by Jesus. He is thanking the Father for allowing him to live out God’s purpose, and for giving him the disciples who have followed their purpose. Jesus is telling us that God has a purpose, not a plan. Let me take you step-by-step through the difference between the two. By the end you’ll understand not only what I mean by saying that God has a purpose, not a plan, but I think you’ll also understand how to become more open to God’s purpose in your prayers. Take a look at the chart below, because that’s our guide for this morning.
Let’s start with the basic foundation. Whether you know it or not, God has a purpose not only for everyone, but for absolutely everything. Everything has been created both out of and for God’s purpose. When it comes to each and everyone of us, we have been created out of and for God’s purpose. And our purpose is so much a part of us that it is even part of our DNA and genetic make-up. Your purpose is part of your genetic code. It’s not just some spiritual thing grafted onto your life. God endowed you with purpose.
For example, did you grow up as an athlete or did you grow up as someone interested in intellectual pursuits? Most people aren’t both, although some are. Would you tell someone who is good at reading, but not at sports, that the only thing separating her or him from being a great athlete is a lack of effort? Could Einstein have been a great athlete if he had just tried harder? No. It is obvious that he is a man who was endowed with a purpose to be a thinker, just as Mario Lemieux was endowed to be an athlete. Einstein’s and Lemieux’s DNAs were different, and each one’s laid out their purpose in life.
Just like them, we have been given a particular genetic composition that is part of our purpose, part of what God created us for. Unfortunately, we can never really say for certain what our purpose is. We can’t even capture our purpose in words. It’s too deep for that. We can’t know our purpose, yet God has still given us a task, which is to live out our purpose throughout life. The struggle is that our purpose is sensed rather than known because we can never really say what our full purpose is. So how do we live out our purpose if we don’t know what it is?
While we can’t say what our purpose is, we can say what our calling is. God gives us a purpose to live out throughout life, and to aid us along the way in living out that purpose God calls us in each phase of life and in each moment, guiding us on how to live according to our purpose. We can’t know our purpose, but we can know our calling,… if we are willing to be open to it. Our calling is God’s call to live out of our purpose in this moment, in this situation, in this phase of life. Calling is more than just a career. It is how God is calling us to be in life.
It’s hard to give you good general examples of our calling in life, but I can give you examples from my life. Going back through my life, I was called to be an athlete. Athletics were hugely important to my formation as a person in high school, college, and young adulthood. And my calling wasn’t just to athletics, but to team athletics. I never really felt comfortable in individual sports. I always gravitated to sports as part of a team. Athletics wasn’t just a particular calling. It was part of my purpose, and becoming part of a team, where I had to be willing to sacrifice and become disciplined for something greater than myself, was responding both to a calling and to my purpose.
I also had a calling to become a therapist, and so responded to my call in college by working as a probation officer intern with the Roanoke City Court System, and after college as a therapist in a psychiatric hospital with children and adolescents, as a drug and alcohol therapist, and as an individual and marital therapist. This wasn’t disconnected from my calling as an athlete. I was still working to support others and to be part of an effort to work with others to achieve something better.
I eventually was called to become a pastor. I’ve also had a calling to be a teacher, a writer, a spiritual director, a leader, a husband, a father, and so much more. Each time I’ve responded to a calling in my life that is connected to my purpose, I’ve become clearer about my purpose in life. My purpose is very much tied up in trying to help others become better than they are, both individually and collectively, to grow spiritually in faith, compassion, and wisdom. I still can’t tell you what my purpose is for sure, but I can sense when I’m living according to it or not. And each time I respond to God’s calling in my life, both in general and from moment-to-moment, I become clearer about my purpose.
Still, there is a problem. The problem is that while God creates each and every one of us with a purpose, God also gives each and every one of us complete freedom to choose whether we will follow that purpose or not. God will never force us to do God’s will, or to live the life that God created for us. Many people choose the option of creating their own path to follow. In fact, the idea that we should create our own path is now part of the American cultural wisdom: be your own person, carve your own course, do your own thing! What I’ve found over the course of my life is that often the people who leave God’s purpose behind to create their own purpose end up living difficult lives. Their lives become chaotic. Often they get caught up in addictions and persistent bad decisions. They become unhappy, and complain that nothing seems to work out for them. Yet they are determined to go their own way, and God lets them. But every once in a while someone recognizes that her or his life has become unmanageable. She or he recognizes that this path isn’t the right one, and then she or he decides to seek God’s purpose. Often the experience accompanying this return is quite dramatic. It’s what we’d call a born-again experience. When people describe their experiences, you can hear them describing a return to purpose: “I was going my own way, seeking my own course. I was drinking too much, chasing women, and trying so hard to have a good time. But I was empty inside. And then one day I discovered that God was with me, and that there was another way to live.” This is the testimony not only of someone who is born-again, but of someone who has left his own purpose to follow God’s purpose. By the way, the reason many religious people never have a born-again experience is they never strayed far from God’s purpose.
Do you know what the great thing about God’s purpose is? When you return to God’s purpose, God uses your time following your own purpose for God’s purposes. God calls the recovering addict to reach out to other addicts. God calls those who’ve lived chaotic lives to reach out to those living chaotic lives. God takes your time of following your own purpose and makes it serve God’s greater purpose. This is the difference between God having a plan and a purpose. If God only has a plan, your time following your own plan screws up God’s plan. It weakens God’s plan not only for you, but for everyone. Yet because God has a purpose, God can use even our own self-created purposes for God’s purpose.
This brings us back to prayer. Why does God seem to answer some people’s prayers more than others? My experience is that the more we are live according to God’s purposes, the more we have a connection with God, and the more we end up not only allowing God to answer our prayers, but praying for what God wants. Ultimately, the more aligned our prayers are to God’s prayers, the more we end up praying for what God wants. That’s the difference. People living according to their own purposes are so out of sync with God that there’s little connection, and even less interest in praying for what God wants. We end up praying, but it’s a prayer that asks God to do what so that we can achieve our own ends. Our prayers may be quite sincere, asking God to heal us, or to help another, but because we’re out of sync with God, the prayers have diminished power.
At the risk of keeping you just a little bit more, let me tell you about someone who sought to live according to God’s purpose, and had a dramatic change in his life because of it. I’d be surprised if you had heard the name David Schock, but he is a fairly well-known artist who paints beautiful scenes of nature and people absorbed in nature. His paintings are somewhat reminiscent, in a more colorful way, of his favorite artist, Andrew Wyeth. He studied Wyeth’s paintings as a student, and it had been his aspiration to eventually be an artist as prolific as Wyeth. It’s well worth your while to Google David Schock and look at his paintings.
Despite the beauty of his paintings, he came very close to not having a career as a painter. In the early 1980s, after studying painting in New York City, he became disillusioned. He was burned-out by the city. He found both the city and his fellow artists to be unfriendly, hard-edged, and toxic. After a time studying at the Art Student’s League and working in a gallery, he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. So he moved back home to Rhode Island to work in an art gallery. He would no longer create art, but he would appreciate it and sell it.
Over the next few years he decided to explore his faith and spirituality, and as part of this he started working on something called A Course in Miracles, which was very popular in the 1980s. This course, which mixes Christian ideas with some New Age ones, called on people to become radically open to God’s Spirit, and to listen for God’s voice in each moment. Schock had been working on this for a long time, and felt that he was getting better at hearing the Spirit’s promptings.
One particular Saturday, when he had nothing else to do, he decided to do a radical experiment in listening to the Spirit. He dedicated a whole day to it. He started in the morning, just being open and asking God to guide him. What he heard was a bit strange. He sensed a prompting: “Drive South.” “What,… drive south? What for?” All he sensed was “Drive South.” So he got in his car and started driving south on I-95. He kept asking, “Should I turn here? Turn here? What about here?” He kept sensing, “Drive South,” until he found himself in New York City. He then sensed a prompting to go to the Art Student’s League. From there he kept following these promptings, visiting his old apartment building, the pizza shop down the street, several galleries, and eventually the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each place he went to, which had felt so toxic before, became places of fond memories, forgiveness, and light.
Eventually, by 7 p.m., he started praying, asking if it was time to leave. What he heard instead was that he should return to one of the galleries he had visited earlier in the day. It seemed preposterous. He had a three-hour drive home, but he followed the promptings. The gallery was filled with people there for a special showing of the artist Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew. Jamie wasn’t one of Schock’s favorites, but he liked his work well enough. He just couldn’t understand why he was there. Over the course of the next hour he had numerous conversations with influential New York artists and dealers, which rekindled his passion to paint. And then it happened. A man entered the room, and Schock was invited to speak to him. It was Andrew Wyeth, and Schock found himself in an amazing personal conversation with his idol, a man who rarely left his home, and even more rarely went to his own showings, let alone his son’s or anyone else’s. Schock’s passion for painting was now turned into an inferno. Schock was inspired. He was jubilant. And from there Schock rediscovered both his purpose and his calling. (Adapted from “Drive South,” in When God Spoke to Me, by David Paul Doyle).
Schock’s story is a reminder that we each have a purpose, and our callings flow out of that purpose. The question for us is a simple one: Are we living according to God’s purpose by following God’s calling?
Amen.
