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WAYFARERS
Topical Sermon on the Occasion of
the Baptisms of Juan Joya, German Mendoza-Rodrigues,
and Andrew Nye
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 5/19/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(NOTE about the audio for this service: This is the service in which Juan Joya, German Mendoza-Rodriquez and Andrew Nye were baptized. First you'll hear Juan, German and Andrew give their personal testimonies, followed by Shelley Schurch's "roll call" of family and friends. Then you'll hear the baptisms themselves, followed by the Scripture passages they chose, read by relatives. Then Ruth Lemus tells a children's story, and Pastor Maylan Schurch preaches the sermon "Wayfarers," prepared from those Bible passages. Because of copyright restrictions we're not allowed to play the audio for the two lovely songs, one sung by Alivia Nye and the other by Sarah Ceron. To hear the spoken audio for this service, click here. Only the sermon is printed below.)
Please open your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 3.
As I was working through these guys’ Scripture passages this week, I picked up a couple of really interesting patterns. Both Juan’s passage (Proverbs 3:5, 6) and Andrew's passage (John 14:1-4) talk about "ways” or "paths." That's why I called this sermon "Wayfarers." Each of these three young men has been moving down various paths in his life, and after today they'll continue to be wayfarers on the road of life.
And then, as I studied, it seemed to me that each of these Scripture passages holds a key word which is important not just for Juan, German, and Andrew but for each one of us.
Key words are important, aren’t they? These three young men enjoy spots, and German also is an avid photographer. Just for the fun of it, I Googled soccer terminology, basketball terminology, and photography terminology. Let me give you some examples of how words are important..
Here are some soccer terms I found:
Banana kick: a type of kick that gives the ball a curved trajectory; used to get the ball around an obstacle such as a goaltender or defender.
Carrying the ball: a foul called on a goalkeeper when he takes more than 4 steps while holding or bouncing the ball.
Direct free kick: a kick awarded to a player for a serious foul committed by the opposition; the player kicks a stationary ball with no opposing players within 10 yards of him; a goal can be scored directly from this kick without the ball touching another player.
Hat trick: 3 or more goals scored in a game by a single player.
Draw: a game that ends with a tied score.
The Draw: the selection of World Cup teams to place them into playing groups for the tournament, and is also the event surrounding this selection.
Now, on to some basketball terms:
Air ball -- An unblocked shot that fails to hit the rim or backboard. Does not reset the shot clock.
Alley oop -- An offensive play in which a player throws the ball up near the basket to a teammate (or, more rarely, to himself) who jumps, catches the ball in mid air and immediately scores a basket, usually with a slam dunk.
Bounce pass -- A pass that bounces once before reaching the receiver.
Double dribble -- (1) To dribble the ball with two hands at the same time (2) To dribble, stop, and then begin to dribble again; Either act results in a loss of possession.
Granny shot -- An underhand shot taken using both hands, usually as a free throw.
Gunner -- Someone who shoots the ball too many times.
When it comes to photography terminology, I'm on more familiar ground – except that back when I took a photography class in college, a lot of the terms dealt with developing rolls of film rather than processing pixels.
Aperture -- the hole inside the lens that allows light through. Aperture is measured in “f” numbers.
Depth of field -- a measure of how much of a scene (from the front to the back of the image) will be in focus.
ISO is a term "borrowed" from film photography. In film photography the ISO was a measure of how sensitive the film was to light. It was called film speed.
Noise -- is the digital equivalent of film grain. It shows up on digital photographs as small coloured blotches, usually in the darker areas of an image.
As I say, I took photography in pre-digital times, and when it came to sports, my brother was the sports fiend, not me. But as I read through all these vocabulary terms, these key words, it's amazing how much I learned. Of course, simply knowing that a "banana kick" is sort of like a curveball in baseball doesn't make me any better able to kick a banana kick, but at least I have a greater understanding of that part of the sport of soccer. Now, if I watched a game, I could say in a confident, authoritative voice, "Wow. What a beautiful banana kick!"
This morning for the next few minutes I'd like us to look at three key words, one from each of these Scripture passage, can be something like God's signposts for these young wayfarers and for the rest of us. I believe these three words will point us straight and keep us steady during the complicated "last days" ahead of us.
So let's discover these words, starting with Juan’s passage.
Proverbs 3:5 – 6 [NKJV]: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.
I suppose we could choose several keywords from those verses, but the word that leapt out at me – it was repeated twice – was the word "all." In fact, if you're taking sermon notes, here comes Point One.
I believe that God’s first key word to successful wayfaring is the word “all.”
Notice the two ways "all" is used. First, the proverb-writer urges us to trust in the Lord with all our hearts. All three of our talented young man have from time to time “set their hearts” on this or that goal. Maybe it's shooting a three-pointer, or kicking a shrewd banana kick, or catching on a camera a candid pose or expression at exactly the right moment and then cropping and photoshopping that image to make it even more effective.
As time goes along, each of these guys will set their hearts on, and give their hearts to, other causes and other people. That’s the way God created us, to fling ourselves enthusiastically at life.
But you don't achieve hair as silver as mine without seeing some people set their hearts on less-than-healthy pursuits, or less-than-stable people. I believe that's one reason why these verses urge us to devote every part of our heart – the career-seeking part, the creative part, the romantic part –devote every part of our heart to trusting Him. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart."
And notice the second way the keyword "all" is used.
Verses 5 – 6: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.
I believe that if we trust in the Lord with all our hearts, then it will be much easier to acknowledge Him in all our ways. Young people and anybody else travel many paths throughout the week. Some of these paths are the routine trips to school, the route from classroom to lunchroom to gymnasium to soccer field. But other paths involve choice – the choice whether to gossip, whether to persecute, whether to do something, or go someplace, foolish that will harm yourself or someone else, or the choice to surrender your choices to other people who may be less mature.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart." “Acknowledge Him in all your ways.” In other words, make His agenda yours. Apply His promises and His commands to your life.
A couple of months ago I heard a radio interview with a father and his son. The father had been a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and in blue ink on the inside of one of his wrists the Nazis had tattooed his personal prisoner number.
Over the years, this father tended to ignore this number, and when he happened to glance at it he regarded it as an ugly symbol of what he'd gone through, and was glad he had survived.
However, his son – who had been born late in Dad’s life, long after the Nazi atrocities – became fascinated with that number, and actually had that same number tattooed on his own wrist, using lettering that looked as much as possible like the original.
At first, his father was puzzled and horrified. He couldn't understand why on earth his son would willingly take on this ugly and demeaning symbol. But as they talked together, the dad realized that his son wanted to identify as fully as possible with what dad had gone through.
Hebrews 2:18 tells how completely Jesus identified with us. It says that He was tempted and tested in every way that Juan, German and Andrew will be tempted, and will be able to help them, and the rest of us, emerge from these temptations victorious.
And this can give us greater confidence to trust in the Lord with all our hearts, and acknowledge Him in all our ways.
Now let's move to German’s passage, Psalm 91.
It is every parent’s fondest hope that their children—German, Juan, Andrew and every other young person here – will sail smoothly through their 20s, going from strength to strength, from triumph to triumph, into their more-seasoned 30s and beyond, without any sort of trial or tribulation.
But as every parent knows, with a sinking heart, life rarely goes this smoothly. That's why we need to discover and remember another key word.
German actually considers the entire chapter of Psalm 91 as his Scripture passage, and I wish we had the time to move through it in leisurely detail. But let's look at the summarizing verses at the start:
Psalm 91:1 – 4: He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him I will trust.” Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence. He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler.
As I read through this entire Psalm, I discovered that whoever is narrating it is not really doing anything at this moment. He's not going out and fighting the Lord's battles. Instead, he is surrounded by enemies – the metaphorical "fowler" who has set his snare, the pestilence that seeks to poison him, the terror by night, the arrow by day.
It's only when we get to verse 8 that we realize who is causing all these problems.
Verse 8: Only with your eyes shall you look, and see the reward of the wicked.
One of the Bible's most bitter truths – and Jesus experienced this far more harshly than anyone else – is that there is a devil, and that he despises God and His Son, and often uses human beings to persecute those who are doing their best to follow the Lord.
This is not a pleasant thing to think about, but it's a good thing that Psalm 91 tells us about it, and gives us a key word to remember.
I believe that if God’s first key word to successful wayfaring is the word “all,” God’s second key word is “abide.”
As I mentioned, we don't see the writer of this Psalm doing anything active. He seems to be surrounded so completely with spiritual danger, at least for the time being, that all he can do is dwell in the secret place of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
This is helpful to know. Several years ago, for a few months, a man attended this church who because of a back injury was not able to go to work. He shared his frustration with me during that time, told me how he earnestly and impatiently prayed to the Lord to change his situation, which seemed hopeless. Eventually he had a successful operation, and to his delight, the Lord opened up the perfect employment opportunity for him, a dream job which later led to an even more satisfying position in another part of the United States.
And before he left, this man gave me permission to share his story, and he told me, "If you ever come across someone who is discouraged, and who doesn't think the Lord is working in their situation, just tell them to be patient. The Lord may just have to take time to set things up."
Our third keyword is found in Alivia’s brother’s scripture passage.
John 14:1 – 4: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”
Again, we could choose several different keywords from these familiar lines. But here’s the keyword I would like to present to Andrew and the rest of you for your consideration and use.
I believe that if God’s first key word to successful wayfaring is the word “all,” and His second key word is “abide,” I believe His third key word is “believe.”
“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.”
A few weeks back in another sermon I mentioned how there were no such things as chapter-divisions in the original Bible manuscripts. John did not sit down with his pen and write a big number 14, and a little number 1. In fact, John didn't realize that he was starting another chapter at this point. And he wasn't – people would not divide his words into chapters until more than a thousand years later.
And if you eliminate the words “Chapter 14,”what's so touching is that when Jesus says "Let not your heart be troubled," He is probably talking first and most directly to Peter. Because in the last verse of the previous chapter Jesus has just had to tell Peter that he, Peter, will deny Him, Jesus. But immediately Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled. Believe.”
It's easy to believe in God when things are going well. It's less easy to believe in God when we're going through Psalm 91 pressures and persecutions. And maybe it's most difficult to believe in God when we have gravely disappointed Him. And maybe what's so difficult to believe is not so much that He can forgive us, but could He really, deep in His heart, want to forgive us?
But there, with the air still vibrating with the horrifying prediction about Peter's denial – a prediction that would come true within just a few hours – there, after that dreadful revelation, Jesus tells Peter and the rest of His disciples, and everybody in this room today, to keep believing. Keep believing that in His Father's house are indeed many mansions, keep believing that Jesus went to prepare those mansions for us, keep believing that yes, there is enough abundant forgiveness so that He will come again to receive us to Himself, so that we can be with Him forever.
So what should Juan, German and Andrew do now that they know this? What should the rest of us do?
Well, we all need to remember that Romans 10:17 tells us how belief happens. “So then faith [which is the noun form of that exact same John 14 word “belief”] faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
So the strongest faith comes not merely from a good Sabbath school class, or from a good Christian elementary school, or good parents. Those are so important—and they reinforce that faith—but the strongest faith that will guide and protect these young men throughout their lives comes by personally hearing, by listening to, by acting on, what the Word of God has to say to them.
So guys, I urge you to read those Bibles of yours. If they tell you to confess and forsake sins, confess and forsake them. Read some more of those common-sense Proverbs. Read some more of those Psalms, those songs from Israel's ancient hymn book. Read some more from the book of John, that wonderful, warmhearted biography of Jesus.
And that's what the rest of us need to do as well. Remember that the Son of God met each of the devils deadliest deceptions not with logic or reasoning but with a well-chosen quote from the book of Deuteronomy. And one of those temptation-refuting verses says, "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
Can we all commit to do that this morning? Would you like to raise your hand, and later use that hand to turn the pages in God's Holy Word?
CHOOSE YOUR PROCESSION!
Expository Sermon on Luke 7
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 5/12/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to Luke Chapter 7.
Early Wednesday afternoon I was driving up I-5 from Federal Way. I was heading to the same Honda repair shop I have been using since the mid-1980s.
Just as I was coming up even with South Center Mall, I saw that there was a message on one of those long, lighted traffic-report signs which stretch over the freeway, the ones that tell you about things like the 520 bridge closure.
But this one had a message that wasn't quite like any I'd seen before. This one said: “Earlier incident north of MLK Jr. Way.” I knew that Martin Luther King Way was up ahead of me, but the sign didn't say "accident" as it normally does, but "incident."
As it turns out, I already knew what this "incident" was. A few minutes before, I had turned on a radio traffic report, and the traffic person said that there was still something of a traffic tie-up because President Obama’s motorcade procession had been passing along.
A few hours later, on the computer, I was able to pull up the KOMO News clip reporting on the president's visit. I hadn't seen pictures of a presidential motorcade in a long time, and I guess I still pictured a procession of long, low limousines. But here were these tough-looking black SUVs, probably about as bulletproof as you can get. And somebody in the watching crowd who had worked at the White House pointed out one of the SUVs which had a black truck-box on its back. From what the man said, this was where they would put the president if he were ever exposed to some sort of hazardous material and needed to get quickly cleaned off.
As you probably know, these presidential processions happen as quickly and as secretively as possible, to lessen the chance of terrorists or anyone else causing problems.
Luke Chapter 7 tells us about not one but two processions. Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Back in Jesus' time they probably didn't have anything like a Mother’s Day. And here in Luke seven, we see a mother who is having what is probably the worst day of her life. She is part of a procession that she never in her worst nightmares imagined would happen. Let's watch this amazing story unfold.
The story begins, actually, with another procession, going in the opposite direction.
Luke 7:11 [NKJV]: Now it happened, the day after, that He went into a city called Nain; and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd.
Let's try to imagine for a moment what Jesus’ procession might've been like. I'm sure that as Jesus and His procession walked along, there were probably a lot of separate conversations going on, and maybe little pockets of people were singing psalms to pass the time. Jesus and His disciples are up at the head of the procession, maybe talking theology.
As Jesus heads west toward the entrance to the village of Nain, He is actually fairly close to His home territory. Just seven miles to the northwest is His growing-up hometown of Nazareth. 20 miles west, on the horizon, He can see the range of high hills which contains Mount Carmel. And according to the article on Nain in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, "East of Nain are rock-cut tombs of an ancient cemetery, which Jesus had probably just passed when he saw the funeral procession coming out of the city." (International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 480)
But suddenly, the crowd following behind Him becomes hushed. Because coming forth from Nain is another procession. Voices are raised, but not in singing.
Verse 12: And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her.
If you read this in the original Greek, it's even more sad. Do you see the English phrase "a dead man"? The word "man" is not in the Greek. It simply says, "a dead was being carried out." The Greek word used here for “dead” is tethnekos, it means to die, or to be dead. You see the same thing happening over in John 11:44 at the resurrection of Lazarus. In English it says, "And he who had died came out," but in Greek it says "the dead came out."
This was a particularly cruel way to speak of someone who has departed this life. How it must have cut this poor mother to the heart. It's as though, after his last breath, her son's name and his very personality had been erased from the earth, and he was now spoken of only as "the dead."
At Lazarus' tomb, you remember, Jesus would have none of this anonymity. He called out, "Lazarus, come forth!" One of the most comforting Bible truths, and I hope we don't take it for granted, is that everyone of those who have died is clearly remembered, by name, by the One whose voice will raise them to life.
At this point, the procession following Jesus comes to a halt, and probably the people in front back away a few paces. Because now that this young man lying in his open coffin has departed this life, he has become immediately unclean. In the laws of Moses (and these were, of course, excellent regulations to protect a nation from terrible epidemics) it says that anyone who has touched a dead body is to be unclean for seven days, and this probably includes his mother. What a cruel twist . . . the boy whom she loved to hug is now untouchable.
Two processions meet at the city gates. But as we know, one of these processions isn't an ordinary one. The focus of one procession is the body of a son who has died. But the focus of the other procession is a Son (with a capital "S") who has the power to give life.
And while His followers back fastidiously away, watch what Jesus does.
Verse 13: When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”
Let's pause for a moment in case you want to note down the first of our two sermon points. Here the first one.
Why should I make sure I'm a part of Jesus' procession? Because Jesus is the only one who can tell a grieving mother not to weep.
Every pastor learns early in the ministry that there are certain things you simply do not say to someone who is grieving. In fact, articles and books have been written on that topic. When we are with someone who is grieving, it's tempting to rush in with words which will try to explain, try to make things make sense.
You see, the human mind was not designed to be comfortable with the appalling, unnatural fact of death. So unless we firmly button our lips, we feel we need to rush in and suggest explanations, as though logical propositions lessen the grief. They don't. So don't try.
So what do you say? A website I looked at this week mentioned some of the “don’t say this” comments, dealing specifically with the death of a baby. Then the website went on to say this:
“After reading the above list you may be wondering what there is left to say that won't offend. The truth is, if you support them and feel for their loss, you can give them sympathy without offering explanations, judgments, opinions or comments. Just say the truth: that you are sorry for their loss, that you are sorry that they have to go through this.”
http://www.babyandinfantloss.com/for-family-and-friends/what-not-to-say.html
Even "Don't cry" is a wrong thing to say – except when one Man says it. When Jesus told this mother not to weep, He did not mean that grief was wrong. He was not advocating some kind of stoic philosophy which urges us to rise above our emotions. On the contrary, Jesus Himself will weep several times during His ministry. He will weep at Lazarus' tomb. He will weep over the unrepentant city of Jerusalem.
No, Jesus told this grieving mother not to weep because He knew that before she had taken another five breaths, her heart-wrenching wails would turn to incredulous screams of joy. It's like He was saying to her, "Save your tears. You might need them for your joyful sobs."
So now these two processions have met at the gates of Nain, one headed by a son who has died, the other by a Son who will die, but whose death will give Him the right to do what He is about to do.
Watch what happens next.
Verse 14: Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”
Why should I make sure I'm a part of Jesus' procession? Not only because Jesus is the only one who can tell a grieving mother not to weep, but because Jesus is the only one who with His voice can change death into life.
Notice several incredible things Jesus does. First, He touches the coffin. This shows that He is not afraid of death and its uncleanness.
Jesus is the one who has the greatest right and the greatest authority to repeat these words from John Donne’s defiant sonnet:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe, . . .
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
That's what Jesus did with His death. He murdered death.
Notice what else He did – in this case, what He said:
Verse 14: Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”
Notice that Jesus did not say, “Tethnekos, arise.” “Dead, arise." Instead, Jesus gave this boy back the dignity of being a human being, and called him "Young man."
Next He said, literally in the Greek, “To you I say.” It's like He was saying, "Young man. You. I'm talking to you. Yes, you! Get up!"
With something like that happen at the great last-day resurrection? Will Jesus, through some amazing divine ability, be able, in a fairly short space of time, to call us each by name from our graves, speak specifically to each of us as He reunites mothers with sons, and daughters with fathers? Maybe so.
Maybe the voice which called "Lazarus, come forth," and "Young man, I say to you, arise," will – as with His magnificent angelic procession He glides above dry South Dakota prairie grass – call out "Henry Schurch, June Schurch, I say to you, arise."
Let's take a look at another interesting fact. Look at verse 15.
Verse 15: So he who was dead sat up and began to speak . . . .
Isn't that interesting? If you think back to Jesus' other resurrections, and even beyond that to the other times in other parts of the Bible when human beings came back to life, you get absolutely no sense that there's any blinking, no gazing around in astonishment, no "Where am I? What happened?" And certainly no convalescent period, no gradual regaining of strength.
In 2 Kings 4, when Elisha raises a little child to life, the child sneezes seven times, and then presumably ran off and started doing kid things again. And in our very next chapter, Luke 8, when Jesus resurrected Jairus’ daughter, it says that she immediately got up, and Jesus quickly commanded that they give her something to eat. Before her illness she had probably been a normal, active 12-year-old, and when she came to consciousness again – perfectly healthy and ravenously hungry – she probably thought to herself, "What am I doing down here on the floor? And why are all these people looking at me so strangely? When’s supper?"
So here at the gates of Nain, Jesus commands the young man back to life, and the young man immediately begins to speak. Maybe his death had been from a work-related injury, and maybe he'd been carrying on a conversation with a fellow worker at that moment. And now, back to life again, maybe he picks up the thread of his thoughts as though there hadn't been a break. Or maybe he's a very perceptive young man, and as he came to life he noticed his mother's tears, then started asking her what was the matter.
If we could just realize, and remember, and keep remembering just how totally Jesus has everything under control. He does not control our wills, but with our permission He sends His Holy Spirit to write His law of love within us so that we will grow to be more and more like him.
So what should you and I do, now that we have heard this story again?
I think we should remember what happened to that funeral procession. When Jesus approached, and when He gave back the gift of life to that young man, He changed that procession’s direction. Before He arrived, that mother was following her son out of the city on whose streets he had played, and from whose alleys she had called him home to supper. And now they were taking her boy out to those cut-stone graves, where it was bleak and lonely, and he would never come home again.
But when Jesus arrived, He turned that funeral procession into a triumphant parade, headed back into town. Maybe the young man stayed up there on his former coffin, riding along, waving and smiling, being jounced joyfully by his pallbearers.
How do we join Jesus' procession? How do we come close to Him? Maybe it's something like what people had to do who wanted to be close to the president on Wednesday. They had to make some serious commitments – and of course financial commitments -- in order to draw close to him.
And maybe (and actually, there's no "maybe" about it), in order to join Jesus' campaign procession, you and I need to make the most serious campaign donation of all – ourselves. And when we decide to become totally His, along with our hearts will come our lives, our time, our talents, even our treasure.
How about you? Tomorrow is Mother's Day, that day which celebrates the women in our lives who work so hard and sacrifice so selflessly to nourish and guide us. We owe them devotion, and we owe at least as much love and fidelity and respect and follow-through to the One who gave us life in the beginning, and who holds in His hands the keys to eternal life.
Will you do that this morning? Will you say, "Lord Jesus, I want to follow You, march with You in Your happy procession this coming week?"
YOU CAN TRUST THE SINGER
Expository Sermon on Zephaniah
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 5/5/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles for a few minutes to Zephaniah chapter 1.
As you probably know, this week marked the one-year anniversary of the Navy SEALs' raid which put an end to the life of Osama bin Laden. Those who prepared this raid, and those who approved it, shared the same goal – to make the world a safer place.
The bearded man who authorized the Twin Towers horror, and who laughed about it afterward, was – we learned this week –planning more attacks against Americans, including a special strike team which was to have been stationed at the very Afghanistan airport where President Obama landed during his visit there this week. If such a team had been in place, their orders would have been to try to blow up the president’s plane if they ever caught sight of it.
As you know, America is perceived in different ways by different people. Back in the 1980s, when I was pastoring another church, the news began to mention references to Palestinian terrorists. One Sabbath morning, to make some point or other during a sermon, I actually used that phrase – "Palestinian terrorists."
As I was shaking hands at the door afterward, a young, slim, dark-haired lady approached me with an absolutely unsmiling face, and asked talk to me. So we went into a room, and her eyes were like two gun barrels pointed at me. She was polite, but in almost hissing voice she asked me why I had said what I had about Palestinian terrorists. It turns out that she herself was from the Middle East, and she told me icily, "The CIA is the worst terrorist organization of them all!"
I don't know where this lady is today, or whether she would still hold to that view with the same intensity, but she was dead serious. She had seen – or heard of – things being done by these representatives of America, maybe done to this lady's relatives or close friends, things which the average American didn’t realize the CIA would ever do.
People could probably debate just how important it is for America to be perceived correctly by the rest of the world. But the Bible makes it very clear that there should be absolutely no debate about how important it is to get a completely correct view of God.
Because God is so often misunderstood. And the two main reasons He is often misunderstood is that some people read the Bible in little bits and pieces. Others don't read it at all but depend on other people to tell them what it says and what it means. As a pastor I have seen too many people who have an incomplete view of God.
Some think He is inexplicably uncaring or cruel or vengeful, and they turn away from Him. Others believe that since God is love, He will eventually save everyone.
It's very important to get this right, of course. Nowadays, with Facebook and texting and tweeting, it's chillingly easy to carry on a reputation-bashing campaign against anyone, even the most blameless person. It's happening all the time, from top-level politicians to kids in school.
And it's bad enough to smear fellow human beings, but fellow human beings do not hold the safety and happiness of the universe in their control. When an incomplete or distorted picture of God is the one people see, they won't be able to take the proper steps to connect with Him. As I mentioned, if I think like this I’ll either turn my back on Him, or I will treat Him like a “Santa Claus” God, who exists merely to hand out good things from His gift bag, and otherwise doesn't really care about, and doesn’t hold me accountable for, what I get myself into and how I hurt those in my life.
That's where the book of Zephaniah is such a great help. It's only three chapters long, but it summarizes everything we need to know about God so we can get ready for a happy and emotionally healthy relationship with Him.
I believe that because of Zephaniah, you and I can go from this room understanding God more completely – and loving Him more deeply. Let me show you what I mean.
Zephaniah 1:1 – 6 [NKJV]: The word of the Lord which came to Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hezekiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah. “I will utterly consume everything From the face of the land,” Says the Lord; “I will consume man and beast; I will consume the birds of the heavens, The fish of the sea, And the stumbling blocks along with the wicked. I will cut off man from the face of the land,” Says the Lord. “I will stretch out My hand against Judah, And against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. I will cut off every trace of Baal from this place, The names of the idolatrous priests with the pagan priests— Those who worship the host of heaven on the housetops; Those who worship and swear oaths by the Lord, But who also swear by Milcom; Those who have turned back from following the Lord, And have not sought the Lord, nor inquired of Him.”
By now it should be fairly clear what is the first truth Zephaniah teaches us about God (this is Sermon Point One in case you’re taking notes):
God despises idolatry.
This is incredibly good news.
Because since you and I never lived back in the 650s BC as Zephaniah and King Josiah did, we probably will never truly understand what really went on in an idol –worshipping culture. It was far more than just bending your knee to a stone image.
In some versions of idolatry which the Jews practiced, you chose one of your children and sacrificed him or her to the heathen god. In other idolatries, part of your worship was becoming physically intimate with the priest or priestess at the local shrine. This meant that you returned home a carrier of the town’s most dreadful diseases, which you later passed on to your wife, and to any children she might later bear to you.
You see, idolatry at its root gives the worshiper permission to do whatever he or she wants to do. If human beings create their own gods, the morals of those gods rise no higher than those gods’ creators. The true God wants our worship, not because He is selfish, but because He knows that His ways have the best and purest influence on us. He will teach us to be unselfish, which is the exact opposite of idolatry.
God despises idolatry. And He despises modern idolatries too – anything or anyone we devote more time and energy and dollars than we do to His soul-saving agenda.
Now let's take a look at the second truth Zephaniah teaches about God.
Verses 14 – 18: The great day of the Lord is near; It is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter; There the mighty men shall cry out. That day is a day of wrath, A day of trouble and distress, A day of devastation and desolation, A day of darkness and gloominess, A day of clouds and thick darkness, A day of trumpet and alarm Against the fortified cities And against the high towers. “I will bring distress upon men, And they shall walk like blind men, Because they have sinned against the Lord; Their blood shall be poured out like dust, And their flesh like refuse.” Neither their silver nor their gold Shall be able to deliver them In the day of the Lord’s wrath; But the whole land shall be devoured By the fire of His jealousy, For He will make speedy riddance Of all those who dwell in the land.
If Zephaniah’s first truth about God is that He despises idolatry, the second truth is that God will judge the earth.
This is more incredibly good news. Finally, the true truth will come out about all evil which has been done, and who all were responsible for it.
Those of us who have been Adventists for a while, and have gotten into the habit of scanning the news for the signs of the times, we look at each other and wonder just how long the festering crust of this wobbling old globe can last.
And knowing that there will come a day when all we own or drive or play as an instrument or read or watch will become charcoal or molten plastic or bubbling, sputtering slags of metal, and eventually smoke and vapor – if we knew this and nothing else about God, we would have every right to be frightened and dismayed. Because God is definitely going to clean things up.
But let's hurry on to Zephaniah’s third truth.
Zephaniah 2:3: Seek the Lord, all you meek of the earth, Who have upheld His justice. Seek righteousness, seek humility. It may be that you will be hidden In the day of the Lord’s anger.
If Zephaniah’s first truth about God is that He despises idolatry, and the second truth is that God will judge the earth, Zephaniah’s third truth is that during those final horrors God will protect the meek who seek Him.
This of course is good news as well.
But what's so great about the meek? Why will they "inherit the earth," as Jesus asserts in Beatitude Number Three? Well, the meek are not satanically proud, nor are they satanically selfish. The meek are servants – just as God is a servant and His Son is a servant. The meek would never assume – as Lucifer did – that they know better than God, that they can prescribe how God should handle things.
The rest of the Bible – including the Gospels and Paul's writings – gives more details about how to seek God, and how to take advantage of Jesus' wonderful substitutionary sacrifice for us.
But let's take a look at one more important Zephaniah truth. Maybe this is the most important of all, because we have just read some unsettling things about the Almighty. Remember that, as a called prophet of God, Zephaniah's duty was to cry words from the heart of God to the people. He was to be God's voice, uttering God's warnings.
But Zephaniah’s final truth gives us an incredibly precious glimpse into the heart of our Creator.
Zephaniah 3:14 – 17: Sing, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your judgments, He has cast out your enemy. The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; You shall see disaster no more. In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: “Do not fear; Zion, let not your hands be weak. The Lord your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”
Isn’t that really, eternally, the best news of all?
Did your mom ever sing to you when you were a kid? I don't remember my mom ever singing to me, because she didn't think her voice was that great. Yet she must have sung to me, because I know "Rock-a-bye Baby," and "Lullaby, and Good Night, with your blue eyes closed tight." I remember those songs, from before I went to school. So Mom must have sung them to us.
Later, Mom didn't so much sing to us as talk to us, and read to us. She would make up funny words to say to us, and she would tickle us once in a while.
And God sings, coos, croons to us. That’s truth four.
God will be so happy to be with us that He will sing to us.
True, He despises idolatry with the same vicious hatred my mother would despise anything that could hurt her four kids. True, He will destroy every wicked thing and unrepentant wicked person on this planet, just as my mother would take a garden hoe to any snake she even remotely suspected of being hurtful. Mom knew that it was not only her motherly duty but her fiercest desire to protect us from danger, and at night in our safe, cozy farmhouse, she would show her delight in us – maybe not so much with singing – but with her tender speaking voice.
And according to Zephaniah, that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about our Heavenly Parent, the one Jesus called “Father” at least 200 times in the four Gospels. You can trust the Singer who tenderly croons to you, because He loves you.
Doesn't that make you love Him even more?
FOLLOW THE BLOOD
Communion Sermonette
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 04/28/12
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
I was a college student back when the Watergate scandal was happening. During that time I was working a fulltime night shift six nights a week, and during the daytime I was attending college nearly fulltime. So I was often barely awake, and in absolutely no mental condition to add to my school studies the task of trying to keep track of Watergate’s twisting trail of intrigue. Some afternoons in the student union lounge I did watch the Watergate hearings, and I remember folksy old Sam Irvin questioning a very pale John Dean.
But at least one memorable phrase has come out of that era, and word has it that the “All the President’s Men” movie scriptwriters made it up. It’s the phrase “Follow the money.” In other words, the most dependable travel-route through Watergate's tangled maze to its instigators was to try to figure out where the money had come from and where it had gone.
The plan of salvation can sometimes be a puzzle also – but a happy, encouraging puzzle rather than a demoralizing one. Theologians have argued for centuries about salvation’s details, but many have discovered that it can be made far more simple – though no less wonderful – by following the blood.
So for the next few minutes, let's follow the blood.
The first time we see blood in the Bible we don't really see it – we assume it. One twilight in Eden, His heart hurting but filled with love, God went calling for His human children who had decided to distrust their Creator and believe a talking serpent’s lies.
He finally found them, ashamed and shivering, trying to cover their bodies with leaves. And that was when the first blood stained the meadow grass of Eden, because God made Adam and Eve skins for their covering. Not woven cotton, not Spanish moss, but skins – skins from animals, maybe lambs – who had died for them as a substitute, died for them on the very day they ate of the fruit so that they wouldn’t have to die, and who pointed forward to the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world.
It's easy to follow the trail of blood from there. To keep alive the dreadful danger of the ultimate selfishness which forgets its Creator, God commanded His children and their descendents to portray this horror again and again through animal sacrifice until Eve’s Descendent, the Lamb of God, would come to bruise the serpent's head.
And, as if to prove sin's ugliness, as if to prove how selfishness can brutally possess a soul who refuses the shed blood, Eve’s firstborn son Cain insisted that the sacrifice of his fruits and vegetables was just as good. And when God said no, Cain refused to allow himself to be redeemed by blood, and instead spilled his brother's. And that's when we saw how very deadly this “I’ll do it my way” selfishness can become.
Later we see the blood of the ram which symbolized Isaac's redemption. And still later in Egypt, the Passover lamb’s blood was splashed on the door posts of slaves who believed.
Once across the Red Sea and the into the wilderness, God's rescued people erected their tents around a portable sanctuary. This beautiful, carefully-made tent was not to be a museum, not a shrine at which to meditate, not a self-improvement university, but a place to bring blood. Each Israelite family confessed their sins, and then the head of the household would lead a lamb to the courtyard gate, and confess those sins over the head of that lamb, and again blood would stain the ground.
Then in their minds, that little family would follow the blood as the priest carried some of it right directly into the sanctuary, symbolically bringing the family's confessed sins to God. The lesson was clear – when you discover how sinful you are, you don't have to punish yourself, you don't have to run away in despair. Instead, you can confess your sins confidently to God, no matter what those sins are, because only He can forgive them, and He does this gladly and immediately, with joyful relief.
Blood was used in other ways as well. When a priest was ordained and consecrated to God's service, blood was touched to his toe and his thumb and his earlobe to symbolize his holy responsibilities. When a leper was cured of his disease, the priest applied blood to symbolize his cleansing.
And then, one Passover evening in Jerusalem, the blood took on a wonderful new meaning. It's a meaning that no one could have really, fully understood – or dared believe – until then. Jesus and His disciples were celebrating Passover in that upstairs room. The lamb had been killed, just as lambs had been killed for centuries. The ceremonial blood has been splashed upon the doorframe, just as had been done by these men’s fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers for 1500 years.
But then Jesus held up a cup filled with the juice of the grape. "This is My blood," He told His friends. "Drink of it, all of you." Suddenly they remembered what He had said back in John chapter 6: “Then Jesus said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.’” (John 6:53-54)
This is so astonishing that it probably takes a lifetime to understand. Less than 12 hours later, Jesus the Lamb of God would offer His life – and spill His blood – as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. But this Last Supper service, this holy Communion, would prove to sorry sinners from then on that the Savior who shoulders the weight of our sin, and knows our inner ugliness far better than we, still wants to be one with us. "Take, eat," He said. "This is My body. This is My blood."
Matthew 26:27 – 29 [NKJV]: Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.”
Do you see what this means? It means that our Creator’s love for us will never dim, no matter what. Even though our sins forced Him to use the death of lambs as an object lesson to show how we may be saved, and even though He Himself finally became the slaughtered Lamb of God, none of this vile wretchedness has turned Him from us in disgust. His love is still so strong that, just a few hours before our sins would nail Him to the cross, He promised that one day – if we wanted – we could follow His blood all the way to the place where we could finally lift a happy cup with Him in heaven when all the horror was over, as though we had always been the best of friends.
That is just a tiny bit of what we are celebrating this morning. We are celebrating the love of our eternal Friend. And with awe and humility and reverence, scarcely daring to believe, we are accepting His love for us and pledging ours to Him.
PRAYERMASTERS – DAVID:
GOD’S FAVORITE PRAYER PARTNER
Expository Sermon on 2 Samuel 7
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 4/21/2012]
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles again to 2 Samuel chapter 7.
This is another sermon in the series I'm calling "Prayermasters." I thought it might be a good idea to make an up-close study of some of the Bible people whose prayers really moved God. Maybe as we study their lives, and those prayers, we can find out how better to pray ourselves.
I think I must've been maybe eight or nine years old. Both my seven-year-old sister and I had been taking piano lessons for a couple of years from the same woman. And one day she came to the same conclusion to which every other piano teacher of siblings comes – little Maylan and little Onilee should perform a piano duet at an upcoming talent show at the Adventist academy.
To me, piano lessons were already the grimmest, grayest part of the week, both the practices and the actual lessons themselves. I solved the grimness of the practices by the clever decision to simply not practice. This, of course, made the lesson time even grimmer and grayer, since the teacher always made me sludge methodically through the piece I should have perfected by now, noting each of my mistakes in a pained voice. The only benefit that the teacher ever gained from my piano lessons was her weekly dollar. I think that she appreciated, and needed, that dollar, so she didn’t put much pressure on Mom to make me practice.
Therefore, I guess you could consider her either brave or foolhardy for harnessing me to my sister for a talent show piano duet. I remember actually practicing for this, pounding my way through the bass clef, not understanding the music’s inner meaning at all, because of course playing the melody over there on the other end of the piano bench.
When we actually put the two parts together, however, I remember being amazed at how beautiful the piece was. I had to look sharp, of course, to dodge my sister's left elbow and left little finger. And on the day of the talent show, I was startled by the news that we would have to dress up. This meant that I was crammed into black pants and a stiff white shirt tightly buttoned at the neck, and a little black bowtie was clipped to my collar. My sister wore a frilly dress and impossibly shiny black shoes.
This formal costume, along with a bright spotlight, took quite a bit of the spunk out of our performance, so it was a rather meek and watery duet which my sister partner and I presented for the crowd's listening pleasure. They applauded us with great enthusiasm, but I don't remember winning a prize, and would have been astounded if we had.
This week as I was studying the life of David, it struck me that David was a partner too—not a piano partner, because he played a portable harp, and that was definitely a one-person instrument.
No, David was probably one of God's favorite "prayer partners." You might say, "Wait a minute. David was a prayer partner with God? I thought a prayer partner was when two human beings got together and prayed to God." That's true, of course, but another way of looking at it is that the more closely we partner with God in His plans, the more effective we can be as pray-ers.
I think it's a good thing to have human prayer partners. Wednesday evenings right here in the sanctuary, right up close to the front, a number of pray-ers meet at 7:30. Some of them have already been praying during the last part of the 6 PM Bible study which come just before. You are invited to either of these two sessions—or both, as some make a habit of doing. Wednesday nights, 6 p.m., with a light supper, and then 7:30.
These Wednesday night prayer meeting attenders aren't teamed up in twos, but we are all gathering together, often with prayer notebooks, spending a good bit of time mentioning answered prayers and giving thank-you prayers for these, and then spending some more time praying for requests. And we all do hope and pray that our prayers, partnering with God's wishes, can give Him greater permission to work miracles as they are needed. And we’ve seen those answers come.
As I mentioned last week, the Bible people we name our kids after are most often those who really knew how to partner with God in prayer. And just knowing David – from all the stories about him, and from all those songs he wrote – we can tell that God had a special place in His heart for this man.
I think if you were to look through the entire Bible, you would probably never find a chapter as amazing as 2 Samuel 7. I'm sure that God Himself looks on this chapter as an especially happy one. Because in this chapter, we see the God of Heaven having an easy, familiar conversation with a trusted, long-time friend, and we see the human being responding in the same way.
God and David had partnered many times already, working together to create a happy and peaceful nation. David wasn't perfect, and when he sinned, God held him strictly accountable because of the highly visible position he held. But here in this chapter we see directly into the hearts of both God and David, and we see how close their friendship was.
And I believe that as you and I look ahead into this coming week, I think we need to partner more closely with God in His wise and wonderful plans. And I think that as we look at what happened in this chapter, we can discover how to become God's favorite prayer partners too. Let's see if we can discover what we need to do to make this happen.
2 Samuel 7:1 – 2 [NKJV] Now it came to pass when the king was dwelling in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies all around, that the king said to Nathan the prophet, “See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells inside tent curtains.”
I believe that these verses show David's first step to becoming probably God's favorite prayer partner aside from Jesus. If you're taking sermon notes, here comes Point One.
I believe that the first step to becoming a close prayer partner of God is this: As God has done for you, devote your energies totally to Him.
If you look back along David's dramatic life, you definitely see a full partnership with God. David was a shepherd, and even out there on the twilight hillside he was thinking about God, and writing Psalm 19 which talks about the heavens declaring the glory of God and the firmament showing His handiwork.
David's father sends him to the battlefield with care packages for his brothers, and David stands up before the king and then before the enemy giant, declaring firmly that he will defeat that giant through God's power. Samuel comes along to anoint one of Jesse's sons as king, and the Lord directs him to David, the youngest. All the way along, God is watching out for David, and David returns the favor by enhancing God's reputation by giving God the credit. God poured immense energy into David's adventures, and David used that energy for God's glory.
And David took this respect for God to amazing levels. Even though twice, King Saul tried to pin David to the wall with a javelin, and later pursued David with his troops, David refuses to even invoke the "stand your ground" concept. However evil King Saul has become, he is the Lord's anointed, and David patiently waits for the Lord to deal with him.
Every once in a while, and this comes up quite often, you hear that certain famous secular singers or rappers grew up as Christians. The church nurtured them, and provided them performance opportunities, but as soon as fame and fortune beckoned, the Christian nametag was ripped off, crumpled up, and tossed into the nearest wastebasket, and the songs changed to selfish, me-first, lust-pandering songs, or depressed and angry ones. All that energy these performers had previously devoted to gospel music was now channeled in the opposite direction.
Okay, what does this have to do with me? What would it look like in my life if I began to devote more of my energies in God's direction as David did?
Well first, I would need to get a pair of David's glasses and put them on. Some people look at life through rose-colored glasses, others through discouragement-colored glasses, but David looked at life through God-colored glasses. Wherever David looked, he tried to spot God at work, or places where God needed to be allowed to work. The Psalms he wrote show just how much he wrestled with a godless world, and sometimes he wrestled with the God from whom that world had wandered. Aside from a few painful and very notorious lapses, David devoted his energy to God's plans.
So like David, I need to keep my eyes moving back and forth from the Bible page to what is happening around me. I need to be ready to go to work for God. I need to get into the habit of saying "yes" when opportunities to serve him arise. (Notice how subtly I inserted that Nominating Committee commercial?)
But I'm really serious. I grew up in a home where my parents were not Adventists until I was in my late teens, and then they rarely attended church. I think I am still in the church because my parents taught me to say yes when the church needed help. Week after week I attended that little congregation of 15 or 20 people, where I was the only person my age, and where there was never any earliteen class or youth class. But the dear church members cajoled me into playing the piano, or teaching the adult Sabbath school lesson. They made sure that I was needed, and they let me know that.
So, whether you’re responding to a nominating committee call or something else, ask the Lord to guide you into areas of service for Him which fit the talents He has given you. And don't be afraid to let Him stretch you a bit by pushing you beyond your comfort zone.
Now let's look at another reason David became God's favorite prayer partner.
Verses 1 – 3: Now it came to pass when the king was dwelling in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies all around, that the king said to Nathan the prophet, “See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells inside tent curtains.” Then Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you.”
Did you notice something interesting about what we've just read? Nathan doesn't let David finish his thought. David is about to say, "Nathan, I want to build a house for God."
But Nathan knows where David is going with his thought, and jumps ahead and agrees with him. And I think this is really significant. In fact I think this is the second reason David was such a beloved partner in God's plans.
I believe that the first step to becoming a close prayer partner of God is to remember that, as God has done for you and me, we should devote our energies totally to Him. And the second step is that, as God has done for you and me, we should be inspirers rather than dictators.
Think how differently David could have approached this whole subject. He calls for Nathan. Nathan comes into his presence. David is holding a scroll. "Nathan," he says, "I'm going to build a house for God. Here's a rough sketch of the plans. Get hold of an architect to tighten them up, and report back to me. You're dismissed."
But all through his popular rule, David never operated that way. Several months back I was reading through David's life story, and David was an inspirer. He might plan big plans, but rather than laying them out with a royal decree, he travels to different areas of his kingdom, gets together with the leaders, and says, "How would it be if we did this or that?" And immediately, people are inspired.
You see, David may have been the king, but he knew – probably instinctively – that a king with halfhearted followers is not going to accomplish much. So he allowed his subjects to catch a vision to do something great for God, and the people followed him with joy.
Again, what does this have to do with me? What's it going to look like if I change my ways to be more like David in this area? Well, this means that in my efforts to interest people in becoming inspired to follow God, I need to be an inspirer rather than a dictator.
Just yesterday I heard a radio interview with a female journalist for Vogue magazine who, a little over a year ago, had interviewed Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Bashar’s wife Asma is a beautiful woman and dresses stylishly, so they sent this journalist to interview her. This was just before the Syrian uprising, and neither Vogue nor the journalist suspected the tragedies that would follow.
Vogue ran the article, along with pictures, but once the atrocities began, they removed the article from their website. The reason the radio interviewer was talking to the journalist about this was that recently the wives of a couple of world leaders created a YouTube video which addresses Asma Assad directly, urging her to use her influence over her husband to stop what he is doing against the Syrian protesters.
The radio interviewer asked the journalist if she thought this video would change Asma’s mind. The journalist said very firmly, "She surfs the web. She’s seen it. But these people [speaking of the Assads] are just pretending that nothing is happening.”
So what's it going to look like for me to stay away from being a spiritual dictator, and instead become more of an inspirer?
Have you ever heard the phrase "straight testimony"? As in, "Someone needs to give that person a straight testimony"? Over the three decades I've been a pastor, I occasionally receive printed material from offshoot movements who seem to be insisting that all pastors and other church leaders should go around giving the "straight testimony" to people who need it, sort of a brutal, no-holds-barred rebuke to shape up and follow God’s laws.
There is a time, of course, for speaking emphatically against evil, but the only time Jesus seemed feel the need to give a “straight testimony" was to the spiritual dictators of His day, the Pharisees. And they were the ones who seem to do little else but go around giving “straight testimonies” to people about the nitpicking rabbi-made regulations they were breaking.
One of the delightful qualities of our own congregation is how mellow people are. People who aren't acquainted with our church board stare at me disbelievingly when I say that board meetings are fun. This past Monday night we had our first nominating committee meeting, and nominating committee is fun. Not long ago we had a church business session which introduced our Capital Improvement Projects, and that was a good-natured and inspiring meeting as well. Somehow, this congregation has managed to avoid putting dictators into office, choosing inspirers instead. (Maybe we don't have any dictators at all.) Can you imagine how pleasant this makes a pastor's life?
Back in the days when you would hear the "straight testimony" phrase, part of this stemmed from the dread that the individual might feel about not informing someone of the truth, and later possibly being held accountable for this. An Ezekiel passage was quoted to support this principle – but this idea has been badly misused. I've heard stories of people who went over and desperately dumped on their neighbor about the Sabbath, for example, and lost a friend while leaving a bad taste about God in that potential friend’s mind. Yet the “dumper” grimly said to himself or herself, "There. I've cleared my soul. Now they know the truth, and it's up to them."
That is so not the way to do it. That is so not the way, God does it, or Jesus did it. Jesus won hearts by showing the love of God rather than threatening the vengeance of God. For God so loved the world – not "God so threatened the world" -- that He sent His Son to die for us. True, there will be eternal death just as surely as there will be eternal life, but Jesus told stories rather than thundering threats, and when He needed to talk about those stark realities He spoke with tears in His voice.
And God Himself – as David knew very well – is not a dictator but an inspirer. If anyone in the universe had the right to dictate to us, it would be God. But God doesn't work that way. Adam and Eve sin – and God doesn't thunder threats but has a quiet talk in the Eden evening, and then provides a substitute sacrifice for His children. And the stories go on and on. For 120 long years, Noah preached to an increasingly vicious and vile generation. Later God sends prophet after prophet after prophet to His idolatrous people using every persuasion, pleading, or exhortation possible before finally allowing them to be taken captive.
You see, we need to remember that the Holy Spirit is God's true salesman. Nothing you or I say in defense of God will make one bit of difference unless the Holy Spirit softens the heart, and that heart has opened. So this takes a lot of pressure off me, pressure I should not try to take control of again.
In fact, I think this leads us directly into the final step David took, and God took, to make them such effective prayer partners.
This is where we actually hear them in conversation with each other. True, God speaks to David through the prophet Nathan, and then David speaks to God without probably getting any audible response. But notice what happens. Remember, Nathan has just urged David to go ahead and build God a temple. But God immediately sends a different message to Nathan that very night.
And let's listen to the gentle, genial, best-friend tones of what God has to say.
Verses 4 – 7: But it happened that night that the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying, “Go and tell My servant David, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Would you build a house for Me to dwell in? For I have not dwelt in a house since the time that I brought the children of Israel up from Egypt, even to this day, but have moved about in a tent and in a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about with all the children of Israel, have I ever spoken a word to anyone from the tribes of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd My people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built Me a house of cedar?’ ” ’
Do you see what God is doing? In a gracious, gentlemanly way He is taking the pressure off David. David is so conscientious that, now that his enemies have backed off, he feels he wants to do something significant for God.
Later on, we find out the real reason why God refuses to let David build the ark – David is a man of blood. But God does not mention this at all in the conversation. If God had been a dictator, He could have simply had Nathan give David the "straight testimony" about this. But you see, God is tenderhearted, and into this tender situation, with David's heart aglow with zeal, God is not going to cause hurt like that.
Instead, what He does do in the next few verses is to turn the tables on David. "David," He says, "you want to build Me a house – but I'm going to build you a house.” What He's saying is that David will be the head of a long dynasty of kings, and that David's own son will build the temple which David has been planning so fondly.
Right now, before we listen to parts of David's response, let me insert Point Three.
I believe that David’s first step to becoming a close prayer partner of God is to remember that, as God has done for you and me, we should devote our energies totally to Him. And like God, we should be inspirers rather than dictators. And David’s third step to becoming God’s close prayer partner is that, as God has done for us, we need to take time to understand His heart, and share our hearts with Him.
Let’s listen as David does this. And let's listen carefully, because in the next few seconds we will be hearing a heart which God claimed in 1 Samuel 13:14 was "after His own heart." David’s heart throbbed in unison with God's heart. Let’s listen to it beat.
Verses 17 – 22: According to all these words and according to all this vision, so Nathan spoke to David. Then King David went in and sat before the Lord; and he said: “Who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house, that You have brought me this far? And yet this was a small thing in Your sight, O Lord God; and You have also spoken of Your servant’s house for a great while to come. Is this the manner of man, O Lord God? Now what more can David say to You? For You, Lord God, know Your servant. For Your word’s sake, and according to Your own heart, You have done all these great things, to make Your servant know them. Therefore You are great, O Lord God. For there is none like You, nor is there any God besides You, according to all that we have heard with our ears.
Isn't that wonderful? Here is someone who is so in tune with God that he had the highest hopes of building a wonderful dwelling for the ark of the covenant. Yet when God denies David's request, David’s devotion does not flicker in the least. Instead, he reaffirms his admiration, gratitude, and love for the one whom he once sang about as his Shepherd.
So what do I need to do to fulfill this last step, this step to strive to understand God's heart and share my own with Him? I need to do what David describes in Psalm 40:8: “I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart.” The more I allow God’s word into my heart, by reading it and allowing the Holy Spirit to infuse it into my nature, the more natural and delightful will be my true prayer partnership with God, because the better I will be able to hear the beating of His great heart. And the more beautiful will be the duets of love we play together.
PRAYERMASTERS -- SAMUEL
Expository Sermon on 1 Samuel 7
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 4/14/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bible to First Samuel chapter 7.
While you're turning there, just a note to let you know that we are back into our "Prayermasters" sermon series, as we look at the prayer habits of several Bible people who really knew how to pray. So far we have featured Jesus, then Jacob, then Moses, and this morning we’ll be looking at an incident in Samuel's life. Incidentally, you can always go back to the sermon web page on our church website, and either read or listen to the earlier messages in this series.
Anybody who has gotten married, especially to someone who grew up in a different part of the country, or even of the world, knows that there are several adjustments that need to be made. And that's because each family has its own traditions. And it always comes as a slight shock to discover that other people, just as smart as you are, do things totally differently.
For example, when I was a kid, our family always ate melons slices sprinkled with salt. No matter what kind of melons –watermelon, cantaloupe (which we called "muskmelon"), honeydew melons – any kind of melon we were served, we always sprinkled salt on it. Sliced tomatoes, on the other hand, we always sprinkled with sugar.
Even though in my personal opinion the humble green bean tasted best right off the vine, once those beans were taken hostage by my mom, they were always boiled to within an inch of their life, and then, as they lay limp and helpless on the plate, you smothered them in ketchup. And salt. The same thing happened to peas.
The only lettuce I liked in salads was iceberg lettuce. Mom grew leaf lettuce in the garden, but I suspected it of being a weed in disguise. I wanted my lettuce crunchy, and I wanted it anointed with Dorothy Lynch salad dressing. And maybe some salt.
The preparation of fried eggs differed according to the desires of the individual. I preferred mine hard-fried, or as we kids called it, "poked out." To me, in order to manfully hold its place in a fried egg sandwich, a fried egg needed to become pretty much a white-and-yellow slab of rubber. I got pretty good at making eggs that way.
When I married Shelley, I discovered that she prepared food almost totally different than the way my mom prepared it. As it happened, Shelley fixed food that was healthier, and a whole lot tastier, because my mother did not loved to cook. She loved us, and cooked our food just the way we were used to, and we loved it. So even though Shelley had to gentle me into quite a few changes like that, and even though I grumpily resisted them from time to time – I'm healthier now than I ever would have been if I hadn't changed.
That's kind of like what First Samuel 7 is going to teach us this morning. Just as there are healthy ways to eat and less healthy ways to eat, there is God's way of doing things versus other ways of doing things.
Take the matter of a spiritual revival, for example. That's what this chapter is going to be talking about. Probably pretty much all of us have been through some kind of revival meeting, whether it's an evangelistic series or an Academy week of prayer.
But how long such a revival lasts depends on whether or not we follow God's way of doing it and praying for it. As you’ll see, real revival is far more than a few moments of deep emotion, or some kind of mountaintop experience you later descend from with a crash.
I think that this chapter can be Samuel’s "prayer guide" for you and me – if we feel the need of a personal revival – or for someone else to whom we’re hoping this will happen.
Because any longlasting revival is of course thoroughly bathed in prayer. Samuel was a true “prayermaster.” He'd probably been praying for revival for many years. In fact, let's just set the stage for this story. The Israelites were at war with the Philistines, and things were not going well. Finally someone got the idea that if the ark of God could be brought into battle, that would solve everything, because wasn't the ark of God powerful?
So they brought the ark into the battle, and lo and behold, the Philistines captured it and took it back to their own country! This was a devastating blow to Israel. However, any Philistine city where the ark was parked soon began to suffer illness, and finally the Philistines begin shuttling the ark to different towns, and pretty soon each new town started saying "No way! Don't bring that deadly golden box within our city limits."
To make a long and rather somber story short, the Philistines finally allow the ark to go back to Israel, and that is where chapter 7 begins.
1 Samuel 7:1 [NKJV]: Then the men of Kirjath Jearim came and took the ark of the Lord, and brought it into the house of Abinadab on the hill, and consecrated Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the Lord.
If you're taking sermon notes here comes Point One. What's the first step to revival in this chapter? Here it is:
Bring the ark back home.
A very interesting thing happened to me late last week. I was kneeling out beside the church reader board sign changing its message to the little poem which is on there now – "Within your heart will you make room for one who left an empty tomb?"
I had already changed the letters on the north side of the sign, and now I was on the south side, just laying down the first line of the message. The traffic light changed to green, and someone in a long white car started to accelerate northbound through the intersection, but then slowed down as he came past our sign. He called cheerfully out through his window, "Praise the Lord!" He wasn't doing it ironically, but very earnestly.
I smiled and waved at him, and he sped up and continued heading north. As I say, I hadn't put much of the sign’s message up, so it couldn't have been the words that caused this joyful outcry. I think that he must've just seen the silver haired man crouching by the sign, and assumed I was the pastor, and had just decided to express his gratitude to God for pastors in general, out loud.
As I think back on that experience, it strikes me that that man sounded as though his might be the perfect house to bring the ark of God to. Here was someone who probably wasn't a Seventh-day Adventist, and who certainly didn't know for sure who I was, but who deliberately rolled his window down, and deliberately slowed his car, and spontaneously praised the Lord out loud about me and whatever I was doing at that sign. Somehow I could feel that his heart may have already contained the ark of God.
So what do I mean by bringing home the ark? Obviously, the Bible doesn't tell us where the real ark is, unless it is the "ark of His covenant" in Revelation’s portrayal of the heavenly sanctuary.
But if it's true that we should symbolically bring the ark home, into our lives, what would this look like?
Well, consider what the ark represented. First of all, it represented the presence of God. Secondly, because of what was inside, it represented the presence of His law. Third, also inside it were reminders of His miracles—the pot of manna, and Aaron’s wooden stick which had budded.
It isn't that what every home, and every heart needs – the presence of God, a reminder of how important His law is to Him, and reminders of how awesomely, miraculously good He is to us? How much we have to thank Him for?
I got to thinking this week about all of the advantages Lucifer, Heaven’s highest-ranking angel, enjoyed. But as he began to focus more and more on himself, he must have allowed gratitude to die within him. He must have forgotten, one by one (or began to think he was responsible for), God's gifts to him – life, talent, influence, the chance to make a lasting difference in the universe. None of these capabilities had he given himself. All of them were gifts from God.
And of course once the devil began to ignore or make light of God's benefits, the next step was to decide that God wasn’t worth obeying. But if we symbolically and fully bring the ark into our lives and homes, we will not make those same deadly mistakes. Jesus mentioned that God loves to live within us, and Hebrews 10:16 says that God Himself will write His laws on our hearts and minds.
But once we have decided to symbolically bring God's ark into our lives, with His presence and His law and the reminders of His miracles for us, that's still not enough. That's just the foundation. We need to take a step further. Notice what happens next in the story.
Verse 2: So it was that the ark remained in Kirjath Jearim a long time; it was there twenty years. And all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord.
We need to keep in mind that, even though the ark had come home, it had come home to one specific family who took good care of it. The nation as a whole was still not converted. But at least they were taking the next step toward revival.
If the first step to revival is to bring the ark back home, the second step is to lament after the Lord.
The Israelites had a lot to lament about. The Philistines, who lived just west of them, were making life very difficult for them. But Israel didn't simply lament – they lamented "after the Lord." The NIV says they "mourned and sought after" the Lord.
There's a difference between “lamenting” and “lamenting after the Lord.” Have you ever known someone who was a lamenter? Once in a great while I have come upon such person who just cannot look on the bright side. Everything is going wrong, and often there are a series of people to blame for their problems.
Whenever I get to know somebody like this, I get the distinct feeling that rather than lamenting "after the Lord," in other words mourning and seeking after Him, these lamenters instead have something of a chip on their shoulder about God. In fact, there's a good chance they have simply stopped talking to Him altogether.
And that's not good. That's the reason the nation of Israel was in such trouble. Rather than treasure His ark because of His presence and because of the ark’s reminders of His law and His miraculous care, they had tried to use that ark as a magic tool.
Several years ago, right about the time the first Harry Potter movie was coming out, I got an assignment from the Review and Herald publishing company to write a little book for kids about Harry Potter. At that point lots of Christians were condemning the Potter books, some without even reading them. I knew that if I were going to be credible I would need to see what was inside them. So I read a couple of them, and discovered something really interesting.
Basically, Harry Potter and his friends were living the fantasy of every 10-year-old. What kid wouldn't want to possess a magic wand which really had power? What kid wouldn't want to fly around on a broom?
The problem was this – in this fantasy story, these kids had access to immense power, but they did not have to be accountable to the source of that power. That magic power was smarter than electricity, but there was no wise mind behind that power, no supernatural being who would switch that power on or off depending on some higher purpose. No, if you know the right spell, the power was yours.
In a way, the Israelites were trying to use the ark against the Philistines like Harry Potter might use a magic spell. But God doesn't work that way, and let the ark be captured. So when Israel started lamenting after the Lord, they had at least come as far as to understand that God was the source of whatever power might one day defeat the Philistines, and that they should take His opinions into account.
Another part of the problem was that Israel was working toward the wrong goal. Their main goal was to drive the Philistines away. But God's main goal was to establish a heaven-centered culture there on the land bridge between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian desert, so that everyone who passed through there would see how wonderful it was to worship the Creator of the universe.
If you want a “demo manual” for lamenting after the Lord, read the Psalms. A good number of them do just exactly that – praying urgently to the Lord that He will intervene for the ones doing the praying. These Psalms are not bland, formal prayers. They are heart-cries from people who are hurting, either because they themselves are in trouble or because someone they love is in trouble.
Again, lamenting after the Lord is good, but we can't simply stop there. We don't know exactly how long Israel was lamenting after the Lord, but nothing happened to answer their prayers until they followed Samuel's suggestion and took another step.
Verses 3 – 4: Then Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, “If you return to the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths from among you, and prepare your hearts for the Lord, and serve Him only; and He will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines.” So the children of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and served the Lord only.
If the first step to revival is to bring the ark back home, and if the second step is to lament after the Lord, then the third step to personal or corporate revival is to get rid of your foreign gods.
There's probably a pretty good chance that nobody in this room has every actually bowed down to a literal heathen idol. So, do some varieties of foreign gods actually tempt Christians today? I believe they do.
Jesus, of course, mentioned at least one of these gods – money. And when you think of it, money is foreign to God's original plan. God didn't set up a joint checking account for Adam and Eve in Eden. And even though Jesus told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar's, that doesn't mean we should obsess about, or worship, money.
You see, anything that is foreign to God's kingdom – in other words, damaging to that kingdom or something that can become a roadblock on our journey toward that kingdom – this is a foreign god.
And just like little statues were centuries ago, modern gods are objects of worship. When you think of it, a god can be someone you spend a lot of time obsessing about, or something you spend a lot of money on, or something that arouses emotions within you which Jesus would be concerned about.
Foreign gods can be good things we think wrongly about. I remember how, several years ago, someone broke into our Bothell house and stole several things, including a couple of my guitars. The insurance money from that robbery helped me buy the guitar I have now, which is a good guitar. But once I bought that guitar, for a couple of weeks I kept it in its case and literally carried it around with me in my car trunk. I was that obsessed about keeping it safe.
Finally, I came to my senses and just left it at home. But for a little while, that guitar had come perilously close to being a minor god to me. I’d forgotten that it was merely wood and wire, and will eventually become charcoal, like everything else we see around us.
Is there anything in your life that is acting something like an object of worship? Is anything taking up time which you should be balancing out among other things, such as staying thoughtfully and prayerfully acquainted with your Bible? It might be good to take a small-“g”-god inventory of your life, and put away those foreign gods from among you.
Yet even getting rid of all our foreign gods isn't the end of the story. Remember Jesus' Matthew 12 parable about the evil spirit who left a man, but that man didn’t bother replacing the bad spirit with anything wholesome, but simply left himself empty. That spirit returned, with seven other spirits, and this man was worse off than before.
Notice the next step Samuel prescribes toward revival.
Verses 5 – 6: And Samuel said, “Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lord for you.” So they gathered together at Mizpah, drew water, and poured it out before the Lord. And they fasted that day, and said there, “We have sinned against the Lord.” And Samuel judged the children of Israel at Mizpah.
If the first step to revival is to bring the ark back home, and if the second step is to lament after the Lord, and the third step is to get rid of your foreign gods, the fourth “revival step” is to gather.
Pretty much every Tuesday from 9 AM to 1 PM, I'm on the campus of our two Adventist schools in Kirkland. This past Tuesday I saw something happen that really made me chuckle.
I was walking along the hallway close to the fifth grade classroom. Suddenly, out through the door came all of the fifth-graders in a speedy bunch. I flattened myself against the wall as they raced past me, and as I gazed after them I saw that they were all running at top speed across the playground. And their speed did not let up until they reached the far end.
Their teacher appeared at the classroom door and started walking along the hall after them. I chuckled as I told her how all the kids had raced past. I said, "There weren’t just three or four runners and the rest walking thoughtfully along chatting to each other. They were all running, and they all ran all the way across the playground. What were they heading for?"
She glanced out the hall doorway and grinned. "Tetherball," she said. And sure enough, the kids were now intensely involved in a tetherball game. I have a feeling that whoever got to the tetherball pole first had some sort of advantage, which explains all that speed.
These kids were remarkably unified in their goal. They all wanted in on that tetherball game, and weren't willing to dawdle behind. They wanted to be in on the action, right from the start.
In fact, they are a pretty good example of what Samuel has just told the people to do – to gather together. We're doing that this morning, right here in this room, and we did earlier in our Sabbath school classes. Quite a few women from this congregation are gathering down in Auburn for the women's event.
Samuel could have simply told the people, "Now that the ark is back, now that you've lamented after the Lord, now that your foreign gods are put away from you, just make sure you keep up your private devotions at home." Instead, he said "Let's gather. Let's all get together at Mizpeh, and I will pray to the Lord for you."
God calls individuals, but God is a God of groups. All through the Bible He gathered people together rather than send them off to individual hermit grottoes. I think if I had one piece of advice for every struggling Christian, it would be to just come to church. And don't just slip in after the worship service has started, and slip out again before anybody can shake your hand and say “Hi” to you.
Gather at Sabbath school at 9:30 for the feature right here in the sanctuary. Gather in one of the Bible study classes starting at 10. Gather in the sanctuary during the announcement period between Sabbath School and church so you can hear something about which direction this church is going. Gather at the worship service, and then stay around in the foyer after a while and hobnob.
And whenever there is a potluck, or on elder parish group gathering, gather there. Because gathering is an unavoidable, inescapable part of true personal or corporate revival. We need each other. We need the encouragement we can give each other, we need the listening ears others can provide, we just need to know that we are not alone. And in the case of the Israelite people, they needed to gather in order to repent as a goup for what they had done.
I can find one more step to true revival, and it's a step the Israelites had to learn, even as Samuel was gathering them together. Watch what happens.
Verses 7 – 10: Now when the Philistines heard that the children of Israel had gathered together at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. And when the children of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines. So the children of Israel said to Samuel, “Do not cease to cry out to the Lord our God for us, that He may save us from the hand of the Philistines.” And Samuel took a suckling lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering to the Lord. Then Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel, and the Lord answered him. Now as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to battle against Israel. But the Lord thundered with a loud thunder upon the Philistines that day, and so confused them that they were overcome before Israel.
If the first four steps to revival are to bring the ark back home, lament after the Lord, to get rid of your foreign gods, and to gather, the fifth revival step is that in spite of looming trouble, remember how powerfully God can work.
Again, this takes us right back to allowing God to work things out the way He wants to. If we forget how powerful He is – if we forget those instances in our very own lives when He solved the most worrying dilemmas with stunningly creative, often low-key, behind-the-scenes miracles – if we forget the "manna" experiences in our lives, we’re tempted to desperately get our fingers into solutions we think are best, rather than waiting for God to do things His way.
But how little we have allowed God His way. In Exodus 23, God promised to send hornets before the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites so that Israel could have their land back. And in Joshua 24:12, Joshua quotes God as telling how He did indeed do this. But most of the time, Israel simply didn't have the faith to relax and let God take care of things.
Not long ago I was in a large mall, and it was a busy afternoon with a lot of people walking through. Along came a little three-person procession, which consisted of mom walking in front, a little three-year-old girl walking a few feet behind, and a grandma bringing up the rear.
I noticed something very interesting and touching about mom. She was walking along, watching ahead of her, and carrying her purse in one hand. But the other hand was stretched out behind her, fingers spread wide. As I say, the little girl was several feet back, nowhere near those fingers. You could tell that extending her hand like this had become a habit with this mother, a habit as habitual as walking itself. This mother had trained herself, probably without knowing it, to always have that hand ready for the little girl to grab onto.
As I saw the mother’s outstretched hand, I thought to myself, "Isn't God like that? Doesn't He walk ahead of us, His hand stretched invitingly back toward us, so that we can grab it and hold on tight if we need to? And, like that mother, doesn't He fondly hope that we will not be distracted by toy store windows and candy shops, and dart away from him to where the devil might wait to abduct us?
How about you? Do you need revival? Are you praying for someone else’s revival?
Do you want to gladden God’s heart by doing as Samuel himself did as a young boy, and all through his life, do you want to reach up and take God’s welcoming hand right now? Why don’t you raise your hand if that is your wish.
PRAYERMASTERS 3 -- MOSES
Expository Sermon on Exodus 32
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 3/17/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to Exodus 32.
Today's sermon is the third in a series I'm calling "Prayermasters." The idea behind this series is that I would like to learn how to be a better pray-er, and I thought that one way I could do this would be to study some of the Bibles great prayer people. The first “prayermaster” we looked at was Jesus, and we studied His Lord’s Prayer. Then we looked at Jacob, and watched the development of his prayer life.
Today we are going to spend a little time with Moses. Moses, of course is in a different category than Jacob, because it was Moses and not Jacob who eventually stood with Jesus on the mountain when the Savior was transfigured. Moses may have understood God’s heart better than anyone else besides Christ. Certainly, God opened His heart personally and emotionally to Moses far more than to anyone else.
And observing God's emotional side (seeing how powerfully God cared) may have been what made Moses the powerful prayer person he was. Let me tell you what I mean by that.
For years I have enjoyed the well-drawn and witty cartoons in the New Yorker magazine. A few weeks back I even bought a special edition of the New Yorker which contained nothing but cartoons which had appeared during the previous year.
These single-panel cartoonists work within a surprisingly narrow range of cartoon plots. Two people are marooned on a desert island, and one makes a humorous comment to the other. A seeker after truth struggles to the top of a mountain to learn wisdom from a hermit, and the hermit often dispenses a smart crack instead. Several high-powered business people are gathered at a conference table, and the boss makes an unintentionally humorous remark. In fact, in one cartoon, there was a conference table whose chairs were occupied by dogs, all looking at the chairman, who was a cat. The cat was saying, "All in favor?" And all the dogs said, "Meow."
One stock cartoon situation which shows up with surprising frequency features God on a throne in heaven. God is always white-robed, white-haired, and white bearded. In one cartoon He sits on his throne paging through a Bible with a startled look on His face. He says, "I can't believe I forgot to tell them about the dinosaurs!"
But in most of these “God” cartoons, God is shown standing on a cloud looking at Earth, and is making a comment to another white-robed figure. And usually, God is annoyed at what is happening down below. Most often, these cartoons speculate about what gets God mad. And since these are cartoons, they are always silly reasons.
What gets God mad? This is not an academic question. This is a real question, which needs a real answer. People who draw cartoons – and editors who buy cartoons – evidently sense, subconsciously at least, that this is something which catches people's attention. What gets God mad? Or maybe a better way of putting it would be, What gets God emotionally stirred up? What disturbs Him?
I believe that one of the reasons Moses became so close to God was that he let himself enter into God's emotional life. Maybe it was that way with Enoch, too. Enoch, you remember, walked with God, and at one point God simply opened up the door into that other dimension where heaven exists, and Enoch walked right on through.
There's no doubt about it, God lets His emotions show, throughout the Old and New Testaments. This morning I'd like us to watch God get disturbed. And when I say "get disturbed," I'm speaking in human terms. God's emotions are not tainted by human selfishness or sin, but it is certainly true that He can become stirred up.
And I believe that, the more that you and I see into God's loving heart, and see what delights Him and what grieves Him, I believe that this can make our prayers less selfish and more empathetic – empathetic not only to others, but to God Himself.
So here in Exodus 32, we’re going to watch God become emotional. God is a Parent, and parents get emotional, and we also need to remember that God isn't merely responsible for a wife and three kids. He is responsible for an entire planet in rebellion, and an entire intelligent universe watching with great interest to see how He handles that rebellion. If Lucifer was able to seduce a third of the angels of heaven to his side, then this isn't simply a matter of sending a child to his room until he settles down. The entire peace and happiness of eternity depends to a great deal on what happens when God gets emotional.
So let's watch. Just a few weeks before this chapter begins, the Israelites were still back in Egypt as slaves. One by one, they watched as 10 devastating plagues swept over the land. Then there was Exodus night, when with the taste of yeastless bread between their teeth, they marched toward freedom. Then there was the Red Sea, and the thunder of the Egyptian army on the horizon, and the waters parted, and they walked through, and when the Egyptians followed they were drowned.
And then came Mt. Sinai with its clouds and smoke and fire, and the very voice of God. And once God had spoken His 10 Commandments, He called Moses up the mountain to talk. And days go by.
And now we are going to see a little of what cuts God to the heart.
Exodus 32:1 [NKJV]: Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron . . . .
If you taking notes, here comes Sermon Point One.
One thing that disturbs God greatly is when people say, “I demand that God follow my timetable.”
Not, “I request, Lord, that You consider my timetable,” but “I demand that You follow it, or let me follow it.”
Again, God is a Parent, but not simply a parent. Every parent has had to deal with some version of "Are we there yet?” "When is Christmas coming?" "I want a bike." “I want a car, a cell phone, an iPod, an iPad. And I want them now!"
And these Israelites, of course, were grown-ups, not kids. If you know a bit about the Exodus story, you might remember that a group of Egyptians, which the Bible calls a "mixed multitude," came out of Egypt with the Hebrews. And often it was the mixed multitude who stirred things up.
But each of these grown-up Israelites should have learned by now to believe that a God who had so powerfully brought them forth from slavery, and who had actually spoken to them with His own voice, could be given a little slack.
Not long ago someone sent me a YouTube link to a video which was actually made up of several home videos patched together. Each little mini video showed a dog, and in some cases several dogs, who had been trained to wait patiently at their dog dishes, and not eat until their owner had said grace and finished the prayer with the word "Amen."
There was a cute little fluffy dog who sat upright, and when his owner said, “Let’s pray,” he would put his little paws together. In another video there were four dog dishes in a half-circle, with four dogs of various sizes all standing there ready for their food. The owner prayed aloud, said Amen, and those noses were buried in those dog dishes immediately—but not until then.
Why can't we human beings allow ourselves to be trained as obediently? One of the crucial benefits of reading our Bibles is that those Bibles contain stories about people who trusted God even in the darkest and most uncertain times, and what happened. Other stories tell about people who didn't trust God, and what happened there as well.
And every parent knows what happens when a child does not follow mom’s or dad’s timetable. Even though a three-year-old child has great curiosity, a three-year-old child should not have access to a pistol. Nor should a nine-year-old child.
The Bible is packed from end to end with stories of people who either ran ahead of God's timetable, or lagged behind it. And the results were tragic.
I mean, these Israelites had actually had splendid patience-training. First, they had waited all those centuries to be released from slavery. Then they had waited through the 10 plagues. They had waited through Passover night, and then had waited at the shore of the Red Sea while the Egyptian army approached. And after each of these “wait-times,” God had come through.
What does this have to do with me? Well, if I have read the stories – like the one we're looking at now – I know that it's important to wait for God's timing and not my own. I should pray earnestly and fervently (and make sure I am following His will in everything), but I should recognize that if I don't get the response I want, I need to be patient with God. All through Moses’ time of leadership, he prayed fervently, but except for one tragic slip-up when he allowed himself to lose his temper, he was incredibly patient.
How do I acquire patience if I don't currently have it? Well, over in Galatians 5:22, "long-suffering" or patience is the fourth gift of the Spirit, following love, joy, and peace. The Holy Spirit is the one who can give us divine patience. If you need it, pray for it. And open your heart for it, or the Lord might have to teach you patience in more unsettling ways than you might like!
Now let's look something else which causes God great concern.
Verse 1: Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
One thing that disturbs God is when people say, “I demand that God follow my timetable.” Another thing that disturbs Him is when they say, “I want to create and control my gods.”
I didn't grow up in a culture where people bowed down to idols. As a kid, I would read these Bible stories and wonder how on earth anybody would want to do this. But in my culture, just as in any other human culture, there were people who wanted to create and control their gods.
A god is something – or someone – whom you allow to control your time, your money, your thinking patterns, your actions, the music you listen to, even what you do on the day which the true God calls the Sabbath. Life on this earth is one long series of choices—do I obey the capital-G God or the small-g gods?
And every once in a while someone will take it upon himself or herself to try to re-create the true God. Several years ago a man was going through a period of great personal discouragement. He took up a pen and started to write, and he discovered that words flowed very easily from him. And not only that, the words appeared to be the words of God speaking to him.
This man went on to publish this material in a book called Conversations with God. And later he wrote another book where the words he claimed were God’s words answered teenagers' questions. I read a little of that material, because I had been asked to write an article about it, and what was so chilling was that the "God" of those conversations did not have a wide emotional spectrum. He spoke more as a kindly uncle--and even more bloodcurdlingly, this "God" never really condemned anything.
Teens would write in, agonizing about what they were going through, or confessing things they were doing, and this "God" would assure them that everything was all right, everything was fine, they should accept themselves as they were, they should just go ahead and do what they wanted.
In other words, what this author was doing – whether he understood it or not – was creating his own God, creating God in his own image. This author was probably a tolerant person, or may not have wanted to submit his life to the Bible’s moral code, so the "God" he created ended up being appallingly tolerant also. Who knows how many people have been led astray by those books, while allowing themselves to believe that they were truly listening to divinity.
Again, how does this relate to you and me? Well, the clearer a picture I have of the true God, especially if I have allowed Him to come into my heart through His Holy Spirit, the more willing I will be to allow God to be God, and not try to create my own version of Him.
But we need to move on to something else which destroys God's peace of mind.
Verses 1 – 2: Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” And Aaron said to them, “Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”
If God gets disturbed when people want Him to follow their timetable, and when they want to create and control their own gods, He also gets disturbed when they say, "I want my religious leaders to approve of what I do."
The Bible does not tell us what got into Aaron's mind which led him to go along with the people’s idea. I mean, this man had had a front-row seat at the true God's most dramatic Egypt miracles. A staff in his own hand had become a snake, and then a staff again. And it's not like Aaron had been a mere spectator – he had been Moses' spokesman. Aaron had looked into the very face of the idolatrous Pharaoh and had told him the words God wanted him to hear.
Aaron had seen the plagues, Aaron had watched the Red Sea part and clash together again. Aaron had heard the voice of God, and had heard what that voice had said: Don't make any graven images, or bow down to them.
But when the people put Aaron on the spot, he caved.
So – what does that have to do with me? Well, it has a lot to do with me, personally, because I am a pastor. I must not betray my pastoral trust. I thank everyone of you who prays for me, and prays for Shelley. Every once in a while someone in conversation says to me, "Boy, it must be hard being a pastor."
Well, every once in a great while a crisis or uncomfortable situation does come up that makes it tough to get to sleep at night. However, when a pastoral couple knows that he and she have people who are not only willing to share the burden and share their wisdom, and most importantly to pray, pastoring is a true joy. Please continue to pray for us.
And of course, pastors aren't the only leaders in the congregation. Each one of us – whether or not our name will come up on our next nominating committee list – is a minister for Jesus. If you lead a children's Sabbath school class, you are a role model whether or not you want to be. If you stand in the foyer and greet people who are here for the first time, you are, for them, for the moment, the Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist church. If, at our potluck this afternoon, you invite someone you don't know to sit at your table, you may be providing pastoral care the pastor would never be able to. If you listen silently on the phone to someone sharing their discouragement, you are an angel of God.
And if, when you are away from this building and doing what you normally do during the week, you do everything to the glory of God and for the enhancement of His reputation, and to uphold what you know He believes is the right thing to do, then He will change lives through you.
Let’s watch the conclusion of this story, and notice God’s reaction to it.
Verses 3 – 6: So all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf. Then they said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!” So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.” Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
What happens next always causes my skin to tingle, because we will see God becoming extremely emotional. But we will also see His trusted friend Moses at prayer. Notice what happens.
Verses 7 – 10: And the Lord said to Moses, “Go, get down! For your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!’ ” And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people! Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. And I will make of you a great nation.”
And of course God has every right to be fed up. He has worked many miracles to guide these people away from slavery not only of the Egyptians but of their idols, and while He's talking with His friend Moses, they are having the worst sort of pagan orgies around their self-created god. The Lord is probably thinking of the desperation He felt with the pre-flood civilization of Genesis 6:5, whose hearts were “only evil continually.” Is it possible that He cannot fulfill His plans for a happy humanity through this degenerate generation either?
But now, Moses turns to prayer. Prayer is actually “conversation with God” – not a conversation with your own mind, but with God. And notice that Moses doesn't utter a humble and fatalistic "Thy will be done, Lord" and plug his ears against a nation's destruction. No, Moses takes a deep breath and begins to intercede in a way he never had before, and maybe never will again. Moses disagrees with God, but rather than turning grumpily away and refusing to talk with God, he begins reasoning with Him.
Verses 11 – 14: Then Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, and said: “Lord, why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, ‘He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” So the Lord relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.
And did you notice the main talking-point Moses used as he interceded for the people? It was God's reputation. Both Moses and God knew that the most important question in the universe is not, "Will I be saved?" but "What is God like?" Moses knew that God wants to live forever with people whose minds have been satisfied about His goodness.
And whether or not the Lord was testing Moses, the Bible doesn't say. But immediately, the Lord relents, and maybe within His heart He feels the joy of discovering a human heart that is very like His own.
Do you want to be a successful pray-er? Like Moses, learn what breaks God's heart. Then, like Moses, learn God's fondest hopes, and as you pray about your own requests, pray toward those hopes of God. And you will bring him joy.
PRAYERMASTERS -- JACOB
Expository Sermon on Genesis 28 - 32
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 3/3/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To listen to the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to Genesis 28.
While you're turning there, I'd like to mention that this is the ssecond sermon in a series I'm calling "Prayermasters." What I'd like to do in this series is to look at some of the Bible’s most powerful pray-ers. I'd like to see what we can learn from them.
As I mentioned last week, I don't want this to be a sermon series where we simply build up a long list of "prayer success" tips. Instead, I would mostly like to look at what these veteran pray-ers understood about God. I would like to get to know God the way they did, and if possible know how they got to know Him this way. I believe that the better we understand their true friendship with God, the more confident and effective our own prayers can become, because first of all we have become His friends.
This week I'd like to take a look at some of the prayer experiences of Jacob. As far as I can tell, the three major “prayer events” in Jacob's life give us a fascinating view of his growth as a pray-er. I think it's a good idea to spend a few minutes seeing where we can place ourselves along the line of his spiritual maturity, and see if we can learn something about how to grow as he did.
When we pick up the story here in Genesis 28, Jacob's life is about to change dramatically. Back when he and his twin brother Esau were born, the Lord had promised their mother Rebekah in Genesis 25:23 that "the older shall serve the younger." Esau was actually the first one born, and Jacob was the second. We know that Jacob's mind was focused on this “reversal” promise, because at one point when a tired and hungry Esau came in from hunting, Jacob "bought" Esau’s oldest-son birthright with a dish of the lentil stew he’d fixed.
An when it came time for the sons to receive their father's official blessing, Rebekah knew that Isaac, the father, favored Esau, and since he was born first would probably give him the firstborn's blessing. So since Isaac was blind by this point, Rebekah worked up a little deception to make Isaac think that Jacob was Esau. And it worked – Isaac gave Jacob the firstborn's blessing.
Esau, of course, was extremely angry about this, and vowed that once father Isaac had died, Esau would have his revenge on Jacob. And this is where chapter 28 starts. Rebekah suggests that Jacob go stay with some relatives a long way off. Old, ailing Isaac agrees with this, and sends Jacob off with another blessing.
And Jacob heads north, and right on to the stage of one of the Bible’s most familiar stories – and into his first recorded prayer experience.
Genesis 28:10 – 12 [NKJV]: Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran. So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
When I was a kid, whenever I read this story and got to this point, I could see that ladder. I think I only pictured it is being maybe 30 feet long, if that. As a farm boy, I knew what a ladder was, and once in a while had to climb one. We had two kinds of ladders on our farm – never a metal one, just ones that were made out of wood.
One kind was the store-bought kind, although ours was really old, made of wood that had turned gray with age. The rungs were round, and each one had an iron rod running through the center of it for safety, in case the rung’s wood started to crack. The other kind of ladder we had was the kind Dad made. He took two long two-by-fours and nailed wide scrap-wood inch-boards at intervals.
When it came to those ladders, I noticed that my dad felt very much at ease on them. I myself was pretty queasy when it came to heights, and especially when it came to making that horrifying move from a rooftop back onto the ladder, that moment when you swing one leg out over open space and hope the ladder-rung is there when you need it, and you hope the ladder suddenly doesn’t give this horrible, grating lurch sideways.
But Dad trusted ladders, probably because he had either built them or had thoroughly checked them out. And he trusted himself on ladders, and again, this was because he knew what he was doing.
One of his first town jobs was painting a tall grain-storage elevator connected to a feed mill. Nobody else would go up that tall ladder, so Dad gingerly ascended to the top with a paint-bucket, leaning out just far enough to the right and to the left, so he could paint as wide a strip as possible before having to shift the ladder over.
I think Dad was secretly puzzled and discouraged that I was not as comfortable on ladders as he was. Maybe he brooded that he had not been the right kind of father, that he had maybe failed as a parent. But it was simply that I had not learned how to trust a ladder the way he had – and to not betray that ladder’s trust by doing something stupid.
Anyway, here is Jacob at midnight, his head on a stone pillow (hopefully padded with his backpack or something), experiencing a dream like he’d probably never had before.
At this point, let's stay alert and ask ourselves some questions about this prayer experience of Jacob's, and we’ll also do this with the other two experiences we'll look at.
The first question to ask is, where is God located during this prayer? The second question is, how does Jacob feel about God? The third question is, what does Jacob say in his prayer?
Let's pick up the story. Jacob sees this magnificent ladder, with the angels climbing up and down on it. And suddenly his attention is caught by Someone’s voice.
Verses 13 – 15: And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.”
What God is doing here, of course, is repeating promises to Jacob that He had previously made to Abraham and Isaac.
So first of all, where is God located? In Jacob's dream, He is standing up there at the top of the ladder. He does not descend the ladder as the angels are doing, but He stays up in heaven.
Now, let's listen to how Jacob responds to all of this, and as we do so, I think we’ll be able to pick up some hints as to how Jacob feels about God.
Verses 16 – 19: Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” Then Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel; but the name of that city had been Luz previously.
Jacob's mind is in a whirl. The first thing he does is to reveal by what he says that it's quite possible that up to this point he may not have been as close to God, or as personally familiar with God, as his father and grandfather were.
And this is often the case. My mother and father were devout Christian people. They prayed constantly, but always privately. To them, God wasn't standing at the top of a long ladder in heaven. He was much closer than that.
What probably happened in Jacob's dream was that the Lord understands that, especially since He is introducing Himself to Jacob in a way that Jacob has never experienced before. Maybe it would be better if the Lord spoke from heaven, to remind Jacob that this was indeed the Almighty God who was speaking. It’s like on Mount Sinai—God thundered because He needed to generate respect among people who barely knew Him.
So far, what does Jacob think about God? Well, from what he says to himself, he is intensely surprised at God's presence. He says, "This is the house of God, this is the gate of heaven!" He even sets up his little stone-pillow as a monument and anoints it with oil.
And Jacob may have had reasons to be surprised at the presence of God. One idea he might have assumed about God is that God is so far away that He needs a little human help sometime. Even though God had promised that Jacob would be more important than Esau, Jacob's mother felt the need to “help God along” a little by deceiving old Isaac into thinking that Jacob was actually Esau.
I think a lot of people these days feel that way about God. They figure that God needs their help to accomplish His will. And it's true, God has given us spiritual gifts which we can use to draw people to a position where they can get a clearer view of His face. But it's tempting to go beyond being a servant of God and become God's SWAT team leader.
All through the Bible you see examples of people trying to run ahead of God, hastily doing things for themselves, that God wants to do Himself, at a more appropriate time or in a better way. Rather than wait for her Creator to educate her, Eve munches the tree’s fruit so she can become wiser. Lot chooses the beautiful pastures surrounding sinful Sodom because he wants better grazing for his animals. King Saul impulsively and desperately offers animal sacrifices when Samuel doesn't arrive. Saul-who-became-Paul felt that he had to help God by stamping out Christianity. The list goes on and on – people who, at a critical moment, simply do not trust God as much as they trust their own wisdom or abilities, or their understanding of what God really wants.
Now let's look at what Jacob says in what I think is his first recorded prayer.
Verses 20 – 22: Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I come back to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. And this stone which I have set as a pillar shall be God’s house, and of all that You give me I will surely give a tenth to You.”
Come to think of it, this is half-vow, half-prayer. Notice how cautious Jacob is? Notice how in the first part of this semi-prayer, he doesn't even address God directly, but uses the third person. It's only halfway through his final sentence that he cautiously starts addressing God as "You."
And when you get right down to it, this is little more than a bargain in a sheep-market. Jacob is probably very used to bargaining, as any animal-farmer needed to be. First he makes his requests of God – God's presence, God's direction on the journey, and bread and clothing, and a peaceful return to his father's house. Then come the "Here's what God gets in return" items – Jacob will claim the Lord as his God, that pillow-stone would mark the house of God, and then Jacob tosses in what maybe he thinks is the real deal-sweetener: he'll start returning tithe!
This is a fairly immature prayer. It's the prayer of someone who does not know God very well, and therefore assumes that God must be something like a supplier of goods and services if the terms are right. Jacob will learn better, as we will see.
So what does this have to do with me? What do I do, now that I've seen Jacob's first prayer event? Well, I need to remember that I have a promise-keeping God. As the Lord stood at the top of that ladder, he was gazing down on a deceiver, someone who had lied to get what he wanted. God understands this, yet He still offers to activate His promises for Jacob.
Now, God's promises to you and me are mostly different than the specific “I will make you a great nation” ones He made to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. But in a way, those promises are ours too, in a larger sense. After all, in Galatians 3, verse 29, Paul tells us, "If you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." So if we belong to Jesus we can step under the comforting umbrella of God's promises to all human prodigals who drop their pride and stumble home.
And evidently this is what happens in Jacob's life during his years with Laban. Once he arrives at his relative’s farm and falls in love with Laban's daughter Rachel, Jacob the deceiver gets deceived into first having to marry Rachel’s sister Leah. Finally, in Genesis 31:3, the Lord advises Jacob to gather his family and his flocks and herds and possessions and head back home to Palestine.
Which of course means heading back into Esau's territory. Jacob sends messengers to give Esau the heads-up, and the messengers come back and say, "Esau is heading your direction with 400 men."
This is not good news. Let’s pick up the story in chapter 32.
Genesis 32:6 – 8: Then the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, and he also is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.” So Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed; and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two companies. And he said, “If Esau comes to the one company and attacks it, then the other company which is left will escape.”
And now, Jacob prays. Notice how vastly different this prayer is from his previous cautious, vow-making, sheep-farmer-deal-sweeting bargain. Let’s take this prayer step-by-step.
Verse 9: Then Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, the Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your family, and I will deal well with you’:
Now this is the start of a grown-up prayer. And notice where God is. Back in the stone-pillow era, God was at the top of the ladder, and Jacob was probably glad that He stayed at that distance.
Now Jacob speaks as though God is well within earshot. And now there's no speaking in the third person – "if God will do this, then I will do that." Jacob is now speaking personally to God, the God who makes and keeps promises from generation to generation.
And notice what Jacob says next in his prayer.
Verse 10: I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown Your servant; for I crossed over this Jordan with my staff, and now I have become two companies.
Where is God in this second prayer? Very close. How does Jacob feel about God? A humble, heartfelt gratitude for all God's blessings, ones he (Jacob) knows he doesn’t deserve. Again, no bargaining – no "Lord, I'll give You this if You give me that." Instead, it's "Lord, you have been so overwhelmingly, abundantly good to me, and I am not worthy of even the least of Your mercies.”
Watch what happens next. Here’s what else Jacob says in his prayer.
Verse 11: Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and attack me and the mother with the children.
Back years before, when he slept on the stone pillow, Jacob must have feared Esau, but he didn't open his heart to God about it. Now we see a far more mellow, honest Jacob, one who knows God so well that he feels comfortable admitting his fears to Him.
Now watch as Jacob ends his prayer.
Verse 12: For You said, ‘I will surely treat you well, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’ ”
This is the prayer of someone who has prayed often, and about important matters. I have a feeling that, if you are a parent, the birth of your children probably raised your prayers’ fervency-level to heights you never thought possible. I'm sure it was the same with Jacob.
If you know anything about other Bible prayers, you can sense a familiar pattern here. This is a pattern I think we need to remember to use, and I know that quite a few experienced pray-ers in this congregation already use something like this.
First, as he begins his prayer, Jacob gives thanks to God. I think it was my parents who taught me that prayers should always begin with thanks. If we pause to express our gratitude to God for specific things He has done for us, or for potential dangers He has protected us from, this rapidly places any request we might have into it proper perspective.
So Jacob first of all humbly thanks God for His blessings. Next, he claims God's specific promises which apply to the request he's making. Then he makes his request, and ties off the prayer by again claiming God's promises.
It's important to keep in mind that Jacob does not know what will happen when Esau arrives. If it was just Esau and 10 or 15 men, that would be one thing. But Esau plus 400 men? This sounds like war. Yet in the midst of this extreme crisis, Jacob could still begin his prayer by thanking God for all his mercies and blessings, and ending that prayer by claiming God's promises in faith.
I may be going out on a limb a bit by calling the third event, the one we are about to see, a "prayer event." But I think it can be called that. Again, be watching for where God is in this prayer, and how Jacob feels about God, and what Jacob says in his prayer – if indeed it is a prayer.
To set the stage, let's start at verse 22.
Verses 22 – 24: And he arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had. Then Jacob was left alone; . . .
Alone for a while anyway. But watch this:
Verse 24: Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day.
If you're using the New King James Version, you'll see that the word "man" has a capital M, which means that the NKJV people have read ahead in the story and know that this Man is divine. But there weren't any capital letters in the ancient Hebrew, and anyway, this hadn't become Scripture yet when Jacob heard those footsteps approach him in the darkness. All he knows is that someone is coming close – maybe an assassin sent on ahead from Esau – so he lunges to his feet and starts defending himself.
This is so fascinating. Where is God? Jacob doesn't yet know that this wrestler is God, or most likely Jesus Christ Himself. Yet Jacob evidently assumes that wherever God is, He is close enough so that he, Jacob, can patiently and courageously wrestle with the situation he's facing.
And these two wrestlers wrestle for hours – until the break of day. Maybe Jacob has to stagger back and pause to breathe deeply, and maybe the Man pretends to be weary as well, but suddenly they’re in a clinch again, and the desperate battle continues.
Verse 25: Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him.
Here's an interesting development. Whoever it is that's wrestling with Jacob senses that Jacob is simply not going to give up. So He touches Jacob's hip-socket, and out goes the hip.
I don't know what it feels like to have your hip bone leave its socket. I would imagine it is very painful. By this time Jacob must realize that he is wrestling with no human adversary. And the hip-socket maneuver probably confirms this knowledge. But still Jacob does not give up.
Maybe this says something about our own wrestling with God in prayer. Trials may increase, pain may increase, but maybe we can see from this example that, just like Jacob, we should not give up our wrestling matches either. It’s like God is saying, “Don’t leave Me up at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Don’t even hold Me at arm’s length. Wrestle with Me in prayer. Show me how much you really care about what you’re praying about.”
And maybe both these wrestlers – one in great pain – have actually started to laugh together, like two brothers tusseling. Jacob now knows he is wrestling with God, and God may simply be delighted to get His hands on one of His children again.
So, even though God could have de-socketed both Jacob’s arms and won the match in an instant, maybe it's in the voice of good-humored expostulation that He says what He says next.
Verse 26: And He said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.” But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!”
So, back to our questions. In this prayer, where is God? He's as close as a wrestler – in fact, He is a wrestling partner! How does Jacob feel about God? Evidently, he feels a kinship which is beyond prayer, a familiarity which transcends all of the traditional prayer-phrases.
Jacob, at least for this moment, is enjoying a closeness to God which very few others have had. Enoch had it. Moses had it. Elijah may have had it. The human Jesus had it.
And there, with dawn lightening the sky, God good-humoredly agrees to bless again the one He has blessed so bountifully.
Verses 27 – 28: So He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
And then, with a wonderful, friendly familiarity he would never have been able to summon up at Bethel, Jacob asks a question.
Verses 29 – 30: Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me Your name, I pray.” And He said, “Why is it that you ask about My name?” And He blessed him there. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
Where is God in this event? As close as a wrestling-hold. What does Jacob think about God, feel about God? A reverent, close companionship. Don't you imagine that God, after going back to heaven that morning, couldn't stop grinning for a week?
And what did Jacob say in this prayer, if it was a prayer? Well, I don't think it matters so much what he actually said. He and God were so close at that moment.
We need to remember, of course, that this kind of closeness comes only after long acquaintance. Again, the Lord did not descend the ladder and wrestle with Jacob at Bethel. But now, God evidently knew that this was the time to test Jacob's persistence, to show to Jacob himself how much prayer-staying-power he really had.
How's your prayer-staying-power? I know that I need to improve mine. Would you like to work on this, just as I am planning to work on this? Raise your hand if you’d like to do this.
PRAYERMASTERS—JESUS AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
Expository Sermon on Matthew 6
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 2/25/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio version of this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6.
While you're turning there, I'd like to mention that this is the first sermon in a series I'm calling "Prayermasters." What I'd like to do in this series is to look at some of the Bible’s most powerful pray-ers. I'd like to see what we can learn from them.
I don't want this to be a sermon series where we build up this long list of "prayer success" tips. Instead, I would like to look at what these veteran pray-ers understood about God. I would like to know God the way they did, and if possible know how they got to know Him this way. I believe that the better we understand friendship with God, the more confident our own prayers will become.
And I thought, for the first sermon in this series, who better to start with than Jesus Himself? Jesus certainly knew how to pray, and in His Sermon on the Mount He gave some earnest advice about how we should pray.
If you know anything about the Sermon on the Mount, you know that it's a strong mix of theory and practice. Jesus doesn't simply give us theory, and let us decide how to put this theory into practice. Instead, He tells us how to apply that theory.
This week as I was studying the Lord's prayer in its context, I discovered something I had never noticed before. As I mentioned last week, Bible writers did not put chapter and verse numbers into what they wrote, just like you and I don't put chapter and verse numbers into e-mails or letters we write. These numbers and divisions weren’t added until at least 1000 years after the New Testament was written.
So when we study, for example, the Lord's prayer here in Matthew 6, it's tempting to simply start out with the “Our Father who art in heaven.” However, Jesus doesn't simply introduce this "model prayer" by saying, "By the way, let's now turn to the subject of prayer. Here is a model prayer you can use. ‘Our Father . . .’”
Instead, He leads into this prayer with two very specific "Don't do it like this" commands. And since He mentions these, and ties them in with His model prayer, let's not skip them. Because I believe – and evidently Jesus believes – that we would miss so much if we didn't look at these two “no-nos.”
Matthew 6:5 [NKJV]:“And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites . . . .”
If you know anything at all about what Jesus said in the four Gospels, you know that He had very firm ideas about hypocrites. Did you know that Jesus was the only one in the New Testament, and maybe even the whole Bible, who called anyone a hypocrite? A couple of other New Testament writers talk about the dangers of "hypocrisy," but only Jesus called people "hypocrites," and it was mostly the scribes and the Pharisees. And He didn't pin these labels on them to be nasty – instead, He was hoping to jolt them out of their complacency.
If you happened to be present at our Unlocking Revelation seminar this past fall, you know that we began each evening with ten minutes’ worth of the Matthew video where Bruce Marciano plays the part of Jesus. Ellen White has suggested that when Jesus spoke rebukes, He did so with tears in his voice. And that's exactly how Bruce Marciano spoke the words in Matthew 23, where seven times Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, seven times just in that one chapter.
Well, if Jesus was so concerned about hypocrites, we have to find out just what a hypocrite is, and what a hypocrite does. Let's keep reading.
Verse 5: “And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men . . . .
Another thing I learned for the first time this week, as I dug around in some of the Greek reference books I have at home, was that in Jesus' time, the Greek word hupokrites, “hypocrite,” meant “play-actor.”
Two Greek people would be walking down the street, and one would say to the other, "I was at the theater last night and saw this great play by Aristophanes." And the other person would say, "Is that right? Who were the hypocrites?" And he wouldn't be speaking an insult but merely asking who the play-actors were
I'm sure that Jesus had far more urgent things to do than attend plays by Aristophanes, but He probably had no problem with play-actors doing their acting when the audience understood that it was make-believe. But what Jesus really got distressed about was when people put on a “front” to make others think they were more righteous than they really were.
When I was a kid growing up near the little prairie town of Redfield, South Dakota, the buildings on Main Street always looked so impressive. You'd be standing there on the sidewalk, and in front of you would be some genuine brick buildings that were two stories high. Next to them would be wooden buildings the same height, all the way down Main Street.
But I remember once walking in the alley behind one of those lines of buildings, and I saw that many of the wooden buildings had false fronts. The first story, the first level, would be real. But the second story wasn't there. Instead, what looked like the second floor from down on the street was nothing but a tall wall with siding on it. Sometimes there would even be a window built into that wall.
The idea, of course, was to convince visitors to Redfield – and visitors to many other small towns throughout the plains states – that these towns were important and prosperous enough to have two-story buildings all the way up and down their main streets. I suppose the idea was that visitors would be so deeply impressed by the town's prosperity that they would move there, and spend a lot of their money there, and maybe these stores would eventually be able to build second stories. Sort of like, "Fake it till you make it."
But sometimes windstorms would knock those false fronts down into the street, leaving just a pitiful little one-story building, a sad little play-actor hypocrite who’d been found out.
To me, one of Heaven's most delightful and confidence-building qualities is its absolute honesty. Just imagine – with the inspiration of Scripture entirely in God's control – how many false fronts He could have erected in the lives of His major leaders. Abraham and David and Solomon and Saul who became Paul, all of these and many others could have been presented as absolutely perfect. All their lacks of faith, and adulteries, and idolatries, and murderous persecutions of Christians could have been swept under the rug.
But that's not how heaven works. God and His Son and His Spirit are honest with us. And they want us to be honest with ourselves, and with Them. The chilling story of what happened to Ananias and Sapphira shows just how dangerous Heaven considers hypocrisy is to our souls and the souls of those around us.
So as Jesus gets ready to teach us His model prayer, the first thing He warns us against is praying like hypocrites pray, showing off spiritually, pretending to be pious so that people will admire you and put confidence in you – and maybe vote for you.
And now Jesus gets specific about how to pray non-hypocritically.
Verse 6: But you, when you pray . . . .
Do you see the way that verse puts it? That's exactly the way it is in the Greek – the word "you" comes first. Jesus makes it very clear, in as emphatic a way as He can, that you and I are supposed to be different. It's like any parent will react when their child mentions something shady or dangerous he wants to do, and brings up the name of a friend. “But Bobby’s mom and dad let him do that.” Any parent worth his or her salt will promptly say, "They can do what they want. But we’re not letting you do that.” My brother and sisters and I learned early on that the “other kids get to do this” argument made absolutely no impression on our parents.
Verse 6: But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.
Notice that Jesus says that God is in the "secret" place. God isn't out front, appearing on talk shows, starring in movies or reality TV shows. God is behind the scenes.
Jesus did His best to be behind the scenes. He was not a child star. The Bible tells us nothing about His childhood except His miraculous birth and His visit to the Temple at age 12 with his parents. We know nothing about what happened in His Nazareth carpenter shop.
And during his 3 1/2 year ministry, Jesus did not promote Himself. One chapter back, in Matthew 5:16, He tells us to let our light shine so that people might see our good works and glorify not us but our Father in Heaven. And Jesus practices what He preaches, because in Matthew 9:8 and in several other Gospel verses, Jesus does miracles in such a way that people immediately gave glory not to Him but to God.
Now let's look at Jesus' second “don’t pray like this” command.
Verse 7: And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.
So who are these “heathens”? The Greek word here is ethnikos, and if it sounds like the word "ethnic," it's because it’s where we get the word “ethnic.” Last Sabbath at our "South of the Border" potluck we had what I would call ethnic food. But to people who come from the countries where that food comes from, it wasn't ethnic food at all. In their countries, they probably think of North American food as ethnic food.
The old King James, and the New King James I’m using this morning, translate ethnikos as "heathen." Modern English gives "heathen" a negative spin, like “You’re nothing but a heathen.” But in Jesus' day, it simply meant anyone who wasn't a Jew. Some of your Bibles will translate this as “Gentiles,” and some versions will say “pagans.” And in Jesus' day, anyone who was from a culture different from Judaism probably believed in pagan gods.
So Jesus first of all warns us not to pray like play-actor hypocrites, and now He tells us not to pray like pagans. And He’s just told us what's wrong with pagan prayers.
Verse 7: And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.
One thing that really struck me as I studied these verses was that the play-actors and the pagans both have problems when it comes to relating to deity. However, at least the pagans are trying to get in touch with their gods, false as those gods are. The pagans are using all of those vain repetitions, but at least they're trying to get in touch.
But the play-actor hypocrites don't even seem to care about whether God is really listening – they are simply praying as a pose, as a posturing. They are actually praying to themselves. In fact, in Luke 18:13, when Jesus tells the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to the Temple, that's how He describes the Pharisee’s prayer: "The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself."
So the play-actor prays to himself, or with himself, and the pagan prays to his false gods using lots of repetition. It's like the Occupy Wall Street people, who for a while were hoping that if they repeated their slogans and kept waving their signs, they’d get attention about their issues. It’s like the “Arab spring” protestors trying to wear down a brutal dictator.
But Jesus says, "No. With your Heavenly Father, you don't need to mumble through long litanies and rituals in order to get His attention. You wouldn't talk that way to your earthly parents – why do it to your Heavenly Parent?"
And notice how He sums things up.
Verse 8: “Therefore do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.
The pagan knows he has needs, and thinks he has to babble and mumble about them to God in prayer formulas. Interestingly, the play-actor hypocrite doesn't seem to know he has needs, because he's praying for show and not for results.
This week one of the public radio stations has been doing a series on Thomas Jefferson's home called Monticello. I happened to catch part of Thursday afternoon’s broadcast while driving, and I was very surprised at what it said. Evidently, while Jefferson was building Monticello, he had these huge ledger books in which he would write down every expense, no matter how small. So you have all of these impressive account record books filled with amounts of money.
But the appalling truth is that Thomas Jefferson never added those figures up! He simply noted down his expenses, but never tallied them up to see how his finances were. As a result, when he died, he left his family and relatives with a huge debt, and some of them actually became wards of the state for awhile. You could say that, in a way, Thomas Jefferson was like the play-actors Jesus talks about, who did not know – or refused to think about – their true needs.
Well, whether you and I have play-actor problems or pagan problems, Jesus now introduces us to a prayer which will help guide us away from either of these tendencies. Let’s watch how this prayer deals with these issues.
Verses 9 – 10: In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
This part of the prayer is good for the play-actor hypocrite to pray, isn't it? The play-actor wants his own name to be synonymous with the highest level of piety, and the Lord’s Prayer reminds him that it is God's name which should be exalted. The more we understand God's kingdom and the more we pray for it to arrive, the less we will obsess about setting up our own little kingdoms here below.
Verse 11: Give us this day our daily bread.
You can imagine a pagan listening to these seven words, and expecting Jesus to begin repeating them over and over and over, perhaps in a chant. But the request for daily bread stops after seven words, and the prayer goes on to another subject.
The pagan blinks in surprise. "Is that it?" he asks. "Is asking for my daily bread really that simple?" It certainly is. After all, Jesus said back in verse 8 that God knows our needs even before we ask Him.
Verses 12 – 13: And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one.
Can you imagine a play-actor hypocrite praying those words? Debts? He doesn't have debts – his financial situation is perfect (at least that's the story he's giving out). Temptation? The play-actor is far, far above temptation, and has been for years. He is so pure and spotless that he almost blinds the eyes of God Himself! And if anyone needs deliverance from the evil one it's the poor, pitiful pagan.
Verse 13: . . . For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
If you know a bit about Bible translations, you know that this verse wasn't in the most ancient Greek manuscripts. What happened was that, when the King James Bible was being translated in the early 1600’s, people hadn’t tracked down very many of Greek New Testament manuscripts by that point. Later on, more ancient ones came to light, and it was found that this verse wasn't in the oldest ones.
But even if this verse didn't show up exactly here, it's ideas are rock-solid Bible truth. Other Bible passages say that God will eventually rule this Earth, and that this rule, including its power and its glory, will indeed last for ever.
And that’s what both the play-actor and the pagan need to understand. God’s Son will eventually come back to this planet, and will blow down all the false fronts which all the play-actor hypocrites have carefully built. There will be a judgment, and the Judge will be He who sees what happens in the secret places, where deception has done its best to prevent discovery. Soon everything will be made known, and those who are wise right now will admit their needs and their sins and take them to the Lord, who will gladly forgive and restore.
And the pagan, who is used to a pantheon of gods—all those many powerful beings warring with each other, leaving the poor pagan at his wits’ end trying to appease this god and flatter that god, hoping against hope that good fortune will come his way—this pagan needs to know the vastly liberating truth that there is just one God, and He is kind and loving, and that He has proved His kindness and love by sending His very own Son to die sin’s death in our place.
And the pagan and the play-actor need to know how much they need this God, and how much He longs to be needed, longs to enter the play-actor’s life and subdue his pride, and enter the pagan’s life and calm his fears.
MEET YOUR MAKER
Topical Baptismal Sermon
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 2/18/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 55.
Today's sermon title is "Meet Your Maker." If your knowledge of American idioms goes back far enough, you know that this can be a sinister sentence, as in "Get ready to meet your Maker!"
But this morning, with the help of three different Scripture passages – all chosen by Terri Durham or Kellie Zielinski -- I'm going to show you how incredibly positive and life-changing it can be to meet your Maker—in a way in which we all need to meet Him.
President Barack Obama was in town yesterday, and spent some of that time meeting some "makers." The people of the Boeing Company made the two 747s in the Air Force One fleet, which is the presidential airplane he rode into Seattle. In a very real way, the president’s life is in the hands of those who made that aircraft, and those who fly it.
And in a far more real way, our lives are in the hands of our Maker with a capital "M.”
My dad was a "maker." And what he made, he made well. I would often help him string barbed-wire fences. If you've ever had anything to do with barb wire fences, you know that the corner-post assembly is crucial. If you don’t have a solidly-planted corner-post, plus an additional one a few feet further down one fence-line, and another one a few feet from the corner down the other fence-line, and boards nailed between them as bracing, you SOON have a fence which is loosey-goosey.
But where other farmers would be content to make their corners using the wimpy wooden fence posts you could buy at the lumberyard in town, dad somehow got hold of old telephone poles, and cut them up, and used them for cornerposts. I sometimes had to dig the holes for those monsters, and Dad always wanted those holes far deeper than I thought they needed to be.
Finally, when the hole had reached nearly to Australia, and I could almost hear the kangaroos calling to their mates, Dad would decide we’d gone far enough, and he would thump the telephone pole down into that hole, and pour cement around it. And after that cement had hardened, you could tighten several lines of barbed wire almost to breaking point if you needed to.
God, of course, is the ultimate Maker. And as I studied the three Scripture passages which Terri and Kellie chose, I discovered that all three of these passages talk about meeting our Maker – not in a gloomy sense but in wonderfully vital ways which we can start using as soon as we hear about them.
Let me show you what I mean. Terri’s chosen verses in Isaiah 55 are a little deeper into the chapter, but I want to take a quick glance of the first verse, and the first word of that verse.
If you're using the King James Bible or the new King James Bible what is the first word in Isaiah 55?
It's the word “Ho,” right? But if you're using a more recent translation, it's most likely that the first word in the chapter, for you, is "Come." I don't know why these newer versions are so shy and timid, but in Hebrew, the first word is, literally, Hoy! That's what the Hebrew word is. Hoy! was a shout to get someone’s attention.
In fact, good old Eugene Peterson, when he translated his The Message, wasn't too shy or timid (he seldom is) to translate the real Hebrew. He starts this chapter with a cheery “Hey there!” -- which is exactly what Hoy! means.
And this is God Himself speaking. He's not thundering commands – instead, He is calling out a cheerful invitation. It's almost like He's the coordinator of a potluck telling us it's time to eat.
Isaiah 55:1 – 2 [NKJV] “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk Without money and without price. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And let your soul delight itself in abundance.
God speaks these words to anyone who will listen, begging us to turn away from anything else we are trying to worship as a god, and to turn back to Him before it is too late. This is a Bible-wide call, which is repeated many times through Scripture, to everyone in this room return to our Maker.
And it's important to watch carefully here, so that we know specifically what we need to do as we return.
Verse 6: Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near.
So if we want to return to the Lord, we need to seek Him, hunt for Him. How do you do that? Well, you're doing it this morning. If you got here in time for Sabbath school class you hunted through the Bible for what it says about God and His Son, and you probably saw Their kindness reflected in the kindness and humor of your teacher and the other people in your class. And now you're sitting listening in the very phrases of God himself.
But notice what else needs to happen as we return to the Lord.
Verse 7: Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
You look around in our culture today, and very few voices are telling us what is right and what is wrong. Now, obviously, we do not want the government legislating morality, as we learned from Karen Scott and her religious liberty seminar. But if you want some reinforcement for your morals, you certainly don't get it from a lot of the most popular public figures. Many of the well-known people whose names are household words at any particular point are by no means examples of right living.
One of the ways the Bible differs from our culture is that the Bible gives our Maker’s opinions about what is right, and what is wrong. As we return to the Lord, we need to remember that we are all sinners, and that in verse 7 He is telling us that if we are doing wicked things we need to forsake them. And even if we are thinking wicked thoughts, we need to forsake those, too.
What are the wicked things He’s talking about? Well, it's a good idea to pray through the 10 Commandments once in a while, asking the Lord to forgive me for idol worship (and remember, Jesus clearly stated that one of the most powerful modern idols is money). We need to ask Him to forgive us for taking His name in vain, for breaking His Sabbath, for dishonoring the good ways our parents raised us, for physical and mental murder, for physical and mental adultery, for theft, for lying, and for coveting.
And once we've prayed our way through the 10 Commandments, we need to go to Revelation 21 and remind ourselves of what will finally keep us out of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem.
Revelation 21:8: But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
So things haven't changed in the New Testament. People who have not returned to the Lord, and have not forsaken those same wicked ways, won't be in that New Earth which the last two Revelation chapters speak about.
But let’s keep our eyes on Isaiah 55, and read the rest of Terri’s special verses:
Isaiah 55:6 – 7: Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.
Not just barely enough pardon to take care of my sins – but "He will abundantly pardon." Everything God does, He does abundantly. If you want to peer into the heart of God, just look around you at people, at nature, at what grows at the microscopic level, at herds of elephants which thunder across African plains. Look into the face of a newborn baby. Look into the eyes of those sweet Sabbath School kids who did our worship team last Sabbath. The Heavily Artist is not a minimalist. He is prolific, and He is prolific in His pardon, too.
So if you're taking sermon notes, here comes Point One. What's the first thing that God our Maker will make for us?
God will make me a new covenant (that covenant is mentioned up in verse 3) which promises abundant pardon for me if I seek Him.
God is a covenant-maker. He knows that it would be wonderful if we simply trusted His words, but He goes the second mile and promises us a signed covenant. He will never break His word, but He uses human contractual language to emphasize this even more.
But seeking Him – forsaking my wicked ways and thoughts as I move in His direction – is only Part One of the story. For Part Two, let’s turn to the other Scripture passage Terri chose. (She told me to choose between these and pick one, but I told her they were both so good I was going to include them both.) Let’s go to 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
Terri’s verses in Second Corinthians 5 pick right up from where we left off. If I've followed God's advice in Isaiah 55, I have decided to seek the Lord, and to forsake my wicked ways as I move in His direction.
But whether I realize it at first or not, in order to forsake those wicked ways, I am going to need something more than just a fervent desire to forsake my sins and come to God. My sinfulness is just too strong. So these Second Corinthians verses provide what I need.
2 Corinthians 5:17: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
That’s good news. Really good news. But how is this going to happen? Again, let's just keep reading.
Verses 18 – 21: Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
That is the astonishing message of the gospel, and Ellen White sums it up so well on page 25 of her biography of Jesus, The Desire of Ages: “Christ was treated as we deserve, that we might be treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our sins, in which He had no share, that we might be justified by His righteousness, in which we had no share. He suffered the death which was ours, that we might receive the life which was His.” (Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 25)
So I am given the righteousness of Jesus as a free gift. And meanwhile, through His Holy Spirit, God will be fulfilling within me His promise in Hebrews 10:16: “This is the covenant (notice the “covenant” again?) that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them . . . ” (Hebrews 10:16)
So if Isaiah 55 tells me that God will make me a new covenant which promises abundant pardon for me if I seek Him, what does 2 Corinthians 5 tell me my Maker will make for me?
God will make me into a new creation if I accept the righteousness of His Son Jesus.
Like a drumbeat in those 2 Corinthians verses we just read, Paul repeats over and over the word “reconciliation.” "Be reconciled to God," he pleads with us.
Doesn't your heart go out to the people who are suffering within complex historical and political situations such as the one in Syria? If everybody on either side – and there are actually several sides – could lay down their grudges and their weapons and just reconcile, wouldn't that make the world sit up and take notice?
Let's pray for those people over there. Let's pray for everyone who needs the presence of the Prince of Peace. Because I believe the time is moving faster and faster toward that moment when Jesus' wonderful promise in Kellie’s Scripture passage will be fulfilled. Please turn to John chapter 14.
Because perhaps the most wonderful truth about God and His Son is that you and I are not merely Their leisure time hobby. What's that old saying – “The best day in your life is when you buy a boat, the second best day in your life is when you sell that boat”? (I never owned a boat, so I don't know whether that's true or not.)
But you and I are not God's “boat.” We are not His science project. We are not His pets who, after we die and after He grieves a little, He will forget us. That is not how God loves us.
You see, everything God has let Himself be put through for us has had one final goal – He wants to reunite with us. Even though this planet has wobbled and lurched and rolled away from Him, He has bounded after us in pursuit. Again and again He came down to be with us, talking with Adam and Eve one sad Eden evening, coming down to talk with Cain, coming again to study the situation at the Tower of Babel, approaching the tent of Abraham in the heat of the day, speaking to Moses from a burning bush, settling down on Mount Sinai in thunder and flames, moving within the smaller of two chambers of the wilderness sanctuary. On and on they go, God’s intense and incessant visits, and then His arrival in the flesh, and then His remaining as the Spirit.
Can we take the hint? Hasn't He given us enough clues to indicate that He is lonely for us?
Kellie tells me that John 14:1 – 3 became very important to her during her later high school years, and a great source of encouragement.
And no wonder – these verses prove beyond the deepest human doubt that Heaven will not abandon us. Heaven does not secretly long to wash its hands of us, to be done with us. God and His Son and His Spirit hunger for our presence, just like moms and dads hunger to travel over to Walla Walla and visit their college student children there.
So now let's bask in the wonderful love of Kellie’s verses. But before we read them, we need to remind ourselves that there were no such things as chapter breaks or verse numbers in John's original gospel. That big “number 14” was not added until more than 1000 years after John wrote the original. And it's stunning to think about exactly where these comforting verses show up.
Jesus speaks them immediately after He has just informed Peter that Peter will deny Him. Yet with Jesus' heart still hurting from what He knows Peter will do, Jesus can still take another breath and fervently promise His return.
So let’s read these verses the way John probably meant them to be read—not with Jesus starting a new chapter, a new thought, a new worship talk, but with Jesus reassuring Peter—who within just a few hours would sob in brokenhearted shame—that he, Jesus, still loved Peter and His other friends enough to travel back from heaven for a happy, forever reunion.
John 13:37 – 14:3: Peter said to Him, “Lord, why can I not follow You now? I will lay down my life for Your sake.” Jesus answered him, “Will you lay down your life for My sake? Most assuredly, I say to you, the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times. Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”
My Heavenly Maker will make me a new covenant which promises abundant pardon for me if I seek Him. He will make me into a new creation if I accept the righteousness of His Son Jesus. And He has also made me a place where I can live near Him.
Yesterday afternoon, as I was listening to a public radio program called "The World," I heard about a little songbird called the Northern Wheatear. According to the story, this is a very tiny bird. If you want to know how light it is, pour 2 tablespoons of salt into your palm, and that's what it would feel like if this little bird were sitting on your hand.
There are two populations of these birds in North America, one in central Alaska and the other in the Baffin Island area of Canada. For some reason known only to their Maker, every year these little birds travel as far as 9000 miles over a two-month period down to Africa to breed.
The wheatears which go from Alaska fly across the Bering Strait, through Siberia, then down across the Arabian desert and end up in Uganda or Kenya. Those which start at Baffin Island flit out over the Atlantic to the southern tip of Greenland, then migrate across the Atlantic to England then across the Mediterranean then over the Sahara desert, and finally end up in western Africa. Then, after breeding, they turn right around and fly back to where they were before.
It's clear that these birds do travel these distances – scientists track them using little geo-tracking devices. But according to the scientist who was interviewed on the program, nobody knows why they go that far, or how they can navigate those distances and end up in the right place.
I thought to myself as I listened to that program, "If little tiny birds can show such persistence, over and over again as they seek their life destiny, surely I as a human being can seek my Maker’s life destiny for me with at least that same persistence – especially since my Bible tells me about the persistence with which He has sought me."
FIRE-ENGINE LOVE
Expository Sermon on Revelation 5
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 2/11/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(Click here to listen to the audio for this sermon.)
Please open your Bibles to Revelation Chapter 5.
If you are at all the kind of person who is alert to color schemes, you will have noticed that certain grocery store aisles have been turning pink over the last few weeks. Radio commercials have been urging men to take advantage of online floral services. Card shops have stocked up on carefully-worded messages of Valentine love.
This week, as I was thinking about what to preach on, it struck me that God's love for us isn't so much romantic as it is self-sacrificial. And that means that red ought to be the color which represents God's love.
And then, for some reason, I got to thinking of fire engines. Fire engines are pretty much all red. And the firefighters who respond to each new alarm know that if conditions turn suddenly wrong, their very lives might be on the line.
I grew up near the little town of Redfield, South Dakota. We just had one fire truck back then, and I think that's all it has today. Back then that truck was housed in a large brick garage just south of the post office, and if you wanted to see it, you had to be tall enough to peer through the line of glass windows in the mostly-wood garage door. Diagonally across the intersection was the town's grade school, and all the younger classes took turns in going and getting a tour of the fire engine.
The Redfield Fire Department at that point was probably all-volunteer, and unpaid. One of the volunteers was the chief, but that simply meant that he was the one who got the fire phone calls, and then had to call a couple of other guys from their workplaces to join him on the engine.
Back in the 1960s our county tried the “Fire Number” system. Each farm was given a “fire number” (I never knew what ours was), and the idea was that if you had a fire on your farm, you called the operator and told her that there was a fire at “Fire Number Seventeen,” and the firefighters didn’t have to puzzle out your location but could look you up on their maps. I don’t think that system was in use for very long, maybe because in a crisis people probably got too rattled to remember their fire number.
I actually don't ever remember seeing that fire truck racing to a fire, although I would once in a while hear it in the distance. Most of the fire calls, I'm sure, were for summer prairie fires. A lot of farm people, if they saw the fire truck race pass their property, would jump in their pickups and hurry after it, to see whose prairie was burning.
Sometimes it was a barn fire, and I remember once going out to see the burning barn. It was nighttime, and by the time I got out there, the barn was nothing but a huge skeleton, and I remember how against the night sky, the wood rafters glowed orange like they were alive.
When Shelley and I bought a house about a mile north of the old conference office headquarters in Bothell, we were out on a walk one day – probably a Sunday – and we meandered into a neighborhood we hadn't explored before. As we walked down one street, we were astonished to see a fire truck parked in a driveway.
It was an older fire truck – probably from the 1960s – but there it was, all red and shiny, right there in the driveway of a modest bungalow. I thought to myself, "This must be one dedicated hobbyist!" And we were even more astounded sometime later to see another old fire truck parked right beside the first one! That left no room for the family car, which had to park out on the street. And just a few months ago in late 2011, when I was up in that area again, I checked, and sure enough, there were those two fire trucks, still there.
Last week during little Maylee Meert’s child dedication service, I mentioned that God's love was a parental love. This week, I think we can add another layer to that love. I think God also has fire-engine love. Because as you probably know, the Bible clearly states that this world will finally end in fire, when the devil and his angels, along with sin and anybody who clings firmly to it will be destroyed.
But my Bible tells me the long and amazing story of a God who – even though He knows He will eventually need to cleanse His creation from the devil's works – even so, He has worked ceaselessly to rescue as many as possible from every generation so that they won’t have to go through that final destruction.
Every once in a while I'll be in a Safeway store and I'll see a team of firefighters doing blood pressure and blood sugar tests. What these firefighters are doing is trying to put themselves out of a job. If they can get someone with high blood pressure to check in with his doctor, that might prevent them from having to send out the aid car for him later.
And that is pretty much an excellent illustration of what God has been doing down through history. He's provided us with a 750,000-word first-aid manual, and He has sent prophet after prophet to try to get people with cardiosclerosis (hard-heartedness) to make an appointment with the Great Physician.
God and His Son and His Holy Spirit have gone to incredible lengths to save us. Their love for us is been not a vague, generic, friendly feeling but a fire-engine love.
And of course Jesus has taken center stage in this rescue effort. Revelation chapter 5 introduces Him in a rather unusual way, but it's a way which leaves no doubt about how much we can trust Him. Let’s take a look.
Since this is Revelation we’ll be looking at, get ready for some unusual sights and sounds. John is watching everything happen while in vision. In fact, he's staring right at the throne of God.
Revelation 5:1 – 4 [NKJV]: And I saw in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne a scroll written inside and on the back, sealed with seven seals. Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals?” And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll, or to look at it. So I wept much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll, or to look at it.
At first we might be a bit puzzled at John’s emotion. Why not just a mild curiosity about this scroll? Why the tears?
Well, for one thing, back in John's day, there was no such thing as junk mail. Nowadays you go out to your mailbox and you might have one first-class letter and six or eight other envelopes which contain information you do not need, and couldn't care less about. My mom, who died in 1998, still gets mail at my house, since I was the executor of her estate. A month or so ago she got something from “Reminisce” magazine which said, “Welcome back, June!” It gave me a funny feeling.
But back in John's time, if you saw a scroll with writing on it, that meant somebody had actually pressed a pen to that parchment. And if you saw that it was sealed, especially with several seals, you knew that the information inside must be dreadfully important.
And of course since it is the hand of God Himself holding this scroll, its contents must be infinitely important. But if no one is worthy to open that scroll, then that valuable information may never be known. And John knew very well that if God has written down valuable information for us, we need to know it.
It occurs to me at this point that maybe the Bible itself is like a sealed scroll to many people. Maybe some feel intimidated by it, and maybe think they can never understand it. Maybe others feel rather bored by it, and rather than opening the Book themselves, they are content to let other people tell them what it says. But “All Scripture,” says Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16, “is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness . . .”
I had the chance back in 1992 to go to Russia with an evangelistic team. We took with us a lot of Russian Bibles, and gave them out to the people who attended the meetings. I remember how many of the people clutched that Book as though it were the most wonderful treasure in the world. Something that had been denied them so long was now given to them free. Watching that happen made me appreciate my own Bible even more.
Anyway, back to this heavenly scene. God is holding a scroll in His hand, and for a while it looks as though no one is going to be able to see what's inside. This distresses John terribly. But watch what happens.
Verses 5 – 6: But one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals.” And I looked, and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood –
Stood what? A lion? No, not a lion.
Verse 6: And I looked, and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent out into all the earth. Then He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne.
What an amazing sight to see, in a deathless heaven, a Lamb looking as though it has been killed. Maybe there's still blood on His wool, maybe even a knife-slash. But this Lamb is very much alive, because He walks over and takes the scroll out of the hand of God.
What we need to do is pause right here and find out what that scroll actually had in it. We know that it is sealed with seven seals, and in the next chapter those seals will be opened one by one. But after all that unsealing, we don’t see anybody actually reading that scroll.
But if we study what happens after each of those seals is broken, we seem to see a mini-history of Christianity all the way down to the end of time. After the seventh seal is opened, for example, we see a lot of the same signs which Christ predicted just before His coming. So maybe, what is written in the scroll is portrayed, bit by bit, in audio-visual form, as these seals are removed.
But the important point is that, since this scroll reveals the future, and Jesus the Lamb of God was the only one worthy to open that scroll, then Jesus knows the future.
In fact, you might say that this could be Sermon Point One if you're taking notes.
I can trust Jesus with my future because He knows that future.
Since Jesus took that scroll and broke those seals one by one, the future is, quite literally, in His hand.
So. What do I do now that I know that I can trust Jesus with my future because He knows that future? Well mainly, I can relax. Because the future isn't unknown anymore. AS the song says, "The one who holds tomorrow is the one who stands by me.”
If you spend any time at all in bookstores, you know that to be successful, a book needs to fall into a certain "genre." A genre is a type or category of book, such as a spy novel, a police procedural novel, a private detective novel, a Western novel, and so on. The same thing is true for movies. The stories which make the most money are the ones which follow the rules of the genre.
In other words, there has to be a certain predictability, and it's up to the author to use his or her creativity to still make the story interesting. In a detective novel series where the same detective appears from book to book, you can be pretty sure that no matter what danger the detective gets into, he or she is going to get out of it by the time the story is over.
So even though you and I face a pretty uncertain future, we can know the One who knows the end of the story. And therefore we can relax.
That is, we can relax if we keep reading the next few verses and find out what's in them.
Verses 8 - 9: Now when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll, And to open its seals; For You were slain, And have redeemed us to God by Your blood Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
Here comes Sermon Point Two.
I can trust Jesus with my future not only because He knows that future, but also because He died to redeem me no matter who I am.
This past week I heard a radio news feature which talked about some of Washington's Native American tribes. Occasionally a Native American person who might be living off the reservation will hear that things are going well on that reservation, and he or she applies to become a member of a particular tribe.
At this point, the tribe this person is trying to join asks about this person’s blood line. In some instances, if that person has a high enough percentage of that tribe’s bloodline, that person can join that tribe. But some tribes are becoming flooded with so many requests that they are trying to decide if they should tighten the rules about who can officially join.
The good news for anyone wanting to be a Christian is that, as we have just read, if we want to accept Jesus' redemption, it does not matter what tribe we are from, what bloodline we have, it doesn't matter whether we were raised in privileged circumstances or impoverished ones. It doesn't matter whether we came from a happy home or a dysfunctional one.
So what do I do, now that I know this? Well, knowing that if I choose to be, I am covered by the blood of the Lamb of God, and accepted fully and completely into Heaven’s tribe, this means that I can hold up my head and gaze into the future with courage. And that's because I belong. I'm not an outsider – I'm an insider.
If I have repented and asked Jesus for forgiveness for my past, I can turn my back on that past and start over. It's like when my ancestors traveled over from Switzerland to America back in the 1880s. When they left the "old country," they could leave behind all of the feuds, all of the disputes over this parcel of land or where that stone fence should go. They could allow generations of grudges and animosities to roll off their shoulders, and they could take a deep breath and start all over again.
That's something like what we can do if we accept Jesus as our Savior. "The old is gone, the new has come."
However, there is even better news still to come. Let's start back at verse nine.
Verses 9 - 10: And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll, And to open its seals; For You were slain, And have redeemed us to God by Your blood Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, And have made us kings and priests to our God; And we shall reign on the earth.”
I can trust Jesus with my future not only because He knows that future, and because He died to redeem me no matter who I am, but also because He has given me royal responsibilities.
Notice that He hasn’t simply made me royalty – He has given me royal responsibilities.
60 years ago this week, on February 6, 1952, King George VI of England died. At that moment, his oldest daughter Elizabeth and her husband Philip were spending 19 hours in a tree-house in a wild animal viewing area in Africa. Elizabeth ascended the ladder to that treehouse a princess, and descended the next day a queen.
And of course her life immediately changed. For the last six decades she has methodically and faithfully fulfilled her many royal duties, even though she has gone through some difficult experiences.
But influential though she is, Queen Elizabeth's royal duties shrink beside the responsibilities the Lamb of God gives to those who become His servants. The Queen deals with an earthly kingdom, and the Lamb’s servants deal with the heavenly.
So knowing that Jesus has given me royal responsibilities, how’s this going to change my life?
First of all, I need to remember something Queen Elizabeth learned very early – royalty has no “private life." In Elizabeth's case it means that for decades, people with cameras have followed her and her family everywhere. Newspapers with varying degrees of credibility speculate about her every move. She is really at the mercy of a lot of forces the ordinary person doesn't have to face.
And as a Christian, my life really has no privacy. Wherever I go, people who know my professed faith are subconsciously measuring how closely it matches with my behavior. And even when I'm away from the public eye, I am being observed by angels and who knows who else in the unfallen universe. I can’t be a prince or princess from 9 to 5, and a slave of Satan the rest of the time.
Another thing I need to do as a member of Jesus' royal priesthood is to find out what my duties are. I need to read in the New Testament about the various spiritual gifts which help us serve the Heavenly King. I need to allow myself to be put into position where I can use the talents He gave me to advance His kingdom.
Still another thing I need to do now that I know I am part of the priestly royalty is to pray daily that my King will send me where He needs me.
And finally, even though my Creator has given me responsibilities that no human royalty could ever fulfill, I need to stay humble. Paul tells me how to do this in Philippians 2.
Let this mind be in you [he says] which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 2:5 – 8)
Jesus teaches me that humility means stepping down from proud heights. Sometimes it means kneeling down to wash someone's feet at the communion service. Sometimes it means listening carefully and thoughtfully as someone pours out his or her heart. Sometimes it means graciously sharing your faith in God as He gives you the opportunity.
On our way home today from church, Shelley and I will pass a large fire station in the Fairwood area in south Renton. Every time we drive by, especially when we are returning home, we glance at the three bays, each of which has a glass garage door. The Fairwood station has two ladder trucks and one aid car, and we always feel glad when all three vehicles are there, because it means that they haven't been summoned to a crisis.
It's always interesting to see these trucks. They are always facing out rather than in. And both doors on each vehicle are left wide open, and large cables are connected to each vehicle, probably keeping various electrical devices charged. It's interesting that Saturday morning is when the trucks are rolled out into the sunshine, and the firemen wash them.
Maybe that’s something like what we are doing this Sabbath morning, remembering who our Power Source is, readying ourselves to “face out” into the week ahead, with ire-engine love, and no matter what happens, doing our best to go where God calls us and needs us.
I can trust Jesus with my future not only because He knows that future, and because He died to redeem me no matter who I am, and also because He has given me royal responsibilities.
How about you? Would you like to resolve to join me in fulfilling our responsibilities for Him this coming week?
THE PARENT’S PSALM
Expository Sermon on Psalm 33
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 2/4/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(Click here to listen to the audio for this sermon.)
Please open your Bibles to Psalm 33.
We are in Psalm 33 because Jason and Charlie Meert chose some verses from that psalm which they find deeply meaningful, and which our elder read for the Scripture reading a few minutes ago. This morning, at the end of my sermon they will be dedicating their little daughter Maylee to the Lord.
For me, yesterday was something of a "children's day." In the morning I stood before well over 100 elementary kids in our Seventh-day Adventist school in Kirkland and sang songs with them and did a little talk.
And then, since we were in the area, Shelley and I drove up to the Family Christian Bookstore in the Totem Lake shopping center. The store has an entrance from the sidewalk outside, and another entrance into the mall area. This second entrance is a large sliding-glass door, which the store people keep open so shoppers can go in to the rest of the mall if they want. (But since there are only two other stores in the mall, and they have only entrances to the outside, the mall is empty, and is used by a few people who want to get their walking exercise in when it’s raining.)
While Shelley browsed through the store, I stood out in the mall area few feet from that sliding door, where there is a beautiful wooden counter which used to be the mall's information center. It was a perfect place to rest my sermon notebook and the sheet of paper on which I had printed off Psalm 33. I stood there reading the Psalm and making notes in the notebook.
And then, suddenly, I saw right in front of me a parent-child event. To me, it seemed to sum up not only what parents go through with their kids, but what our Heavenly Father goes through with His children.
A young mother had arrived at Family Christian Store by way of the store’s outside entrance, and through the sliding glass door I could see her pushing a stroller. However, her child – a cute little blond boy – was not in the stroller but was trotting along beside her. I am no good at telling the ages of children, but this boy seems to have just reached the age where his walk was no longer a stagger but was a fairly confident trot.
Well, mom wasn't exactly having an easy time with her little guy. She tried to interest him in playing with the blocks in a little children's play center the store had thoughtfully provided. But the boy would have nothing to do with the blocks. Instead he gazed out through the sliding glass door and into the mall. He decided he wanted to go out there, so he started trotting through the doorway. Mom followed him and hauled him back into the store, and they both disappeared around the corner of some DVD racks.
I turned my attention back to my sermon. Suddenly my eye caught a movement. I glanced up. The boy had reappeared, this time all by himself. He glanced thoughtfully out into the mall where I was, and then he took a couple of steps toward the doorway. Then he stopped, and glanced back over his shoulder. Then, since mom wasn't in view, he took another couple of steps, which brought him out into the mall itself. Again he stopped, and glanced back. No mom.
This time he trotted 10 or 15 feet further into the mall. And again he stopped and looked over his shoulder. Mom still wasn't visible, so he just trotted away without another backward glance. He showed absolutely no fear at being away from mommy’s side. His idea was to put as much distance between him and mommy as he could, in the shortest time possible.
Well, I knew what my responsibility was in this situation. The boy would have probably found it fairly traumatic if a tall, strange, gray-haired man began pursuing him. I would have done this, of course, if the mall had been full of people, but as I say, there were just a few mall-walkers.
So I was just about to dart into the store and get mom’s attention. But along came a gray-haired lady mall-walker. She spoke to him in grandmotherly tones, got hold of him, and took him back inside the store to his mom. Mom thanked the rescuer, and promptly buckled her offspring firmly into his stroller, which he did not like one bit
I thought to myself, "Isn't that a perfect little parable of human parenting, and maybe even divine parenting? Hasn't human history been one long series of restless and sometimes runaway kids?”
The little boy in the mall was younger than Maylee’s big brother Rylan, and I would imagine that Jason and Charlie have had to deal with similar exploratory instincts on Rylan’s part. And I would imagine that, once in a while, they look ahead a bit apprehensively to when Rylan or Maylee have grown to the point where they won't always be close enough for Mom and Dad to run after them and buckle them back into a stroller.
As I was looking over Psalm 33, I decided to give it my own title – "The Parents’ Psalm." This psalm doesn't mention children. It gives no child-raising advice. None of its verses say "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."
Charlie and Jason could have chosen the "train up a child" kind of verse, but I have a feeling they don't need that right now. They are both sensible Christian parents, and they know their kids better than anybody else does.
No, what they must sense that they need – and the Scripture passage they chose proves it – is to be reminded that when human parenting reaches its limits, there is a powerful God who can protect and guide.
I'd like to spend the next few minutes mentioning some deeply encouraging facts about our Heavenly Parent which Psalm 33 tells us. And even if, like me, you don't have kids, these will encourage you. Because we are all God's children, and knowing we have a loving Heavenly Father – and knowing just how resourceful He is – will make all the difference. So get ready to be greatly encouraged.
The first thing we notice about this anonymous Psalm is that its writer considers God to have celebrity “rock star” status. Watch what happens.
Psalm 33:1 – 3 [NKJV]: Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous! For praise from the upright is beautiful. Praise the Lord with the harp; make melody to Him with an instrument of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully with a shout of joy.
Notice that this Psalm doesn’t start out by simply listing the reasons God is so good to know. That will come later. This psalm-writer starts with joyous musical ovation, sosrt of a “Hail to the Chief.”
So if we’re God’s children, and He is our Parent, what’s the first thing this Psalm tells us? If you’re taking sermon notes, here comes Point One.
I need to pay God attention.
Recently one of our church members forgot his Bible at church. When I found that Bible on the pew, I knew it was probably this person’s Bible, because I knew where he'd been sitting, but I opened the front cover just to make sure. And there, right inside the front cover was a little handmade card, hand-printed with childish letters, which said, "I love you, daddy."
Don't you imagine that all it takes to cheer Dad up when he's down is to take a peek at that little expression of adoration? Sometimes I think we make God too much of an impersonal Force, far too remote from emotions we humans recognize. But we have to constantly remember that we are made in His image. He is not an alien. He is our Father. In a way, we have His emotional genetic code.
And I have a feeling that the better we get to know Him, the more we will understand that He does appreciate appreciation. Have you ever considered that your fervent gratitude, expressed lovingly to Him, could give Him courage? Don't you remember how Jesus wept over Jerusalem, in agony because they would reject Him? Don't you remember those mournful phrases in John chapter 1, where it says that Jesus “came to His own, and His own received him not"? Have you read God's heart cries in Hosea 11:8, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?”
One of these days, and it's going to come breathtakingly quickly, little Maylee will sit down at a table, grip pencil in her fingers, and carefully scrawl out a staggery stick-figure picture of mommy and daddy. And that picture is going right up on the refrigerator, or in a place of honor at work.
How do you pay God attention? You're doing it right now. You are honoring His special gift to you, His Sabbath, the memorial of the creation He so lovingly crafted for you. And as you sit here, you may not be reading God’s e-mail, but you are reading His “ye-mail,” this Book He has written to all of us.
Every time you hum a heartfelt Christian song in a heartfelt way as you drive to work, or stride through the halls at school, you're paying Him attention. Every time you talk to Him as though you are addressing not an impersonal alien or a celestial vending machine but as somebody you can really open your heart to, every time you do that, you are paying Him attention. And He loves it.
And the Lord is worth every throb of love, every moment of attention you give Him. Here's why.
Verses 4 – 5: For the word of the Lord is right, and all His work is done in truth. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
What’s the next encouraging truth our Psalm tells us about God?
I need to pay God some attention, because He is good through and through.
No dark secrets, no incriminating e-mails, no under-the-table corruption. One of the reasons the Bible is sometimes R-rated and even X-rated reading is that God is open and transparent. In the pages of the Bible we read of jaw-dropping human failures as well as successes. God is good – so good that He refuses to airbrush out His children's flaws, but bravely prints them as examples and warnings to us.
Wouldn't it be nice if human leaders could be “good through and through”? If you pay any attention at all to world news, you long for this to be said about the leaders who benefited from the Arab spring uprisings. People surge into their public squares, crying for justice, shouting for change, hearts high with hope, and what do they get? A different group in power, with the return of some of the same old tactics.
What a refreshing change God is! Knowing that God does His work in truth, that He loves righteousness, that He loves justice, gives me great courage for a future in His great universe.
However, knowing that God is “good through and through” is not quite enough for a couple of parents named Jason and Charlie raising a couple of kids named Rylan and Maylee. After all, Abraham Lincoln was a good man. Mother Theresa was a good woman. But they have both died. You and I need a God who has more than just goodness.
And our psalmist doesn't disappoint us.
Verses 6 – 9: By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.
Now we're getting somewhere. This is getting closer to what parents and everybody else concerned about the future need to hear. We can put it this way:
I need to pay God attention, because He is good through and through, and because He created everything I see.
And what's so amazing is that these verses remind us of how He created. Nowadays, if you want to create a tablet computer such as an iPad, you assemble a lot of very intelligent people, and you piece together bits of technology from lots of other intelligent people, and you farm out the work to factories all over the world, and finally you have your product.
But all God did was speak. No doubt, He had everything planned out in His head, so that when He spoke it was like pushing the "Enter" key. Evidently, the only parts of His creation which weren't formed by His voice were His first two children, Adam and Eve. Just like any proud parent, He wanted to cuddle them in His arms rather than keep them at a reserved distance. That's probably where the instinct to reach out and give a kid a parental hug comes from – from the very heart of God.
This might be a good time to remind ourselves of just Who we are talking about in these verses. There's a lot of Bible evidence that every time you read the word "LORD" in little capital letters in the Old Testament, this is talking about Jesus Christ. Verse 6 says that "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made," and John chapter 1:3, speaking of Jesus, says, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”
So whatever role Jesus had in creation, creation couldn't have happened without Him. Maybe it was He who spoke atoms and molecules into existence. And it most likely was He who formed Adam from dust of the ground. And when He came as a human being to this planet, Jesus' constant goal was to show us the Father, show us God by acting and speaking and loving the way God does. "I and My Father are one," He said in John 10:30.
But if you are a really thoughtful parent, gazing anxiously into the next decade or two and knowing that – unless the Lord returns first – your child is going to have to navigate those decades with less and less of your presence and influence, and more and more influence from other sources, knowing merely that God created everything is still not quite enough. What you need is a God who does something more.
And sure enough, our anonymous psalmist doesn’t let us down.
Verses 10 – 17: The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He makes the plans of the peoples of no effect. The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance. The Lord looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men. From the place of His dwelling He looks on all the inhabitants of the earth; He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works. No king is saved by the multitude of an army; a mighty man is not delivered by great strength. A horse is a vain hope for safety; neither shall it deliver any by its great strength.
I need to pay God attention, because He is good through and through, and He created everything I see, and He’s keeping an eye on things down here.
And when God keeps an eye on things, He does so not as a neutral, disinterested observer. I still remember how my dad reacted when word got back to him that another kid was bullying me at my elementary school. I was Dad's firstborn, so he had not had to deal with this problem before, and he was frothing at the mouth. He wanted to go over to that kid's house and have a talk with him. Mom (who had been a schoolteacher) had to calm Dad down and tell him that doing that would cause more problems than it would solve.
And to some extent, God Himself is helpless. Or to be more accurate, He has tied His own hands. Almost daily in the news we hear about how this or that nation's leader operates a police state, or some other kind of system where those in power can pretty much do what they want when they want. And a lot of innocent people get hurt.
But God refuses to work that way. He does truly allow free human choice, and right now, He must generally allow the results of those choices to play themselves out.
But that, too, is faint comfort for parents like Jason and Charlie, and for any Christian who cares about the powerless. Just knowing that God is keeping an eye on things would be pretty discouraging, except that our psalmist now fills in the final blank as well.
Verses 18 – 19: Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, on those who hope in His mercy, to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.
Aha. Here is something tangible. Here are things God will do for those who fear Him and hope in His mercy. He will deliver their souls from death – either physical death down here or eternal death at the end of time. He will keep them alive in famine – either physically alive or with the promise of life in an eternity where the memories of famine's agony will quickly fade. The main thing is that God intervenes.
I need to pay God attention, because He is good through and through, and He created everything I see, and He keeps an eye on things down here, and will intervene for our eternal safety.
Now can you see how the eyes of our two loving parents, Jason and Charlie, moved unerringly to the final three verses of this Psalm? These verses not only summarize this entire encouraging Bible chapter, but they give Jason's and Charlie's own parental commitment. These verses show that they are not only dedicating Maylee to God, just as they dedicated Rylan-- these verses show that they are dedicating themselves anew to Him.
As I read their dedication verses again, why don’t we let this be an opportunity to dedicate or rededicate ourselves to the Heavenly Father who dotes on us so fondly?
Verses 20 – 22: Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield. For our heart shall rejoice in Him, because we have trusted in His holy name. Let Your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, just as we hope in You.
JESUS’ THREE KEYS TO DISCIPLESHIP
Topical Sermon from the Gospel of John
by Maylan Schurch
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here.)
Please open your Bibles to John chapter 8.
Not long ago, when I was in a used bookstore, I came upon a glass case with items on display. When this bookstore puts items behind glass, this means that they are especially rare, so I paused to look.
What I saw made me feel queasy and sad at the same time. The display featured first editions and reprints of some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's lesser-known works. One of the items was a pamphlet called Pheneas Speaks: A Striking Message from the Hereafter, Reported by Arthur Conan Doyle, M.D., LL.D.
What made me feel sad was that when I was a boy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of my top 2 or 3 favorite authors. His Sherlock Holmes adventures portrayed a lean, hawk-nosed, magnifying-glass-wielding detective who scorned all superstition and instead solved baffling crimes with pure reasoning. Sherlock Holmes has enchanted readers for several generations--and even within the last 2 or 3 years a couple of new Sherlock Holmes movies have come out.
And the sad part—and the queasy part as well—was that the “Pheneas” in Doyle’s book title was supposedly someone who had lived thousands of years ago, and whose spirit was being channeled by a medium whom Doyle knew. The medium would go into a trance and tell Doyle what Pheneas was communicating, and Doyle would write it down and print it up, and spread it around.
Years ago, when I first heard that Doyle had become a spiritualist in the last couple of decades of his life, I could hardly believe it. How could the creator of Sherlock Holmes let his mind go flabby enough to abandon the icy logic of the man who lived in Baker Street?
From what I've read, here's what happened. In a relatively short space of time, Doyle lost his wife in death, and then his son and some male relatives were killed in the First World War. He was in such an agony of loneliness that he allowed people to convince him that maybe he could speak with his departed loved ones by going to séances. The deeper into spiritualism Doyle sank, the more enthusiastic he became, and he would go across England and America and elsewhere, lecturing on the subject.
Now, you and I have just been through an Unlocking Revelation seminar, and we saw clear Bible evidence that when people die, they simply do not return as spirits. Instead, they sleep until the resurrection, which is by far the most humane way for God to handle this.
So what could have diverted Arthur Conan Doyle away from his sad search? I'm not sure whether he was acquainted with Christians who really knew their Bibles, or whether the believers he knew were content with some of the superstitions their ancestors had taught them. But maybe if he had been friends with someone who was an informed disciple of Jesus Christ, things may have turned out differently.
Because if there's one thing Jesus makes crystal clear in His teachings, it's that He calls you and me to be far more than “spectator Christians.” He calls us to be disciples--and not only that, in the last couple of verses of Matthew He tells us that once we have become disciples, we should to go and make other people into disciples.
Now, if this is so important, just what is a disciple? What does the word mean?
Well, the Greek word for “disciple” is mathetes. It means “learner,” and according to my Merriam-Webster 3rd New International dictionary, it's actually where we get the word “mathematics.”
Notice that the Greek word mathetes does NOT mean “teacher”--there's another Greek word for that. Mathetes means “learner.” Naturally, of course, when someone becomes a devoted “learner” or disciple of Jesus, he or she can guide someone else toward the Savior. A number of people who attended our Unlocking Revelation meetings were introduced to them by people in this church. But Jesus wanted to make sure that we understood that when it comes to our relationship to Him, we are all to be learners.
But what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? How can I know whether I am His disciple?
This week I discovered that there are only 3 places in the Gospels--and those 3 places are all in the gospel of John--where Jesus specifically spells out some ways we can know if we are His disciples, using the very word “disciples.” I mean, if we really want to know how to be a disciple of Jesus, what better way to listen to Jesus' words on the subject, right?
And the first key to knowing whether we’re His disciple is found right here in John chapter 8.
John 8:28 -- 32 [NKJV]: Then Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things. And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.” As He spoke these words, many believed in Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
What’s Jesus’ first key to knowing I’m a disciple of His?
The first key to becoming Jesus’ disciple is for us to abide in His Word.
Okay, that sounds good, but what does it mean?
Well, first of all, here's another Greek word, the word for “abide.” It's the word meno, and it means basically, “remain” or “dwell.” One thing I discovered this weeK was that John loves this word meno, “abide,” “remain,” “dwell.” Matthew uses that word only 3 times, Mark 2 times, Luke 7 times. John uses it 30 times.
But what does it mean to abide, remain, dwell in Jesus' word?
Think about the house or apartment you lived in when you were, say, in the 4th or 5th grade. When I was that age, I live in a two-story white farmhouse a mile southeast of my hometown.
As a kid, you “dwelled” or “abided” in your house or apartment, just as I dwelled in that little farmhouse. I lived there. No matter where I went during the day--to school, or play with my friends, I always came back to that house. What happened inside that house had far more influence on me than what happened anywhere else. From my parents--mainly subconsciously--I learned how to relate to life. I learned the voice tones my parents used when they faced the challenges they had to face.
I learned how when my dad hit his thumb with a hammer, he did not swear. He just gasped, sometimes with a shuddery gasp. And that's why even today if I hurt myself in some painful way like that, I do not swear. I wasn't brought up like that.
Maybe this is part of what Jesus meant when He said “Abide—dwell—remain—live in My Word.” Maybe He wants His words and the rest of the Bible to be a house for us, so that no matter what happens to us throughout the day, we return to His words as a refuge, a balancer, a restorer of our courage and sanity, a healer of our wounds.
How well do you know the words Jesus spoke? How long has it been since you’ve read through some of His parables? You’d be surprised how much more there is to learn—because you yourself have learned more about life.
So why not consider the Bible your spiritual “house” this year? Why not live in it? A couple of years back, someone wrote a book called something like Living Biblically. The author tried to spend an entire year living only the way a Bible person would live. You and I need to do the same, in an internal, spiritual way—which will then work itself out to the outside.
Now let’s flip a few chapters forward to discover Jesus’ second key which I can use to know if I’m His disciple.
John 13:33 -- 35: Little children, I shall be with you a little while longer. You will seek Me; and as I said to the Jews, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come,’ so now I say to you. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
If Jesus’ first key to becoming a disciple is for us to abide in His Word, His second key is for us to love each other.
A year or so I saw a bumper sticker which you might have seen as well. It says, “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand!”
And why did Jesus call this a “new” commandment? Isn’t the command to love your neighbor as old as at least Deuteronomy? Maybe He called it a new commandment because He was speaking to a feisty group of prima donnas (or primo dons would be the more correct Italian) who had squelched their love and had put self-advancement in its place. The agape kind of love (that's the Greek word Jesus used here--the same word He used in the verse “For God so loved the world”), the agape kind of love probably was new to these men.
So if the second way we can know we are Jesus' disciples is if we love one another, what does that look like?
Well, these verses give a strong hint.
Verse 34: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
So that is the standard of love we are supposed to use toward each other--the same kind of love Jesus loved us with. How did Jesus love His disciples? For one thing, He constantly showed them what God was like. From early morning until late at night, Jesus did this. Again and again, He said things like “I don't do My own will, but the will of the Father.” “The words that I speak are the words God wants Me to speak.”
I think I've mentioned before how some of the most frightening experiences of my childhood were when I discovered that my friends' parents sometimes behaved quite differently at home then they did at church. At church they would smile kindly, and speak graciously to kids or adults. But when I visited their homes, and they didn't know I was close by, I would sometimes hear the snaps and the snarls, and my stomach would tighten.
But we need to get more specific. How can I put Jesus' agape love to work this coming week?
A good plan would be to read through Jesus' startlingly idealistic statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Remember that at the beginning of Matthew 5, it says that Jesus went up to the mountain, and His disciples came to Him, and He taught them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and so on. It should definitely give us a heads-up to discover that Jesus spoke at least the first part of the Sermon on the Mount to His disciples. So if I want to learn to act out Jesus’ true love to other people, I need to internalize these ideas.
You might want to read through those Beatitudes this afternoon. Notice how they end with Jesus' insistence that “Blessed (happy) are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.” A fully devoted disciple of Jesus doesn't quail or flinch when persecution arises. At these points we need to remember that Jesus considers these times as just as much “blessed” or “happy” as those experienced by the pure in heart a few verses earlier.
Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, I asked myself this week, “How can I behave so that people realize that I am a disciple of Jesus and not a disciple of, for example, the Dalai Lama?”
It's something to think about. Because the Dalai Lama also teaches peace and kindness and many other virtues. So what sets Jesus' teachings apart from Buddhist principles or any other well-meaning earthly philosophy?
Well, the crucial difference is that in the Sermon on the Mount and in many other places, Jesus doesn't simply teach ethics. He constantly alludes to Someone Buddhism doesn't allude to and can’t allude to—“Your Father in Heaven.” A Buddhist might say, “Work toward perfection,” but Jesus says, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” People who believe what Jesus says know that we have a personal God, Someone who loves us and cares for us and gives us power to do His will. And that makes all the difference.
Once again, move forward in John as we find Jesus' final key, the final way we can know whether we are His disciples.
John 15:5 -- 8: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.
At first glance, it seems like Jesus is laying on a bit of pressure here. It seems like he's saying, “To be My disciple, you have to bring forth a lot of fruit.”
But since we have read the verse in its context, we understand that fruit-bearing is not Jesus' third key. Instead, it's this:
If Jesus’ first key to becoming a disciple is for us to abide in His Word, and if His second key is for us to love one another, His third key is for us to remain connected to Him.
Every one of Jesus' disciples was very familiar with grape vines. In their travels through Palestine over the last 3 1/2 years, they had often walked through the vineyards and plucked grapes to eat. They knew how delightful it was to find huge, fat, purple grapes bursting forth from the branches of the sturdy vines.
And what Jesus is saying, of course, is that if the branch remains fastened to the vine, bearing fruit is the most natural thing in the world. It automatically happens.
So, what is the fruit that a non-grapevine human being bring forth by remaining close to Jesus? Well, the Greek word for “fruit” here is karpos, which is exactly the same word used in Galatians 5 for the “fruit” of the Spirit.
And as you read them, this Galatians bunch of fruit, this cluster of grapes, is what every disciple of Jesus Christ needs to allow to grow on his or her branch. These luscious, tasty, satisfying spiritual qualities will cause many other people to reach out for them, and taste them, and become part of the Vine, and grow more of that fruit themselves. Listen to these qualities--wouldn't it be wonderful if we could offer this kind of fruit, day by day, in tough times as well as easy times, to the people around us?
Galatians 5:22 - 25: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.
What about you? Would you like to allow Jesus to grow a prize-winning crop of this spiritual fruit in you this year?
THE KEEPER
Expository Sermon on Psalm 121
on the occasion of Bill Thurmon’s baptism
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue SDA Church 1/6/2012
©2012 by Maylan Schurch
(To hear the audio for this sermon, click here)
Please open your Bibles to Psalm 121.
This is the Psalm Bill Thurmon chose for his baptism Sabbath, and it's the one which begins "I will lift up my eyes to the hills." When I was growing up as a South Dakota farm boy, I would read that verse, and then I would lift up my eyes and discover that there were no hills! Maybe Bill was living in a part of Texas where this was true.
So that meant that when I read Psalm 121:1 I had to imagine hills. And since both Bill and I both grew up on the King James version, the verse said "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." So I at first assumed that somehow, when I needed it, the Lord would send help down from the hills. Except that when it came to hills, we prairie folks were out of luck!
Well, since then, we've had some more accurate translations come along, such as the New King James, which we’re using this morning. It basically says, "I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?” And since the hills were supposed to be where the heathen gods dwelt, which is why heathen people (or people who were playing with heathenism) kept going up to sacrifice at the "high places,” the psalmist firmly says, "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth."
God isn’t roving around somewhere up in the hills and mountains. God is the Creator of the hills, and real help comes from Him and not some kind of impressive geographical elevation.
If you've ever had a chance to look at pictures of Biblical archaeological sites where they’ve dug up ancient cities, these are most often on tops of hills. That was because a hill was the safest place. If you built a city on top of a hill, and surrounded it with a wall, the enemy wouldn't be easily able to roll their battering rams right up against your wall and start banging away at it
If you were a farmer in the valley, and you saw the enemy army coming over the horizon, you headed right for your hilltop city and hoped they kept the gates open for you.
But here the Psalm-writer tells us that the Lord provides better help than any hilltop god or hilltop city. But what kind of help does the Lord give us?
I found out more of the answer than I ever had before by working my way slowly through this Psalm this week. I even printed it out in large print in the ancient Hebrew. And I discovered something really surprising. I discovered a Hebrew word which shows up six times in these eight verses.
And it’s not just a common word, like “the.” It's one of those ancient Bible words which requires a whole bunch of different English words to translate it. You can't just get the full meaning with one English word. It’s the Hebrew word shamar, and here are some of the ways the old King James Bible translates it: “observe” (as in “observe the commandments”), “preserve,” and “take heed.”
But most of the time shamar is translated “keep” or “keeper.” That’s the way it’s translated in Psalm 121.
Okay, why is this such a big deal?
It’s a big deal because this is a high-powered word. The English word “keep” can be a rather wimpy word. If I cull through my books before taking some of them to sell at a used book store, I might look at this or that one and say, “Well, I guess I’ll keep this.” Maybe you do the same thing when you get ready for a garage sale.
But that’s a pretty weak “keep.” That’s simply expressing a mild preference for that book or object. “Well, I guess I won’t get rid of it this time.” But the word shamar in this Psalm is so powerful that a couple of hundred years before Christ, when the Jews translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek and called it the Septuagint, they used the Greek word phulasso.
And phulasso is by no means a wimpy word. It’s the word which means “guard,” like you’d guard a city, or guard a prison. A phulake is a prison. That’s from that same word. Phulasso and shamar are both “maximum security” words. If the Navy SEAL team who planned the capture of Osama bin Laden had spoken ancient Greek or Hebrew, those are the very words they would have spoken many times.
So that’s what’s the “big deal.” When the Psalmist says that the Lord is our “keeper,” he means that the Lord is our SWAT team captain, our SEAL team head, our pirate-captured-Iranian-fishermen-rescue coordinator. God’s motto is “maximum security.” That’s what “keeper” means here.
So now that we've discovered the high-caliber power of God's "keeping," and we know that He is the source of the help we need, what kind of help does He actually provide? Let's take a look.
Psalm 121:1 – 3 [NKJV]: I will lift up my eyes to the hills— From whence comes my help? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to be moved . . .
What’s Psalm 121’s first kind of help the Lord gives me? (Here comes Sermon Point One if you’re taking notes.)
The Lord helps me by keeping my feet steady.
(By the way, I did a spot-check of this Psalm, and every time it says “you,” it’s a singular you, not a plural one. In other words, this Psalm isn’t written as though it’s talking to a whole group at once. It is talking to every individual person—Bill, you, and me.)
Now. What does it mean that the Lord can keep my feet steady? Well, this is obviously poetic and metaphorical. To help clear this up, listen to some verses from Proverbs:
Proverbs 4:23 -27: Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put perverse lips far from you. Let your eyes look straight ahead, and your eyelids look right before you. Ponder the path of your feet, And let all your ways be established. Do not turn to the right or the left; remove your foot from evil.
Proverbs 5:3 – 5: For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.
Proverbs 6:16 – 18: [Mentioning some of the things the Lord hates:] A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift in running to evil,
So figuratively speaking, "feet" are symbol of where you choose to go spiritually and morally. And the Lord is interested in the paths we choose to take. Proverbs 5:21 says, “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and He ponders all his paths.”
The good news is that Bill’s Psalm 121 says that the same God who pays attention to our paths is able to keep our feet from slipping off them. So what's my part in all this? I need to find the right path, as Bill has done, and stay on it. And to trust the Lord to give me strength to stay faithful to Him.
At this point, the Holy Spirit, who inspired this Psalm, evidently felt that we needed another reminder of the Lord's power. Let's pick it up at verse three.
Verses 3 – 4: He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
What’s Psalm 121’s second kind of help the Lord gives me
Well, if the first way the Lord helps is to keep my feet steady, the second way He helps is by keeping awake.
I mentioned a few minutes ago that the state I grew up in is flat, at least in the eastern section. And not only that, but the roads are straight. And that means driving can get a little boring.
I think I was probably 17 or 18, and our entire family was in the car, and I was driving. We were coming back toward our hometown of Redfield from the west, traveling on the smooth blacktop of Highway 212. A mile ahead I could see the grain elevator of a tiny town. (And evidently my guardian angel has his driver’s license!)
The very next thing I knew, there was a rumbling sound. My right tire had hit the gravel on the highways shoulder. Mom was shouting at me. And the grain elevator was right beside me! I had been asleep, or at least in some kind of highway-hypnosis daze, for approximately one mile!
This little incident scared my mother badly. For several weeks afterward she questioned me about if I still got sleepy as I drove. If the road hadn't been straight as an arrow, I might have injured or killed my family.
Remember in 1 Kings 18 how Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal as they were dancing around the altar they’d built? They were going through all sorts of gyrations, cutting themselves and screaming with frenzy trying to attract their god's attention. Elijah said, "You'll have to do better than that! Baal is probably sleeping!"
But this Psalm insists several times that God doesn't sleep. God's attention doesn't waver. God is not listening to you and texting at the same time. If He were standing in the foyer with you after church talking to you, His eyes would not be flicking around seeing where His other friends were.
That means, according to this Psalm, you and I constantly have God's undivided attention. So now that I know this, what should I do?
Well, if God is always alert, I need to be alert as well. Jesus constantly told His disciples, "Watch and pray so that you don't enter into temptation." In the Garden of Gethsemane an hour or so before His capture, Jesus begged His disciples to watch with Him.
One of those disciples who was so drowsy in Gethsemane got the message. First Peter 5:8 says, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. . . .”
Kevin Wilfley is the pastor of one of the Spokane Adventist churches, and for a couple of days this past week he spent some time with a group of us Washington Conference pastors. me in a group of other pastors from this conference talking about prayer. Kevin understands what all the rest of us know – prayer isn't something that often comes naturally. So he gave a number of suggestions about how to make prayer more of an important part of your life. (By the way, the text of this sermon will be on our church website this afternoon or tomorrow, so you can check there to get this list.)
Here are some of Kevin's ideas. Use Scripture to pray – in other words, pray through one of the Psalms, or a parable of Jesus. He suggests also using an outline, such as the acronym ACTS-- Adoration, Confession, Thanks And finally Supplication.
He suggests using a prayer journal if that helps you pray. He suggests that you vary the location of your prayers – and that especially you avoid stuffy rooms. He actually got down on his knees to demonstrate to us how a lot of people pray. They kneel beside a chair or couch, then they lean forward, and put their heads on their hands. He said, no wonder we go to sleep when we pray. He also suggested we speak our prayers out loud.
Now let's look at a third extremely encouraging way this Psalm tells us the Lord can help us.
Verse 5: The Lord is your keeper . . . .
There’s shamar again, this time the noun form of it. It's a reminder to notice again just how powerful the Lord’s "keeping" can be.
Verses 5 – 6: The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night.
When I was a kid on the farm, there were some summer days when mom insisted that I wear a hat, or at least a cap. "You don't want to get sunstroke," she would warn. I never did suffer sunstroke, and I don't remember seeing anybody else suffer it. But mom knew that one of the ways to keep sunstroke at bay was to give your head some shade.
But what does the Lord mean by talking about shade? It's obviously some sort of spiritual shade, just like the foot in verse 3 was a spiritual foot.
As often happens, we can find the answer to this question by continuing to read. What does the Lord mean when He talks about shade?
Verses 5 – 7:The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul.
Do you see that word “preserve”? That’s that same word shamar. Over the holidays Shelley and I enjoyed a jar of fruit “preserves” given to us by one of you. The person who had made it had very carefully sealed that jar in order to “keep” those “preserves” tasty for as long as possible. (Of course, once we opened that jar we made no effort to “preserve” the “preserves.” They tasted too good!
So God first helps us by keeping our feet steady, and second, He stays awake. The third way the He helps us is to shade our souls from sin.
That is what Bill Thurmon has decided he wants the Lord to do for him—preserve him from all evil, preserve his soul. That's why, one evening toward the end of our Unlocking Revelation series, Bill approached me and told me he would like to be baptized and join our church. His soul responded to that soul’s Creator. Bill wants the Lord to preserve him from all evil. He wants that muscular shamar help which comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.
That's why Bill has taken this step this morning. As I mentioned a few weeks back when I baptized Nora Martinez, a baptism isn't a graduation – it's a wedding. In a good marriage you grow closer together with the one you're married to.
As Bill was thinking about this service, he asked me if he and I could sing a song together. He chose the song, and it has deep meaning for him. What I would like you to do as you listen to this song is to be thinking about your own walk with the Lord.
Would you like the Lord to keep your moral feet steady year in 2012? Would you like to take advantage of His constant alertness? Would you like to have Him be your shade from sin?