Category Archives: Sermons

Rend the Heavens

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(Psalm 32:1-5, Isaiah 64:1-8; Acts 19:11-20)

In order to understand what’s going on in Isaiah 64, we need to understand more about the book as a whole.  The driving concern all through Isaiah’s ministry is the contrast between what Israel is called to be—namely, God’s servant among the nations, through whom he will draw all the nations to himself—and what Israel actually is—their idolatry, their injustice, and their insistence on putting their trust in themselves and their military power (such as it was) instead of in their God.

The first five chapters set out the broad themes of the book; chapter 6 tells the story of God calling Isaiah as a prophet.  Chapters 7-39 are the first main section of the book, showing us Isaiah’s prophetic ministry.  When the kingdom of David and Solomon split, the ten northern tribes took the name “Israel” with them; the south became known as “Judah” after its dominant tribe.  Isaiah was a prophet in Judah, beginning under the reign of King Ahaz.  At that time, the main threats Ahaz worried about were Israel and Syria.  Isaiah went to Ahaz and told him, “This is what God says:  Israel and Syria are plotting to invade you, but just trust me—they won’t do it, because I’m going to stop them.  Ask me for a sign—anything—and I’ll give it to you to confirm this.”  Ahaz refused, because he had already decided to ally himself with the Assyrian empire and use them to take care of Syria and Israel.

Now, that was like calling in a lion to drive out a stray cat.  It made God angry that his people would rather trust their bloodthirsty enemy than him, and he gave Ahaz a message through Isaiah:  because of the king’s refusal to put his trust in God, Assyria would bring disaster on the nation.  Judah would be saved from being conquered, but only by the skin of their teeth.  Over the course of time, that’s exactly what happened.  At the worst, which we see in Isaiah 36, the Assyrian armies held every city in Judah except for Jerusalem.  By this time, however, Hezekiah was king.  Unlike his father Ahaz, Hezekiah put his trust in God, and God drove out the Assyrians and delivered the nation.

And then came disaster.  All through his ministry, Isaiah had been telling the king and the people that the real threat to them wasn’t the Assyrians but the empire coming along behind them, the Babylonians.  In Isaiah 39, Hezekiah made a critical mistake.  When envoys came from the king of Babylon, Hezekiah did everything he could to make an ally of them.  He made the same mistake Ahaz did, choosing to put his trust in his enemy rather than in God—God whom he had already seen deliver his nation from the power of Assyria.  In response, the word of judgment comes:  Babylon will conquer Judah, and your people and treasures will be carried off into exile.

With that, the book of Isaiah leaves historical account behind.  The prophet has seen the worst; now he has to deal with it.  The story of the people of God couldn’t end there, or it would invalidate everything God had ever said about himself.  For God to be faithful, he would have to bring his people back from exile—but how?  On what basis?  What will God do with this people who refuse to be the servant people he called and created them to be?  Will they respond to their exile by repenting and changing their ways, or will God’s work have to go forward some other way?

Beginning in chapter 40, Isaiah receives a series of messages from God which deal with those questions.  He’s given words of comfort and hope, such as we saw two weeks ago in Jeremiah 31, which is written a little later on.  He’s also given hints that God’s people will not respond in their exile as they should, as we saw last week in reading Daniel 9.  Most of all, he’s given the promise of God’s anointed Servant who will carry on his work, to redeem not only Judah but the nations.  Isaiah is standing before the catastrophe to come, looking ahead to both disaster and deliverance, and seeing the sin of his people persist through all of it.  He’s seeing the unworthiness and faithfulness of Israel, and the unyielding faithfulness and mercy of God.  The contrast moves him to anguish, and at the end of chapter 63 he cries out, “God, we can’t break our pattern of sinning because you aren’t helping!  Why not?  Why do you let us live as if we’d never known you?”

That’s where chapter 64 begins.  Our English translations give the wrong impression, because this is actually past tense, not future; the language of the first three verses is disjointed, full of powerful emotions.  “O, that you had torn open the heavens and come down, your presence shaking the mountains—like fire burning the brush and boiling water—revealing your nature to your enemies, your presence shaking the nations, doing awe-inspiring things we could never have imagined—had you come down, your presence shaking the mountains . . .  No one has heard of a God like you, no one has ever seen such a God, who acts for those who are waiting for him!”

The gods of this world claim the power to split the heavens and shake the mountains—whether we turn to the god called Ba’al, or the one called Technology—but they’re just copying your power; and yet they impress people, and the nations follow after them.  They can’t be trusted, they aren’t faithful.  God, you alone are faithful; you can be trusted!  Why don’t you come down and show the world the real thing that we keep trying to fake?

Two things need to be said here.  One, God doesn’t act for anyone who calls out to him once, but for those who wait for him.  As John Oswalt writes, “‘to wait’ is to manifest the kind of trust that is willing to commit itself to God over the long haul.  It is to continue to believe and expect when all others have given up.  It is to believe that it is better for something to happen in God’s time than for it to happen on my initiative in my time.”  It refers to those who live by faith in God even when it seems to be pointless.

What does that look like?  We see that in verse 5.  First, the one who waits for God is one who does what is right out of joy in the Lord, and finds his joy in doing what is right.  Second, the one who waits for God is one who is devoted to God, who is pursuing God himself, nothing else.  To quote Oswalt again, “to wait for the Lord is . . . to commit the future into God’s hands by means of living a daily life that shows that we know his ways of integrity, honesty, faithfulness, simplicity, mercy, generosity, and self-denial.”  It is to do so not to impress others or to win any worldly advantages, but simply out of the desire to know God and to please him.  These are the people for whom God acts; they are the ones whom God meets, and often when he’s least expected.

Now, you might say, “People who live like that—it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and they get eaten.  That’s just not a reasonable expectation to put on people.”  You know what?  I won’t argue with you.  That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in, that Isaiah describes in verses 5-7—a lament that’s probably as true in our own mouths as in Isaiah’s.  That’s why Isaiah cries out as he does in the beginning of this chapter, because we have no other hope.  If we put our trust in ourselves, as King Ahaz did, then even our most righteous acts—even the ones where we’re most trying to please God—are just filthy rags.  If we’re trying to make things happen our way in our own time, even the best of it is filthy rags, nothing more.

We need to wait for God, knowing that if he doesn’t meet us here and he doesn’t act for us, then yeah, we’re going to get eaten.  That’s the place of faith.  In faith, we need to cry out to God that he will do as Isaiah wished he had done:  that he will show up in power, his glory tearing open the heavens and his presence shaking the earth.  And as we wait, and as we pray, we need to call others to join us, both within the church and without.  We need to call our fellow Christians so that the joy of the Lord in us will refresh and renew the church; we need to call out to those who aren’t so that the joy the Lord has given us will freshen their spirits for the first time.  I encouraged you some time ago to be praying for four non-believers, and asking God to give you opportunities to share the gospel with them; I hope you’re still doing it, for the sake of their souls, and for the sake of your own.

For the Sins of the Nation

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(2 Chronicles 7:11-22, Daniel 9:1-19; Acts 3:12-21)

The first thing that needs to be said this morning is that 2 Chronicles 7:14 doesn’t mean what we often use it to mean.  It does not read, “If American Christians humble themselves and pray . . . then I will heal America.”  This is God’s promise to Solomon for his nation, and it’s a specific response to the king’s prayer at the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem, which takes up most of chapter 6.  What God promises in 7:13-15 is a summary of what Solomon asks for in 6:18-31, 36-40.  Verse 14 isn’t a generic promise to anyone who reads it, it’s God honoring his servant’s request, and it’s specific to its context:  the worship and sacrifices of the whole nation of God at his temple.

Israel was a nation composed of one people which God had created as his chosen people, and organized around the worship of God.  Even the king was in some ways under the authority of the priests; he didn’t appoint them or control them in any way, and he had to go to them to offer sacrifices for his sin just the same as anyone else in Israel.  What’s in view in verse 14 isn’t God’s people within a given nation—God’s people are the nation.  If the nation as a whole repents, God promises to heal them.  As such, we can’t take this to mean that if Christians in America pray, God will certainly heal this country—especially if we insist on our own idea of what that healing would look like.

Now, am I saying that this promise has no relevance to us at all?  No.  As the British Old Testament scholar Martin Selman observes, “the fact that spiritual restoration is offered to one nation also makes it available in principle to any other nation. . . .  The spiritual health of each nation is something in which God has a direct interest.”  Further, “How far the corporate life of one’s own nation shows evidence of spiritual decline or progress depends to a significant extent on the prayers of Christian people.”  We can’t just apply 2 Chronicles 7:14 to ourselves, but we can certainly learn from it.

First, note that God’s promise in chapter 7 answers the prayers of one man in chapter 6—but not one man praying on his own behalf.  That one man was the king, God’s anointed leader of his people, praying on behalf of the whole nation as they dedicated the new temple for the worship of God.  If we would pray for the healing of the nation, we need to stand for the nation and pray on its behalf, not as “them” but as “us.”

Second, consider what 7:14 requires:  humble repentance, in prayer and action, from our wicked ways.  If we would see God move to change our nation, we must begin by giving up and letting him change us.  We need to begin by admitting that we’re sin­ners—and not just in some generic “everybody sins” kind of way, because none of us are generic sinners.  We’re all very specific sinners.  We are proud, we are lazy, we are liars, we are self-righteous, we are manipulative, we are greedy, we are lustful, we are gossips, we are self-indulgent, we are judgmental, we are wrathful, and whatever else we might be.  It’s not enough to say, “God, I’m a sinner”; we need to confess, “I am this sinner,” and be honest with him and ourselves about the details.  This means allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal our hearts to us, with all the things we’d rather not see—and it means listening when he does so by speaking to us through other people.  It means being humble enough to know that sometimes we deserve correction and rebuke from those around us.

Third, put these two things together, and look at the example of Daniel.  Daniel was reading the prophecies of Jeremiah, and the Spirit of God showed him that the appointed time for the Jews to return from exile to Jerusalem was drawing near.  You might have expected him to rejoice at that, but instead he responds with grief, because he recognizes that his people are still deep in their sin against God.  He knows that Israel deserved God’s judgment; he also knows that their continued unfaithfulness to God should earn them only more judgment, not an end to judgment.  They aren’t confessing their sins to God, and they aren’t repentant; so he identifies himself with his people and stands in their place to confess their sins and repent on their behalf, and to ask God for mercy.  He doesn’t say, “They have sinned,” though he himself is as close to blameless as anyone ever is; he says, “We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled.”

This seems strange to our ears, being the products of a highly individualistic culture; we tend to see sin and guilt and salvation as purely individual things.  Your sin is your problem, not mine, and your salvation is between you and Jesus.  Biblically, though, we’re a lot more closely connected than that, and our selfish individualism is an aspect of the sin of Cain.  We don’t actually exist as isolated individuals, but in webs of relationships—families, friends, colleagues and co-workers, communities, and so on.  As the great preacher and poet John Donne wrote, meditating on the sound of the funeral bell,

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were . . . :  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

What my family does, what my church does, what my denomination does, what my nation does—I am part of them, and therefore I’m involved in each of those actions, even if I never chose them.  The same goes for each of us.

Before we can follow Daniel’s example, we need to humble ourselves to confess our own sins; we need to acknowledge and begin to turn away from our own wicked ways.  We have no right to confess “their” sins for “them,” as if we somehow stood apart from the sins of humanity; we have every right to stand with and for the people of this nation and confess our collective sins for the sake of those who have not yet come to repentance.

By His Mercy

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(Jeremiah 31:1-17, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Titus 3:3-8)

Jeremiah 31 gives us one of the great biblical pictures of revival.  We could have read the whole chapter, but it would have been too much to absorb all at once, let alone to address in one sermon.  There’s powerful imagery here, building off the previous chapter with its promises of restoration and reminders of judgment.  Look at verse 2:  “The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness.”  The Lord brought the sword down on his people for their rebellious ways; it was his hand, wielding the conquering armies of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, that drove them into the wilderness.  At that point, they were a dead nation.  Of the conquered nations of the ancient world, there were some few who survived through cultural conquest—their culture was so great, it overcame that of their conquerors; think China or Greece.  A few survived in name only; we still have nations called Syria and Egypt, but they have nothing else in common with their ancient namesakes.  All the rest disappeared into the sands of time.

Except for Israel.  They were a dead nation walking, but after God drove them into the wilderness, there he showed them grace, and reaffirmed his covenant faithfulness, the faithfulness of his promise, to them.  He has razed them to the ground; now he promises a day when he will build them up again, bringing them back to life as a people.  They are devastated, as a consequence of their own sin, but he promises them abundance and prosperity.  They are scattered to the four winds; he will gather them home, tenderly care for them on the way, and then guard them as their shepherd.  They are mourning now, but they will rejoice, because the Lord who sold them into slavery to the nations for their disobedience has now redeemed them—has bought them back for himself.  Even the children who were lost will be found, and brought home from the land of the enemy.

Why will this happen?  Is it because the people of God finally came to their senses and turned back to him?  Is God responding to a new spirit of faithfulness in Israel?  No.  There is some evidence of repentance in verses 18-19, but it’s not much more than, “You punished me, I’m sorry, please stop punishing me.”  Beyond that, nothing.  This chapter doesn’t begin with anything people do, it begins with what God is doing, and almost all of it is about what he’s doing and what he’s going to do.  This is God’s initiative and God’s work from beginning to end.

As far as I know, there has never been a revival born out of an organized political or social movement to improve the world.  There’s never been one that started with the rich, the powerful, and the influential.  If you want to talk about social reform movements, the Pharisees are an absolutely classic one, and what did they do about the revival that was born through Jesus and burst out in the early church?  They fought it at every turn and did their level best to kill it.  You will not bring revival by demanding your rights, campaigning for politicians, or fighting in court.  You may hinder it, though, if you’re not careful.

Revivals don’t come through demonstrations of human power, but through admissions of human weakness, and dependence on God.  They don’t come through money; in fact, money doesn’t seem to have much to do with them at all.  They may come through people who happen to be rich, or powerful, or wise, but only if they heed the words of God in Jeremiah 9:  “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, let not the powerful boast in their power, let not the rich boast in their riches, but if anyone would boast, let them boast in this:  that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord who practices covenant love and mercy, justice, and righteousness in the earth.”  That’s hard, which is why revival more often comes through people on the margins of society.  They’re the ones who know they need it.  The greatest enemy of revival is self-satisfaction.

If revival won’t come through human power and human efforts to be righteous, then how and why will it come?  Jeremiah is ruthlessly clear on this:  only by the mercy of God.  I’ve talked about this before, that the Hebrew word we translate “mercy” is the word ḥesed; there’s only a couple Hebrew words you need to know, and this is first among them.  Sally Lloyd-Jones in her wonderful Jesus Storybook Bible describes it as God’s “Never Stopping, Never Giving up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love,” and that captures it as well as anything.  It is the relentless faithfulness of God to his people, to keep the promises he has made, and the love that absolutely refuses to stop loving us, or even to love us any less.  Thus he declares, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”

God’s work is drastic.  Jeremiah and Paul both know this.  God doesn’t save us because we’ve done anything right at all.  He does it according to his own mercy, because he loves us despite ourselves.  And when he saves us, he doesn’t just give us a list of rules and tell us to go out and behave ourselves better.  That’s what we do with our kids, not what God does with us.  He’s not on about giving us some life skills and some tools and principles for self-improvement.  Lifehacker is a useful website, but it’s not a model for Christlike living.

God is on about making us new the way he’s making the heavens and the earth new.  We’ll still be ourselves, because we’ll be ourselves as we’re supposed to be—which means we’ll be very, very different from who we are now.  In Jesus, we’re born all over again, brand new from the inside out, made new by the Holy Spirit, “whom God poured out on us richly, abundantly, overflowing, through Jesus Christ our Savior.”  Laws?  Where we’re going, we won’t needlaws—not when God gets done with us.  Our hearts will beat with his law, and the knowledge of God will be the marrow of our bones.

Of course, we don’t see this fully now, and we won’t until all the world is judged; but remember, the work of revival is the work of the new Jerusalem, the power of the kingdom of God breaking in to this world order.  What we see in Jeremiah is what God is doing with this world, it’s what he’s doing in us and through us and with us, and what every part and every moment of our lives is for.  This is what the church is for, and what we’re about:  this is the gospel—not just the gospel of salvation, but the gospel of the kingdom.  It’s the promise that the covenant faithfulness and mercy of God is overcoming and will overcome the faithlessness and false justice of this world.

This is why I had Kaleb sing “The Great Storm Is Over” two weeks ago.  I wanted him to sing it while we were in Revelation because that’s the main source of the imagery of the song; I was hoping it would stick in some of your minds, attach itself to the biblical text, and just keep humming there in the back.  The Book of Revelation is the soil from which that song grows; here this morning is the application.  Our message to the world isn’t, “You need to live better.”  It isn’t, “You’d better shape up—or else.”  It isn’t, “We’re going to pass a bunch of laws to make you behave.”  We’ve been given a promise of hope to those who know they’re weak and vulnerable in the face of the storm of life:  One is coming who will calm the storm.  In fact, he already has—we just haven’t gotten to that point in the story yet.

Our message is, “Be at peace—let go of your fear.  Your Father in heaven loves his own, and his faithful mercy is more sure than this world’s faithless justice.”  No, we don’t see our heavenly Father with us, but we do have a spiritual mother here:  the bride of Christ, the church.  We have been given a song to sing in the night, a song of peace and love and hope, a song of the mercy of God; and whatever else we do and whatever may come, we’ll keep singing it until our Lord returns.

For the Healing of the Nations

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(Isaiah 60:17-61:7; Revelation 22:1-17)

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”  I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful line in all of Scripture than that.  Obviously there are many beautiful verses in the Bible; just as obviously, this one would be meaningless without all the rest of them.  But I think this one, coming at the climax, may be the best of them all.
Maybe you think I’m making too much of this, but follow me here.  I said last week that I don’t believe in immortal souls that live in a spiritual realm called heaven, because what the Bible promises us is the resurrection of the dead into the new heavens and the new earth.  More than that, though, this idea that our spirits are immortal and separate things from these bodies that we just happen to wear is completely unbiblical.  If you start with that idea, it chops up everything that God is doing.  You end up with this division between body and soul, between this world and heaven, between this life and eternal life, and ultimately the idea that this life and this world are only here to determine who’s going to heaven and who isn’t.  That’s wrong.  The life of the world to come will still be the same life and the same world, even as it will be made completely new.
Look at the picture John gives us.  At the center of the city stands the throne of God.  No longer will he rule from on high, far above and beyond us, but from right in the center of his people.  From his throne—from his authority, from his lordship, from his unchallenged rule—flows the river of the water of life.  We’ve talked about this before, that in a hot, dry climate without our modern technology, it was water that determined whether there would be life.  If there was clear, flowing fresh water, plants could grow, and animals and people could live.  If not, then not.
Here, the city has its own river, which flows right down the middle of its main street—right at the heart of all its business and traffic.  Our cities are creators of culture, but they’re consumers of life.  They can’t produce the food to feed those who live there, or the raw materials to feed their factories and supply their stores.  The culture of our cities consumes the life of our fields and forests.  In the new earth, that will no longer be the case.  Life will flow from the city of God, for the city will be the place from which he rules the world.  His reign will be the source of its life, and the center of its activity.
On either side of the river stands the tree of life.  Don’t imagine some great mutant tree here; the point is rather that there won’t be just one tree of life anymore, but a whole double row of them.  It won’t just bear one kind of fruit, either, but twelve:  one crop for each month, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, one for each of the twelve apostles.  Our first ancestors had one chance at the tree of life, and lost it when they chose to disobey God; in the new Jerusalem, the new city, the life of God will be abundantly available to all.
And here’s the key:  that life covers and fills and revives everything in this world and every part of our existence.  What are the nations?  Just as the city is the highest point of human achievement, so the nation is the highest point of human identity.  Ethnicity, culture, history, land, belonging, loyalty, home, all these things are tied up and bound together in and by our nations.  The enduring temptation to divide the world into “us” and “them” and define ourselves by who we’re not is all tied in there too, and has been a driving force behind some of our most horrific wars.  And of course, we give the nations lordship, accepting the authority of our various governments over our lives and bowing to their demands.  Having rebelled against the God to whom we belong and who is the one true Lord over all creation, we had to come up with some kind of replacement to give structure to human life and keep it all together.  The nations are what we came up with.
And just as God redeemed the city, so he redeemed the nations.  All of our culture, as we saw last week; all of our history, all of our land with its beauty and brokenness and all we’ve done to it, all of our sense of home and belonging, all the things that make us “us” and not “them”—all our rivalries, all our conflicts, all the walls that divide us—he took all of it and bought it with the blood of the cross and gave it new life.  None of it that is true will be abolished or wiped away, but it will all be made right.  The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
And yes, I said God redeemedthe nations—past tense, already done.  We don’t fully experience that now, but the work is already accomplished, in God’s time; and it has already begun, in ours.  The world has not yet been born again, but we have.  The new Jerusalem has not yet come down from heaven, but the work of the city is already here, and has been given to us to do.  It is our privilege and our honor to do it; it’s a blessing from God to give us a part in his work.
This is why and how we need to think and talk about revival, and pray for it to happen.  Revivals are part of God’s work of healing the nations.  That means, in the first place, they’re nothing we can control or make happen.  As the Rev. Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote,

A revival is a miracle.  It is a miraculous, exceptional phenomenon.  It is the hand of the Lord, and it is mighty.  A revival, in other words, is something that can only be explained as the direct action and intervention of God.  It was God alone who could divide the Red Sea.  It was God alone who could divide the waters of the river of Jordan.  These were miracles.  Hence the reminder of God’s unique action, of the mighty acts of God.  And revivals belong to that category. . . .  These events belong to the order of things that men cannot produce.  Men can produce evangelistic campaigns, but they cannot and never have produced a revival.

Second, this means we cannot be tied down to the way we’ve done things in the past.  What we’ve done that has worked before may not be what we should be doing now; God doesn’t tend to reuse his methods, lest we put our trust in the method rather than the Maker.  What we’ve tried to no apparent effect may be exactly what we’re called to do in this time, as what God is doing now isn’t the same as he was doing then.  And just because we try something and it doesn’t seem to work doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing.  When it comes to human effort, it’s well said that “If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.”  When it comes to following God, though, all bets are off.  Often, the faith he uses is the faith that persists in praying and doing his will even when it seems to be pointless and a failure.  How long did Noah live with the jeers of his neighbors while he was building the ark?
Third, revival is the only hope for the healing of the nations, including ours.  As we look out, we see America swinging away from any respect for Christian faith, and that swing is accelerating.  Whole sections of the church think they can hold on to that respect by riding the swing and conforming themselves to what the elite culture demands, but they won’t.  The root of the matter is, the rich, the powerful and the influential increasingly want us all to believe that we’re gods to ourselves—because then they’re the biggest gods on the scene, with predictable results—and in the end, the only way the church can conform to that is by committing suicide.
We can’t stop this by writing new laws, because they’ll be interpreted and enforced as it suits those in power.  We can’t stop it by electing new politicians, because as they join the elite, many will be corrupted—not all, but far too many.  We can’t stop it through the courts, because the courts are part of the problem.  As Psalm 146 says, “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save.”  Rather, our only hope is in the name of the Lord our God, who made the heavens and the earth, and who will make them all new.  America doesn’t need to be taken back, it needs to be healed.  It doesn’t need to be reprogrammed, it needs to be revived.
If we would restore the ancient foundations that are crumbling before our eyes, don’t pray for electoral victories, or for the government or the courts to protect Christians from opposition, oppression, and persecution; pray for revival.  Pray for God to do a mighty work in all our hearts by his Holy Spirit.  It’s our only hope.

The City of Glory

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I suspect most people in this country, if you asked them what Christians believe is going to happen to us when we die, would say that we believe that our immortal souls leave our bodies behind and this world behind and go to live eternally with other spirits in heaven.  I expect the majority of Christians in this country would say something like that.  For my part, I don’t believe a word of it.  I don’t, because the Bible doesn’t.  That’s not what God promises, because he’s not interested in writing off the world like that.  The Bible doesn’t tell us we have immortal souls that will live eternally as spirits; it tells us God is going to raise us physically from the dead, and that those who love him will live eternally with him in a world made entirely new.

This isn’t just going to be sitting on clouds playing harps, either—which is a good thing, because I don’t think I’d make much of a harpist.  For that matter, it won’t just be what we think of as a “natural” setting, with trees and flowers and friendly animals.  Look what John says:  the centerpiece of the new creation won’t be a garden, it will be a city.  That’s a really important thing.  What is a city?  It’s a human creation.  You might even say it’s a little human world, in which you can spend your whole life surrounded only by things either made or processed by human beings.  (Except for the rats and the bugs, anyway; but even the weather is affected by the city, if not in ways that we can control.)  It’s the highest example of human mastery of the natural world.

And when God makes all things new, it won’t just be things that only he can make; right at the center of it, made new right along with everything else, will be a city—the human place, the human achievement.  I think that’s a very big deal.  I think that tells us that what we do, and what we make, and what we build, matters.  I believe that tells us that God cares about our work and our production, and that when he remakes the world, he’s going to keep the best of what we’ve done.  I don’t say everything good; a good artificial hip is a noble and beautiful thing, truly a work which honors God, but it simply won’t be needed in the new creation.  But everything that belongs will be there—our music, our buildings, our art, and the rest.  I don’t just mean stuff that was made by Christians, either; I believe God will preserve the great gifts of all our civilizations.

Nothing that is truly good in itself will be lost.  No beauty, nothing of honor, no joy will be lost; they will be transformed.  When God makes the world new, free of sickness, sorrow, pain, and death, full of his presence of love and peace, it won’t be only his world; it will be our world, too, with our gifts included with his delight.  What we do, what we make, what we build, matters to God, because we matter to God, because he loves us.

It Is Done!

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(Isaiah 43:16-21, Isaiah 65:17-25; Revelation 21:1-8)

As I said back in January, the sermon planning for this year coalesced around the sense that God was calling me to preach on revival, shaped by the reality that I didn’t know how to go about doing that.  I did a lot of thinking, and a lot of study, and spent a fair bit of time praying through it; what evolved out of that time was a sermon series composed of several chapters, each with a different emphasis.

As part of that, it seemed to me we needed to begin by looking at where we are now and where we’re going.  Unless you’re planning a trip around the world, it’s the beginning point and the end point that define your travel.  Of course, when you’re talking about true revival, you’re talking about something which is entirely a work of the Holy Spirit from first to last, so it’s critical to understand ourselves as we are in God and under his authority.  That’s what we’ve been doing in 1 Peter.  But 1 Peter points us toward the goal, to a reward at the end of the road which will be great enough and good enough to make all the hardships and grief of the journey more than worth it in the end; and so I thought we should begin this series by looking forward, to the glory that’s in store.  After all, while revival comes as a blessing to the world, that’s not its primary goal.  That goal lies ahead—further up and further in.

To revive is to make alive again, and we need to recognize that that’s neither meta­phor nor hyperbole.  God isn’t in the business of making people better, nor is he on about making the world a better place; he’s not just trying to patch up the damage sin has done to his creation.  He doesn’t see us as a fixer-upper in need of some repairs and renovations and a new coat of paint.  He’s going to remake everything, from first to last, from the inside out.  Every enemy and all that is wrong will cease to exist.  He’s going to raise this whole creation, and his faithful ones with it, from death to life—forever.

There’s a great deal we could say about this passage, but I want to focus on three points.  First, it’s not just that there will be no more human evil; there will also be no more natural evil.  Think typhoons, earthquakes, and those little accidents of timing that can make the difference between a harmless mistake and a traffic accident.  We see this in verse 1 when John tells us, “there was no more sea.”  The ancient world understood the sea as a force which was hostile to life and all human order.  Babylonian mythology identified the sea as the home of Tiamat, the dragon of chaos which the great god Marduk had to overcome and kill before he could create any other life; their attitude toward the sea was typical.  Though the people of John’s time made long journeys by sea, they stayed in sight of land as much as possible, and never forgot it could kill them at any time.

Whether a deep ocean like the Atlantic and the Pacific, or a shallow, land-bound body of water like the Mediterranean or the Great Lakes, the sea is treacherous even now.  The Greeks who told tales of Poseidon and the Kraken would have understood “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” just fine; some of Gordon Lightfoot’s lyrics would have been obscure, but the story would have come through loud and clear.  When the world is made new, John says, this power will be no more.  I expect the new earth will still have the ocean; but it too will be remade, and fully obedient to the goodness of God.

Second, pain, sorrow, sickness and death will be no more because God will live among his people.  Our greatest joy won’t be the absence of those evils that blight our lives in this world, but the presence of the One who is all good things.  He will be fully with us, in all his glory and goodness, always and forever.  All shall be well, and all shall be good, because he will be with us.  All fear, all doubt, all insecurity will disappear, for he will be with us, and his love for us will leave no room for such things.  All sense that we’re ignored, unappreciated, overlooked, misunderstood, or alone will be gone, because he will be with us, and we will know without question that he knows and understands us fully, and that he values us as his children.  We will never walk alone or unnoticed, because he will be with us; we will never walk in darkness, for he will be our light.

Third:  “It is done!”  None of this is uncertain, or merely possible; this isn’t something God’s planning to do.  He’s already accomplished it.  The work is finished.  We haven’t experienced it yet—we haven’t caught up to it—but it has already happened.  All things have been made new—wehave been made new—sin and death have been defeated, and Jesus rules over all as the King of creation.  We don’t see it yet, but we will.  We can count on it; we can stake everything on it, including our very lives.

This is why Peter could tell us, again and again, that our reward in Christ will be more than worth the cost of whatever suffering we endure on the way.  It’s why Jesus could tell us not to focus on our earthly bank accounts, but to concentrate on storing up treasure for ourselves in heaven.  It’s why Paul could write, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed to us”; and again, “We do not lose heart.  Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.  For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.  For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
This is bedrock.  As Christians, we don’t bet on the past, and we don’t put our trust in the present.  The past is the evidence of the faithfulness of God to remind us in the present that we can stake our lives on the future.  This is true whether our present circumstances are good or ill, whether all is going according to plan or we no longer even remember what the plan was, whether we have a sense of physical and material security or we don’t know where our next meal is coming from.  It’s true whether God is blessing us with worldly success or tempering and testing us through worldly failure.  Our future blessing and glory in Christ is more certain than our present, and even more firmly fixed than our past.  After all, our past as we know it is limited by our memory and our under­standing; but our future is held in the mind and promise of God, who is without limits.

A People of Grace

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(Proverbs 3:21-35; 1 Peter 5:5-14)

The NIV’s translation of verse 5 is a little unfortunate.  Peter has been talking about elders in the church, and he still is here; the distinction in this first sentence isn’t between younger people and older people, but between those who aren’t elders and those who are.  It’s quite clear from the way he continues that he’s addressing the believers as a whole at this point, not just one subset of them.  What he has to say is important, because if the temptation of leader­ship is to dominate and demand, servant leadership creates an equal temptation among those who are being served.  It’s easy to mistake humility for weakness and a servant’s heart for a servile spirit, and start to think of a servant leader as “the help.”

I first understood what that means on the occasion of a wedding I did for a couple who came from wealthy families.  They appre­ciated all I did for them, but when the service and reception rolled around, I realized that their families didn’t.  They saw me the same way they saw the people bussing the tables:  as little more than animate furniture.  That sort of attitude is the result of arrogance, and breeds arrogance—the same arrogance we were warned about last week.  In that, we can see that these two temptations, that of the leader and that of those who are served, are really one:  the temptation to arrogance instead of humility and a spirit of entitlement instead of a spirit of grace.  As such, they stand in complete opposition to the life which Christ has given and invited us to live.

Peter brings his letter to a close by telling his readers how to live that life in the face of persecution and suffering.  What he says amounts to this:  we are to be a people of grace.  He lays this out in three ways.  At the center of this passage, he calls us to live by grace toward God.  “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God,” he says, “and cast all your anxieties on him.”  Set aside the pride that says that you can do it on your own, that you’re good enough just the way you are, that you deserve to get what you want, that you deserve better than what you’re getting.  Give up the desire to run your life and the insistence on making it all happen yourself—that’s the only way you can cast your anxieties on God; as long as you’re trying to keep control, the anxieties will come with it.  To cast your anxieties on him, you must give up control to him.

This is an invitation to entrust ourselves and our lives totally to God, because he cares for us—much better than we do for ourselves, in fact.  I love the way theologian Douglas Harink puts it:  the Christian life is only possible if

we trust God absolutely in every circumstance. Only such trust will free us from the constant and normal temptations to assert our own power in circumstances, to take down the enemy or oppressor, to seek our own good, to establish our own rights, to attain our own position of honor, or, most basically, simply to defend ourselves and secure our own safety.  Without humble trust in “the mighty hand of God,” how would we be able to follow the way of the Messiah, who did not do any of those things, but rather, “entrust­[ing] himself to the one who judges justly,” walked the journey from divine glory to the cross?

As Dr. Harink continues, “a mere imitation of Christ carried out by the sheer power of human will” is not the Christian life.  You can live an impressively moral life that way (on the outside, at least) and convince a lot of people you’re a godly person, but you won’t be.  That’s a life lived apart from God, because it’s a life lived to impress God (and other people).  Following Christ begins in truth with the admission that wecan’t actually follow Christ at all.  All we can do is lay ourselves at his feet in abject humility and admit our utter inability to do what he commands us to do, and let his Holy Spirit pick us up and carry us.  It’s only as we are in Christ by the power of his Spirit, only as we’re completely surrendered to him and our own pride is completely abandoned, in total dependence on his grace, that we can live his life.

The other two points flow out of this reality.  One, Peter says in verses 8-9 that we’re to live by grace against sin.  It’s easy to miss that because it’s easy to miss that Peter isn’t talking about human opponents here.  If you look back at the rest of the letter, he never tells his readers to resist those who persecute them; quite the opposite.  Thus, when he says to resist the Devil, he has something very different in mind.  This is important.  As Dr. Harink points out, when we focus on “apparent flesh-and-blood enemies, we . . . miss the sneak attack of the real adversary—the devil—the one who has already devoured ‘them’ and now seeks to devour ‘us,’ exactly by setting us in warfare against them.”  When this happens, “the defeat of the messianic people [is] total, because the very messianic character that defines them [disappears].”

Our enemy is the Devil, not other people, not matter what other people might do to us, and we cannot resist him by our own strength or force of will.  We can’t, because he will turn those against us.  Our enemy doesn’t only seek to destroy us through our temptations, he seeks to destroy us through our highest goals and most noble motivations, by corrupting and twisting them and by teaching us to use them as excuses for sin.  We can only resist him by putting our faith entirely in Christ and resting wholly on his grace.  We can only resist the Devil by turning at every point to Jesus, entrusting ourselves as he did to the one who judges justly.

Finally, Peter commands us to live in grace toward one another.  Not for us the pride that presumes to look down on others; God opposes the proud.  Rather, the more we humble our­selves before God and confess our total dependence on his grace, the more this will determine how we regard and treat one another.  There are two aspects to this.  First, if the Lord himself didn’t come to be served but to serve, how much more should this be true of us?  He calls us to give up our lives in service to each other, not for a little while, not so that they will serve us the way we want to be served, not until they realize we’re too good for that, but in total, with no expectation of any earthly credit or reward.  He calls us to give up our agendas and our insistence on having things our way, not as a sneaky strategy for getting our way in the end, but as our sacrifice of worship to him.  He invites us to cast our anxieties on him and pour ourselves out in service, holding nothing back, trusting by his grace that all will be well, and all will be good.

Second, if we’re sinners who are utterly dependent on the grace of God for our own salvation—and we are, every one of us—and we’re grateful to God for his mercy when we sin against him, how can we not show that same mercy to those who sin against us?  None of us has standing to assume the posture of the judge, looking down on others from a height of moral superiority; measured against the goodness and holiness of God, the greatest height of moral superiority any of us can claim is no more than an anthill.  When others sin, it isn’t our place to decide what justice should be done to them, much less to impose it.  Rather, our proper place is to come alongside them in humility, on an equal footing with them as fellow sinners saved only by grace, and strive gently and kindly to teach and encourage them to resist the Devil.  In this, too, we are to serve regardless of any hope of reward.  Jesus commands us to forgive each other until we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve done it, then keep forgiving.

All of this will mean suffering.  It will mean suffering from the world, as we set an example that makes our society uncomfortable, and as God allows us to suffer so that he can use it for our growth.  It will mean suffering from the Devil, both the pain of conviction for our sin and the pain of resisting temptation.  It will even mean suffering from the church, as there will be times that others will take advantage of us.  To this, as he has all the way through the letter, Peter encourages us to trust Jesus.  Trust him, and after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.  This is the true grace of God.  Stand firm in it.

 

Engraving of John Wesley preaching outside a church, from the Wellcome Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Servant Leaders

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The NIV is missing a key word in verse 1:  “Therefore.”  It is time for judgment to begin with the house of God, suffering is coming to separate the wheat from the weeds—therefore, Peter says, I appeal to every elder in the church.  What he’s going to say would be true and important regardless, but when times are peaceful, the church can survive, and sometimes grow, even under un-Christlike leaders.  It may not be all that strong spiritually, but competence in worldly matters can at least keep it muddling along.  When suffering and judgment loom on the horizon, that’s no longer the case, and the need becomes critical for those who lead the church to do so as Christ does.

Note how Peter frames his appeal to church leaders.  He doesn’t say, “I appeal to you as an apostle,” putting himself above them and asserting his authority.  He could have, as he established that in the very first line of the letter, but he doesn’t.  Instead, he says, “I appeal to you as a fellow elder,” putting himself on the same level as them.  What matters isn’t positional authority—I have this position or this office, so I have the right to instruct you or to give you orders.  What matters is their common position under authority, as servants of Christ and his church.  This is important:  Peter is modeling for these elders the attitude he wants them to have toward their churches.

He’s calling them to turn away from their culture’s common understanding of leadership, which Jesus summarizes aptly.  “Those whom the Gentiles regard as their rulers lord it over them, and their high officials make them feel the weight of their authority.”  It was all about positional authority with them:  my position gives me the right to get what I want, to have things my way, and to force you to comply.  It’s the leadership approach we saw with the President five years ago when he met with Republican leaders to discuss his proposed economic stimulus plan.  When they started pushing him to structure it differently, he responded, “I won.”  I won, I’m the guy who has the desk with the red phone on it, so I get to do things my way.  I don’t have to listen to you if I don’t want to.

Now, this is not to say that just because Republicans disagreed with him, the President should have given in.  There will always be disagreement, and leaders have the re­sponsibility to chart the best course they can according to their best judgment, not to try to make everyone happy.  You can’t make everyone happy, and if you try, all you’ll manage to do is jam the rudder.  The problem is the attitude:  I won, you lost, so either go along with me or go fly a kite.  There’s no humility in that, no respect for those who dis­agree, and thus no willingness to learn anything from them.  Indeed, there’s no sense that there might be anything to learn from them.  The assumption is, “I have the authority, therefore I have the right, therefore I amright.”

Peter tells us that in Christ, we need to lead very differently:  we need to lead as shepherds.  We tend to collapse the shepherding metaphor into pastoral care—which then often means we only apply it to pastors, and let the rest of the elders of the church off the hook.  Peter’s point is much bigger.  Shepherds put their lives at the disposal of the sheep.  They lead the sheep, but they don’t set the agenda—the sheep do.  The sheep are concerned about having good grass, good water, and a safe place to lie down, and they aren’t going to change that for anybody.  The shepherd leads the sheep, but that only means his job is to figure out how to get the sheep where they need to be, and then to do what it takes to make that happen.  If that means going without sleep to find a missing lamb, he goes without sleep.  If it means risking his life to protect them, then so be it.

The shepherd is entirely the servant of his sheep, with no hope that they will ac­commodate his wishes, or let him get comfortable, or even express proper appreciation for all his sacrifice on their behalf.  They’ll certainly complain if they don’t like the grass or the water, but they aren’t going to tell him he’s wonderful when he leads them to good pastures.  They won’t make him rich, either, because most of them aren’t his sheep; one or two may be, but the rest belong to someone else, and so too will the profit.  He’s just a laborer working for his daily bread.

Peter speaks to us as a fellow elder—as one who knows this work from the inside out.  As a fellow elder, he tells those of us who are elders that this is who we are and how we’re called to lead.  This is the model for anyone who would lead the people of God, no matter who you are.  If it was true for Peter, who had about as much claim to importance as anyone in the history of the church, it’s true for all the rest of us.  As Jesus said, the world thinks leaders are people who exercise power to make things happen the way they want them to happen, but those who would lead his people must be a very different kind of leader, with a very different heart and mindset.

If you want to be a leader in the church, you need to be all about serving others—not putting yourself first, but putting yourself last.  Leadership means laying down your life for the church.  And note this:  this is addressed to us to apply to ourselves.  As leaders, we have the responsibility to convict ourselves before we presume to criticize others, and to challenge ourselves harder than anyone else.

Thus Peter tells us how and why one ought to be an elder in the church:  not out of any sort of compulsion, not for money, not to dominate others or serve our own agenda, but freely, out of a desire to serve and bless the church as a whole.  In this, he says, we are to be examples to those whom we lead.  I’ve talked about this before:  this is the heart of Christian leadership.  The essence of the calling is to say to the church with Paul in 1 Corinthians 11, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”  This is critically important because of what we’ve seen all the way through 1 Peter:  being a Christian doesn’t just mean following a different set of rules from the world, it means we have a whole new identity apart from the world, because we are now in Christ.  This isn’t something you can just explain to people; they have to be able to see it lived out if they’re going to understand it.  It has to be modeled.  It can’t be taught unless it’s also caught.

The church is the body of Christ, alive by the life of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life for us.  He calls us to live as a people who do everything we do not to be served but to serve, and to give our lives for others—for enemies and opponents as much as for friends and family.  This means that the primary duty of elders is to be examples of the life of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life for us.  To lead as servants isn’t a strategy, or a method, or a program, it’s the essence of the work of Christian leadership, because we can only teach others to live this way if we’re living this way ourselves.

The House of God

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Our passage from 1 Peter this morning brings the main body of the letter to a close.  The apostle’s primary practical concern as he wrote was to help these believers understand and respond in a Christlike way to the present reality and future prospect of suffering for their faith.  As we’ve seen, he approaches this by focusing them on their identity in Christ, for two reasons.  One, they need to realize that if they live as committed followers of Christ, suffering is unavoidable.  The world will try to force them to change, and punish them if they don’t, for being who they are instead of who the world thinks they ought to be.  As the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.  Two, they need to believe that following Christ is worth the suffering, that the rewards are and will be worth the pain, so that they don’t lose heart and walk away.

Here, as he wraps up all that he’s been saying about suffering, he brings in one more idea which serves to land the whole section.  After all, even if you buy in to every­thing Peter’s had to say to this point, you might well still be thinking it isn’t fair.  Sure, no one ever said life is fair, and I believe that Jesus makes it all worth it, but we shouldn’t have to suffer for our faith in him, and why doesn’t God protect us from it?  He could, after all—he’s all-powerful and all-knowing, and he could do it if he wanted to.

Many answers have been offered to that question.  One that I keep coming back to is the reality that if we were miraculously protected from all suffering, we would quickly lose our ability to relate to, much less to minister to, people in pain.  As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “The man who has not suffered—what does he know, anyway?”  That’s an approach, one of many, which points to the usefulness of suffering—which means, while I believe it to be true, it is nevertheless an attempt to soften the question a little bit by making it seem like not quite such a bad thing.

Peter is bolder than that; in this passage, he strikes deeper than we ever really want to go.  In verse 16 he says, “If you suffer as a Christian, don’t be ashamed, but praise God that you’re known as a Christian.”  OK, that’s nothing new for this letter.  Then comes verse 17.  “For”—which is to say, this is why you should praise God if you suffer as a Christian—“it is time for judgment to begin with the house of God.”  In other words—at least, this is what it sounds like—praise God if you’re suffering for his sake, because this is his judgment on you.  What on earth do we do with that?

There are three things that need to be said here.  First, while Peter doesn’t use the word “family” here, if we think of this in a family context for a minute, we begin to get a handle on it.  I discipline my children, but I don’t discipline other people’s children, because it’s not my right to do so.  That would make me a meddler or a busybody, which Peter tells us not to be in verse 15.  When I discipline my kids, they may perceive it as suffering—Iain certainly does—but it isn’t that I want them to suffer.  I want them to turn away from their sin rather than continuing in it; I want them to grow in godliness rather than in sinfulness.  It’s better for them to suffer sooner under discipline than to suffer later under judgment, for the latter is far worse, with far greater consequences in the long term.  So it is with us under God.

Second, what Peter has in view here is God’s judgment on the whole world, which will come to its fulfillment at the return of Christ.  He isn’t talking about God judging you or me as individuals; this is the judgment of God in the big picture, sorting out the world into those who have come to Christ and those who have rejected him.  That’s why he says specifically that it’s time for judgment to begin with the houseof God, with God’s temple on earth—which, you may remember, he defined back in chapter 2.  God’s spiritual house, the place where he is worshiped on earth, is the church, and we are the living stones out of which he is building it.

Why does this matter?  Well, it shifts the picture.  Peter isn’t actually saying that if I suffer for my faith, that it’s God’s judgment on me personally—presumably for my sin, which wouldn’t make a great deal of sense in this context.  Rather, he’s saying that if suffering comes on the church, that we need to recognize that as the beginning of his judgment on the whole world.  His judgment on the world is the separation of the wheat from the weeds, to borrow from one of Jesus’ parables.  When the church suffers, that separation is made within the church; those who aren’t truly disciples of Christ, and thus would lead it away from him and bring it under judgment for sin, are weeded out.  If you suffer as a Christian—if suffering for your faith doesn’t drive you away, but drives you to Christ—then, Peter says, you should praise God for that.

There has been a long season in this country for the wheat and the weeds to grow up together, but I think we’ve seen that judgment beginning in the American church.  A lot has been written about the “rise of the Nones,” as the fastest-growing religious category in the census is those with no religious affiliation; many have taken this as a major change in American society, and either lamented or celebrated it, depending on their point of view.  It isn’t really a change at all, though, just a symptom of change.  Most of those folks used to describe themselves as affiliated with one church or another because this is America and that’s what you do, even if they only ever went for Christmas, Easter, and weddings.  Now, increasingly, that isn’t what you do anymore, and so people who don’t go to church and don’t really care about church have no reason to say otherwise; they aren’t really changing their religious position, just being more honest about it.

Beyond that, whenever Christianity is socially approved, there will be many who will go to church for reasons that have little to do with God—for the sake of their reputation, or their business dealings, or what have you.  As traditional Christian faith falls out of favor, that creates a problem for them:  they don’t want to lose the connections they’ve made in the church, but they don’t want to be associated with something which is unpop­ular in their social circles.  Their usual response is to try to drag the church along with the culture, and thus we see many in the American church changing historic Christian teaching to conform to what elite society tells us all the right-thinking people believe.

That’s been going on for a long time in the Protestant mainline, such as our former denomination, but it isn’t just there; we also see it happening now among many who would call themselves evangelicals.  The church is being divided out.  If we refuse to go with the flow, if we stand for Christ against the desires of the world, we need to realize that we’re in for trouble for it, and we need to accept that in advance.

Third, if we do, it matters.  It matters tremendously, because this is about the cleansing of the temple.  The house of God is the place on earth where God is worshipped; it’s the access point for all those in the world whom he draws to seek him.  He made many promises through the Old Testament prophets that the time would come when all nations would come to Zion, to the mountain of God, to his temple and his city, to worship him and to bow before him; the church is the spiritual Zion and the inheritor of those promises.

One that we should especially remember is God’s statement in Isaiah 56, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”  I say we should remember it because of something Jesus did—twice—which I’m sure Peter never forgot.  The high priest set up a religious marketplace in the Court of the Gentiles; it probably made him a lot of money, but it also made it impossible for Gentiles to worship in the Temple.  They probably couldn’t even hear what was going on in the inner courts over the sounds of animals and money and business deals.  When Jesus saw this, he flipped over the tables and drove out animals and moneychangers alike, denouncing the whole thing in the words of Isaiah 56:  “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves!”

The worship of God had to be pure because those whom God was calling needed to be able to answer that call.  It wasn’t, so Jesus purified it by driving out those who weren’t in that courtyard to worship.  God’s judgment on the church is the separation of those who are focused on worshipping him, who are learning to love to worship him, from those who, in the last analysis, are really worshipping something else.  It’s God renewing his church as a people who worship him in spirit and in truth, and whose worship is pure—as pure as we ever manage, anyway—so that those who come are led and taught to turn away from the idols of our culture and worship him alone.

Faithful Stewards

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(Proverbs 10:8-12; Luke 19:11-27, 1 Peter 4:7-11)

We seem to have finally shaken ourselves free of the grey skies and cold winds of winter; but even if the sun is finally shining, there is heavy weather ahead.  When the news came down that Zimmer had bought Biomet, the horizon turned black and ominous for a lot of people in our community.  A lot of them are afraid of being laid off, and a lot more are talking about leaving.  It’s the end of an era, and it could take far more than just the era with it.  A storm is coming, and the skies are dark.

It isn’t just here, though; look to the world’s horizon.  If Iran wants to develop weapons of mass destruction, we can’t really stop them, and we don’t know how close they might be—and the government of Iran is the geopolitical equivalent of a homicidal sociopath.  North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and I’m not even sure what you’d compare them to; that may be the most fundamentally deranged government and political culture in human history.  The skies are dark; a storm is coming.

And our nation?  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven”; and unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses, we cannot claim to be “One equal temper of heroic hearts / . . . strong in will / To strive, to see, to find, and not to yield.”  Our culture is collapsing back into a class system; the real divide isn’t between Democrat and Republican anymore, but between the elites and the plebes, and they’re beginning to separate like bad veneer coming off cheap particle board.  That separation is sapping the life from our political system.  Increasingly, our elites are too focused on playing their own power games and enabling their own self-interest—particularly with regard to sexual politics—to take the problems of the world around them seriously on their own terms, rather than as opportunities for political gain.  And sacrificial leadership?  Forget it.  The skies are dark, the wind is rising, and the captain is down in the hospitality suite.

Now, perhaps you think I’m being far too grim, and painting far too black a picture.  I believe there’s an end looming—not the end of the world, but at least the end of the world as we know it—and maybe you don’t see that.  But even so, squint a little, and listen closely, because this is the horizon that frames both Peter’s instructions and Jesus’ parable.  Peter’s audience could see it:  unofficial persecution was rising, and Nero was unstable.  Those who stood around Jesus couldn’t; but forty years later, Jerusalem would burn, and the Temple would be dismantled down to the last stone.  Whether they realized it or not, the end of the world as they had known it was around the corner.

In truth, it always is, even in the best of times.  We cannot control the future, and we can never be sure what’s going to hit us next.  I don’t expect any of us to be dead by tomorrow, but any of us could be.  One moment’s distraction, at just the wrong time, and you could be hit by a bus, or a train, or lose control of your car.  Or something weirder could happen.  Our oldest and most beloved member in Grand Lake was walking to church one morning when an enraged bull moose charged down the alley behind our house and killed him.  Between one moment and the next, everything can change forever.

Therefore, says Peter, be faithful stewards of all the diverse forms of God’s grace, to the purpose that God would be glorified through Jesus Christ.  There are a few things to say about this.  First, “speaking” and “serving” means all our words and all our actions, everything we do in every part of life.  Paul says much the same in Colossians 3:  “Whatever you do, whether in word or in deed, do it all in the name of Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”  Peter elaborates:  if God has given you breath to speak, he has given you breath to speak his truth, every time you open your mouth.  If he has given you strength to act, he has given you strength to use to serve others.

Second, everything we have is God’s gift to us by his grace; there’s nothing that’s purely ours to use for our own purposes.  Your riches, your brilliant mind, your gentle personality, your great athletic ability, none of these are truly your possession.  All of them are gifts from God, given to the church in your person to be used for his work.  And for those of us who have none of the above, well, we bear other gifts from God to the church.  Nor is our time our own.  God gives us every moment, and he measures out the length of our days on this earth; we have only the time he gives us, and he gives it to us to serve him, including by serving one another, not to serve ourselves.  None of us can say “my time,” “my money,” or “my life” as the one who owns any of those things.  We’ve been loaned them for a little while; in the end, we’ll be judged for how we’ve used them.

Third, it’s even truer to say that none of us can say “my church” as the one who owns it; none of us have the right to say, “This is my church, so it should be what I want it to be.”  We are God’s church; he owns us, and this is where he owns us.  On earth, this is my church and your church because we belong to it, not because it belongs to us.  God calls us to the church in much the same way Jesus came into this world, not to be served but to serve, and to give our lives for the sake of the many.  This isn’t the church where any of us is allowed to insist on what we want or demand our own way; this is the church where each of us is called in the love of God to give up what we want and sacrifice our own way so that our brothers and sisters in Christ will grow in his love and his grace, and so that those who are estranged from him will come to know and love him as we should.

Fourth, as individuals and as a church, good stewardship doesn’t mean making sure we have enough in the bank to give us financial security.  It doesn’t mean using God’s gifts for our own benefit, or for our own support.  The goal of our stewardship of all our possessions and talents and time is not worldly success, or a comfortable retirement, or even to keep the lights on and the doors open.  When God comes to ask us if we’ve been faithful in our use of everything he’s given us, there will only be one criterion:  did we use it all to the best of our ability to serve and glorify him?

In our parable from Luke, a nobleman goes off to the imperial capital to receive a kingship, but some of his subjects send a delegation after him to oppose him.  If he gets his way, he’ll come back with even greater power.  If they get theirs, he’ll be exiled and replaced.  While he’s gone, his servants are in a somewhat precarious position—he’s gone, but most of his enemies are still around, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play.  He leaves each of them with money and a choice:  will they stake everything on his victorious return—because obeying their master’s command will earn them the hatred of those who hate him—or will they act as if he isn’t coming back?  When he returns, he judges them not on their financial acumen, but on their faithfulness:  did they continue to represent him and do his business while he was away, or not?

And what is the king’s business?  To what should we give the time we have left as the end draws nearer?  “Above all,” Peter says, “love each other deeply.”  When Jesus returned to the Father, he gave us the gift of his love, making us free to love each other humbly and sacrificially; but if we don’t make the decision to do so, then hatred will creep in, through its various guises—dislike, mistrust, bitterness—and sow conflict, gossip, backbiting, and undermining of leadership.  Love, however, buries those plants whenever they begin to grow, before they can bear fruit.  It breaks the cycle of sin in the community.  As the British pastor N. J. D. White put it,

a man who puts himself under the control of the love God acts, when a private personal injury has been done to him, as though nothing had occurred. In this way, by simply ignoring the unkind act or the insulting word, . . . he brings the evil thing to an end; it dies and leaves no seed. . . .  This consideration gives dignity and worth inestimable to the feeble efforts of the most insignificant of us to make love the controlling principle in our daily lives.

However feeble our efforts may seem to us at times, that we make them sincerely is what matters to our Lord; he asks us not, “Have you been successful?” but “Have you been faithful?” When he comes, may he find us faithful to the end.