Seeing Everything, Believing Nothing

Pastor Pat starts with a scenario. Imagine having a front-row seat to every miracle Jesus ever did, from the healed leper to Lazarus walking out of the tomb to the Sermon on the Mount, and walking away saying, “That was all right.” “There is something about being familiar with God that can be a dangerous place to be.”

He explains the difference between knowing about someone and knowing them. He knows plenty of facts about Pastor Carl, down to the pork sliders Carl brings to a barbecue, but facts are not a relationship. After 18 years of marriage, with their kids out of the house, he doesn’t want to know only where his wife keeps her brush. He wants to know her. Information about God can make us feel secure in a relationship we don’t actually have. The challenge is not to go through life “knowing more about Jesus than we have actually trusted him with.”

In Matthew 11, Jesus has just encouraged a doubting John the Baptist. Now he denounces the towns where most of his miracles happened, because they did not repent. “There is no genuine faith without genuine repentance.” They didn’t fail Jesus trivia night. They had all the information and rejected both John and Jesus. Pastor Pat explains repentance as a God-given change of mind that turns into obedience, the kind that “affects Wednesday afternoon.” Jesus looks past the religious performance of Capernaum, the hub of his ministry, and past the open rebellion of Tyre, Sidon and Sodom, and sees people who would have repented after one miracle.

Once we feel like the teacher, it’s hard to become a student again. Miracles won’t soften callous hearts, and they won’t awaken complacent ones. We are held accountable to what we know, and Pastor Pat compares it to how his responsibility grew from dating to marriage to raising three kids. He tells how John Wesley knew more theology than most of England, panicked in a storm while a group of Moravians sang and prayed, and later felt his heart “strangely warmed” when he trusted Christ alone.

He says God’s justice is part of his love and that our culture often turns “God is love” into “love is God.” The “woe” is God’s grief, a Father who wants to run after his children. He gives two steps. First, examine: what city are you living in? When did something about Jesus last change how you live? Second, repent: name it out loud, whether complacency, anger, unforgiveness or jealousy, and receive God’s mercy. “It takes God’s love to help me love God.”