Category Archives: Sermons

Extraordinary Obedience

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(Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25)

It hadn’t occurred to me until just now (I don’t know why, it seems obvious once you see it), but in these two passages—Matthew’s account of the angel’s message to Joseph, and Isaiah’s message to Ahaz, which Matthew references—there’s a remarkable contrast between the two men who received those divine messages. The obvious one is between their social status; but more than that, there’s a sharp contrast between the two in faith and obedience.

Doesn’t it seem strange to you—lots of people ask God for signs; the Old Testament is littered with examples—but here, God’s prophet actually invites someone to ask for a sign, and Ahaz says, “No thanks.” He cloaks it in false piety, saying, “I don’t want to put the Lord God to the test”; which sounds great until you remember that God made the offer. Why does he do that? I could be wrong, but I think it’s because he honestly didn’t want the sign; he had his own plans for political and military deliverance. He’s fighting Syria and Israel, and his idea for dealing with them is to bring Assyria down on them—to ally himself with the tiger to get rid of the fox.

Really, that wasn’t all that bright an idea, as the long-term consequences would be severe; but he was trying to deal with his problems on an ordinary level—ordinary for a king, anyway—by means of plans he could devise and events he could at least hope to control. He was trying to solve political and military problems by political and military means, and here’s the prophet coming along with an offer from God to solve them in a way that was completely out of the ordinary and beyond his control. To that, he says, “No, thank you. I don’t want that.”

In retrospect, knowing how the story ended, we can see how foolish Ahaz was; but in our own lives, in our own context, it’s much, much harder to see. Intellectually, we understand that God is out there and doing stuff—we say it, and at some level, we believe it—but in terms of the day-to-day operation of our lives, we don’t live by faith in what God is doing, we live by faith in what we can see and touch and quantify and control. When we have big problems (as certainly Ahaz did), we tend to look to big people rather than to God—to politicians, to the rich, to the famous, to the influential; to big corporations and big government. And yes, God can and does work through them as much as through anyone else; but he doesn’t need to, and he doesn’t rely on the powerful to accomplish his purposes. This time of the year above all others, we should remember that, because the birth of Jesus dramatizes the point with exceptional force.

Jesus’ parents came from Nazareth, a small town which lay in a high valley among the hills of Galilee; they were far from rich or powerful. They may have been poor, given that when they presented Jesus at the temple, they offered the sacrifice of the poor, two small birds, rather than a lamb; but it occurred to me this week, those were unusual circumstances—they had just made the trip to Bethlehem, and their families were mad at them. In a world with no bank accounts, ATMs or credit cards, the fact that Joseph couldn’t afford a lamb right then doesn’t mean he was poor in general. We think of Joseph as a carpenter, but in our terms, it would be better to call him a builder, even a general contractor; no doubt he did work with wood, but he probably did a lot more with stone, and the bulk of his work was most likely in construction.

That said, while economic times were pretty good, and building houses was a good way to make a living, this was still a man working for a living in a small town; Joseph was not a man to whom Rome would have paid any attention, save at tax time, nor a man who you would ever have expected to wind up in the history books. History is usually about those who are blue in blood, not in collar. Sure, he probably hoped Messiah would come, just like many in Israel did—but to have any part in his coming? Messiah was for Jerusalem, and he was for Nazareth, and his plans for his life would have been much smaller than that. No doubt when he and Mary were betrothed, he looked for nothing more than a happy marriage, a healthy family, and at least one son to learn the trade.

And then one day, Mary came to him and told him she was going to have a baby. One would think he must have been the first person she told; and one would also think he must have felt like one of his houses had fallen in on him. I don’t know if it made it better or worse when she then took off for Judea to visit Elizabeth and Zechariah, leaving Joseph alone to wrestle with everything; either way, it had to have been agonizing.

He had been dishonored—or so he thought, and so the whole society would think—and he had no option but to divorce Mary; engagements in that culture were as binding as marriage, they could only be ended by divorce, and not only Jewish but Roman law demanded that a husband divorce his wife if she were guilty of adultery. If Joseph failed to do so, he would have two choices: let everyone think he had gotten Mary pregnant, or be subject to arrest by the Romans for facilitating prostitution. Either way, he would be shamed, subject to the scorn and contempt of everyone around him. What’s more, in divorce proceedings, Joseph could have claimed her dowry—whatever assets she brought with her into the marriage—and reclaimed any bride-price he had paid, thus coming out of the matter with his revenge and a tidy profit.

But instead, we see the first indication that Joseph, for all his ordinary life, was truly no ordinary man. Where financial considerations, the desire to save what he could of his reputation, and simple anger and hurt would all have pushed him toward a public divorce, instead he decided to do the best he could for Mary, rather than for himself. He had to divorce her, but he resolved to do it as quietly as possible, minimizing her public dishonor at considerable cost to himself. Justice would have permitted him to do much more, but he chose instead to treat her with mercy, which was a remarkable decision. Indeed, it was truly Christlike.

So Joseph comes to this decision, then goes to bed; he tosses and turns for a while, no doubt thoroughly miserable, and finally falls asleep. And in his sleep, an angel comes to him and says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And then the angel was gone, and I imagine Joseph sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, the room dark, but the light of the angel still shining in the backs of his eyes.

And then—he didn’t try to fight it, he didn’t say it was just a dream or try to explain it away: he did what he was told. He believed the angel, and he accepted Mary’s story, and he acted on it. Sure, it was impossible to believe; but then, what had happened to him was impossible to believe, too, but it had happened. It would cost him his honor in the eyes of his community, it would mean great shame for him and all his family, but God had commanded him, and he obeyed. This showed remarkable faith in God, and an even more remarkable willingness to follow God into the teeth of all the displeasure and contempt the world, and his family, could throw at him. It’s hard, hard as a door slammed shut, to buck the demands of family and society for God’s sake, but he did it.

We really need to appreciate this: Joseph gave up his life when God called, with no idea how much of it he might ever get back. He gave up his reputation, he gave up revenge, he gave up his own plan for how his life should go . . . he surrendered his life. He could have rejected the dream; he could have refused the call and chosen to keep control of his own life. Instead, he chose to put himself in God’s hands and accept the part God had for him, even though it meant being a fool to the world and a pariah to his family.

And because of that, he got to be there when God came to earth, a baby who would become a man whose footsteps would shake the world; and in so doing, in surrendering himself to the plan and the hands of God, Joseph surrendered himself to joy: the joy of the angels; the joy of the shepherds; the joy of all creation. His extraordinary obedience brought extraordinary reward.

The Sign of the Manger

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(Isaiah 9:1-7; Luke 2:1-21)

There’s a pastoral couple out in New Jersey in my home denomination, the Reformed Church, Seth and Stephanie Kaper-Dale, who Sara and I knew at Hope. Before they went to seminary, they spent a year working with an RCA-supported orphanage in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Some years ago, Seth wrote a piece about the birth of Jesus, and in the course of the article, he told this story from the orphanage:

A few months into our time there we started taking the kids from the orphanage on field trips into the wealthy parts of the city . . . One day we took a group of kids to a new shopping mall—malls are the rage in the rich sector of Ecuador. When we arrived at the mall by bus we jumped off, and our child companions looked with amazement at the building before them.

“You mean, you’re going to take us in there? We can’t go in there.” Only one boy spoke, but it was clearly the opinion of all the orphans.

“Of course you can go in,” I said. “This is a public shopping center. You are just as entitled to walk around in there as anyone else.”

The kids shrugged their shoulders, and with the permission they needed, they ran off ahead of us to the front door—where armed guards promptly stopped them. Only when the guards saw us, and saw that we were with these kids, were they even allowed to enter the shopping center. Inside, I began noticing shopkeepers and shoppers giving nasty looks to the beautiful children with us. Apparently, the rich could see the impoverished reality of these children, as if their poverty were a visible garment.

There was no place for them in the mall that day.

In society’s eyes, they were unworthy; and just so were Mary and Joseph. We hear the traditional translation that says there was no room for them in the inn, and we tend to project our own experience into it and assume that the inns were all full. The thing is, though, Bethlehem probably didn’t have an inn—only the big cities did; Bethlehem was too small, and too close to Jerusalem. Also, the word Luke uses here isn’t the normal word for “inn”—he uses that one in the parable of the Good Samaritan; rather, it’s a word meaning “guest room”—the same one he uses for the upper room in which Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Last Supper. Which fits, because in that day and age, people didn’t travel all that much, and when they did, they usually stayed with friends and relatives. Given that Joseph was going back to the home of his ancestors, where he would have relatives—distant cousins, perhaps, but family is family—the normal plan would have been to stay in the guest room in one of their homes.

So there’s more going on here than we usually realize. Which shouldn’t surprise us. Stop and think about it—put yourself in the shoes of Mary’s father or mother: your teenage daughter, who’s engaged to a good man, turns up pregnant (disgracing your house, incidentally), and when you ask her who got her pregnant, she says, “God did!” Do you believe her? No, you probably don’t—and judging from the fact that the gospels never mention them, neither did they. In fact, nobody did, unless angels had given them reason to do so. Elizabeth believed her, being herself miraculously pregnant, but Joseph didn’t, until he had his own angelic visitation. As far as the world was concerned, here was a teenage girl who had fooled around, gotten pregnant, and had now concocted this ridiculous story to try to excuse herself; she had brought great shame on herself, Joseph, and both their families, which was no small matter.

This, I think, is one reason Mary went to visit Elizabeth and stayed three months: it got her away from her parents and their disapproval. When she did go back to them, she doesn’t seem to have stayed very long, since Matthew tells us that after Joseph had his dream, he took Mary into his home; it isn’t certain, but it sure looks like her parents kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant, shaming the family, and then lying about it (and perhaps committing blasphemy in the process). The only person Mary had who was both willing and able to care for her was Joseph.

That’s probably why she went with him to Bethlehem. Legally, she didn’t have to; she was neither a taxpayer nor eligible to serve in the Roman army, and thus didn’t need to be registered. As far along as she was in her pregnancy, traveling to Bethlehem wasn’t the best of ideas—better to stay home, if she could. So why did she make the trip? Because she had no place else to go. Her parents had rejected her, Elizabeth had a baby, and she had no other option.

And then, in Bethlehem, she found the same rejection. You would think the extended family should have made room, however crowded things were, for a woman in the last stages of pregnancy—but they refused. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to turn Joseph and Mary out, but they were completely unwilling to show any real hospitality to anyone who had brought such shame on them. They finally allowed Joseph and Mary a grudging spot in the house of one of the family, but not in the upper room, with the honored guests—and not in the part of the main room where the family lived—but only in the lowest part of the house, with the animals, where their dishonor would be plain.

In other words, there was no room for Joseph and Mary in that guest room because their family refused to make room; it was less that there wasn’t room on the floor, and more that there wasn’t room in their hearts. Joseph and Mary had dishonored the family; let them be treated with dishonor. No respectable bed for such a woman, or for her illegitimate child, the fruit of her shame. And so the mother of God was given a place with the sheep and the cow, and the Lord of the Universe was laid in a feed trough dug out of the floor; the Messiah came home to his own people, and his own family rejected him, because he didn’t come on their terms.

And yet, even in this we see the grace of God. Isaiah says, “To us a child is born, to us a son is given,” and that the child’s name was to be Immanuel, “God with us,” and God meant all of us—look whom he invited to the birth. Shepherds filled a critical role in the economy in Israel, but increasingly, their only role in Jewish society was at the bottom; yet they were the first outside witnesses to the birth of the Son of God. Would they have been welcome in the guest room of a respectable house? No; but in the lowest part of the house, where the animals stayed, they belonged. If there was no place for the shepherds in polite society, and if they were to be welcome at Jesus’ birth, there couldn’t be a place for him in polite society, either.

This, I believe, is why the angel tells the shepherds, “This will be a sign for you.” It’s not just about telling them how to find the right baby—there’s a message here. God has come to Earth, love has come to his people, and he came to a place where anyone could come, so that right from the beginning he was God with all of us—no exceptions, no ifs, ands, or buts, end of sentence.

Which is both comforting and discomfiting. On the one hand, it means that I am welcome, you are welcome, to come to him. Nothing that any of us are or have been or have done will make Jesus turn away from us; we cannot be so unworthy as to outweigh his love for us. At the same time, though, it means that he doesn’t cater to our comfort zone, either, nor does he reject those whom we reject. We can’t say to Jesus, “I’ll come to you, but first you have to get away from the animals and move someplace more comfortable—I don’t like the smell, and there’s no place to sit down.” We can’t say, “I’ll come, but only if you get rid of those shepherds. I don’t like being around people like that, and I certainly don’t want to be seen with them.” Jesus came to those who he knew would reject him, and he calls us to follow him shepherds, stable reek and all.

The Herald of the Sunrise

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(2 Samuel 22:1-4, Micah 7:8-20; Luke 1:57-80)

I have to admit, this passage from Luke gave me fits. There’s a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I don’t just want to stand up here and tell you interesting stuff; and I had trouble finding the sermon in it. To be sure, it’s a great story. Elizabeth gives birth, and her family and the whole community rejoice. They wait to name the baby until he’s circumcised, and everyone around assumes he’s going to be named Zechariah after his father—until Elizabeth interrupts, “No, he’s going to be called John.”

Well, now that wasn’t how things were done, because sons were supposed to be named after fathers or grandfathers, and John wasn’t a family name. The neighbors seem to have figured Elizabeth was cutting her husband out of the decision—they clearly thought he was deaf as well as mute—so they asked him directly; to their surprise he wrote, quite emphatically, “His name is John.” Note that—not will be, but is. God named that baby before he was even conceived, and he’s been called John since before he even existed. With that, Zechariah’s speech is restored, and he begins praising God—and the community falls back in fear, recognizing that God is at work, wondering who on Earth this child is going to be. It’s a great scene, and it would be easy to talk about Zechariah putting his faith in God and receiving his reward; but is that really the point?

Then you have this great song of praise, commonly called the Benedictus; interestingly, he’s praising God for giving him a son, but that’s really not the focus of his song. It’s been said that every man wants his son to be a star, but we don’t see that in Zechariah’s words; instead, he essentially says, never mind the star, the sun is rising—and my son, you get to go ahead of him to let everyone know he’s coming. It’s a wonderful declaration, drawing once again on Malachi, which we read a couple weeks ago. It would be easy to turn it into a nice little moral lesson about how we should value people for how they point us to Christ, not for how impressive they are in themselves; which is true enough, but that isn’t the gospel heartbeat in this passage.

More interesting is verse 72, which our English translations blunt a little bit. Zechariah declares that God has raised up a horn of salvation for his people—the image is of the horn of an ox, with which it strikes and drives back its enemies—and then he says, “to do mercy to our ancestors.” Again, the idea here is the Old Testament word hesed; our concept of mercy tends to be pretty passive and pallid, just a matter of letting the guilty off the hook, but here we see the biblical concept of the faithful, covenant-making love and mercy of God as an active force, God taking decisive and powerful action to deliver his people. And even more interesting, Zechariah says that in bringing his people salvation from their enemies, God is doing mercy to their ancestors—he is fulfilling the covenant promises he made to them.

If you really stop and consider what Zechariah is saying, you have to be struck by the grand sweep of his vision; and here, I think, we strike something that is the gospel word for us this morning. We have the real tendency to collapse our view of God’s salvation to just one thing. Classically, for evangelicals, it’s personal individual spiritual salvation from sin, which can lead into a sort of “me ’n’ Jesus” isolationism. Equally classically, for liberals, it’s social justice—political liberation from oppressive societal structures. With the American evangelical move into political engagement that began a few decades ago, salvation began to be somewhat identified with moral transformation of the culture. You wind up with dueling theologies as political campaigns.

None of these visions of salvation is big enough; none matches the vision God gave Zechariah. There is definitely a political element to the deliverance he foresees, as the enemies of the people of God will no longer be able to oppress them—they will be removed as enemies, either by their destruction or by being brought to repentance. That cannot be removed from the picture, because the deliverance God promises is not merely internal and subjective. At the same time—and this is where so many in Israel missed the boat—his deliverance is not merely political, either; the language of verses 77-79 goes far beyond that. The Lord will deliver his people, not merely from political bondage to Rome, but from spiritual bondage to sin; he will free them, and guide them by his light, so that they will at last walk in the way of his peace.

Now, here again we have a word that cannot be captured by its English translation, though shalom is rather better known. This doesn’t just mean “peace” as in “peace and quiet” or “not fighting.” Rather, the idea in this word is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will, and thus, second, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety; this in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life to which Jesus will call those who believe in him, and which he will make possible for those who believe in him.

Along with this, there’s also the aspect of his salvation we see in verses 74-75: God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is what we might call the social aspect—the bridge between our individual deliverance from sin and the political deliverance of the people of God from those who do evil: God saves us in order that we may serve him with our whole lives, and in fact that opportunity to serve is part of the blessing he gives us. That service is not merely activity on God’s behalf, but is a way of life submitted in humble obedience to him—conformed to his holiness and righteousness, accepting his definition of what is good and right rather than insisting on our own ideas and preferences.

The salvation of God in Jesus Christ unites all these elements, because God is on about redeeming a people for his name; he saves us as individuals, but not just as individuals, and he isn’t saving us only from our individual sin, but from all the sin of all of us together. That’s why Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the work Jesus has entrusted to us as “the ministry of reconciliation,” because in delivering us from our sin and giving us peace with him, part of his purpose is to give peace between us—to cleanse the sin not only from our own hearts, but from our relationships. As he gives us the humility to bow before him and accept his good instead of our own, so too he gives us the humility to bow before each other and accept each other’s good instead of our own.

God is on about redeeming our hearts, our relationships, our families, our churches, our culture, our society, our nation, our world—in fact, all of creation. His deliverance comes at every level; his salvation operates in every area, in every aspect. He will not stop until the knowledge of him fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, and all people bow the knee to him as the only Lord and God, the only authority, the only one to be obeyed, the only one deserving of worship.

In the Middle of the Ordinary

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(1 Samuel 2:1-11; Luke 1:39-56)

God didn’t come when he was expected. He didn’t come during the crisis of conquest, or the heady days of the Maccabean revolt, or the hopeful (if brief) period of independence; in any of those times, the opportunity for a national deliverer to arise and restore Israel to its glories under David and Solomon was apparent, but God didn’t come then. He didn’t come where he was expected either—he didn’t show up in a palace, or among the priests, or with the rich and powerful; indeed, he didn’t even come to the capital city of Jerusalem, the city of God. His coming was not in an extraordinary time, or an extraordinary place, or to anyone whom the world would have considered special or important in any way.

Instead, God came where the world wasn’t looking, when its head was turned. He came at a time that was like most times—neither one of great prosperity and success, nor one of crisis and great need. He came to a place that was like most places, not a center of culture nor a community of power and wealth, but just an ordinary small town where nothing much ever happened once, let alone twice. And he came to an ordinary family, no one to whom society would have given a second glance, people who were completely anonymous in the broader scheme of things. The most extraordinary event in human history—the birth of God as a human being—began in the most ordinary context you could possibly imagine.

And in this we see the gospel. We see God working salvation completely by his own initiative and power and grace, completely apart from any human effort or plan or expectation. Mary does nothing to earn this or make this happen; neither did Elizabeth or Zechariah. Yes, Zechariah and Elizabeth were faithful and godly people, and Mary seems to have been a young woman of deep and serious faith and character as well, and that’s clearly part of why God chose them; but the choice was all God’s, none of their doing—for them, there was only to receive his blessing with gratitude and faith.

We also see here that God does not judge people the same way we do; as he told Samuel, where we look at the external stuff, he looks at the heart. The world would never have chosen Elizabeth or Mary for anything important, but God did—because he knew better. He doesn’t honor our hierarchies, our evaluations, our priorities; he inverts and upends them. He doesn’t follow our agendas, he does what he will and calls us to follow him—and he does so in a way that drives home the fact that we neither know nor control as much as we think we do.

Now, there are those who use Mary’s song in political ways, as justification for their political agendas, but to do that is to miss the point and drastically shrink its vision. Human revolutions may bring down the proud, but they only replace them with other proud people; in most cases, they end up being hijacked by those who are hungry for power and greedy for wealth, and you wind up with folks in power who are no better than the ones they overthrew. Human schemes to humble the rich and raise up the poor don’t really change the system, they just shift the balance of winners and losers. That’s all they can do, because they’re all about our goals, our agendas, our efforts, and our desires—they’re about us, and focused on us. What God is doing is very different.

The great theme of Mary’s great song of praise—underscored by God’s choice of her and Elizabeth—isn’t rich vs. poor, but the humble vs. the proud. God has brought down those who are proud “in their inmost thoughts”—those whose pride is deep in their bones, who think they have no need of God. They are oppressors, perhaps of whole nations, perhaps of their wives and children, because they don’t respect others—and they don’t respect others because they don’t respect God. They feel free to use and take advantage of other people if they can because they’re strong enough to do so and they bow to no law but their own; but God has brought them down.

Now, to be sure, we can’t hide from the fact that if we look around, we can see a lot of the proud doing just fine, to all appearances; God keeps bringing them down, and more keep rising up. As we’ve said before, we live between the times—the kingdom of God broke into the world with the coming of Jesus, and is already here in us his people, but it has not yet been fully realized; in the vivid image of Swiss NT scholar Oscar Cullman, we live between D-Day and V-E Day, when the outcome of the war has been decided, but the enemy has not yet given up fighting. The proud may not know they’ve been brought down, but Mary is right: their final defeat has already been accomplished.

If we lose sight of that, it’s probably because we’re looking for hope in all the wrong places. We keep looking to the proud, to the powerful and influential, for deliverance. We look to politicians to fix our country’s problems, to government or big corporations to solve our economic issues, to people we see on TV to reverse our moral decline—and we forget that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who’s famous is proud in their inmost thoughts—though being famous tends to breed that pride—nor am I saying that God doesn’t or can’t use powerful people. Obviously he can and he does. But we need to remember that “God helps those that help themselves” is Ben Franklin*, not Scripture, and Scripture doesn’t tell us that God gives grace to the mighty. God gives grace to the humble.

This is the key, and it’s the crux of Mary’s song: God is holy, and his hesed is for those who show him reverence. If you haven’t been here when I’ve talked about hesed, stick around and you’ll hear about it—this is one of my favorite Old Testament words, in part because it’s so rich there’s no good way to translate it. Our English versions render it a lot of ways—mercy, lovingkindness, covenant love, covenant faithfulness, faithful love; but really, it needs a sentence at least. Hesed means love in action, steadfast love that always keeps its promises, unswerving loyalty and faithfulness, complete commitment and unfailing reliability; it’s the way God treats those with whom he has made covenant. It’s what the Jesus Storybook Bible calls his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

This is the love of God, the mercy of God, the faithfulness of God, for his people whom he has chosen—not because we were impressive, wise or wealthy or powerful; indeed, as 1 Corinthians tells us, God quite deliberately chooses the unimpressive in order to make it clear that the wisdom and the power and the riches are all his. He chooses us in our weakness and foolishness, and he gives us his Holy Spirit; and by his Spirit he gives us Jesus, whom he has made our wisdom, righteousness and holiness and redemption. He fills us with his love, and he teaches us to worship him, and him alone. What matters is not that we are good enough, talented enough, important enough—none of us is; what matters is that he has chosen us, and he is more than able.

* Note: though not original to Franklin, the phrase is best known in the US through its inclusion in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Eternity Contracted to a Span

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(Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38)

What we see here is God announcing his plan to do the impossible. In the first place, it’s physically impossible—Mary’s a virgin. She’s betrothed to Joseph—and just so we’re clear on this, betrothal is what they had back then in place of engagement, but it was much stronger; it entailed all the commitments of marriage with none of the benefits, and it lasted a whole year. So, she’s legally bound to Joseph, but they’re still living apart, probably with family making sure they don’t sneak off and do anything inappropriate. There’s absolutely no way she can be pregnant. But she’s going to be.

The physical impossibility, though, is secondary; it’s only to underscore the spiritual impossibility: this baby born to a virgin girl would be God. The angel doesn’t really push Mary to understand this fully, and she probably didn’t until much later; it was far too great an impossibility for anyone to comprehend at that point, and Mary was overwhelmed enough as it was. It’s all there, though.

In particular, note verse 35: the child will be called holy and the Son of God—why? Because he will be conceived, not by normal human action, but by a direct miraculous work of the Spirit of God. He will be fully human, but he will be more than merely human, right from the absolute beginning. He will be God become one fragile human being; the creator of the universe, the Word by whom the world was made, will take up nine months’ residence in a woman’s womb.

It’s a wonder, this; it’s a wonder we keep collapsing into sentiment and trite moral lessons because even now, even as many millions of times as the story has been told, it’s still too big for us to really grasp. The maker of all that is, the one who holds our incomprehensibly vast universe in the palm of his hand, as an unborn baby doing backflips and kicking his mother in the bladder; Almighty God with messy diapers and a rash. As the British poet John Betjeman asked in wonder,

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, incomprehensibly, gloriously true: the infinite, all-powerful, all-glorious Son of God, the source of all life through whom all things were made, reduced himself to a zygote in the womb of a humble girl in a backwater village on the edge of civilization, to be born among the animals and laid in a feed trough by parents who were soon to be fugitives, to live as a homeless wanderer, to be falsely convicted and wrongly executed, to rise again from the dead—and he did it all for you, that you might know him, and know he loves you.

Bearing Witness

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(Malachi 2:17-3:4, 4:5-6; Luke 1:1-25)

There aren’t all that many hymns for Advent. We have a lot of hymns for Christmas, of course, and a lot for Easter, and there are quite a number that work well for Lent, focusing on the sacrifice of Christ; but for Advent, not so many, and very few at all that are widely sung. Really, the only ones you can count on finding in the hymnal are “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” Which, for a season of the church year that lasts four Sundays, is just a little bit short.

I was lamenting this the other week as I was starting to plan the service for this Sunday and next, and I got this comment from my wife: “Our culture is actually anti-waiting, anti- letting things take time and not be instantly resolved . . . I think it might be the same reason that the church is so bad at grieving.” The point about grieving was one that hadn’t occurred to me, but she’s right about our culture. We live in a society that wants to get it decided, get it done, and move on. We have our instant oatmeal, microwave popcorn, and fast food; we have drive-through pharmacies so we don’t have to wait ten minutes while our prescriptions are filled—we can drive off and come back later. Our communications are supposed to be instantaneous—many people derisively refer to physical letters as “snail mail,” because having to wait a day or two is such a burden.

Of course, our ability to do things quickly has its advantages; but to the extent that we’ve taught ourselves to expect quick, easy answers to our needs and our problems, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Some things just take time; some plants bear fruit slowly, or not at all. Our wounds often take longer to heal than we wish, or realize, and trying to rush the healing process only does more hurt. And all of us, in various ways, at various times, will find ourselves hung betwixt and between—unable to stay where we are, but with no apparent way forward. Even the most fortunate among us have nights of anguish, not knowing, hoping against hope that the worst hasn’t really happened; even the most blessed have times of longing for good news that does not come.

And the fact is, it’s into just such cruxes in our lives that the gospel speaks; they are entry points for the Holy Spirit in our hearts because they are points at which our sense of self-sufficiency breaks down, and we are driven beyond our wants and desires to the true deep need of our souls. Waiting, even when it’s painful, is not an interruption of God’s plan, or something we have to explain away; it’s part of his plan, part of the way he works in us to accomplish his purposes.

In light of that, it’s interesting that we see this theme working at a couple different levels in our passage from Luke this morning. At the big-picture level, of course, Israel had been waiting long for God’s promised Messiah. If you were here this spring, you remember Malachi’s ringing words, proclaiming the coming Day of the Lord . . . but those words had fallen into silence. Where God had so often spoken to his people through his prophets, after Malachi there were no more. “Behold,” God declared, “I am sending my messenger, who will prepare the way before me” . . . and then nothing, for over four centuries. After the Persians came the Greeks, then a brief period of independence, then the Romans, and through it all no sign of God’s messenger.

That’s the big story here, but it’s not the only story Luke is concerned about; indeed, it’s not the story with which he begins. Instead, he begins at the human level. Zechariah was a priest, married to a woman who was a descendant of Aaron, the first of all the priests; they were a devout couple who faithfully obeyed God and sought to please him. No doubt Zechariah prayed for and earnestly desired the coming of the Messiah—but there was something else that weighed more heavily on his heart, for he and Elizabeth had no children. They had prayed and prayed for a child, but it seemed God had ignored their prayers; they had waited so long for a baby, they’d given up, for they were now both too old for such things.

And then came the high point of Zechariah’s priestly career: he was chosen by lot to go into the Holy Place in the heart of the temple during the sacrifice—apparently during the evening sacrifice, because there was a large crowd gathered to pray; since there were some 18,000 priests, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And as he stands there, burning incense before the altar of God, carrying the prayers of the people to heaven with the smoke, an angel appears to him and says, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. God did hear your prayers for a child; Elizabeth will have a son, and you will call him John. He will be the messenger God promised, the one who will go forth in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare the way for the Lord.”

God could have chosen any couple he liked to bring John the Baptizer into the world; but as he brought his people’s long wait for their Redeemer to an end, he chose to bring this couple’s long wait to an end as well. To a Jew in those days, being childless was one of the bitterest of sorrows, and usually taken as a sign of God’s judgment. Zechariah and Elizabeth had served God faithfully all their lives, and so her inability to conceive must have been agonizing and perplexing. Had they somehow displeased God? Had God failed them? From everything they understood about God, it didn’t make sense; and yet they remained steadfast in their faith, serving him devotedly even when he had withheld from them the one gift they most desired.

You have to feel for Zechariah here. He’d probably given up any hope of a child long since, and now an angel appears to him and announces that God is going to give him and his wife a son, and it’s all just far too much to process. It’s hard to blame him for asking, “How can I be sure you’re telling me the truth?” The poor man was simply overwhelmed. And yet even so, the angel gives him a sign, but the sign is a punishment for his unbelief—his ability to speak is taken away until the child is born.

It’s hard to blame him, because Zechariah knows that what is happening to him is impossible—and worse, it’s implausible. It’s the stuff delusions are made of. He has a firm grip on how the world works, just as most of us do, and this simply doesn’t fit. He’s a man of faith, but within the bounds of the rational and the limits of what is reasonably possible; he knows the stories of what God has done in the past, but they’re stories, not a part of his present. As such, he can’t quite believe that God could actually do such a thing now; his faith struggles to outgrow the box of his assumptions. And so Gabriel rebukes him, for part of God’s purpose is to teach him, and others, that God is not limited by what we think he can do, or will do.

In conceiving and ultimately giving birth to John, Elizabeth isn’t just giving birth to the one who will bear witness to the Son of God; she is herself bearing witness to the truth that God is capable of doing far more than what we think is possible, and of blessing us far beyond what we can dare to hope. She is bearing witness to the truth that God can turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy—that he can take our defeats and our losses and use them to bless us in ways we never could have dreamed. She is bearing witness to the truth that just because God makes us wait doesn’t mean he isn’t coming, and just because he doesn’t act on our schedule doesn’t mean he’s too late. He is faithful, ever faithful, and he never fails to act in his good time.

That We May Know

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(Numbers 15:27-31; 1 John 5:13-21)

John is a big one for knowledge. “I write these things to you who believe in the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life,” he says. This is closely akin to his purpose statement near the end of his gospel, in John 20:31: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” That we may know who Jesus is, that we may act on that knowledge by putting our trust in him, that we may know that in him we have eternal life—that’s what John is driving at here; and in this conclusion of his letter, he backs that up with statement after statement about what we as Christians know about who God is and who we are in him. Not merely what we think, not just what we want to believe, but what we know—what is bedrock, what is absolutely certain; what we can stake our lives on.

And as part of that, he calls us to stake our lives on what we know. These days, we tend to think of knowledge the way we do in school, as a collection of facts that we have to be able to remember to answer the questions correctly and pass the test. You tell me stuff, I tell it back to you to prove that I was listening and remember what you said. It’s rather like mama bird feeding little baby birds—eat worm, regurgitate worm, repeat.

That’s not the biblical definition of knowledge, and it’s not what John is on about. Biblically, true knowledge, knowledge of the truth, produces true action; it shapes and forms the way we live. Thus John says here, “I write these things to you so that you may know that you have eternal life,” but back in 2:1, he wrote, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” To us, these sound like different things, but to John, they aren’t. Knowing we have eternal life in Christ—and Christ alone—affects how we live; it draws us away from sin and toward God. We don’t learn not to sin by force of will or fear of punishment or some form of manipulation, we learn not to sin by coming to know God and his blessings, and so to love him, and value them, more than the pleasures and promised rewards of sin.

That truth underlies the points John is making in this final section of his letter. “This is the confidence we have in God’s presence,” he tells us, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” “Hearing” in this context doesn’t just mean that God knows we said something, but that he responds positively to our request, and thus that we can know that we will receive what we ask. If we ask according to his will. In which case, isn’t our prayer redundant?

No, it isn’t. You see, God can bless us whether we ask him to or not; but he can’t bless us as an answer to our prayers unless we pray. And more than that, God doesn’t do things capriciously or without reason; why should we assume that his will doesn’t take our prayers into account? Our prayers don’t force God to do anything, but does that mean he doesn’t will to do things in part because we ask him to? I think one reason we have trouble thinking about prayer is that we implicitly have a transactional model of prayer, as if we were asking the bank for a loan, or the library for a book. We say prayer is about our relationship with God, but we don’t really think through what that means. Prayer is how God involves us in what he’s doing; we give him what’s on our mind and heart, and he takes that into his counsel, and he helps us to understand his will and what he intends to do. We learn to see our lives in that light, and to want what he wills.

This begins, though, with knowing—not just in our heads, but in our hearts and in our bones—that in Jesus, we have a different kind of life from the world at large, something more than the world has to offer. Prayer according to God’s will begins with the trust that God’s will really is better—and better for us specifically—than our own ideas and plans. Sin, by contrast, is the practical expression of the belief that we cannot trust God. They’re polar opposites of each other.

That may be why John commands us in verse 16, if we see a fellow believer sin, to pray for them: the first response we should have to the public sin of another is not condemnation, or lecturing, which are applications of our own power to punish, but prayer, which is an appeal to the power of God to heal and restore. Yes, public discipline is sometimes necessary as well, but that isn’t where we should start—and even discipline must be combined with prayer, because nothing we can do can bring people to repentance; only God can do that. Only he can give life.

Now, John distinguishes between “the sin that does not lead to death” and “the sin that leads to death”; people have come up with various random suggestions for what “the sin that leads to death” might be, but I don’t think John’s making a random reference here. Remember the context; remember the false teachers against whom he’s writing, who have deliberately turned away from Christ, choosing darkness over light. That deliberate rejection of our only hope of salvation is the sin that leads to death, because it is the sin of choosing death over life; we call it apostasy, and John says, “I don’t command you to pray for such people.” You can, but he isn’t going to force the issue, because that will break your heart. It’s not a bad thing, that what breaks the heart of God should break our hearts as well; but it isn’t easy to bear.

The danger in talking about this is that in bringing eternal punishment into the conversation, it can inspire fear; I remember a couple conversations in high school with classmates who were afraid they had committed the unforgivable sin. Thus John follows up with strong words of reassurance, reminding us what we know, why we need not fear or lose heart. None of this is new, he’s said it all over the course of the letter, but he wants to make sure it sticks. “We know that anyone born of God does not keep on sinning”—yes, we do sin, but we repent, we ask forgiveness, and we give it to Jesus, who took it all on the cross. Jesus protects us, and he keeps the evil one from leading us into the sin that leads to death. The system of this world is under the control of the evil one, but we know we’re free of that, because we are of God—we belong to him alone.

“And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ, who is the true God and eternal life. Therefore, little children, keep yourselves from idols.” “Therefore” isn’t in the text, but I think it’s implied. John’s closing thought is at once a profound statement of praise and a call to action—a call to live lives in accordance with that praise.

We’re tempted to go after idols—to put our trust and our faith and our love in people or things ahead of God; but how foolish is that, really? In God, we have nothing to fear, and there is nothing better we could desire—the Son of God has come, and through him we are able to know the one who is true, the God of all creation, the source of all light and goodness and grace. More, we are in God, we live in him and he lives in us, because we are in Jesus Christ, who is God, who is eternal life. We have been united with Christ by his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, who lives in us by the will of God the Father; he is the source of truth and grace and love, hope and joy and peace and all good things.

Don’t settle for idols; accept no substitutes. Jesus came that we may know God—not just know about him, or worship him, or know his commandments, but know him, as we know our closest friends and family. He came to be the way for us to God, and there is no better way. Indeed, there is no other way, never has been and never will be; and John writes so that we may know this beyond all doubt, and be moved to praise, and to trust—and to follow.

A Different Kind of Life

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(Deuteronomy 30:11-14; 1 John 5:1-12)

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves everyone who has been born of God.” With that line, John begins his final turn, into the conclusion of his letter. The people of God are those who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God born as an ordinary human baby to live and die and rise from the dead on our behalf, so that we might be ransomed from death and given new life, and that true life is found in Jesus Christ alone and no other. Those who believe in him do not merely have someone else to follow or someone else to worship, we have been reborn, spiritually, by the will of God the Father and the power of his Holy Spirit; he is alive in us, his Spirit fills us, and we have been given his love. By his love, we love each other—everyone else who believes in Jesus is family, and we love them even when we don’t like them very much.

And then John throws us a bit of a curve. He’s been saying that the sign that we love God is that we love our brothers and sisters, which we see in verse 1 as well, but now he flips that; in fact, he closes the circle by saying, “This is how we know that we love God’s children, when we love God and obey his commandments, because obeying God’s commandments is how we live out his love.” We know we love God because we love each other, we know we love each other because we love God—if one is there, the other is, they can’t exist without each other, because love for God necessarily produces love for his people. And the sign of that, the practical heart of that, is obedience to God.

Which is interesting, because we aren’t accustomed to thinking of love in that way. We tend to define it subjectively, in terms of whether the other person feels loved. Understandable, certainly, and if nobody feels we love them, that should probably tip us off that something’s wrong; but those perceptions are not always accurate. People aren’t always going to receive loving statements and actions as loving, because as we’ve said, loving each other well has to involve challenging each other at times and calling one another to repentance. The final measure of whether we’re loving God and each other is whether we’re doing what he told us to do.

Now, against that, we have a lot of voices in the church insisting that following the commands of Scripture is burdensome, and that whatever commands they consider burdensome must not really be God’s commands anymore, because his commands aren’t supposed to be burdensome. If the Bible tells me I can’t have sex with that person I want to have sex with, or that I’m supposed to give generously to the church and to the poor and vulnerable, or that I have to love and serve that person over there who hurt me deeply, well, that’s burdensome, and so God can’t really mean that. Which makes a lot of sense, from a human perspective, and so a lot of people happily buy in to that approach, and happily follow teachers who present this as God’s word. John wants to change our perspective on what “burdensome” is, by changing our idea of what life is.

To give you an idea, one of the joys of being a Seattle Seahawks fan back in the days when there were any was the play of our great left tackle, Walter Jones. Normally, watching a left tackle isn’t what you’d call “fun,” but Big Walt was an exception. He’d drive defensive linemen back ten yards before they knew what had happened; on pass plays he’d stretch out one arm, grab a pass rusher, and put him flat on his back. He was as big and strong as a truck—and he got that way by pushing them around. Literally. Part of his workout every offseason was pushing a three-ton Escalade around a big parking lot near his house. You’d see pictures, and from his face the man was in pain. That hurt to do. But was it burdensome? No, it wasn’t. He did it gladly, even joyfully.

Why? Because that’s part of what it took for him to be what he wanted to be—a dominant, Hall-of-Fame force at one of the game’s key positions. That struggle wasn’t a burden, it was a blessing, because through it, he grew, he got better, and the physical gifts God gave him were realized in his performance on the football field. Walter Jones could easily have avoided all that pain and turned aside from all that struggle; but his life would not have been better for it, as he would have been far less than he had the ability to be.

We tend to go to God and say, “I want the world.” Maybe not all of it, but at least this part of it. When we don’t get the world, we complain and say bad things about God. When the Bible tells us we can’t have that particular part of the world we want, we try to explain it away or get rid of it; when other people call us on it, we say they’re unloving. But the fact is, God doesn’t promise us the world; in fact, he doesn’t even offer us the world. God offers us something completely different in Jesus Christ: a whole new kind of life, and a victory that overcomes the world.

I was thinking about this the last few days, not in quite these terms but in terms of our freedom in Christ; John doesn’t use that language here, that’s Paul in Galatians, but it connects. You know, the freedom I want in Christ—the freedom I believe we’re promised—is freedom from myself. Hear me carefully on this, I don’t mean freedom to be somebody different, I’m not talking about different talents or abandoning my commitments or anything like that; I mean at a deeper level.

I want freedom from the fears that cripple and paralyze me—I know God’s love has not been perfected in me yet, because there’s a lot there still to drive out. I want freedom from the desires that drive me—and I don’t just mean the sinful ones; I don’t want to be controlled any longer even by those that are perfectly appropriate. I want to be free from my bad habits, and more, I want to be free from my idols. I want to be able to stop putting myself first in my life, and thus to be free to love. I want to be unchained from my ego, and my need to make everything happen by my own power, so that the power of God may flow freely in me and through me. I want to stop flapping my puny little wings and just soar on the winds of God’s joy and grace and love. I’m not there yet, but before God, that’s the freedom I want. That’s the life I want.

And my hope—even as it’s also my frustration at how often I submarine myself—my hope is that that’s the life I’ve been given. It’s the life we’ve all been given, by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Our faith is the victory that has overcome the world—including the influence of the world in our hearts—not because there’s anything special about our faith, but because it is through our faith that we confess Jesus as the Christ and have been born again, from above, of God. It is by faith that we have turned from the world to the life of God in Christ, whose life has overcome the world, and is overcoming it, and will overcome it.

God Is Love

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(Leviticus 19:17-18, Deuteronomy 6:4-5; 1 John 4:7-21)

God has a strange sense of humor. Mind you, I can’t complain, because I have a strange sense of humor, too, but sometimes God’s is differently strange. This week was a good example of that, to find myself preparing this passage as we had two meetings with the Presbytery of Wabash Valley regarding our departure from the PC(USA); they didn’t use 1 John, but they did try to argue that it was a betrayal of Christian love for us to end our affiliation with them, and especially to do so in the way we did. It was another reminder of how easily the language of love can be used for the reality of manipulation.

That’s what happens if we define love in human terms; not only is that even true for Christians, I’d argue it’s especially true for Christians. If we affirm that God is love but don’t allow that truth to challenge and change our understanding of what love is, we end up by defining God in human terms—which is to say, we end up worshiping a god made in our own image; we end up worshiping an idol. We end up twisting Jesus, by one means or another, until we have a pretty picture of a Jesus who would never lead us anywhere we don’t want to go, or push us in any way we don’t want to be pushed. I don’t know if that’s what happened to the people against whom John is writing, I don’t know if that’s why they left the church—though I wonder; but I think it’s exactly what led astray the false teachers who are currently running the mainline Presbyterian church, and what has seduced them away from the true gospel to a lie.

This is why John has taken great pains to say two things. One, we know what love is by the example of Jesus, and especially his death on the cross for us; we learn what love is and what it looks like by looking to Jesus. This is essential, but it isn’t sufficient for identifying false teaching, because we can be deceived; thus John also says, two, that anyone who speaks by the Spirit of God is oriented completely toward Jesus Christ, and is primarily concerned that people put him first in their lives, love him above all others, and seek to please him in everything they do. The love of God never aims us at pleasing ourselves or fulfilling our own agenda, though that may happen along the way, nor at satisfying the desires and agendas of others, though that too may happen; rather, the love of God in us makes us concerned first and foremost with loving and serving him and doing what he wants us to do, whether it’s what anyone else wants us to do or not.

The place where we’re so prone to go wrong, the mistake that so often wrong-foots us, is our assumption that the love of God, because it is unequivocally for us, is therefore about us. Nothing could be further from the truth. The love of God is above all else about God. We talked about this last year when we talked about the Trinity and what it means to say that God is love—not that he is loving, but that he is love. The key to understanding this is the truth that God is three in one—a reality which we see at work in verses 13-16, as the Father sends the Son, who pointed us to the Father, and he sends the Spirit by whom we are able to acknowledge the Son, and by whom God lives in us.

When we begin honestly to understand God in that way—which is beyond us to grasp fully, but when we begin to think that way—we can start to understand what John is saying here. We can say that God is love because in his very nature, they exist in love between himselves. The love of God is the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for each other. We were created that we might be drawn into that circle to share it, but the circle doesn’t break because we enter it. Love is still fundamentally something which comes only from God and which is directed ultimately toward God; we share in his love, we are included, it has become for us as well, but it isn’t for us first. Which means that we don’t get to define it, or control it, or try to dictate terms to God, because his love doesn’t depend on us; if we reject him and reject his love, it grieves him, but it does not diminish him or his love in any way, only us.

Now, does this mean that God doesn’t love me best? Yeah, it does. Is that reason to feel bad? No, it isn’t. The love of God is infinite, and his love for each of us is infinite, and how much headway are we going to make comparing infinities anyway? If Jesus already loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend, what does it matter to us that he loves the Father and the Spirit even more? Where exactly do we lose in that? What matters is that he created us to love us, he redeemed us because he loves us, and he is leading us home to live in his kingdom for eternity because he loves us—and that by his love, he is teaching us to love him and to love each other as he loves us.

This creates a cycle here, one which is implicit in this passage though John doesn’t spell it out. Why do we love? Because God first loved us. How do we know? Because he sent Jesus his Son to offer himself as a sacrifice on our behalf, that our sin might be taken away and replaced with his righteousness. How do we know this, and how do we know what his love looks like? Because he has given us his Holy Spirit, who shows us Jesus.

And how does the Holy Spirit show us Jesus? In his word, the Bible—and in his body, the church. In the only body Jesus currently has in the world—us—his people, filled by his Spirit with his love that we might be like him. We learn to know his love, and we learn to love, in part because the Spirit of God loves us through the people of God; by so doing, he makes us part of his people and fills us with his love so that we might love others and they might learn his love through us.

This is what God is doing with us, and what he is doing in us, and through us; more than that—God is love—this is who he is, this is his nature, and this is what it means that he lives in us. This is what it looks like for Jesus to be the Savior of the world, because this is what his salvation means. It isn’t merely that we have sinned, that we are incapable in ourselves of getting free of our sin or making it all right, and that we need Jesus to cleanse us and set us free from our sin; that’s all true and absolutely essential, but it doesn’t stop there. He sets us free from our sin into his love—and in so doing, he radically transforms us, from the root up.

We can see this in John’s statement that perfect love drives out fear. From the context, part of the point is that the love of God removes our fear of being sent to Hell when we die; but God’s salvation is much bigger than just that assurance, because it isn’t merely a transaction, it’s not just about giving us a “Get out of Hell free” card, it’s a transformation. Our confidence, our assurance of salvation, is rooted in the fact that the love of God is at work in us, changing us from the inside out, to such a point that John could say with a straight face that we are in the world now in the same way as Jesus was then. His Spirit is in us, his love is in us, he is at work in us, and while a lot of other things are also in us and get in the way, they are dying; they are passing away as we become by the power of the Holy Spirit the people we already are in Christ.

Thus we can see that God’s perfect love drives out any reason for us to be afraid of God, because God no longer stands in relation to us as the one who will punish us; which, by the way, shows the essential falsity of those who would seek to scare people into Heaven by terrifying them with Hell. God isn’t in this to punish us because he has given us his love, and his love is purifying us and setting us free from all that. We love him because he loves us, and instead of being judged and punished, we are renewed and remade as the people of his love.

And in so doing, God’s perfect love doesn’t only remove our fear of him, it removes our fear of the world, because the world no longer has the ability to punish us. We fear rejection—that people will punish us for not being who they want us to be. We fear failure—that society will punish us for not being good enough. We fear loss—that the world will punish us for caring, for hoping, for dreaming. We fear many things, because we look to the world to meet our needs and give our lives meaning and significance. The less we look to the world and the more we look to God, the more we depend on him to provide all our needs and the more we trust him to do so, the less we need the world and the less power it has to hurt us; and so our fear of the world leaves our hearts, driven out by the perfect love of God, which is ours in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the grace of Jesus Christ the Son of God, by the will of God the Father, who is now and forever to be praised.

Our Spiritual Compass

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(Deuteronomy 13:1-5; 1 John 3:23-4:6)

Unlike certain earlier parts of this letter, John’s argument here is very simple, and very clear. It’s also critically important. As we’ve seen, the purpose of his letter is to keep his audience from being led astray by false teachers who have left the church to preach a false version of Christianity; he has drawn a sharp line between those who walk in the light of God and those who don’t, and made it clear that those who walk in the light are those who are filled with the love of God, and those who don’t, aren’t. In our passage last week—of which we’ve included the last couple verses again this morning, as John once again links his argument very closely—he gave us the standard for what the love of God looks like: Jesus Christ, and most particularly his death on the cross for us. Love is not just anything that calls itself love, it’s something that looks like Jesus.

And here, he gathers that point up, binds it together with his earlier observation that the false teachers are false because their teaching denies Christ, sharpens it all into a spike, and drives it home. You want to know who to follow and who not to follow? One simple rule: anyone who is all about Jesus Christ, first, last, and always, is from God. Anyone who isn’t, even if they use the name of Jesus Christ, is not from God. Period.

It doesn’t matter if you were born in the church and your name was on the membership rolls three weeks before you drew breath; it doesn’t matter if you have a perfect-attendance badge in Sunday school going all the way back to your days in the nursery. It doesn’t matter if you’re an elder, a deacon, a pastor, a professor; it doesn’t matter if you work in a building that calls itself a church and holds services every Sunday morning. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a denomination that’s been calling itself a church for 500 years, or 2000 years. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written books for Christian publishers, articles for Christian magazines, songs for Christian record companies, or greeting cards for Christian bookstores, or showed up on Christian TV programs to talk about any or all of them. If your primary purpose isn’t to point people to Jesus Christ, to encourage them to put their faith in Jesus alone to follow Christ alone, then you do not acknowledge him, you’re only trying to make use of him for your own purposes; and if that’s the case, then you are not from God, and you are not speaking by the Spirit of God.

Now, again, John isn’t expecting perfection here, and none of us do this perfectly; we all have ulterior motives that creep in at various places. We need to keep after them, cutting them back and digging them up, but they do not disqualify us. The key is, what are we trying to do first and foremost—what is our goal? What are we really on about, and what is essential about what we do and why?

You know, I certainly hope that y’all will invite people to come, and they’ll keep coming and invite others, and that some who are outside the church will come, and hear the gospel, and bow before Jesus as Savior and Lord, and in their turn invite others, and so on and so forth; I certainly hope that this church will grow, and it would be nice if it grew enough that the giving was high enough to support all the ministries we do, so that we didn’t have to keep selling off assets to pay the bills. That would be nice, and there’s nothing wrong in hoping for it. But if I start to make that the purpose of my preaching, if I start to make that the focus of the ministry God has given me here, then I would be out of step with the Holy Spirit, and I would become a false teacher. I want the church to grow—but if God should call me to preach a sermon that would somehow drive half the church away, my responsibility to him would be to stand up and faithfully preach that sermon, whatever the consequences. I don’t see that happening, of course—it’s a pretty extreme thought experiment—but that’s where my calling would be.

Similarly, when teachers come along insisting that we need to change our understanding of God or of the Scriptures, and their arguments are all about what people in our culture believe or want or think they know, when they contend that we must fit the biblical definition of the love of God to what the majority in our society wants to believe is loving, we need to stand against that. The fact that the world listens to them, and does so with approval, is not evidence they’re right, it’s a sign that they are from the world, not from God. If the world seeks to marginalize and silence us, it’s not a sign that we’re wrong, out of date, or regressive; rather, it’s evidence that we are standing in the way of Jesus, who spoke the truth of God so clearly to the world that they butchered him for it.

Now, we need to be clear about something here: “the world” doesn’t just mean “not the church,” and it doesn’t just mean “liberal.” There’s plenty of the world in the church, too, unfortunately, and plenty of people who are conservative because the part of the world they want to please happens to be made up of conservative churchgoers. It’s all too easy, as Jesus notes in Matthew 7, to see the speck in our brother’s eye, and not notice the log in our own; the teachings of Christ, properly understood, will convict us and make us uncomfortable just as much as they will encourage and support us, and just as much as they will convict and disrupt “those” people “out there” who we know are wrong about this, that and the other thing. Indeed, if we are truly conscious of our own sinfulness and need for grace, we should expect the Spirit of Christ to convict us even more than others, for we should be able to say with Paul, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

That said, though we must be humble before all people, even the false teachers and false prophets of our age, our humility is because we are sinful and imperfect, and our understanding of God’s truth is thus incomplete and flawed. God is perfect, and his truth and love are utterly without flaw, and so we must hold fast to him and his truth with no hesitation, no apology, and no compromise. We don’t understand everything yet, and so we continually need correction and refocusing as we abide in Christ and grow in him; but by his Spirit we have all truth, and we can trust him to help us understand it more and more as we need to, in his own good time. We always need to recognize and admit our limits, but we never need to back down, no matter what anyone might say or do.

And you know, as we hold fast to Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we should do so joyfully, even when doing so brings us trials and tribulations. James doesn’t say, “Complain, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that society should appreciate you properly and do what you want”; no, he says, “Rejoice when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” When the high priest had the apostles flogged, they didn’t grumble that this was supposed to be a godly nation—they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ. And John doesn’t say, “Little children, expect the world to like you and approve of you for being like Jesus”; rather, he says, “The world just didn’t get Jesus, and it’s not going to get you either if you look like Jesus, so don’t be surprised when the world hates you.”

If we are truly agents of the gospel of Jesus Christ working to carry out the ministry of Jesus Christ in the face of the hatred of the Father of Lies, then the more effectively we point people to Jesus, the more the Enemy is going to attack us, using every weapon he can conjure up—and he is the Father of Lies, so that gives him plenty of opportunity for conjuring—and the more unexpected, undeserved, and painful the attack, the better. When we respond with complaint, with bitterness, with anger and resentment, when we fight back, we play right into the Enemy’s hands and give him what he wants. It’s far better for us to respond to those attacks by looking to Jesus.

Just as an example, when Dr. Kavanaugh’s ministry comes under attack in one way or another, if you hear him talk about it at all, you’ll always hear him say, “Well, praise God.” There are times I think he’s maybe a little ironic about that, but I have the sense—and correct me if I’m wrong, Doc—I have the sense that he’s trained himself to that discipline to keep pointing himself back to the truth that such things really are reasons to praise God.

When you are attacked for preaching the gospel instead of telling people what they want to hear, for pointing them to Jesus Christ instead of what they want to see, don’t complain, but rejoice that you are sharing in the sufferings of his ministry, and that his Spirit is using those sufferings for your growth; and don’t fight back, don’t let yourself be drawn away from the truth, but go on preaching the gospel. Go on pointing people to Jesus Christ. Go on trusting him to be faithful and true even when that’s hard to see, and in your own trust, show others how to do the same. And those who don’t listen, leave them to God—they’re not your worry, they’re his. You, look to Jesus, follow those who help you see him, and show him to others in your turn. That is enough.