Today’s passage is Romans 10:14-21. People first need to hear the gospel before they can believe in Jesus. Paul quotes Psalm 19, Moses and Isaiah to contrast the reluctance of the Jews to believe in Jesus with the Gentiles who do believe when they hear the gospel.
1(14) How do I tell the gospel to others?
2(17) How do I hear the message, how does faith come to me?
3(21) Do I continue to give the message to my reluctant family and those stubborn ones around me? Or do I give up?
Impatience
Last night after worship, one of my troubled mogwons called me.
He didn’t go to the worship service, making many excuses.
He could have heard about seeking a sanctuary in the church and eating the holy bread of the word.
Instead he called me to complain of his problems as he does almost every day.
The complaints are always the same, and my message is always the same: Please come to worship and mokjang.
Hear the word so you can interpret your life with it and come to know God, see your sin, and change through the power of the Holy Spirit.
I am both bothered by this mogwon, who usually calls at awkward times, and grateful for the training he’s giving me.
Two days ago, he called while I was helping friends move.
I explained I was lifting furniture but it didn’t register with him and he launched into his complaints.
Today it was when I was driving in heavy traffic.
He complains like my sister, repeating the same few incidents over and over and over.
He’s been calling for two months now and has managed to get to two mokjangs and three worship services during which he fiddles with his phone.
When he calls, it’s usually when he’s stepped out of his apartment to smoke.
So many of his phone calls are part of his cigarette breaks, which range from 15 minutes to 2 hrs.
At first I tried to give him advice and direct him to the QT passage or something from one of the sermons, but he can’t hear it.
He’s so focused on his problems that he can’t focus on his relationship with God.
Sometimes I despair of him ever changing because he will not look at himself, only his problems.
I am grateful to him because he is teaching me to persevere with the gospel to a “disobedient and contrary people”(21).
He is showing me that until he gives up trying to fix his problems himself, he will never turn to God.
Like Jesus walking around Judea for 40 days, my mogwon is training me to be patient, to wait for the time he is ready to turn to God and open his ears to the Word.
This waiting is hard for me.
His problem is transparently clear to me but opaque to him.
Like me, his problem is himself but he can only see his problems in his circumstances and in others.
How I remember the years I blamed others for my unhappy circumstances.
I was a perfect victim and not an offender at all, or at least not very much, not like those other people afflicting my life.
I was willing to admit I made some mistakes, but not that I was a sinner through and through and that I was the main culprit and creator of my situation.
I feel like I’m stupidly looking up at the clouds, like Jesus’ disciples when Jesus ascended.
They expected him to come back immediately, forgetting his words to wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit.
I’m waiting for a profound change to take place in a man in the course of a single conversation! It may take months yet, maybe years!
How long did it take me?
Once I got to Wooridle, it went reasonably fast, at least in my mind anyway.
If that’s true, it’s only because I’d been suffering and wrestling with God for seven years beforehand, blaming others and angry at God, unwilling to really look at the depth and range of my sins.
Without Pastor Kim’s sermons and her insistence that I needed to see my sins and interpret my circumstances through the Word to see what I was doing and what I needed to be doing, who knows how many more years I would have spent flailing at everything and everyone but the real offender, me.
Application: Call my mogwon before he calls me tomorrow.
Lord, turn my eyes more steadily to your Word and not to an impatient dream I’ve made in the clouds.
