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July 25, 2004
Obedience Better than Religion
Obedience Better than Religion
I Samuel 15: 10-23
Acts 5: 1-11
July 25th, 2004
(Ordination of Necia Ketterman)
It is often intriguing to see the Scripture passages that come before us on a Sunday morning and the events taking place in the life of the Church, or in what is going on in the world. God knew beforehand as I plotted our worship schedule some weeks ago what passages of the Bible would speak today or in time yet to come.
This morning we will ordain Nescia Ketterman to the office of elder in the church. It is good that the message Nescia hears today, and we all with her, emphasizes that deep obedience to God is vastly important.
In the Presbyterian Church there is much emphasis on the term, “decently and in order.” The work of the church is to be done “decently and in order.” This is a guideline taught us by the Apostle Paul. But he used it not with regard to doing the work of church government, but as a word of caution when a church speaks in tongues. Paradoxically, speaking in tongues arose out of a full heart and had the goal of building up the church from within. Paul wrote this caution: “So, my brethren, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things should be done decently and in order.” But we have applied this teaching to the outward work of the church.
Maybe we should choose another biblical phrase as our watchword. Perhaps, in fact, “to obey is better than sacrifice” would do. We may do things decently and in order. But what is really important is obedience to God—from the heart.
But then the question comes to us, obedience to what? You would remind me that Christianity is different from the religion of the Old Testament. Then everything hinged on obeying that detailed list of laws God gave through Moses. Now we live according to a different pattern. Obedience to the law didn’t work. We are saved by grace not by works. The Ten Commandments, sure, but overall our religious life is not governed by laws.
Indeed, as we are seeing in our study of I Peter on Wednesday evenings how general are the guidelines Peter gives these early Christians! Don’t incur the wrath of the civil authorities by your wrongdoing. You may suffer for a life of obedience to Jesus. But don’t suffer for wrongdoing.
We assume that in the background of Peter’s teaching were the precepts of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The attitude still governed that Jesus taught when He reminded people that “Don’t commit murder” includes, “Don’t hate.” “Don’t commit adultery” includes, “Don’t think evil thoughts.”
The way of Jesus does not begin with laws to obey, but moves outward from the state of the heart to a way of life. This was the pattern of life Jesus left, and it became the way of the early Church. They trusted the Holy Spirit to guide them. A lot of rules and regulations got added to church life as time moved along, but this is not how it started. God looked for a relationship of fellowship with a unified body of people loving Him and one another from the heart.
So what do we do with stories like the two we have just read? Why is it useful to read how King Saul did wrong in exercising a little thrift and showing mercy to the enemy king—a brother in royalty? Why is it useful to read about the deceitfulness of Ananaias and Sapphira and the dreadful consequences that came to them?
Perhaps a preliminary answer to this question begins with a vivid reminder that what goes on at the heart-level really matters most. You and I see outward behavior. We often interpret the motives of others unjustly. There is so much we don’t know, things we assume, that go into our judgments of one another. But even if we knew all the circumstances that went into the deeds and misdeeds of each other, we still know nothing about the deepest motivations that move others to do as they do. Even depths psychologists can’t get to the inner springs of our deeds. Freud understood a little about what drives us, but there are matters deeper than the instinct to propagate the race.
When we read King David’s prayer, “Search me, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” we find something resonates inside our own hearts—about ourselves.
Similarly, the Apostle Paul lamented about himself, “The things I want to do I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do.” We might expect more of an apostle! How courageous and helpful that Paul let us see into his heart in this way! We all can say, “Yeah, Paul, I know just what you mean.”
Then we come to these passages of Scripture and see the extreme consequences that came to Saul, Ananias and Sapphira, and our confidence in the grace of God is shaken. We might say that what happened to King Saul happened before Jesus came. But still we believe there is a consistency in the character of God throughout time. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, God is “eternal, infinite, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” Saul’s veniality collided with the holiness and justice of God. Might not the same results happen to us in our lifetime even if we get eternal life afterwards, if we violate God’s will as we know it now?
And does not the instant death that came to Ananias and Sapphira after they calmly tried to appear more generous than they were warn us that we had best not pretend to be better than we are?
We may unleash the barbed accusation, “hypocrite!” when we detect apparent falseness—and brand a person as a hypocrite in character. But, we wonder, does God have an even more devastating response? Perhaps we try to keep our motives vague, neither too gung-ho nor too indifferent so that we hide in a fog of vague respectability rather than be taken for either a zealot or a couldn’t-care-less Christian.
Let’s look at these two stories for clues to what God would have us understand.
King Saul had just come from a successful battle with the Amalekites, a neighboring country that was descended from people who had stood against their ancestors who left Egypt to go to the Promised Land. The Amalekites made an unprovoked attack on the Israelites at a moment in their trek through the wilderness when they were most vulnerable. When they were desperate for water at Rephidim and Moses had to strike a rock to get some, they swooped down on Israel in their weakness.
God told Israel to destroy the Amalekites because there was virtually a genetic defect in them by which they stood against the purposes of God for Israel. King Saul’s mission was to completely eliminate every trace of them. But after his forces defeated them in battle he spared their king and the best of their cattle. Why not enjoy the spoils of war, or, to put a pious face on what he did, save the best cattle as sacrifice victims?
Then Samuel came along. The king greeted him cheerfully. “We won, Samuel,” he said. But instead of congratulating him Samuel asked, “Isn’t that Agag the Amalekite king over there? What is this bleating of the sheep and the lowing of oxen that I hear?” The king piously replied, “We saved the best sheep and oxen to offer in sacrifices to the Lord.” But Samuel wasn’t impressed. As the king tried to defend himself for this practical omission in obeying God, Samuel responded with those burning words so basic to life before God.
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.”
It was a hard lesson to learn. It still is.
In days to come the prophets of Israel would bewilder people by saying that God despises your sacrifices. David wrote in the 40th Psalm, “Sacrifice and offering thou dost not desire.” “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit and a contrite heart.” The prophet Hosea echoed God’s plea, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burn offerings.” Why, when God had commanded Israel to offer sacrifices?
This is a very hard idea to grasp. Part of our identity as Christians is found in going to church. Going to church figures in our thinking as offering sacrifices did for Israel. It is good to worship together, but how are things in your heart and mine? That is the question.
When Ananias and Sapphira made their generous contribution to the church it was like the offering of a sacrifice. In fact, the whole idea of giving in the New Testament was “sacrificial giving.” “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” Paul wrote. Give cheerfully from a grateful heart. But these two folk tried to appear more generous than they were. “We sold property for the good of our church and here all the whole proceeds!” They lied. They didn’t have to say they were giving everything.
Peter suspected something was amiss. He asked Ananias why he was lying to God. Peter didn’t strike him dead. We don’t know the mechanics of Ananias’ sudden death, but it had to do with this deceitful act and the effects on the body of a guilty conscience. When his wife came to Peter three hours later he asked her about her contribution, and she lied as her husband had.
It might seem God was very harsh. Or maybe you think their death was completely unrelated to their lying. It was coincidental simultaneous heart attacks. I believe it is as Luke tells us here. Indeed, I have seen thought-provoking “coincidences.” We might say these were psychosomatic effects of their troubled consciences. As you and I feel physical effects to a sudden rush of fear in a time of danger, so something happened that took the life of these two early Christians when they were detected in their deceit.
We don’t know how it was. But we can understand the idea. What goes on inside of us has physical effects. Our bodies, minds, and hearts are connected. “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” Proverbs also tells us, ‘The fear of the Lord prolongs life.”
God speaks to us today as we read the Bible’s account of ordinary people in days past whose temptations to wrong were like our own, and who suffered consequences that remind us that it matters not only what we do, but what motivates us. God calls us to sincerity and transparency. Had Saul, Aninias, and Sapphira prayed as David did, “Search me, and know my heart,” we don’t know how their stories might have been different. But we can do something about our own stories. Pray to God to make you desire sincerity and transparency before yourself, before Him, and before others.
Then, as St. Augustine taught us, “we can love God and do as we please,” since it has become our pleasure to please God. Think on these things. I pray God may fit us, each one, with such a heart.
O Lord God, we who do as we ought not ask you to purify our hearts so that we may will to please you. We bless you for your grace that abounds the more where our sin abounds. Grant that your grace may flourish in leading us in deeds of gratitude and mercy. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2004
Why Baptism?
Why Baptism?
II Kings 5: 1-14 / Acts 16: 11-15
July 18th, 2004
I have been offering you a series of studies on the book of I Samuel. But this morning we interrupt this series to ask again, “Why Baptism?” Why will Scott and Irina bring little Valentina Marie to the font at the front of the church this morning for me to pour water three times on her little head? Irina was reared in the Russian Orthodox Church and I am glad to include elements of the way a Russian Orthodox priest would offer this Sacrament because this is a Sacrament of the Church and not just of a particular sector of the Church. But still, why Baptism?
At Faith Church we come from many church backgrounds. Some of you are from backgrounds where babies were not baptized but instead dedicated to the Lord publicly. Baptism was offered only when someone was old enough to decide he believed in Jesus. You bear with this difference of view with others here graciously.
Others of you were reared in a staunchly Reformed, or Catholic heritage where infant baptism was unquestionably the duty of Christian parents. Catholics don’t have the same thing in mind that Presbyterians do but both baptize babies. John Calvin taught the necessity of including children in the Covenant God made with believing parents. Did not Peter say at Pentecost after preaching the need for these new believers to be baptized, “This promise is to you and to your children?”
But not everyone is sure that when Peter said, “The promise is to your children,” that he meant they should have their children baptized. Since he said this to a Jewish audience who put on their baby boys the sign God gave to Abraham, the sign of circumcision, many of us believe a pattern was established for the people of God. God makes promises to families.
Spiritual nourishment is as important as physical nourishment. A baby’s physical nourishment begins with her mother’s milk. Her spiritual nourishment begins with baptism. She understands neither how the milk she craves nourishes her nor how this water she does not crave on her head will help her. We are more than bodies, and our children’s connection to us is more than physical. So we presume to think we do right to include our children not only at the dining room table before they understand the value of eating, but also at the table of the Lord, in the community of trust in God. The sign of entering this community is baptism. In the Orthodox Church this is emphasized even more vividly. Babies are fully immersed –– three times. Even baptized babies take Communion.
Whereas we “confirm” our baptism when we are young people, in the Orthodox Church confirmation happens immediately after a baby is baptized. The priest takes special ointment, the chrism, and makes the sign of the cross on several parts of the baby’s body saying, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” --on this and that part of your body. It all belongs to God.
After little Valentina is baptized she will receive a cross, a custom in the Orthodox Church that gives her a reminder that she belongs, body and soul, to Jesus. I’m glad to follow this custom today. She will wear it continually as a reminder of her baptism into Christ.
Some think it odd that in our modern day, when we think of ourselves as less superstitious than ancient peoples that we should keep on with these ancient acts, the Sacraments. Indeed, some people who believe in Jesus see little or no value in outward acts like this with symbolic meanings. What’s important is what goes on in your head and how you feel and behave, that’s all, they think. Yet we wear class rings, or wedding rings, and love the American flag, which are symbols with great meaning.
We define the Sacraments as outward signs of interior and invisible grace. The Latin word sacramentum stood for the loyalty oath of a Roman soldier to his superiors, but it came to be used in the Church for mystery. It is because the sacraments are enshrouded with some mystery that so many opinions have evolved about their significance. There are two sacraments we believe, the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, and Baptism.
The Lord’s Supper we take with the outward signs of bread and wine. We receive them with faith in our hearts as a moment of deliberate fellowship with Jesus. When we take the bread and wine we come as physically close to Jesus as it is possible to come, if we receive them by faith.
Baptism we receive with the outward sign of water. Scott and Irina believe in Jesus so that when the water is three times poured on their daughter’s head, they are as physically close to Pentecost as they can come. Pentecost was the day that the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised would come to His disciples, was poured out on them, their children and on those were far off—you and me. At every baptism we stand with Peter and the others at the first Pentecost, accepting the promise of the Holy Spirit. We place ourselves in the footsteps of the earliest Christians.
I chose two passages of Scripture for us to read and ponder this morning that have to do either with washing out of obedience to God or with baptism. The first passage tells of the Syrian general, Naaman, who was a great man in his country. Most recently his stature stood tall because the Lord gave him a win over Israel in battle. It seems odd to think that the Lord, the God of Israel gave him victory over Israel in battle, but this is what the Bible says. When he returned from his victory over Israel he brought with him a little Israeli girl to be his wife’s maid. Maybe this was the whole purpose of winning in battle with Israel, to get this little Israeli girl into his home, so he could come to trust in the Lord of heaven and earth. She was a missionary in Syria.
Naaman was a leper. Leprosy was a horrible disease. When his wife’s little Israeli maid heard that Naaman had leprosy, she told her mistress of a prophet in Samaria who could help. Samaria was another term for the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
So, Naaman went to his king and asked him to use his influence to secure the help of this Israelite prophet. The king sent Naaman down to Israel with a written document to the king of Israel asking him to heal Naaman. He also brought valuable gifts. The last king mentioned in II Kings just before this is Jehoram, son of the wicked King Ahab. He was just a bit better than his dad. This may explain why the king responded as he did when he got the letter from the King of Syria.
Remember that the king of Syria had just got through drubbing Israel in battle so there was probably not much good will in the mind of Israel’s king towards the king of Syria. King Jehoram was afraid too. This is why Naaman came bearing expensive presents to Israel’s king–– not just to butter him up, but to relieve his fears.
Now the kings of Israel knew there was a lot of power in the hands of the true prophets—like Elijah and his successor, Elisha. So King Jehoram might have thought that here was a chance to kill two birds with one stone. He could have negotiated with the King of Syria, getting him to give back all that he had taken in his raids and make him promise never to bother Israel again. Then he could tell Elisha, “Please do your country a favor and heal Naaman, the Syrian general.”
But King Jehoran wasn’t very swift. Instead, he wrung his hands and said, “I can’t heal anyone. The Syrian king is trying to pick a fight.” Fortunately Elisha the prophet heard about this. He sent to King Jehoram and said, “Send Naaman to me.” So Naaman came with an impressive retinue of horsemen and charioteers to Elisah’s front door. Probably the prophet lived in a humble shack off in the country. The prophet didn’t even bother to come to the door when Naaman showed up. Instead, he told his servant to go to the door and tell the Syrian general, “Go wash in the Jordan seven times and you will get well.”
This was not exactly what Naaman thought Elisha would do. After all, he, Naaman, was the Chief-of-Staff of the mighty Syrian army. He expected Elisha to come humbly to the door, bow, make a religious gesture, mutter some magic words, and heal him. But he said, “Go wash in the Jordan River.” Naaman protested, “There are a lot better rivers at home.” He went away angry.
As he went away his servants asked him to reconsider. “Supposing he’d asked you to do something difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? If he’d told you, ‘Go, climb a high mountain, or cross a wide sea,’ wouldn’t you have done it? Give it a try. Do as he said.” So Naaman did as his servants suggested. He went and dipped seven times in the Jordan River. And wouldn’t you know it, he looked at his skin after the seventh time and saw that it looked perfectly normal.
I’ll leave the rest of the story for you to think about because this is enough to make the point I hope we will see. There was apparently no connection between the muddy waters of the Jordan River and a cure for leprosy. People with leprosy in Israel did not routinely come to the Jordan for a cure the way you might go to French Lick to soak in the hot springs to help your arthritis. But there was a distinct connection between obeying God’s command even in an apparently pointless way like this and receiving God’s touch. In Naaman’s case it was a healing touch.
God was teaching this non-Jewish man a lesson of the mysterious connection between obedience to God and enjoying His blessing. It was humbling to Naaman, a Syrian general to be asked to bathe in the murky water of Israel’s main river. It was humbling to submit to this mysterious command because he, like us, liked his medicine to make sense. But God had in mind more than to heal his leprosy. God taught him to trust in Him as he saw this sign of God’s power and care for him.
The second story we have read is shorter and less complicated. The Apostle Paul went to the Gangas River in the Macedonian city of Philippi on the Sabbath day because there was no synagogue in the city. It was the custom for Jews to gather at the river if there was no synagogue in which to pray on the Sabbath. Only women apparently came that morning. Paul sat and spoke to them of Jesus. One of the women was named Lydia, a "worshipper of God," which probably means she was not a Jew but worshipped God as she learned of Him from the Jews. She was a wealthy merchant from Thyatira in Turkey. Paul must have explained that Jesus had said, “Believe and be baptized and you will be saved.” So she was baptized with her household. She invited Paul to come as a guest to her home. He did so. That’s the full story.
The point we are to notice in this story was that Lydia asked for baptism and she and her household were baptized because Paul thought her faithful to the Lord, that is, that her trust in Jesus, though it began only that morning, was real. We assume all these details of her state of mind and heart because all we know is that she and her household were baptized.
I picture her going back to her house and rounding up her children, and even her servants—because these were all members of her household. Luke doesn't tell us if she had a husband. Perhaps she was a widow and now was head of her household. She said to her household, “Come by the riverside.” They came. We wonder how old the members of the family were. We know so little, and Luke doesn’t seem to care that we know so little. After all the operations of grace on us are mysterious.
Lydia knew about circumcision, a sign that was placed on little Jewish boys at eight days of age. And she would have known of the Jewish custom of washing in the mikvah, the little pool attached to a synagogue where women and men went for ceremonial cleansing. But the very idea of baptism must have been totally new to her.
Indeed, it was new from what we can tell since the days of John the Baptist who used water as a sign of cleansing of past sin to begin the process of repentance. Baptism became the sign of repentance and believing the Gospel. When Paul told her of Jesus, her heart was touched, and she didn’t ask that there be a perfectly reasonable explanation of the meaning of Baptism. She submitted to it as part of the mystery of receiving the grace of God.
Can you picture the Apostle Paul dipping her three times in the Gangas River. A well to do woman, she probably was neatly dressed, her hair well coifed. She came out dripping wet, her hair a mess, but with the wonderful sense that she’d done something that was like opening herself up with a funnel for the Holy Spirit of God to come into her.
Probably her home became the place where the growing body of baptized people, Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, first met to take the Lord’s Supper each week in Philippi.
Soon after this Paul and Silas aroused antagonism in the city that resulted in their being beaten badly and thrown in a dungeon. After the Lord wonderfully prompted their release and the conversion of the jailor, they resumed their visit in this newly-born community of faith.
After Paul’s trying and painful episode with the authorities of Philippi was over, he probably took someone from this new fellowship and taught him all that was needful to know about Jesus and how to live for Him. He then appointed this person as pastor. This new Christian would offer Communion on Sunday morning, remind everyone of the basic facts of Jesus for them to share with others, and baptize new believers. And thus the church was planted at Philippi.
But we come back to the question, why was Baptism essential to becoming a follower of Jesus? At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the little band of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, Peter passed along Jesus’ message to those who heard and responded to his long address to the Jewish people who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate this second feast in their sacred calendar. Jesus had told His disciples to baptize and teach those who received the Gospel and took it to heart.
It would seem that Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, had “made up” baptism as an object lesson to drive home the message he preached. John told the many people who came to hear him talk to turn from their wicked ways and live righteous lives. The sign of giving up their past ways of life that John used was to wash them publicly.
Paul taught us that “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old is gone, the new has come.” So baptism was a fit sign of getting rid of the old and starting anew.
But Baptism also tied into details of God’s ways in the past. Baptism is always done with water. Water not only reminds us of cleansing, it also reminds us of how God "washed away" sin with water and saved His people using water in the past. In the days of Noah God got rid of a sinful generation of people by "washing them" away in the Great Flood. When Israel came out of Egypt he rescued them by opening the water for them to pass through the Red Sea, and then delivered them by having the water drown the soldiers who were chasing them. And God healed the Syrian general, Naaman, you remember, by having him dip seven times in the Jordan River.
Water is the most essential element needed by the body. We can get along without eating much longer than we can get along without drinking water. Perhaps it is because of this elemental importance of water to our physical bodies that God chose water as the sign of bringing health to us spiritually. Even though we don’t understand it, we accept this teaching God offers us the way a child accepts what mother and dad teach her. You take your little girl to wash her hands before lunch and she can’t figure out why, but she trusts you, and thus, after doing this mysterious hand-wetting she can eat her lunch. And thus we do as God tells us. We baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus did not command us specifically to do many things. He told us to trust in Him, to love, to forgive, and to serve. And He told us to take Communion and to Baptize new believers. Equipped with these general commands we have all we need if our hearts are fixed on Jesus. If our hearts are not fixed on Jesus then these general commands won’t be important to us. But if we have come to Jesus in faith and realize that this faith takes in all of life for us, then Jesus’ wish becomes our command. When we are determined to obey Jesus, following His sometimes practical and sometimes mysterious commands is all we need to know.
We will give to God’s servant, Valentina Marie, the sacred sign of welcome into the faith of her parents and of this community. Let us then surround her with reminders of faithfulness, so that she will cherish the day in which she was baptized. And she will become one with us as a community that will welcome others too to follow Jesus and enjoy His salvation. Your faithfulness and mine is important for her to experience what Jesus has in mind in calling her to follow Him even before she knows the word, “Jesus.”
Valentina is baptized today. After today we will teach her by word and example how to follow Jesus. Let's do it well.
Let us pray: O Lord, we thank you for the mysterious kindness of your ways, blessing us physically and in our depths, our hearts. Help us to receive your grace with thankful hearts and to live richly in your ways. Through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2004
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest
I Samuel 13: 2-15 / I Corinthians 11: 23-33
July 11th, 2004
I stole the subject of this morning’s sermon from my namesake, F.W. Robertson who preached a sermon with this title on December 15th, 1849, at Trinity Chapel, Brighton, England. I believe it’s not plagiarism if you tell your source.
I claim this older source because the topic on which I must speak this morning is vital and hard, and perhaps I’m trying to hide in the trees of good company. I am saying to you what illustrious forbears have told their congregations in every generation. It is the old two-fold principle that Paul announced, that we all know is true.
First, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.
Second, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.”
These two sides of the principle of spiritual harvest are as sure as the principle of natural harvest. If you plant corn, you harvest corn. If you plant little you reap little corn. If you plant much corn you harvest much corn.
Does it seem odd that the one who taught we are saved by grace, not by works, should emphasize that whatever we sow we will reap and if we will reap bountifully we must sow bountifully? It is a law as unflinching as gravity. It works in us all in due time.
I wonder how often you may have thought or said, “She got what’s coming to her.” Or “He got what’s coming to him.” Maybe you even said those cruel words, “I told you so.” So firmly is this idea fixed in our minds that much of the TV entertainment available to us has to do with reminding us—courtroom dramas, cops handcuffing crooks, high speed chases with police cars in hot pursuit. The news has added image after image of Enron executives led off in handcuffs, reaping what they sowed, getting what was coming to them. Enough is enough! I sometimes think.
The Old and New Testament readings this morning have to do with this principle of a spiritual harvest. It is a law that may seem harsh when it happens to us. Sometimes we recognize its inevitability when we see it at work in others. They earned what they got.
How often have you thought, looking at the unfolding of someone's life, that she earned what she got—for good or for ill?
Still we may find it hard to see how King Saul did anything wrong in making a burnt offering even though he was not a priest. Might not you say to the king, “If the preacher is off somewhere, well, why don’t you pray for God’s help?” After all, his forces were far out-numbered by the Philistine forces, and Samuel wasn’t there to ask God’s help. Didn’t Saul do what he could?
But it wasn’t quite this kind of thing. Offering a sacrifice was not like winging a prayer to God from the foxhole. It was a solemn act protected in its sanctity, no matter what. King Saul could pray as King David did in his times of distress. But he simply had no right to offer a sacrifice, no matter what. He knew it. Saul had a character problem. He bent the rules when he wanted to. He had an under-developed sense of consequences. He reaped what he sowed.
I would not doubt that there are some of us here today who think God was unfair to Saul, or Samuel was. Samuel said, “Now your kingdom shall not continue; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart . . . because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” You say, “You mean his kingdom was stripped from him for offering a sacrifice? Give him a break!” And Samuel replies, “Yes. He’ll reap what he sowed.”
We see in Saul's life story that he reaped what he sowed, losing his kingdom, not in a judicial proceeding, but falling dead after hearing his sons were killed in battle and the Ark of the Covenant was captured by Israel's enemies.
The second reading illustrating this principle comes after the passage you hear every time we take the Lord’s Supper—which we are doing today. After the words of institution you hear me say ("I have received of the Lord what delivered to you . . ."), Paul wrote some other words that I should perhaps remind us all more often. “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord . . . that is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.”
I am very careful not to exclude from the Lord’s Table people I believe Jesus would invite. I make a point of inviting all who have trusted in Jesus to come to this Feast that celebrates how Jesus paid the penalty for our sin.
And this is my duty. But there is another kind of duty that falls on the shoulders of all who come to the Lord’s Supper. I cannot see into your hearts, but you know what’s going on in your life. We are not unworthy if we come to the Lord’s Table as sinners. If this were the case, none of us could take Communion. What is at issue is how we think of our sins. We may protect our sins rather than confess it. Our sins hurt other people. They grieve our Creator. To claim the right to sin—which was the reason for Jesus' death on the cross, while claiming the right to take the Lord's Supper is like crucifying Jesus again, Paul told us.
What was the situation that Paul saw requiring this warning? At first, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated as the Old German Baptist Brethren still do. It was a meal, a full-fledged meal. But this meal as eaten together in Corinth had turned into a tragic reminder that far from being one in Christ, Christians were divided by wealth and social class. They did not eat potluck as we do. Everyone brought his own meal to the Eucharist and did not share it. This meant that rich people ate very well, and poor people ate meagerly as usual.
Thus, the rich would look down on the poor “brothers and sisters,” perhaps making comments about their coarse bread and smelly dried fish. It was anything but a love feast. It was another reminder that the Body of Christ was an ideal rather than a reality.
The Apostle Paul responded to this fiasco in two ways. First, he gave directions that we still follow, by which the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper would be a symbolic meal of which all would partake alike. Second, he warned them about the danger of desecrating the Lord’s Table.
Christians over the centuries have thought a lot about what Paul said in the warning here. “Many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” The Medieval Church took Paul’s warning as a proof-text for flexing its muscle in pre-emptive church discipline. It would determine beforehand who was unworthy to take the Lord’s Supper. Unworthiness did not have to do with violations of God's laws but with not submitting to the power politics of the Church. Excommunication, being barred from the Lord’s Table became a judicial proceeding of the Church. Why? Was it to keep people from incurring God's punishment for desecrating it? Hardly!
In the power struggles that developed between popes and emperors some of the popes used Excommunication as a power tool. They forbade entire nations to receive the Lord's Supper if they had a grievance with the king. Not only that, they forbade Baptism, marriage, funerals, and every other rite at which priests officiated. Because people then took these Church-administered matters seriously, the Church brought life in entire nations to a stand still.
When Pope Innocent III disagreed with the Archbishop of Canterbury that King John chose in the early 13th century, the pope put a lock on the life of England by denying its priests and bishops the right of offering the Sacraments. Bodies lay unburied for days. Nobody could get married. People lived in fear of hell for dying out of a state of grace.
These were developments most certainly not in Paul's mind when he warned Christians about eating and drinking unworthily. What he had in mind was a spiritual harvest, a natural consequence that takes place, not a punitive system imposed by the Church. The consequences were not meted out by church authorities but by God working in the events of life. Sometimes sickness and even death, if the truth were known, were traceable to causes that began with desecrating the Lord's Table. There is a place for church discipline, but this is not what Paul was referring to here.
The truth is far deeper than we realize, that we reap what we sow.
We apply this principle when it comes to rearing our children. For example, if they are reared hearing much criticism, they learn to be critical in spirit. They come to think ill of themselves. If we plant the idea, 'Do as you please,' they harvest this seed-idea in a life of misery. Don’t plant your children badly. What you sow they will reap.
Let me draw again on the sermon my illustrious forbear, F.W. Robertson preached at Trinity Chapel. He apparently called attention to a current event, some entrepreneur who bent the rules of honesty. “Compute now what price was paid for that. The price that merchant prince paid, perhaps with blood of his own soul, was shame and guilt. The price he is paying now is perpetual dread of detection; or worse still, the hardness which can laugh at detection; or one deep, lower yet, the low and groveling soul which can be satisfied with these things as a Paradise, and ask no higher. He has reaped enjoyment—yes, and he has sown too, the seed of infamy. It is all fair.”
In broadening the application of this principle I find myself banging against the standard stereotypes of conservative and liberal that have found a home in the church as well as in society at large. There is a built-in blindness in conservatives to acknowledging bad seed they may sow. There is a comparable blindness in liberals. Both shout of values. Each harbors strong grievances against the other so that neither is aware of the quality of the seed they are sowing. Both will reap what they sow regardless of what they call their seed. In settings of controversy we loose perspective.
Stanford Professor Terry Karl reminded the graduating class at Stanford this spring of something it is hard for us Americans to admit.
Survey data on your generation as a whole is not very promising. It says that you are primarily interested in acquisition, that you define yourself in terms of possessions rather than ‘goods of the soul.’ You are self-interested and care little for developing a moral code, much less for assuming some type of global political responsibility.
Thus he tried to urge these bright young movers and shakers to sow well. I pray we may be wise to investigate candidly how we are sowing as a nation so that we may reap a rich harvest that blesses the world and not find ourselves with a grim harvest instead. Self-interest first at every level promotes bad sowing and results in a tragic harvest. Pray for wisdom in the ideals you defend.
We come to the Lord’s Supper examining our consciences before hand. It is not just a matter of going through the ritual of repeating the Prayer of Confession. If that prayer is not your prayer, you have not prayed. And if we pray with no intention of trying to live as we pray, God is not deceived.
God sees and, happily, forgives the repentant person. But if you and I come to this Table in a cavalier way, with no spirit of repentance, there are consequences that will come to us. It is a spiritual law of the harvest comparable to the law of nature. Not every sickness you and I may incur, and not everyone that dies suffers as a consequence of taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily. Indeed, I would emphasize this forcefully.
We moderns should not curl our lips at Paul’s teaching that there are actual physical consequences to desecrating the Lord’s Supper.
There are other ill consequences too. Those who treat sacred things in a casual manner become callous to sacred things. People who take God’s name casually on their lips come to think casually of God. It is like becoming tone deaf, unable to enjoy the beauty of music after having your eardrums pounded with loud music. What we sow we reap.
And so we come to this table reverently and soberly. Not because I, or the Session has power to condemn anyone, but because God has so made us so that what we sow we reap.
The second aspect of this law I would remind us, that Paul spoke to the Church in Corinth. It was a wealthy Church, which was part of the problem he addressed in their desecration of the Lord’s Supper. To them he wrote, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.”
We see how this principle works in various ways. The student who studies hard invariably gets better grades than the student who sows his study sparingly.
Those of us who watch Purdue football were fascinated some years ago to watch the development of fullback Mike Alstott. He was not a heralded running back coming out of high school in Chicago. He was too slow so he wasn’t highly recruited. But Purdue took a chance and recruited him. During the summer he would tie one end of a rope around his waste, and the other end he tied to several truck tires. And he would run uphill pulling those tires until he developed massive power in his legs. We watched him run over would-be tacklers when he played for us. And he became All-Pro with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, doing the same thing against professional defensive linemen and safeties that he did in the Big Ten. He is often referred to as the ideal of a professional fullback. He sowed what he reaped.
Apply this to your life. It is a law at work in us whether or not we want to acknowledge it in the way we choose to live. We will reap what we are sowing.
Let us apply the same principle to our life together at Faith Church. We too reap what we sow. What are we sowing now? Paul reminded the very gifted church at Corinth, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.” And I would remind us here, a congregation rich in many ways, that we will reap what we sow and we are reaping now what was sown in days past. There are some fashions of church life that encourage the leanest kind of sowing.
We are sowing leanly in the discipline of praying together. If our hearts were warm toward God, on Wednesday mornings this place would be full of people in prayer to God. If we would reap a rich spiritual harvest let us plant richly.
I remind you of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s remark to a person who came to visit Metropolitan Tabernacle in London one Sunday evening. His church overflowed each time the doors were open and the impact of this church of the 19th century endures into the 21st century. He asked this newcomer at the door, “Would you like to see our furnace?” His perplexed guest agreed to see it. So Pastor Spurgeon took him to the church basement that was packed with people praying for God’s work in the service that would soon begin. That church reaped a harvest that still has people noticing. If we will reap richly here, we must plant richly.
If this sanctuary becomes full each Lord’s Day morning with people who during the week are sowing the seed of daily using life as a gift to be offered back to God, we will reap a spiritual harvest.
All of this that I have said you know very well is true. You know that there is a law of spiritual harvest--that we reap what we plant. And we reap in proportion to how much we plant. The mercy of God often gives us better than we planted, in fact. But it is presumptuous to think that it doesn’t matter how we sow because the grace of God gives us better than we deserve.
I ask you to ponder these things not only now as you come to the Lord’s Table, but as you leave this place. I pray it comes to our minds tomorrow morning, and on Friday. We all are sowing, and we all will reap. Let us plant well, for the harvest will surely show what we have planted, and we will reap in proportion to how we sow.
Let us pray: O Lord, we depend on your mercy, and are grateful it is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear you. Give to us a wise heart, to so live as those who are planting good seed liberally, so that we may reap abundantly well. To the praise of Jesus Christ who has saved us by grace for good works that we should walk in them. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
July 04, 2004
What Makes a Nation Great?
What Makes a Nation Great?
II Chronicles 7: 11-22 / Proverbs 14: 34
Mark 12: 17
July 4th, 2004
The most fascinating truth that the Bible tells us about ourselves is that we are created in the image of God. More precisely, we are created in the image and likeness of God. This means that there is something about humanity uniquely like its Creator. Specifically this refers to the creative potentiality we have that no other created thing has.
Before God created heaven and earth there was nothing. When you or I bake a cake from scratch we don’t actually start from mere “scratch.” We have flour and sugar, chocolate and sour cream. But God started literally when there was not even scratch.
Then in Genesis we read about this formless chaos, tohuvevohu is the Hebrew term. Can you imagine a better term to describe total chaos!? Everything was dark, deeply dark, darker than dark, as well as tohuvevohu, until God said, “let there be light.” It was an eerie light, different from the light given off by the sun. I think it must have been like a principle of order that God pronounced over the chaos.
God spoke again so that slowly from the chaos land separated from water. There were oceans and rivers and islands and continents and mountains pushed up from the land.
God spoke again and vegetation appeared, and then when He spoke again the sun, moon, and stars appeared. On and on the creation story unfolds how the world came to be so magnificent and complex as the world we see. God’s creates order and beauty out of nothing. That’s why we have so many kinds of flowers and humming birds and seahorses. And that’s why humanity has produced people like Dr. Seuss, and scientists who develop nanotechnology and J.S. Bach, and children playing with clay---all reflecting their Creator God.
Something similar happened on the plain of human history when God formed the people of Israel. God took a dysfunctional family that went to a foreign land to survive a famine. Ten brothers in this family sold their youngest brother into slavery when most wanted to kill him. This brother saved them from starvation and gave them the best land in Egypt to herd their flocks. But this brother died and their descendents in Egypt were made slaves. But from the heirs of this family God formed a nation through whom He would bring healing and salvation to the whole world. Who would have guessed the benefits of Calvary when the Israelites were sweating under the hot sun making bricks for the tombs of Egypt’s kings?
I have started this way today because it is the 4th of July. Two hundred twenty-eight years ago on this day this country was begun with a word spoken fervently by from created in the image and likeness of God. They did not begin with nothing as God did, but this was something God did only once too.
Our forebears began with the chaos of tyranny and opportunity, slavery and freedom, poverty and wealth, a land whose borders they had no clue how broad they were and whose resources were unknown. Thomas Jefferson and a few other men spoke and freedom separated from tyranny, and a land was born that would blossom in ways none of our forebears could have imagined.
Thomas Jefferson spoke with his pen, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That’s how he first wrote it. Our Declaration of Independence reads a bit differently. And America was born. Brave people came together moved by an idea of freedom, and they fought for it, willingly dying for freedom’s cause. That’s why we will listen to fire works this evening—rifle shots and cannon fire that killed changed to colorful fireworks that celebrate our life of freedom.
The English Puritans who came here in the early 17th century had a vision that God was working on these shores as He had worked with ancient Israel. God enters into covenants with nations, they believed, especially those that have His Word, the Bible, and live by it.
This was an idea that has caught on so that in pulpits all across America today many pastors will speak of America as Christian nation, a nation specially chosen by God to be a light on a hill. We heard this term during President Reagan’s funeral. It is an idea that come from Jerusalem a city on a hill, on Mt. Zion—where there was a house of prayer for all people. We often hear parallels drawn between Israel as God’s people and America as God’s people in some unique way.
Because of this you and I have often heard the words God spoke to Solomon recited in recent years. After Solomon dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem to God, the Lord said to him, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
We hear this last verse quoted often because in our free land many people have used their freedom badly. The opportunity created by wealth, privacy, and freedom has not been used well—by Christians and non-Christians alike. And so Christian leaders have spoken God’s words to Solomon as though the Lord speaks them to America today.
How good it would be if there were a widespread turning to God and turning from evil in our land. Imagine a land with no cocaine or alcohol abuse. Imagine a land where children would not be abused, and women and men lived in mutual joy and respect, and the color of a person’s skin would not work against them, and there was a desire to use our wealth to relieve suffering in other lands. A light on a hill for real!
I believe that even with the many different religions that now find a home here, and even with the highly vocal people who say they don’t believe in God, if only the Christians would humble themselves, pray and seek God’s face and turn from their evil ways, God would not only forgive their sin and God would begin a work of healing in this land. We could serve as a light to the nations, if we would.
Because the world as well as American needs some light right now. These days the reality of terrorism in the Middle East has imposed fear of the threat of terrorism everywhere—even in neighborhoods far from Washington, D.C. This past Monday the University of Pennsylvania sponsored a probing seminar on terrorism.
I was interested to learn that the men who participated in the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center did not come from the dregs of Islamic society. They were not crazy misfits easily stirred to fanaticism. They were not particularly devout Muslims who did this in the name of Allah. In fact, they were quite secular. Some of them sloozed with loose women and drank alcohol. None had a criminal record. Most came from good homes. They were well educated, some with graduate degrees, PhDs in fact. Why the hatred that made them get involved in this evil plan and follow through to the point that they killed themselves in unleashing infernal suffering on so many people they didn’t even know?
Not many months ago if the term “video terrorism” had been used, you would have thought it meant a Steven Spielberg movie with special effects, not actual footage of men being beheaded.
It is a dark time in which we live. The world needs light. And it seems that God has blessed us in this land in a way that suggests we have some opportunity to shed some light. And if we have opportunity, we have duty.
I thought of two other passages from the Bible as pertinent to our setting today, when Independence Day coincides with the Lord’s Day. First, in the Book of Proverbs we read the general statement, “Righteousness exalts a nation.” Second, when some religious leaders asked Jesus if it was right to pay taxes to Caesar he told them to give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God what belongs to God.
Righteousness exalts a nation. Jesus said there is that which belongs to Caesar, but there is also that which belongs to God. And here is precisely where your personal life, your family life, and this congregation fit in the big picture. Righteousness not only lifts up a nation, it lifts up a person. A righteous nation begins with people who purposefully go after a righteous life. A righteous life is a life given back to God—as we confess in the gracious words of the Heidelberg Catechism—I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
Probably if your personal story were told we would all see a surprising tale of how you made it to where you are against odds of a kind that discourage many people. Many people with gifts like yours never succeeded as you have, and you wonder why you made it and they didn’t. In a way your life represents order out of chaos. How many of you made it to academic achievement and even prosperity when the family into which you were born had neither ample means nor high education? How many of us rose above a low self-image to keep on trying and surviving in the quest of high aspirations. You look at yourself and say, “How did I ever get to where I am?” Why all of this? For a purpose.
God made none of us to be islands of wisdom, of plenty and prosperity in a sea of need. God did not offer us the truth of the Gospel so that we could pride ourselves for being right in a world of much wrong. God put us here for a purpose. This purpose is to be part of the catalyst where He causes light to shine in darkness, order to come from chaos, hope from hopelessness, and opportunity from bondage. How do you think of the purpose of your life in the broad sweep of things?
Listen to what God said to Solomon, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” God’s biggest obstacle in using us is what’s going on between our ears and in our hearts. Prosperity and success aren’t the best teachers for humility and a repentant heart. As you see yourself, are you aware of any attitude, any outlook on yourself and others that may keep you from usefulness in God’s hands to bring light in the present darkness?
Finally, I think of us as a congregation in terms of God’s pattern of bringing order and beauty out of chaos. Now we are far from being a congregation that is in chaos. We have good people here. Our bills get paid. We carry on a routine of worship and other churchly activities. I recently made a list of the things that get done in one way or another because of people at Faith Church, and the list is pretty long. But we are like an archipelago, a collection of remarkable islands. What if we came together and became a continent?
I hear cautious, even fearful remarks about the graying of the congregation—and no one cheers if I propose Grecian Formula hair dye as the answer. Gray doesn’t mean dead. I see young families decide there are better helps elsewhere for rearing their children, so they leave us. The archipelago outlook needs an antidote here.
I wonder how God may bring together the raw material He has gathered in this congregation to create something beyond what we can ask or think. Are you available?
The key to God’s creative acts is His Word. God spoke a word and there was light. God spoke a word and there was dry land and water in separate places. God spoke and there was vegetation. God spoke and there was sun, moon and stars. Then there was no need to listen. God did it all with a series of words.
But now God does not just speak and things happen by His command. God has given us ears to hear and hearts to respond. If you and I will give God not only our unseen hearts, but also all that we have and are that can be seen, none of us can imagine what God will bring about in this place.
And so I ask you this morning, as you thank God for the land He gave you to live in, and as you thank God for the bounty of your life, to give yourself back to God. Say with the little boy Samuel, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” And let us hear this response echo throughout the congregation, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” And then begin yourself to do as you ought. And let us as a congregation put together our hearts and our wills that have responded to God’s grace in gratitude, and see what God will bring from this mix of ingredients that is Faith Church.
What a world God created from the tohuvevohu! What a salvation God brought from the dysfunctional family of Jacob! What a nation God brought about on these shores! What kind of wonder will we let God achieve here?
Let’s pray! For the wonders of your creation we thank you, O Lord. For the wonder of your grace poured out in Jesus Christ we thank you, O Lord. For the blessed land in which we live we thank you, O Lord. For lives to give back to you in gratitude, we thank you, O Lord. Take and use what you have made us to be for your glory, for light in this present darkness, for our peace and joy. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)