God's Lesson Plan

17th Sunday after Pentecost – B (Proper 19)                                                 LSB #’s 696, 686, 698
Text – Isaiah 50:4
 
The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.  Morning by morning He awakens; He awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.
 
GOD’S LESSON PLAN
 
 
Part of the daily grind for school teachers is coming up with lesson plans for most every class they teach.  A basic outline could look like this: What is the objective of the lesson?  What activities will enable the students to learn about the objective?   How might that learning be evaluated?   The struggle involves coming up with the details to fill out each & every lesson. 
If human teachers develop lesson plans to guide their work, it should not surprise us that God Himself also works with plans.  There is nothing that human beings can invent that God almighty hasn’t thought of or created first.  And He goes far beyond writing one plan for the entire class.  Yahweh writes a lesson plan for every single human being that He has created. 
Every person ever conceived was created by God with a lesson plan & a purpose for their lives.  Some of them die in the womb due to the brokenness of this world.   Hundreds of millions have been aborted before they ever had the chance to learn or to be taught.   Tens of billions more have lived their lives, short or long, receiving or rejecting the instruction of God. 
To receive the instruction of Yahweh is to receive life, even eternal life.   To reject that instruction is to invite death.  That also will be for eternity.   The gravity of those two eternal contrasts is something the human brain is unable to manage for anything more than a few moments.  We cannot long endure the horrible tension of such an all or nothing reality. 
Instead, believer & unbeliever go about their merry way, ignoring that eternal contrast as best as they are able.  The suffering of this world is horrifying enough.  If people think about it at all, they tend to rationalize things with sayings like this, “We’re all going to the same place, we’re just on different paths.”  On a less optimistic note, others will say, “When we die, we just go back to the ground where we came from.”    As our Creator, God knows better than that & would never leave eternity to chance.  He sent God the Son to become a human being so that He might reconnect mankind to its Creator.  He did this so you could live forever in paradise. 
Getting there is simple = trust in Jesus, but it is not easy.   We live in a world of tremendous brokenness, corrupted beyond anything that you or I can fathom.  Because we cannot find our way, & because Satan is constantly working to lead us astray, our Lord has designed an individual lesson plan for each & every one of us. 
His objective for our lessons is that we get to know Him personally so that we trust Him as He offers us eternal life.   To that end, He plans activities & events in our lives that give us opportunities to learn His objectives.   Finally, God is always evaluating how well we are learning our lessons.  Then, He creates more lesson plans to move us beyond that. 
You might guess that those learning opportunities are not all fun & games.  Each one of us, because we are sinful & live in a sinful world, endures many trials & tribulations.  Our Lord & Savior works all of them into His lesson plans for our lives.    He is constantly at work, directing us, guiding us, leading us to know Him & to realize that we can trust Him. 
Our independent & rebellious sinful nature hates those lessons.  Often, even when we are learning, we have no idea what God’s objective is for our lessons.  As we go through the struggles of life we’re always looking for shortcuts, for ways to bypass the lessons of the day.  Like with math problems, we just want to write down the answer & not show our work. 
Here’s an example of a lesson plan filled with trials & tribulations that I cannot explain.  The only thing I can counsel, even as a pastor, is to trust that God is always at work drawing light out of darkness & life out of death.  Commonly that death involves dying to ourselves.  A woman heard about a barbaric practice in another part of this world where dogs are gathered & beaten while they’re alive, in order to tenderize their meat that will be eaten once they’re butchered for a certain festival.  An organization works to rescue at least some of those dogs & for a price you can pay to fly them to the US as a pet instead of a meal. 
Years later, the owner & the dog went for a hike.  Upon returning the dog was put into the pen, & the owner went into the house.  Knowing how to work the latch, the dog released itself & went for a stroll.  Just at that time a thunderstorm was rolling in, lightning struck nearby & the dog took off running.  The owner realized it & went in search of her beloved hound. 
Minutes turned into hours, hours into days, days into weeks & months.   Family & friends helped in the search.  Signs were posted, neighbors consulted, but in the heavily wooded terrain the dog was never found. 
God did allow this to happen, & He knew since the beginning of time that it would, so it was in His lesson plan.  But why was such pain & anguish part of the plan’s activities for the day?   What role were the sorrow & the guilt to play in the objectives of the lesson plan?  As children & students of God, we are often left without direct or immediate answers. 
In essence, there are days when God places us into a situation where we have no choice but to trust or to reject trust in God’s wisdom & goodness.   Since Adam & Eve rebelled in the Garden, men & women throughout history have been asking, “If God is good & all-knowing, why does He allow us to endure anguish & suffering in this life?” 
Inevitably, the answer always goes back to the Garden of Eden.  Mankind was given a perfect world to live in, yet they refused to listen to God’s Word.    Even today, you & I consistently refuse to listen 100% of our time.  And each time we refuse, no matter how great or how small, we bring suffering & anguish into this world.   Far beyond the ever-present question, “Why?” all of us eventually want to know if there is a purpose in the world’s suffering, & is there hope for that suffering,  & for our guilt,  to end?   Can anyone find rest from the brokenness of their soul?  That is where the OT reading comes into play:
“The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.   Morning by morning He awakens; He awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.”  (Isaiah 50:4 ESV) 
Do you wake up each morning with ears ready eagerly to hear from God as those who are taught?    I know you do not!   I know that because I do not!   The words of Isaiah do describe one human being, however.   Remember – our Creator sent God the Son to become a human being, & He is the One who has ears to hear as those who are taught. 
And Jesus hears perfectly that He “may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.”   Matthew 11:28 is a rather well-known verse where Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary & burdened, & I will give you rest.”  (NIV)    So, yes, there is rest from the brokenness of your soul.  It’s found in Jesus, the only Son of God:
“who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”  (Philippians 2:6-8 ESV) 
Then, at Hebrews 5:8, “Although He was a son, He learned obedience through what He suffered.”  (ESV)   In some respect, as we trust in God, you & I learn obedience through what we suffer.  As Jesus tells us in Matthew 10:24, “A disciple is not above his teacher…”  (ESV)   And the reading from Isaiah summarizes things well by saying:
“Let him who walks in darkness & has no light trust in the name of the Lord & rely on
his God.”  (Isaiah 50:10b ESV)   You know as well as anyone what it is to walk in darkness & have no light.  Everyone in this world experiences that.  And I think it’s in God’s lesson plan for all of us, not because He’s lazy & just wants to use the same plan over & over.  I think it’s there because, as sinful beings, it is difficult for us to learn to trust in God’s goodness & wisdom. 
As I said earlier, getting to heaven is simple = trust in Jesus,    but it is not easy.   There are many trials & tribulations along our way because sin prevents our trip to heaven from being easy.  And it’s not just the sin around us, but especially the sin within us that makes our road trying & difficult.  Satan wants it to be impossible, yet with God all things are possible. 
For most people, if not all, because each of us is sinful, God’s lesson plans will have at least one chapter on darkness.  The lesson plan will be different for each of us based upon our unique set of gifts & life experiences.  The Holy Spirit is always at work teaching us.  If we receive His teaching, God will give opportunities to sustain others through what we learned. 
In the end, Jesus is always there to sustain us, & He knows what He’s doing because He suffered Himself, in our place.  No matter how successful you are, there is always a time when failure strikes, & that failure comes from within.  But Jesus is greater than our failures & He is stronger than our sins, & He has promised to never leave us nor forsake us.  Amen.
 
 
 
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, calls for songs of loudest praise.   While the hope of endless glory fills my heart with joy & love, teach me ever to adore Thee; may I still Thy goodness prove.   Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be; let that grace now like a fetter bind my wandering heart to Thee:  Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love.  Here’s my heart, O take & seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.   Oh, that day when free from sinning, I shall see Thy lovely face; clothed then in the blood-washed linen, how I’ll sing Thy wondrous grace!   Come, my Lord, no longer tarry; take my ransomed soul away; send Thine angels soon to carry me to realms of endless day.  Amen.  LSB 686:1, 3-4.