God is Smarter Than I Am! | Luke 22:39-42 | 5.17.26

All right, I'm going to read our scripture in just a little bit, but going on with what I just shared with the kids, this is what I want you to think about for today.

I want you to think about sometimes, you know, some of us are pretty smart, and sometimes we think we're smarter than we really are, but I want us to think about God is smarter than us all the time.

We read the scripture, I'm going to tell you what I mean by all that.

The scripture comes from the Gospel of Luke.

This is the last, part of the last three days of Jesus' life, and he's had the Last Supper with the disciples, and they're all gathering around him.

He says, We need to pray, so this is where it starts.

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him.

On reaching the place, he said to them, Pray that you will not fall into temptation.

He withdrew about a stone's throw behind them, beyond them, knelt down, and prayed.

Yet not my will, but yours be done.

An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him, and being in anguish, he prayed mously, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

This is God's word for God's people today.

Okay, I've asked you all this question before.

Some of you got it wrong last time.

Some of you might get it wrong this time too, but I have the right answer on this.

What is the best movie ever made?

Princess Bride.

Yeah, you know, because you know me, don't you?

Princess Bride.

Best movie ever made.

If you've not seen The Princess Bride, I don't know what's the matter with you.

But anyway, there's one scene in this movie.

This is a scene of the man named Vizini, and he has this the Spaniard swordsman.

He's got the giant, and they kidnap the princess, and they go off, and the man in black is coming to rescue the princess.

And first he has to meet the Spaniards with the sword, and he defeats him, and then the giant, and he defeats him, and then he chases after, and finally finds Vizini, who has the princess.

And they're sitting down there, and the princess is blindfolded, and he's got a knife holding it to her.

And the man in black walks up and they start talking.

They say, you know, what do you?

He said, Yeah, you know, we have to come to an agreement here.

And he said, Vinny says, You bested my Spaniard, you've bested my giant.

I challenge you to a war of wits.

And the man in black says, You're that smart?

And he says, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, do you know them?

He says, Yeah, morons.

I gotta tell you, we sometimes consider ourselves pretty smart, smarter than even some of them.

I've never considered myself to be a really smart person.

One of the things that I can say, and I tell you, I even kind of brag about this, in three years of seminary, I made one class, I made an A in it.

One class out of three years of seminary, but I graduated.

So it'll tell you a little bit about my my smarts here.

I've known smart people though.

You get smart from different from uh different in different ways.

Some people have a lot of common sense, and I consider that smart.

Some people know how to do things that I don't know how to do, and I watch them and I say, man, they are they are they are smart, just like this guy behind me.

I wish I could play like him, but ain't no way that's gonna happen.

Some people just are intellectual, they know stuff.

So we can be smart in different ways.

Sometimes smart comes from experience.

We learn things as we do it.

You go to change the uh plug-in in your house and needs a new one, and you touch a live wire, you learn something.

You learn something right then.

Or you see a pan in the oven that it's kind of cocky, and you gotta straighten it up a little bit and you reach in without getting the glove on and you push it out.

You learn something from that.

You move from Florida to Tennessee and still root for the gators.

You learn real quick.

I learned that real quick.

That made me a little bit smarter on that one there.

Sometimes I think that we know why things happen, but we're wrong.

We things happen in our life and we say, Well, I know why this happened, but we could be wrong on those kinds of things.

I'm never gonna make it through school.

We know that.

We might be wrong on that.

We might not be as smart as we think on that.

You're stuck in your job and say, nothing's gonna come up.

We might be wrong on that.

We think we know, but we might be wrong.

We're in a bad situation, and nothing good is gonna come from this.

We are positive.

We might be wrong on that.

We might not be as smart as we think we are in those situations.

Sometimes what looks like the worst day in our life turns out to be the best day.

This is what our scripture is about today.

This exact same thing.

Some people thought that when Jesus was arrested, crucified, died, and was buried, they thought this is the best day in the world because they didn't like Jesus.

They he was coming in and stirring things up and teaching things that they didn't think they should be taught, and he was doing all these things, and they made plans.

They said, if we can get rid of this guy, we're gonna be okay.

It's gonna be the best day of our life.

So these people, they thought that this was gonna be the best day of their life.

But you see, God had other things in mind here.

God was smarter than these people, he had other plans.

He says, They're celebrating.

He said, I got a surprise for you.

You know what that surprise was?

Resurrection.

They weren't smart enough to see that this and I am.

God had a bigger plan.

God was smarter than they were.

Well, when we come to God, we're supposed to come to God in a spirit of humility and surrender, not come to God saying, look, here's my plan, do it.

We're supposed to come in in humility and surrender.

Why is that?

Because God is smarter than us.

Well, God knows what we can't know.

And God sees what we can't see.

And if we know that, it's easy for us to say, okay, God may be a little bit smarter than I am here.

Somebody said we're like a fly that's crawling on an oil painting.

That's what we're like.

We see just what's here, but we're not back far enough to see the big picture.

That's kind of how we live our life sometimes.

We got our part figured out here and said, I know all about this, I know what's going to happen, but God has the big picture that we don't see.

God can see what we can't see.

Well, if I were to ask you, what are the two most famous prayers that Jesus had written in the scripture?

You would probably say the Lord's Prayer, and you'd probably say this prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.

But if you look at both of those prayers, both of those prayers has Jesus saying, Father, not my will, but yours.

In the Lord's Prayer, it says, Thy will be done.

Here Jesus says, Lord, if it's pot, God, if it's possible, make this cup pass from me, but not my will, but your will.

This is what we remember about Jesus.

He he trusted his father.

So perhaps it's a good good pattern for us to follow also.

Someone look at that.

We need to look at look to God, and instead of saying, God, I want you to do this and this and this and this, because I've thought it through and I know it's going to work, and I know this is what's best, so I want you to bless it.

Instead of saying that, we need to say, God, help me to see and do what you have in mind for me.

I want to do things your way.

There's a difference between those two, you know.

So, what does it mean to pray, God, your will be done?

What does that mean?

Well, praying, God, your will be done, means that we got to look to God, we got to come to God in a spirit of trust.

We got to trust God if we're gonna do this.

There's a difference between trust, there's a difference between belief and trust.

Let me tell you what I mean.

You probably heard this old story.

There was a daredevil that had stretched a line across Niagara Falls, and he was gonna walk across it, and he'd done these kinds of things before, and a huge crowd had gathered around him.

And he's before he went off, he says, All right, how many of you believe that I can do this?

Every hand went up, yeah, go ahead and do it.

He says, Okay, who's gonna get on my shoulders?

See the difference there.

You can believe, but trust is like an extra step there.

There's a big difference there.

Jesus, when he was in the garden, he trusted his father.

He prays, Lord, if this is possible, take this from me.

And he prayed so fervently his sweat came down like drops of blood.

But he trusted.

He trusted his father to know what was going to go on.

He knew what was ahead, but he still trusted his father.

He said, Not not what I want, but what you want.

So many of you know that John Wesley started the Methodist church way back when, and his brother Charles wrote most of the hymns, I think, in our hymn book.

The story goes that Charles Wesley says, if God gave me wings, I'd fly.

And John Wesley says, if God tells me to fly, I'm gonna trust him for the wings.

Think about that.

There's a difference there.

There's a difference in all of that.

He's praying your will.

When we pray your will, it means we come in a spirit of trust.

We trust.

If you were gonna pray, Lord, your will be done, you gotta trust what God has in store here because you may not know what it is, but God is smarter than you are.

Well, you're gonna pray this, you also have to come with a spirit of obedience.

So you've heard this story probably at one point in time.

The man is praying and he says, Lord, so far today, I haven't been grumpy, I haven't been mean, I haven't been nasty, I haven't been greedy, I haven't been selfish.

But I'm about to get out of bed soon, and I'm gonna need your help on all of this.

That's that, see, we've got to, we've got to have be obedient to the Lord because he's saying, Lord, help me to be obedient and not do these things that I just asked about.

Some people get confused about what God wants, though.

Some people think God wants me to succeed.

Now, I'm not saying God doesn't want you to succeed, I'm not saying God wants you to fail, but we think this is the goal.

God wants me to always be happy and always be blessed and always succeed.

We think that's what God wants.

But what God wants is to trust Him and to be obedient in all things.

He wants our obedience.

So if we do what God wants, we need to leave the success to God.

Instead of planning it ourselves and asking for God's blessing, do what God wants us to do and leave the success part to him.

Christian obedience is applying God's will in every situation, every circumstance, every challenge that we have.

That's what obedience is.

Trusting God and obeying in all things.

It means conditioning ourselves and training ourselves to obey God in all things.

Now we may say that we do that, but if we think about it, we probably don't.

When it comes to something that we don't really want to do, we may not obey God the way we're supposed to.

But we need to remember, God is smarter than we are.

So saying God's uh saying your will mean doing your will means becoming uh coming to God in a spirit of obedience, that's part of what we're supposed to be doing.

Come to Him in a spirit of obedience.

But there's one more thing I think also means that we got to come to God in a spirit of commitment.

There was a young man, really young man, goes into the card shop and he wants to buy a card, tells the clerk, I need to buy a card for my girlfriend, one to tell her how much I love her.

And she goes over and she finds one, and it's a simple card that's that all it basically says is, to the only love of my life.

And she says, This is our best seller.

He says, Great, I'll take three of them.

Some people have a problem with commitment.

This this guy obviously had a problem with commitment.

Sometimes you and I have a problem with commitment also.

For all of the lawyers in the house here, Michael, that would be you, I know.

Michael would probably cringe if somebody signed a blank piece of paper, got it notarized, said I'll do whatever gets put on there, and God fills in the blanks.

That's not how you do things legally, but that's what it means to have a commitment to God.

You're signing the line saying I'll do it.

I don't know what it is, but I know you're smarter than me.

We're gonna do it this way.

I read this story, and I know nothing about this, and I gotta figure out that they're telling the truth here.

It's about training horses, particularly Arabian horses.

This is a story I heard, this one man that trained Arabian horses.

He wanted them to do what he's telling them to do all the time, right when he says to do it.

So he has this whistle, and he trained them to when he blows the whistle, they come straight to him.

So he does that as long as he thinks he needs to, and then one of the final tests is they're out in the desert, and he's got a pen there in the middle, up halfway up a hill, on a horse's, or in this pen, down at the bottom of the hill is the water trough.

And up at the top of the hill is him with his whistle.

He lets them stay out there all afternoon to where, man, they are thirsty.

And then he has somebody open the gate.

And of course, where are the horse is gonna go?

They're gonna go to the water, and they immediately start going to the water, and he blows his whistle, and he says, the ones that continue to go to the water means they're not trained yet.

They need more training, they're not as committed, but the ones that will turn and go to the master that's blowing the whistle are the ones that are committed, the ones that are trusting their master there.

So, what happens if we're so committed to the master that we put the master's will above ours?

Well, like the horses, they're gonna go thirsty for a little bit longer.

But that's part of the commitment that they have here.

So here's the question.

We look back on all of this, we say, you know, I know God's smarter than me, but I've got a plan here.

I I've got I've got things I need to do, and I think they're the right things.

Or we get in a situation and say, God, where are you?

What happened to you?

Did you just disappear here?

We get in situations in our life and we forget that God is smarter than us.

But what we need to do to be reminded of this uh every morning is we need to look at Jesus and use him as a model.

Jesus looked at his father in trust and obedience and commitment.

That's what we're supposed to do too.

We're supposed to live our lives in the exact same way.

We're supposed to wake up every morning and say, God is smarter than me.

Because he is.

I hope all of us can pray, Lord, not my will, but your will be done.

And it's something we've got to do every day.

Let's pray.

Holy God, you call us to do certain things.

You call us to trust you, you call us to obey you, you call us to be committed.

Sometimes we can't see the end.

Sometimes we think we know better than you do.

Sometimes we go on with life not even asking, not even thinking what you want.

Doesn't usually turn out well either.

So, Lord, I pray we could be more like Jesus.

To say, Lord, if it's possible, take this cup from me.

But nevertheless, not my will, but yours.

Amen.