Invitations (Excerpt)

Don’t you love getting an invitation? Parties, graduations, weddings, retirements. It’s an honor to be invited somewhere. And it feels good to know that our presence is requested. Someone wants to share an event with us, whether it’s a celebration or a remembrance. But sometimes an invitation has implications beneath the surface and sometimes we bring our own bias. We may wonder who else is invited? What will I wear? Will there be food? What if so-and-so is there? Awkward… But overall, an invitation that comes is usually a pleasant surprise.

Hollywood is known for its glamour and spectacular parties. The Vanity Fair Oscar party is arguably the most coveted invitation of the year, costing the host over one million dollars to put on. The reason for all this hoopla is simple: the harder the party is to get into, the more people will clamor to be invited.

Especially at this time of year, we receive all kinds of invitations: graduations, weddings, retirement, birthday parties. Do you think there’s a difference in being invited to the Vanity Fair Oscar party and Lily’s Strawberry Shortcake 3^rd Birthday party? Um. Yeah. Whether we want to admit it or not, the importance and/or rarity of the event will have great influence on our response. Neighborhood kid birthday party vs. once-in-a-lifetime red carpet event. Hmmm… tough choice, huh?

There are other kinds of invitations in life, too, aren’t there? Isn’t a marriage proposal a kind of invitation – an invitation from a man to a woman to share his name and a life together? A casual invitation to coffee or lunch can mean a lot to a lonely person. Ultimately an invitation is about relationship. Whether the event is to celebrate relationships – like a wedding – or just including people by being together, marking milestones in life is better when it can be shared in the context of relationship.

What kinds of invitations does God proffer in our lives? Here are three examples:

1. Seek Me. Because God places such importance on relationships, one of His primary invitations to His people throughout the Bible is to seek Him. And His promise is that we will find Him. When the Israelites had been disobedient and God allowed the Chaldeans (Babylonians) to take them as exiles and prisoners into a foreign land, He sent this encouraging invitation through the prophet Jeremiah to the confused, distraught people: This is what the LORD says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. ¹¹ For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. ¹² Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. ¹³ You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ¹⁴ I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” (Jeremiah 29:10-14) He gave the same invitation through the prophet Amos earlier when He said: ⁴ This is what the LORD says to the house of Israel: “Seek me and live; ⁵ do not seek Bethel, 
do not go to Gilgal, do not journey to Beersheba. 
For Gilgal will surely go into exile, and Bethel will be reduced to nothing.” 
⁶ Seek the LORD and live, or he will sweep through the house of Joseph like a fire; it will devour, and Bethel will have no one to quench it. (Amos 5:4-6) In both cases, to two different groups of people, God issues the same invitation that He offers to us: Come and seek me. He wants to be found because He wants to have relationship with us. Jesus also issued this invitation to those who would follow Him when He said: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matthew 7:7-8) It’s a little like a game of hide and seek with a small child who calls out from his hiding place in the closet, “I’m in here!”, making it easy to find Him. That’s our God: He longs to be found and known and He invites us over and over to look for Him so He can have relationship with us.

2. Rest In Me – Jesus offers this invitation in the gospel of Matthew: ²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30) Doesn’t that sound nice? Rest for your soul. Who doesn’t get soul weary from time to time? Who doesn’t feel the burden of life when the pressure mounts and the deadlines are looming large? When relationships are tense and we feel inadequate for the tasks ahead of us? Jesus gives us the invitation to come to Him with all of that. To exchange the self-propelled efforts to manage our lives for the total surrender of our wills to His ways. The reason that Jesus’ yoke is easy and His burden is light is b/c He’s already done everything necessary for us to walk in obedience and joy. 2 Peter 1:3-4 says this: ³ His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. ⁴ Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. In other words, Jesus has done everything necessary for us to live lives as we were created to live them through His obedient, perfect sacrifice on the cross! Our efforts to just improve ourselves instead of allow Him to transform us are what causes so much of our frustrations. Truth be known, many of us are carrying burdens in life that God never asked us to carry and He wants us to give them to Him. Then we can experience “soul rest”.

3. Follow Me – This invitation may be the hardest to swallow – and certainly the hardest to fully accept. ²³And he said to all, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. ²⁴For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. ²⁵ For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? ²⁶For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:23-26) This invitation seems to be filled with paradoxes. As if an invite to a birthday party came in the mail and said, “if you’d like to keep your coat, then give it away at the door.” But if I'm going to a party and can't trust that I'll remember where my coat is, the best thing to do is to trust it to the person at the coat check so it'll be safe and waiting for me at the end of the night. And the logic of this cross analogy has to do with the ancient tradition of taking up a cross. When a condemned man was going to be crucified under Roman rule in the time of the disciples, he was required to carry the beam of the cross to the place of execution. Jesus and his disciples would have seen this happen and Jesus Himself was going to carry the beam of HIS cross to Golgotha. It symbolizes the fact that we are to consider ourselves dead to our former way of life and should live as if that’s true. We are no longer slaves to sin, but Christ has bought our freedom through His trip to the cross and resurrection, so we live for Him now. (Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”) This invitation refers to a complete transfer of allegiance. I no longer live for myself; I’m to deny myself. That is the natural, carnal urges that used to have power over me. When I let go of my life I receive the life God has for me. The one I was created to live. That’s what He’s inviting us to. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “…mere improvement is not redemption”. Jesus did not die and rise from the grave to make us better versions of our former selves. He died to redeem us from our old life – to buy us back from a life of slavery to sin and death so we could be new creations, becoming more and more like Him in the process of sanctification.

So what kind of invitations have you received from God recently? What are you sensing that He may be inviting you? Is He inviting you to just look for Him to see if He’s real? Is He inviting you to lay down some burdens that have been too much? Or are you receiving a more challenging invitation? My challenge to you is to be still and ask God to reveal the kind of invitation He’s got for you.