How to Think Bigger

Think bigger.

Those are the words that surprised me when I spoke them to a group of youth. I was talking about how God can actually change our lives through prayer and use us to have an impact on other people. I meant for them to think bigger about themselves as well as the way they view God.

Almost any preacher will tell you there are times when something comes out in the sermon and boomerangs right back—even though that may not have been the intention.

That’s what happened to me when I told those young people to think bigger. And I’ve been pondering that thought ever since.

Don’t Settle for Mud Pies
It was only reinforced when I saw the film Hidden Figures, the story of three black women in the early days of NASA who fought against perceptions of them: other people’s as well as their own. And all three stepped into roles that wound up being far greater than anything they could have ever imagined.

Think bigger. When I got to the Scriptures for Ash Wednesday, that thought continued to resonate in my head. Is there a sin in living in the kingdom of heaven and being content with making mud pies? Do we, in essence, content ourselves with a restricted view of our lives and what we could be about in a way that limits our capacity to appreciate the greatness of what God has done within us?

You see, if I look at the call to repentance of Lent and Ash Wednesday as a way to figure out the places in my life where I know I’m not doing well, that immediately reduces repentance to dealing with only my peccadilloes, my small moments of weakness.

I don’t think that’s what Jesus was talking about. Read 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10. I almost feel Paul is pounding the desk: “Now is the day of salvation!” (2 Cor. 6:10c).

And of course, salvation is anything but finding a better way to figure out how to deal with our places of weakness. It’s literally being ushered into a different realm, where all has been made right. It’s where we become a vehicle God uses to express the best and the most challenging as well as the most humbling parts of the kingdom of heaven in the places where he has put us. That’s far bigger than, “Lord, help me not to swear to myself, much less in front of other people” or—you fill in the blank.

Do Repent and Seek Breakthrough
I need—and perhaps you do, too—to repent of thinking too small. Both in terms of the greatness of what God has done—the breadth of so great a salvation—and the opportunity He has given us to be instruments of what we have believed.

I think we know this, inside. And today’s passage from Joel (Joel 2:1-2, 12-17) evoked in me a desire for breakthrough—for God to break open in new ways—in my heart, in my family, in the country in which I live, and in the churches where I serve. I believe breakthrough is more than incrementally finding a better way to get along. It’s asking the Holy Spirit to break through and change things for the better in both visible and invisible ways.

Joel calls us to repent, not so much of ignoring the law as of ignoring the greatness of the God who wrote it. And after this call to repentance, we end up in the Psalms: “Who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases” (Ps. 103:3). The lavishness of the psalm promise, in fact, is meant to invite me more deeply into this great well of a place where I can encounter God.

Do Be Reconciled to God
And that takes us right back to the Corinthian lesson. Paul’s writing to Christians here: “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20b). Could it be that one of the places where the reconciliation needs to happen in profound ways is in my perceptions of God and of myself? These are as tainted by sin as anything else, and therefore limited—which is exactly what the devil would want. He can’t keep us from getting to heaven, but he certainly can keep us from living into the heaven that is rightfully ours: the greatness of salvation, the glory of what God is doing in us and desires to do through us. Our enemy can leave us content with too little: making mud pies in the kingdom of heaven.

Making mud pies looks like Jesus’ description in Matthew of the way we constantly play to an audience by doing our righteousness before others, whether it’s by prayer, by fasting, or good works. Sometimes, as Luther said, our righteousness is actually more wicked than our sin.

But in fact, what is in front of us, in the midst of this mud-pie existence, of hoping people will like us and what we do, is the opportunity to enter into the vastness of God. To know the joy and the reward, Jesus says, of living before the audience of One, and out of that, seeing vistas we can’t see if we keep looking to see if others are noticing.

Think bigger! And ask God to help us to do that. When the very well of salvation is ours, oh God, help us to hunger for more than mud pies.

In what ways do you need to “think bigger”? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2017, in the Bishop’s Oratory of the Diocesan Office, Orlando.)

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.