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Ordinary Grace

Genesis 28:10-17; John 1:43-51

Last summer the Pew Research Center released a study of why people
go to church. It was a survey of US adults who attend worship once a
month or more. It identified the top ten reasons that people give for going to
church or other religious services. What do you think they were? What
reasons do you think people gave for attending church? SEE CHART.

By far the number one reason that Americans gave for coming to
church was to become closer to God. 81% of people surveyed said that
was a “very important” reason for church attendance. 61% said it was the
most important reason. In the list of “most important” reasons, the other
reasons did not even get into the double digits. To be better person came
in second at 8%. The main reason people come to church is to experience
God.

It is certainly my number one reason for coming to church. Westminster

Shorter Catechism says, “Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy
him forever.” I agree. I come to church for God. I have other reasons also. I
want a good sermon. I would be in worship every Sunday no matter what,
but which church I go to depends a great deal on the quality of the
preaching, and you get very good sermons here from your pastor. I hope
you realize how blessed you are to have Bob Schneider here. I also need
to connect to people who share my spiritual values. I can’t do it on my own.
So spiritual community is important to me. Those are my top three reasons.
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This morning I am going to talk about experiencing God. Not only is it

the #1 reason why people come to church. It is the reason for our existence
as a church. We aren’t a social service agency. We are not a political
action group. We are not a social club. We are a group of spiritually minded
people who follow Jesus and gather together to worship God. An important
part of that worship is the experience of God. This morning is talk about
experiencing God in ordinary times and places. I am calling it ordinary
grace.

The text read for you from Genesis this morning is the patriarch Jacob’s
experience of God. In our story Jacob was out in the middle of nowhere. He
had messed up things at home with his family. In particular he got his
brother Esau very angry at him. Jacob had stolen his older brother’s
birthright and blessing, and Esau was literally angry enough to kill him. So
his mother Rebekah thought it was a good idea if Jacob left town for a
while and live with her brother - his uncle Laban. So he left Beersheba,
which is the Negev in southern Israel and headed for Haran, which is in
modern day Iraq. This was quite a journey.

He was on his own and on his way, and he camped out for the night in
the middle of nowhere. He pulled up a stone for a pillow, pulled his cloak
around him and slept. During the night he had a dream that we know as
Jacob’s ladder. It says, “12 And he dreamed, and behold, there was a
ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And
behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!” God
spoke to him and identified himself as the God of his father and grandfather
and promised him offspring and land. Then the passage says, “16 Then
Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this
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place, and I did not know it.” 17 And he was afraid and said, “How
awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and
this is the gate of heaven.”

This did not happen in a religious setting, nor was Jacob looking for it or
expecting it. This was just an ordinary place. But Jacob exclaimed that this
place was awesome. “How awesome is this place,” he said. The Lord was
there and he did not know. He exclaimed that this was the house of God
and the gate of heaven. Before he left the spot he erected a stone cairn
there to remember the place. Later the Israelites built a temple on that site
that rivaled Jerusalem in importance. They made this spot into a holy place.
But originally it was just an ordinary place.

We have probably all had experiences of God in a place other than

church. Especially out-of-doors in nature. The Psalm 19 begins, “The
heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his
hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they
display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice
is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the
ends of the world.”

This is what theologians call general or natural revelation. It is an

important spiritual truth taught in scripture that is not mentioned enough
today. The experience of God is universal. Christians and Jews do not
have a monopoly on God or the experience of God. That is one of the
points made in the book of Job, who is portrayed as a Gentile who lived in
the times of the patriarchs like Jacob. Job is described as a blameless and
upright man. God says in that book that there was “none like him on the
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earth.” That means that Job was more righteous than all the Hebrew
patriarchs.

God is not limited to showing up only to religious people in holy places

at certain times, like in church on Sunday mornings. God has always
revealed himself to all peoples at all times. The apostle Paul taught that in
Romans 1, “For what can be known about God is plain to them [and
here he is talking about people who don’t believe in God or honor God],
because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes,
namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly
perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have
been made. So they are without excuse.”

God’s presence is clearly revealed through the natural world to all

peoples. People experience God’s general revelation when they gaze into
the starry heavens on a clear night or when we look out from a mountain
summit. Everyone experiences this whether they believe in Jesus or go to
church. They might not all call this an experience of God, what that is what
it is. The experience of Nature is a spiritual experience. And it is not
dependent on a church building or a preacher or organ music or even
scripture. This is what I am calling ordinary grace.

There is another wonderful story in the OT that illustrates this. It is the

story of Moses and the burning bush. Like Jacob, Moses also had to leave
home in a hurry. He was raised in Pharaoh’s household as the adopted
child of Pharaoh’s daughter. He called Pharaoh Grandpa. But he killed an
Egyptian overseer, which was an act of treason. So he had to flee for his
life to Midian. There he got married and had a child and settled into the life
of a shepherd.
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One day he was out grazing his sheep and something strange caught
his eye on the side of Mount Horeb. It was a bush that was on fire, but the
fire did not go out. The story of the burning bush is one of the most famous
encounters of a person with God in all the Bible. “Take off your sandals,”
God told Moses,” for the place you are standing is holy ground.” Moses’
encounter with God led to the Exodus from Egypt and the Conquest of
Canaan and the rest of the history of the nation of Israel. It all started when
Moses was out taking a walk in the countryside and realized he was on
holy ground. God appears in ordinary places and times.

The point is that God can and does show up anywhere and anytime.
Theologians call this the omnipresence of God. Because God is
omnipresent – present at all times and places – that means that we can
experience God anyplace and any time. Yet we often don’t. We tend to limit
our spirituality to holy times and holy places – worship services and times
of personal devotions at home, or prayer meetings or Bible study groups.

We should not forsake these holy times and places. Scripture says, “Do
not forsake the gathering of yourselves together as is the habit of some.”
Too often in my ministry people have told me that they do not go to church
because they can worship God just as well in the woods as in church. It is
true they can experience God in nature. But in the long run it really helps to
regularly gather together in the name of the Lord where we can sense the
presence of Christ and we can encourage each other in the spiritual life. It
is not either/or but both/and. We do one without forsaking the other.

As far as we church people are concerned, we must not judge people

too harshly who do not come to worship. Instead we must look at our own
selves and our awareness of God. How much are we really aware of God
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outside of Sunday morning? There is a popular practice these days called

mindfulness. It comes out of Buddhism but has made inroads into popular
culture. There are programs in public schools now and in corporations
teaching mindfulness because it helps people calm down and pay
attention. It increases a sense of wellbeing and even productivity.

Mindfulness is a good spiritual practice. But even better is being mindful

of God. God-mindfulness or Godfulness, or whatever you want to call it -
being full of God, having the Mind of Christ, as the apostle Paul calls it.
Being aware of the presence of God here now. For Christians that means
specifically being aware of the presence of Christ. The last words that
Jesus spoke before he ascended to heaven according to the Gospel of
Matthew were, “I will be with you always. Even until he end of the age.”
Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there I am in the midst of them."

Jesus is present here and now. One Sunday when I was preaching at
the church in Sandwich, a woman came out of church and shook my hand
and told me something. She said that while I was preaching she could see
Jesus standing behind me. She insisted that she was not speaking
metaphorically. She actually had some sort of vision and saw Jesus
standing behind me as I stood behind the pulpit. I believe her. Visions are
psychological manifestations of spiritual reality. They communicate spiritual
truth. The truth she saw in that vision was that Jesus was present, just as
he said he would be.

In our story Jacob had a dream. It could have just as well have been a
vision, which is really just a waking dream. It communicated the spiritual
truth that God was with him on his journey. God was not limited to the holy
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land – which was a revolutionary truth back then - but would go with him to
Mesopotamia – to Iraq. This was not going to be the last time Jacob had
such an encounter with God. A few chapters later Jacob was coming back
home to Beersheba from Haran. He had worked for 20 years for his uncle
Laban and had become wealthy. He had gotten married and had children.
Now he wanted to return home. But he was still afraid that his brother Esau
wanted to kill him.

On the way home when crossing the Jabbok River he had another
encounter with God. This seems to have been a vision rather than a dream.
He wrestled with God all night long. Later in the OT in the book of Hosea
this is interpreted as Jacob wrestling with an angel, but that is not what
Jacob said. Here Jacob exclaimed that he had seen God face to face. This
time instead of setting up a stone he renames the place. He calls it Peniel,
which means the face of God.

Jesus talked about discovering the presence of God at ordinary places

and times. He called it the Kingdom of God. He told parables about the
Kingdom of God. He said it was like a treasure that a sharecropper
discovered while plowing a field. And he sold everything he had to buy that
field. In other words he was just out tilling in his garden one day and
experienced the Presence of God. Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was
like a man who found a pearl of great price in the marketplace and sold
everything to own it. For that guy it was just a regular business day and he
encountered God. Jesus told story after story about the Kingdom of God -
about experiencing the presence of God at normal times of life.

This is ordinary grace. Everyday grace. In our NT reading, Nathanael

was sitting under a tree when his friend Phillip came to him telling him
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about Jesus, in whom he had seen God. Nathanael ridiculed the idea,
because Jesus was just an ordinary person from an ordinary place called
Nazareth. “Can anything good come of Nazareth?” he joked. Phillip
responded, “Come and see.” And he did come and see.

When he met Jesus he met God. He immediately experienced Jesus as

the Son of God. Then Jesus said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you. You will
see heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending on the Son
of Man.” He was alluding to the story of Jacob’s ladder. This is saying that
Jesus is the ladder to heaven, he is the dwelling place of God, the
tabernacle of God, the house of God. He is God enfleshed. He is the gate
of heaven. In Jesus we experience God. And this same Jesus is here now.
Just as certainly as he was standing before Nathanael. He is with you
tomorrow as you wake up and go about your day. He who has eyes to see,
let him see.