I want to go on record that I didn’t take two weekends out of the pulpit because I was embarrassed. There is a rumor to this effect but it isn’t true. In fact, I’m surprised that I wasn’t embarrassed. I’m sure that if it had happened to me fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have stewed about it for weeks. Now in my fifties, it’s just a great sermon starter.

Most of you don’t know what I’m talking about.  Here’s what happened. Two weekends ago, our son Andrew played a doubleheader in Bloomington. The games ran long so I arrived at church ten minutes before Saturday worship. I walked right in and started greeting folks sitting in the pews. Fifteen minutes later, I’m in front of the congregation praying. What I didn’t know, and no one told me, was this. I had on two different shoes, a nicely polish loafer and a muddy baseball shoe. I didn’t know I was wearing two different shoes until an hour later. I was standing on the deck, firing up the barbeque and looked down. I just laughed realizing that when I changed shoes at the stoplight, I didn’t  finish the job. What I found interesting was no one said a word to me about it.  

I’m not that feeble-minded, yet. But wearing two different shoes does bring up an important question. Who said both shoes have to match? What authority tells us this?

Sociologist Max Weber might call this authority traditional authority which derives from long-established customs, habits and social structures. There is a way of interacting, a social authority which has slowly developed from the earliest time until today. You might call it social convention but nevertheless, there is an unwritten authority with rules which we follow. We yield our life to this authority without even thinking about it because it is so ingrained in our psyche.

When you ask people about authority, most respond one of two ways. They speak of parental authority or political authority. Our first experience of authority is parental. Parents have authority over their children. Parents tell children what to do and how to act. This authority is overt in your rearing but is still an authority to which you yield. For instance, my father expected gentlemanly behavior with woman like holding a door or letting a woman go first in a line. I still do these things and can’t stop doing them.  In fact, I have an expression. I say, “My father would whip me if I didn’t let you go first.” My father never whipped me and certainly couldn’t now. But this authority is so ingrained in my life that I continue to yield to it. You live within a framework of parental authority, whether you know it or recognize it.

You know and recognize political authority. You stop when the light is red. You pay your taxes. You don’t rob banks or harm others. You obey the law of the land; if you don’t, the authorities arrest you and put you in jail. Again, we yield our lives to this authority most of the time without even thinking about what we are doing. We just do it because we know we are supposed to, because we’ve learned the rules along the way and because we don’t want to get in trouble. Together, we yield ourselves to our political authority to have a civil society. If we didn’t, we’d have anarchy.

There are all kinds of authorities to which you yield your life. Sometimes you are aware of accepting the authority over you. Most the time you aren’t. You just do it. Of course no one in the room doubts where I’m headed. You know that we have an extreme authority. God is the supreme authority over humankind. By the power of God’s Word, God created the heaven and the earth, separated light from darkness, parted the waters from the dry places, and spoke into being every living creature. The Creator formed the world and created the rules of how everything interacts. This is God’s world; God made it. God is the supreme authority of life. Given that it is God’s world, do you yield yourself to God’s authority?

Many years ago at a major university, a group of sociology students did an experiment on authority. They created a simple board game which looked something like Monopoly. There were player pieces and dice and some cards with words and actions that needed to be followed but there were no rules given to the participants in the experiment. Groups of five players were observed as they played the game. The project was designed to discover how charismatic authority was developed. What they discovered instead was the emotional response to living without guidelines from an authority. Some of the groups became depressed. Other groups argued and fought. One group quit, simply refusing to play. But eventually two types of groups emerged. One type of group acted like they knew how to play the game and the other type of group made it their mission to find the rules. The later group asked repeatedly, bargained for, some even begged for guidance and direction from those in charge, from the authority. When it comes to living this game called life, which group would you fall in?  Do you act like you know how to play the game or do you seek to find direction from the one in charge?

The number one bestseller in the United States is the Bible. Sixty-five million copies of the Bible are bought or distributed every year. Nothing else is a close second. The average house has at least three Bibles. The problem isn’t availability, it’s use. According to a Gallup poll, only one third of those surveyed knew who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Only half could name the first book of the Bible. Eighty percent of active Christians believe that the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” is in the Bible. That’s not in the Bible; Ben Franklin said it.[1] While this poll is of a cross section of population, we aren’t much better. If we are people of the Word, why aren’t we reading the Word?

I think there are a couple of reasons and I think both might connect with one. One reason is similar to the experiment. You think you know the rules. You think you know God’s Word sufficiently enough to live the game of life. And you’ll pick up a few nuggets of truth here and there as you sit in worship or hang out at church.

The second reason is approach. Most people use the Bible to find out how to get God in their lives, to discover how God will participate in their world. This becomes very task oriented and probably is derived from early understanding of parental authority. If Daddy says make your bed, I make my bed. If God says, feed the hungry, I feed the hungry. It makes the authority of scripture nothing more than a rulebook, the word of parental authority.

The way we should approach scripture is to discover how we enter God’s world. Our motivation should not be to find and follow the rules or yield our lives to a parental authority. It is rather to discover God’s world and to allow it to pull us into participation on God’s terms, to yield our lives to a spiritual authority. The purpose of spiritual authority is to equip and influence people to become who God wants us to be as we live in God’s world. There is a classic story which illustrates this difference, first told by the great German theologian Karl Barth.

Imagine a group of men and women in a huge warehouse. They were born in this warehouse, grew up in it and have everything there for their needs and comfort. There are no exits to the building but there are windows. The windows are thick with dust and are never cleaned. So no one bothers to look out. Why would they? The warehouse is everything they know, has everything they need. But then one day one of the children drags a stepstool under one of the windows, scrapes off the grime and looks out. He sees people walking on the streets; he calls to his friends to come and look. They crowd around the window---then never knew a world existed outside their warehouse. And then they notice a person out in the street looking up and pointing. Soon several people are gathered, looking up and talking excitedly. The children look up but there is nothing to see but the roof of their warehouse. The people in the street look up and see the heavens and everything in the heavens. The warehouse people have no heavens about them, just a roof.  [2]

What would happen if one day, one of those kids cut a door out of the warehouse, coaxed his friends out and discovered the immense sky about them and the grand horizons beyond them? Life in a warehouse never prepared them for anything like this, a world that stretched endlessly beyond. 

Karl Barth said the apostle Paul was the kid who scraped the grime off the window and allowed him to see God’s world beyond his own little narrow life he’d create. This is what Paul is doing when he wrote to the church at Thessalonica when he urges and encourages and pleads with them “…to lead a life worthy of God who calls you into his own kingdom…” (1 Thessalonians 2:12b). Paul is saying that the world of God isn’t human authority but rather spiritual authority which creates a new world for you to enter. The Bible is not a human word but it is “God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2: 13) If you yield your life to it, it will literally change your walk, change the way you live, not because it restricts but because it liberates.

The essence of Christian maturity comes in understanding spiritual authority as different than any other authority in your life. When we open the Bible, when we believe in the power of Word and experience scripture as both revelatory and transformative, we can experience a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. It’s like leaving that warehouse and seeing how much more there is to life. It is saying “I want to live in this the world, in God’s world revealed in the Word rather than the narrow warehouse world that I create on my own.” Giving our lives over to the authority of scripture, yielding our lives to the spiritual authority of the Word, we willingly enter God’s world and experience God’s power for our lives.

I’ll admit two things to you today. I’ll admit to having problems with rules.  As a kid, I never saw a rule I didn’t want to break. I’ll admit to my fair share of bumping up against authority. Maybe that’s why I’m okay with wearing two different shoes to worship. I’ll also admit to having problems with people who treat the Word as a rulebook. At its best, it is a misunderstanding. At its worst, it is judgmental and damaging to the God’s kingdom.

Having admitted two things, I hope I’ve accomplished two things as well. I hope I’ve helped you discover the difference between spiritual authority and all of the other authorities in your life. And I hope I’ve scraped the grime off that window so you can see the rich possibility for your life in being people of the book.