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October 30, 2005
What Place Do Good Deeds Have in Our Standing With God?
Psalm 62 / Job 34: 10-21
Ephesians 2: 4-10
October 30th, 2005
Job had the kind of friends that made enemies unnecessary. When he was down they piously explained to him it was because he was a sinner. They understood the great moral calculus of life. You reap what you sow. “God gave you what you deserved”—as he mourned the loss of his whole family except his wife, and all that he owned, including his health.
But Job did not deserve what he got. He was a good man. Bad things happen to good people. It troubles us that good things happen to the wicked and bad things come to the virtuous.
But there is a difference between even our idea of the kind of goodness that “deserves” a decent life and the kind of goodness that impresses God. We know it. We sense it. This informs our conscience.
Because God knows the secrets of the heart. A person may appear to fulfill the basic qualifications for a “good average life” but be doing in secret some great evil. A horrible example of this was spread before us not long ago when an apparently good church-going fellow from Wichita, Kansas, a leader in his church, a good family man, was discovered to be the BTK serial killer. Not many are secretly that evil, but there are many closets that folk hope may never be opened.
Not only that but we all know that we are not always totally honest. We speak half a truth sometimes when it’s convenient--and we know it. We know that unfair thoughts pass through our minds about others. It is this sense we have about ourselves--that we try to ignore, but cannot that is the source of conscience. We may try to ignore conscience, we will try not to be caught, but in our hearts we know what's going on. When others do what we hope we may not get caught doing, it is remarkable how great is our protest.
Who of us would say we’ve never held a grudge, or even wished for something bad to happen to someone we didn’t like? If what you and I were thinking were known, how many of us would be embarrassed. Though we look outwardly like good people. When we come to stand before the One who will judge the secrets of the heart, there will be very much we all wished He could not see.
God’s standard, after all, is perfect justice, perfect kindness, perfect love, perfect mercy, perfect morality. Only Jesus attained this. If even Mother Theresa stands beside Jesus, she comes off second best. She would admit it first. So would St. Francis, and St. Theresa of Avilla, and everyone else you think of as a “role model.” Paul called himself least of all the apostles. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Not one of us is uncontaminated by sin.
This is why Jesus was born that first Christmas because we are this way. He was born in order to bear in Himself, in His body, the consequences of our sin that naturally comes to our bodies.
In that lyrical passage in II Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul tells us that, “for our sakes God has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Thus we can stand before Him “as though we had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful.”
This is the sweet message of the Gospel.
But somewhere in the early going there were people who believed in Jesus who thought that they could satisfy God’s idea of perfect humanity on their own. Maybe they got the idea from the diligence the Pharisees exercised in trying to keep God’s law. The Pharisees thought that if they made boundaries around each of the 613 laws in the Hebrew Bible so that they didn’t even get near breaking them, they could fulfill the law of God. Jesus knew this line of thinking well. He said that if a man lusts in his heart after a woman he has committed adultery in his heart. If you hate someone it’s violating the same law that says, “Thou shalt not murder.”
Even if you or I kept everyone of the laws that said, “Do not do this or that,” a holy life is far more than not breaking any of God’s laws. Indeed, there is something repulsive to us about a person who is coldly “perfect.” A holy life is filled with love, with grace, with radiant kindness. It is not merely a life that holds to some withered sense of moral purity.
Yet there were some early Christians who thought that God would not make commands if He didn’t think we could obey them. That’s why the Apostle Paul needed to write the words we read this morning. “For by grace you are saved, through faith. It is the gift of God, not of works lest any one should boast.” John addressed this kind of person in his first epistle. “If we say we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
Nowadays, it doesn’t seem that a lot of people worry about sin. The word comes up at church from time to time, but I think our feeling of national and community security and our general prosperity have lulled a lot of people into a pretty sleepy attitude toward sin if not also a sleepy attitude toward God. I may have everything I need without the Good Shepherd’s help. On my own.
But in the Middle Ages a lot of people thought about sin. The Church reminded them very often of sin. Superstitions developed because of the harshness of life. When the Black Death hit Europe in the 14th century, killing one third of the population, many people saw it as an exhibit of the anger of God. The Church might not be able to avert the bubonic plague but it could help with the afterlife.
Martin Luther, whose stunning deed of October 31st, 1517 we remember today, was afflicted with such superstition. He saw a lightning bolt that struck near him as God cracking a bull whip to get his attention. On the spot he promised St. Anne, Jesus’ grandmother, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that he would become a monk—as though this was what God wanted of him.
Luther became an Augustinian friar, in a particularly strict monastery. He hoped he might please this implacable God who hounded him with the awareness of his own sin if he kept the harsh discipline of the cloister. He went beyond other monks. He slept on the cold stone floor. He lashed himself on the back until it bled. He fasted and prayed. He crawled up a staircase in Rome that was supposedly from Pilate’s judgment hall—on his knees, saying the Lord’s Prayer on each stair. But still no sense of release from his sins.
Perhaps it is fair to say that by the grace of God he was at that time assigned the task of lecturing on the Bible at the University in Wittenburg. It was when he read and pondered Paul’s letter to the Romans that his heart was awakened to the blessed truth that “the just shall live by faith.” He realized, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2, that we are saved by grace, through faith. It is not of works.” Even though Luther would not have boasted at his works, he realized that not only could he not do enough to merit God’s favor, he did not need to. All he had to do was to accept God’s favor with a trusting heart.
When he realized this the whole edifice of the Medieval Church collapsed in his mind. It so happened that about this time Pope Leo X was marketing Indulgences throughout Europe in order to raise funds to build St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.
Indulgences were like checks written on the church’s supposed “Treasury of Merit.” The church taught that since you and I average blokes can’t keep from sinning, we can draw on the excess merits of Jesus, the blessed Virgin Mother, and all the saints who had more goodness than they needed to get into heaven to cancel some of the time in Purgatory that we deserve. Purgatory was the place in the afterlife where we endure what we deserve for sinning in this life. Dante tells us that everyone in Purgatory eventually gets out and goes to heaven. But Purgatory certainly was no fun. So if people could afford to buy enough indulgences they would have to endure less time in Purgatory than otherwise.
Luther did not yet believe that Indulgences were improper. When he posted his Ninety-five These to the Castle Church door in Wittenburg, his complaint had more to do with the pope’s mean spiritedness in not freely granting to all the release from Purgatory made possible by the treasury of merit.
The answer to the problem of sin and guilt, Luther came to see was spelled out clearly in the Bible. We are saved by grace. We are, in fact, justified by God’s grace. This means that because of Christ’s redeeming love God sees us as though we have never sinned or ever been sinful! No purgatory to pay for our own sins. No indulgences.
Justification by grace received only by a trusting heart brought great relief to a burdened conscience like Luther’s. And he had lots of company in 16th century Germany where superstitions abounded and the Church took full advantage of this.
But what if consciences go limp? What if few even think of the holiness of God and almost nobody worries about sin?
In the first half of the twentieth century Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw how the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Germany, having lost sight of the holiness of God, bowed before Hitler who had brought prosperity to the land after suffering that followed World War I. They heard about free Grace so often that it became a commonplace, just one of those things said in church. It was just part of the heritage from Luther.
It was this setting that spawned the Holocaust. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his book, The Cost of Discipleship. He reminded his fellow German Christians that when Jesus bids us to follow Him He calls us to come and die. Paul who taught us of grace that is free to us said: “I am crucified with Christ.” Free grace does not mean cheap grace. Free grace to us meant paying everything most precious for God. Grace was costly to God. Free to us. Accepting the grace of God means accepting the cross. Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for his devotion, for accepting his cross and carrying it.
In an earlier generation a lot of American Christians were fascinated with Bonhoeffer’s stirring book. They recognized a tendency that grew in our land, that the great evangelical doctrine of justification by grace through faith has lulled us too into a very cheap idea of what it means to follow Jesus. Today being a “good Christian” seems to require little more than being a good citizen in a prosperous and powerful America and identifying with one of the “in” churches.
Nowadays the churches in our land are promoting a message of prosperity. I don’t know what to think about much public worship today. Something is not right. God is still a holy God who has called us to be a holy people. The very idea of the holiness of God has been replaced with the idea of a loving God whose greatest delight is to affirm us and make us happy.
In fact, the great evangelical doctrine of justification by grace through faith sounds a bit out of date because people wonder why they need to be justified if God affirms me just the way I am. If God’s desire is to affirm us just as we are, sin is an old-fashioned word. If we have no real sense of our own sin, what need to we have of grace?
I am very sad to see that in the sector of the Church that has been most vocal in claiming to believe the Bible moral living has been severely compromised. Many evangelical pastors have fallen. Many families are broken. Strife riddles our churches. Lulled by thinking we believe correctly, we have been stupefied to how sinful our nature is.
And so I have wondered what is the place of good deeds in our standing with God? Clearly we cannot earn God’s favor because no one can be perfectly good. But this does not mean that good deeds play no part in our salvation. As we are told in the epistle of James, “Faith without works is dead.” If you say you believe in Jesus but are comfortable harboring sin in your heart, you have good reason to ask yourself whether you have saving faith. Maybe you have the kind of belief in God that the devils have that makes them tremble. Your faith has not made you want to follow Jesus.
I get the feeling that God wants us both to trust that Jesus’ death on the cross fully paid for our sins, and to remember that Jesus invited us “come follow me.” So that this is the life of faith, industriously to try to follow Jesus. With this in mind—the completeness of our forgiveness and the complete truth of Jesus’ words, “You are my friends if you do what I command you,” we are to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling. My sector of Christianity likes to harmonize conflicting ideas in the Bible. But I think God would have us let the tensions alone.
Just because we are saved by grace through faith it does not mean that God spreads before us easy street, a life of indifference. It matters that we try. I have not been so convinced of the grace of God that I forget what Jesus taught me that “not all who say to me Lord, Lord, shall enter the Kingdom of heaven.” Only those who do the will of God. I do not view the grace of God as canceling out Jesus’ somber teaching that when we clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned we care for Him, and when we do not do these things, we are neglecting to care for Him. Jesus said the consequences of this neglect are severe. “Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
God has left us with a purposeful tension: it is all of grace, but come, follow Jesus. When either side of God’s word to us is neglected, it is wise that we acknowledge it and mend our ways. This morning I say to you on the authority of God’s word, in Christ you and I are forgiven of our sin; we are justified before God, if we have received His free grace with a trusting heart. This morning I say to you on the authority of God’s word that Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” “Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord” shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Let us pray: O Lord, we are glad to know you love us and have poured out on us your grace lavishly. Help us to receive your grace with a trusting heart and then to pour out our gratitude from day to day in obedience to your Son, Jesus whom we love because He first loved us. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 23, 2005
Do Only Christians Know Correctly about God?
Psalm 19 / Isaiah 19: 18-25
Romans 2: 14-24
October 23rd, 2005
I once read that to get an audience with you it is best for a speaker either to make the audience laugh first or to feel sympathy for you.
Well, this morning maybe you respond to that proposal with at least a grin. I don’t actually want your sympathy but since my task is to address a matter of great importance and delicacy, I hope you are aware how precarious is my task.
I must walk that fine line between two attitudes. On the one hand, a Christian may be so confident of knowing of God and His ways that she comes off cocksure. Belief seems to require this attitude—don’t be wishy-washy. Thus a Christian may deceive herself that she knows far more than she really can or need to—thus hurting the project of the Gospel.
On the other hand a Christian may retreat into a false sense that doubt is more honest than trust in God. As Lesslie Newbigen put it in his marvelous book, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, “The contemporary opinion—very widely held—that doubt is somehow more honest than faith, is an entirely irrational prejudice. It is a form of dogmatism which is entirely destructive.”
Newbigen has proposed, it seems to me rightly, that many Christians have responded to the challenges of the world on the world’s terms—and we’re all tempted to do this. We may try to match “worldly” self-confidence with “Christian” self-confidence in debate with rational arguments using essentially the same data. Or we may try to match doubt with doubt, being so modest in our attempt to be open to all peoples’ opinions that we fail to hold fast to what is true.
This is the texture of the problem that is before us day in and day out. I sometimes get the feeling that a false battlefield has been mapped for Christians today. It seems to me that this battlefield has two fronts. First there is the arena of what may be known of God. Second there is the arena of what God has made.
The first gets us into encounters with other religious views in a pluralist society. The second immerses the Christian in a world that is not only influenced by modern science, which some Christians consider a threat, but in the process fails to notice the greater threat of a materialist way of life.
In a society where people hold to many religions or to no religion at all the Christian believes certain things about God. For example, “The one that comes to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those that seek Him.” We also believe that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” We believe that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” We believe that the Bible is the Word of God. These are exclusive claims. But we know that people who believe in other religious systems make exclusive claims too.
It used to be that these other religions were far away. But now they are according to our Constitution as American as apple pie and motherhood. Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion. Thus Mosques and Hindu Temples now occupy adjacent properties in our major cities, across from churches and synagogues and Mormon temples. Reginald Heber wrote a song in 1819 that was very popular as a call to missions. I remember hearing it sung:
From Greenland’s icy mountains,
from India’s coral strand;
where Afric’s sunny fountains
roll down their golden sand;
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s claim.
What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.
In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.
But now many of these that once were called “heathen” religions are believed by people who work in the same lab, who shop for groceries with us, or live next door. Indeed, many of these religions are themselves engaged in missionary work, both to win converts and to do works of mercy as Christians have done in their missions. There is a Red Crescent and a Red Cross to be seen on relief trucks in the Middle East.
So Christians feel fear that they are losing in the battle for truth. And many wonder, after being exposed to people personally that believe in these other ways, “Do only Christians know correctly about God?”
Last Monday after having told you about John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress the day before, I got on the internet and found Bunyan’s account of his conversion. It is called “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.” Mind you, John Bunyan was a stalwart 17th century Puritan (1628-1688), oft quoted as a champion of Christian truth. I settled down to read because I’d heard this work told how he handled doubts as well as how he’d come to believe in Jesus. I came to section 97 where I read this:
. . . how can you tell but that the Turks had as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet the Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is? And, could I think, that so many ten thousands, in so many countries and kingdoms, should be without the knowledge of the right way to heaven; if there were indeed a heaven, and that we only, who live in a corner of the earth, should alone be blessed therewith? Every one doth think his own religion rightist, both Jews and Moors, and Pagans! and how if all our faith, and Christ, and Scriptures, should be but a think-so too?
98. Sometimes I have endeavoured to argue against these suggestions, and to set some of the sentences of blessed Paul against them; but, alas! I quickly felt, when I thus did, such arguings as these would return again upon me, Though we made so great a matter of Paul, and of his words, yet how could I tell, but that in very deed, he being a subtle and cunning man, might give himself up to deceive with strong delusions; and also take both that pains and travel, to undo and destroy his fellows.
99. These suggestions, with many other which at this time I may not, nor dare not utter, neither by word nor pen, did make such a seizure upon my spirit, and did so overweigh my heart, both with their number, continuance, and fiery force, that I felt as if there were nothing else but these from morning to night within me; and as though, indeed, there could be room for nothing else; and also concluded, that God had, in very wrath to my soul, given me up unto them, to be carried away with them, as with a mighty whirlwind.
This was well before Mosques and Temples could be found on the streets of Bedford where he lived. How much more so might well be the confusion we feel when these once foreign religions have taken root in our land.
I think some of our confusion can be resolved with a bit of charity and common sense. It is no blow against the Christian faith to realize that God has made known to all people something of Himself in the things He has made. Aspects of this knowledge are reflected in the Koran, in the Bhagavad Gita, and in the writings of Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikh religion. Thoughtful Christians have read these and recognized where what may be known of God through creation is reflected in them.
What is the source of the common moral law to which virtually all people subscribe? Somehow, from what God has shown of His nature in creation, people everywhere know that to murder, to steal, to lie, to commit adultery, to be jealous of one another is wrong, and that to show reverence toward Deity is right. The common sense of morality somehow derives from what God has revealed in creation. It is no slur against the unique claims of Christianity to recognize where we see eye to eye with people of other religions. Our distinctiveness has a clear focus, having to do with Jesus Christ.
When we show respect to people of other religions we do as Jesus did when He encountered the Samaritan woman at the well. The Samaritans and the Jews had more of a common heritage than Christians and Hindus, but the principle on which Jesus proceeded with this woman fits for us in our relationship with peoples from other religions. He pushed aside the external forms of the Jewish disagreement with the Samaritans—having to do with the right mountain on which to worship God. He said to her, “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.” I have often pondered this as I have been in conversation with devout people of other faiths. I have wondered what Jesus would have said to them if they brought up their differences with His way of worship.
Furthermore, Jesus taught us that the responsibility of drawing people to God rests with God. “No one comes to the Father unless the Father who sent me draw Him.” And He taught, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by Me.” I believe both that Jesus taught us, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” and “No one comes to the Father unless the Father who sent me draw Him.” This takes the burden completely off of us except to say that we sincerely believe in Jesus, accept what He taught as true, and then to demonstrate that we try to follow Him.
I have taken great comfort in Paul’s words in Romans 1: 16-17: I am not ashamed of the Gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith . . . for in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith.” This last phrase lets us know that it is through that humble and pitifully weak thing that is your faith and mine that God transmits to other people the faith that enables them to trust in Jesus Christ.
One of the privileges of having been welcomed as I have been into the Purdue University community is that I have come to know well many people of other religions. I have spoken openly of my faith, which has been of interest to a number of people because they know I am both a pastor and an academic. Not once have I sense resentment when I state simply my belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. This is my faith which I share, trusting that God may use this to arouse faith in the heart of someone who is hungry for God. Yet I’m aware how meager my faith is. I hope for more for others.
How many of us have taken great comfort in the words of the father who said to Jesus, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” And Jesus saw that man’s faith, who said he was afflicted with unbelief, as big enough to warrant the healing of his child. The man saw his own unbelief even as he said, “Lord, I believe.” How often it is just this way with me—and, I suspect, with you.
You and I are not responsible for that vast arena of other beliefs. We do not have to disprove them. We should be respectful of people who hold these views. We can’t disprove something which is not in the arena of facts or science.
The Christian faith is based on facts of history centering on Jesus, that He was born to the Virgin Mary, that He suffered under Pontius Pilate, that He died, was buried, rose again on the third day afterward, and was seen by many alive. Others may deny this, but none can’t disprove it. We can’t prove it either. But we believe it. Furthermore we suggest its truth when what the Gospel promises finds fulfillment in our lives.
I often find running through my mind the words of a wonderful song: “My faith has found a resting place, not in device nor creed. I trust the ever-living One, his wounds for me still plead. It is enough that Jesus died, and that He died for me.” This is the stuff of my faith, of our faith. Sort through all the confusion of all the approaches to God and arrive at Jesus who did not enter our history as a sectarian opinion but as a Person who came out of love for the whole world.
But this is not all that many Christians are concerned about when they think of believing correctly about God. Many Christians believe that the Bible gives explicit information on matters of science as well as about how to trust in God for salvation—and for wisdom in the way of life that pleases Him. To believe this is so seen as virtually as important as believing in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
As the fund of knowledge has increased, as science has become increasingly sophisticated, some Christians have felt obliged to stand against the tide in unwarranted ways. What the Bible teaches about creation and the perceptions of many scientists seem to collide. Thus some Christians feel the Bible is attacked when it is not under attack. It is true that some scientists are on record as being atheists and scoff at the Bible. But their scientific work cannot touch the Bible. Enough competent and devout Christian scientists see no collision between the evident process of development in creation and the teachings of Scripture to suggest that the battles over evolution are motivated by fear that atheistic naturalism is winning the day. Here I trust the opinions of devout Christians who are scientists who have told me of their excitement at discovering how God has created the world.
I have benefited richly from reading John Polkinghorne’s "The Faith of a Physicist". This small-particle physicist came to believe in God from the ground up, as he put it. It was by seeing God’s handiwork in the sub-atomic structure of the universe that he came to believe in God. Thus he became a pastor as well as a scientist, and has combined his trust in God and his excellent science to bring strong and good influence among scientists to bring them to trust in Jesus Christ.
Stephan Jay Gould wrote that religion and science talk about two different subjects that do not overlap. Outwardly this is true, but inherently it is false if God created the world the scientists explore. This we believe. It is more reasonable to believe the universe was created than that it simply came into being with no cause.
Slogans replace useful conversation with non-Christians. I remember reading a T-shirt with the slogan, “I’m a fool for Christ; whose fool are you?” We are not called to be fools for Christ in any other sense than trusting in the cross of Christ on which the penalty for our sins was paid.
Indeed, some have set out self-confidently to prove the Bible right using tactics none of the biblical writers would have dreamed needful. I once asked the great archaeologist, William F. Albright, if he was trying to prove the Bible right by digging into the ancient ruins of the Holy Land. He was aghast. That what he found often supported what the Scriptures say none can deny, he told me. But the Bible does not need human defense to reveal what God wants to say to us successfully.
Sometimes people may try to make the Bible say what it does not say. How variously we may skew what the Bible teaches to make it support what we think is true. Sometimes people say things about the Bible which the Bible nowhere says of itself. We do not need to defend God in this way. There is an authority latent in the Scriptures because they are given to us by God. That is enough.
Some of the arguments with modern science that some Christians have advanced are not helpful. When the Apostle Paul explained that what may be known of God is evident from the things He made, it would seem he intended that we are free to look with great care at the things God made.
Using the instruments available today for the study of what God has made, scientists have learned enough to stoke the sense of wonder into high flame. It is not wise to fight the project of discovering what God has made.
I want to conclude by reading what Fr. John Garvey, an Orthodox priest, remarked of what we can know of God from the world God made.
The God of the Bible is responsible for the world, but it is a world that has been wounded beyond comprehension by sin and evil. The whole of creation, Paul insists in the eighth chapter of Romans, groans as it waits for its true completion in God. When we study this creation we study something infinitely more mysterious--and torn and unfinished--than a well-designed machine; it is something at once wonderful and perishing and cannot be reduced to what science can see and tell us, either about randomness or design. The God of the Bible is not the prime mover of Greek philosophy or the benign provider of the deists. He appears in the burning bush and will not give his name. He wrestles with Jacob (who is Israel, the one who “contends with God”). This God has no handle--not designer, planner, nor architect, except as a fleeting metaphor. This God is unknowable, silent, suddenly appearing, interfering when unwanted and absent when wanted, always elusive--and this tricky one is responsible for the universe. In Jesus Christ we are invited to call this God our Father, a father whose son was crucified to begin the release of the universe from the bondage Paul tells us about, inviting us to await a goodness that is only dawning, and certainly can’t be seen clearly under a microscope.
Do only Christians know correctly about God? Well, it depends what we mean. What anyone can know of God correctly is revealed in the things that He has made as well as in Holy Scripture. Those who do not read our Bible still have God’s witness to Himself in creation.
The passage we read from Isaiah 19 lets us know that God’s plan extended even to nations Israel considered her enemies, and the enemies of God. It is nearly overwhelming to read that God would treat Egypt and Assyria as at one with Israel. They too would come to Jerusalem to worship Him. How would they know to do this? How would they be drawn to worship God at the Feast of Booths, that great feast of ingathering? They could not know to do this unless somehow God revealed to them too something of Himself.
How little they knew how profound was God’s interest in them! “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”
God is most completely revealed in Jesus Christ who the Father sent out of love for the world. But God has also revealed to us and to all people much about Himself in creation. We trust in Jesus who has been revealed to us in the Bible. We trust in Him. This is a trust that will not be disappointed. Let us be glad that God has revealed to others who do not know of Him except through creation, something of Himself, indeed enough to cause them to seek after God.
Let us pray that what they see of God in creation and what they see in our faith points them to Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life. Let us leave to God the things that are God’s, and then do what is ours to do out of faith in Jesus Christ.
Let us pray: O Lord, the things which are beyond us, we entrust to you. And we thank you that by faith we can rely on your love for us, poured out for us on the cross on which Jesus died, validated in the tomb which He escaped alive. Help us to trust in Jesus, and to live lives worthy of the Gospel. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2005
When Does Salvation Happen?
Heidelberg Catechism, Q 21
I Chronicles 16: 23-36
Romans 10: 1-15
October 16th, 2005
The September 5th issue of Newsweek magazine devoted a cover story to Spirituality in America. This land of ours seethes with religion because people are looking for “salvation.” They may not use the word “salvation,” but they are looking for something that gives coherence to their lives right now. Salvation means wholeness, soundness of soul. And they are looking literally everywhere—from Christianity to Wicca and everywhere in between.
Rick Warren’s best-seller, The Purpose Driven Life struck a nerve with many Christians because it offers a simple, coherent guide to life here and now—in forty days, in fact—for those who had not found this guide in the church as they knew it. Forty days was how long Jesus was in the desert before his ministry began. Forty days of purpose can usher us into a lifetime of purposeful living. It is a good idea.
I can’t think of a period of my life when people were more hungry for any clue they can find to the purpose of life and more impatient with the old means by which the Gospel has been passed along. This longing I think stands behind the remarkable success of the Mormon Church, a relatively new player on the stage of religion. There are many of their ideas about God and life that I find curious and contrary to Scripture, but there is no question that Mormons are fine people. In two hundred years those good people have pulled themselves together into a remarkable community, distinctly a cut above ordinary American living.
The most recent issue of Newsweek devoted the cover story to the amazing growth of the Mormon Church. The ninety-five year-old president of the Mormon Church, Gordon Hinckley, explained the reason for this rapid growth:
“We live in a world of shifting values. The family is falling apart. Parents failing in what they ought to do. And they find in this church something that expects something of people, that has standards and holds to those standards and speaks of requirements and definitions and so on. And they find here a rock that is solid and strong and true and isn’t wavering with every gust of wind.
But there is something in the Bible’s message of salvation that I don’t hear in the air when I listen to the varieties of guidance in the religious marketplace. Something clearly a part of the Bible’s guidance has blown away.
It seems almost stodgy to bring this up. But at the heart of the Bible’s message is the fact that salvation is not merely following a good guide for living. Indeed, the Law that God gave through Moses was a remarkable guide to good living. But it wasn’t enough. The Bible teaches us that there is this fundamental problem that it calls sin. Both the Jews who had the Law and the Gentiles who did not have it sinned. Why bring up that word again? What is sin? The Second Helvetic Confession, one of the earliest of our Reformed confessions of faith, describes sin as “that innate corruption of man which has been derived or propagated in us all from our first parents.” The Westminster Shorter Catechism describes sin as “Any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God.” Scripture tells us simply: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” But we like better to hear good things about ourselves than to be told we may have defects.
Has sin gone out of date? Whereas we love to sing “Amazing Grace that saved a wretch like me,” we’re not big into thinking of ourselves as sinners. Sure, we make mistakes, but let’s not call them sins. Nowhere has Screwtape been more successful among church people than in promoting the idea that sin is out-of-date. I hear in church circles these days a lot of interest in affirmation, but a distinct distaste for the idea that God might need to forgive us our sin and change us. We much prefer to hear that God loves us just as we are and expects no change at all in us.
Thus sin, this deep contaminant of human nature that has brought untold suffering and separated us from God is treated as though it does not even exist. We have lived trying to get comfortable with this profound flaw in us. But how much hinges on acknowledging that something is deeply wrong in us.
If we think we have not sinned, we feel no need of forgiveness. We may repeat prayers of confession as routine parts of a worship service—because we’ve always done it that way--while feeling no need for forgiveness. If we have no sense of need for forgiveness what need do we have for Jesus Christ? Someone said to me at the last meeting of our presbytery, “Jesus Christ has become our mascot instead of our Master.” When she said this to me I was startled with how perceptive she was.
All the trappings of Christianity are front and center, but the fact that Jesus died to forgive us our sin has been buried beneath the verbiage. That He asks us to follow Him as master and Lord seems often to be a bit of pious jargon. Has Jesus become the mascot of the church rather than the Master? We balk at the idea of being told to do what does not come naturally.
I hear quite some talk of the cross these days and have oddly been charged with not thinking the cross is important. Indeed, the cross is the basic Christian symbol. But of what use is the cross if we forget that the cross owes its whole existence to the fact of my sin and yours.
In early Reformed church architecture there was quite some fascination with the rooster because it is a reminder that Peter denied Jesus three times before the rooster crowed that morning of Jesus’ trial. Roosters instead of crosses appeared on steeple tops of some Reformed churches. The rooster reminds me of my need for the cross.
We may be fascinated with the cross as a Christian symbol and forget our sin that required Jesus’ death there.
Isaac Watts gave us a wholesome perspective on the cross:
When I survey the wondrous cross
on which the Prince of glory died,
my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.
And then the last stanza:
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small,
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
One of the great documents in our heritage was written in a time of great conflict after the Reformation was well enough established for the reformers to start to quarrel. How confusing it was in the part of Germany where Lutheran and Reformed Christians fought each other over which kind of Reformation Christianity would be followed. In 1563 the Elector Frederick III, nicknamed “the Pious,” asked two young men in Heidelberg to write a catechism for the instruction of the young. They were confused at the fighting going on between Christians. So the pastor of the Holy Spirit Church in Heidelberg, Caspar Olevianus, and a young theology teacher at the university, Zacharias Ursinus, wrote a gentle-spirited catechism to make clear the things of God.
In the section of the Heidelberg Catechism we remembered this morning they wanted young people to know precisely what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ. They wrote that “true faith is a wholehearted trust that the Holy Spirit creates in us through the Gospel that it is not only to others but to me also that God has given the forgiveness of sin.” Faith is not something out there, a vague idea hovering like a fog over the Church. Faith is something in the heart that God creates through the hearing of the Gospel. I hear that Christ died for my sins, and something in me responds to this good news. I will not respond if I think I have not sinned. But if I know and acknowledge what I’m like, what a blessing to know in Christ I am forgiven.
When you and I have acknowledged that we need God’s forgiveness and have asked God to forgive our sin, then we have entered into that condition before God that the Bible calls “salvation.” This offers us not only peace of mind as we approach death, but guidance for a purpose-driven life now. When Christ is in our hearts by faith, we know we live in the presence of God.
This morning we read King David’s ecstatic words when the Ark of the Covenant was brought to Jerusalem. The Ark of the Covenant represented the presence of God. It is such a happy part of the Bible. “Sing to the Lord, all the earth! Tell of his salvation from day to day . . . Honor and majesty are before Him; strength and joy are in His place . . . Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice . . . Let the sea roar, and all that fills it, let the field exult, and everything in it . . . O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever.”
The key to David’s joy in this psalm, that is included in the Book of Psalms, was the vivid sense of living in the presence of God. The visual symbol of God’s presence was the Ark, but it was not just that gilded box that made David happy. When he looked at it his eyes were drawn from all the vain things that charmed him usually. He was wealthy. He was powerful. He had his pick of the most beautiful women of the realm. He had everything an oriental king could claim as his right.
But none of these things could begin to compare with the delight of knowing he lived in the presence of God. In the 27th Psalm he confessed his faith, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I see after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to enjoy the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple.”
Through the ages Christians have built beautiful churches to try to capture the sense of what David describes here. When you and I go into a majestic cathedral, or perhaps when you enter this quiet and simple sanctuary, if your heart is so set you can feel the presence of God. But God is not restricted to a place. Whereas God in some way was locally present between the outstretched wings of the cherubim on top of the Ark of the Covenant, He was not restricted to that place. The skies and the sea and mountains and valleys and all else that God created rejoiced in God because God inhabited all His creation. Indeed, as David put it in the 139th Psalm, there was nowhere he could escape the presence of God.
Wholeness of life, living in a state of salvation means living in the continual awareness that we are in the presence of God. We may not be able to answer the question, “What would Jesus do?” But we can live in the sense of the presence of God—even if we are scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchen, as Brother Lawrence describes in his wonderful little devotional guide. The only condition in which you and I will feel out of sorts remembering we are in the presence of God is when we are doing what we know we ought not.
This is a real problem that faces us all.
In the section from Paul’s letter to the Romans we read a few minutes ago, the great Apostle laments for his people, the Jews, who had this remarkable tradition under-girding King David’s joy in the section we just read. What happened that the thrill in God’s presence that Israel enjoyed as God’s unique people disappeared? You and I who have been moved and quieted when visiting the great churches of the world have experienced only a fraction of what was available to ancient Israel. No cathedral could evoke the sense of God’s presence like the place where God was really present!
But Israel forfeited all this because it rejected the conditions of God’s continuing presence with them. Paul wrote of them, “They have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. They sought to establish their own idea of living rightly in place of submitting to God’s righteousness.” The nit-picking with the Law of God that gave Jesus fits with some of his fellow-Jews resulted in their straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. They treated as important what was not and ignored the weighty matters of the way God revealed through Moses.
This was not unique to ancient Israel. We who have received the Gospel nudge that pure and simple Gospel to the side and become preoccupied with other things. Think of the matters that distress us! And so we need to let ourselves be reminded of the Gospel. We read with delight the words of Isaiah that anticipated the Gospel, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.” How delightful that it should be there in the Old Testament. It proves our point that Christianity is the right way. But this is not the inference we need to draw. The appropriate response is faith that comes from hearing the preaching of Christ.
And the life of faith then, is a quiet and peaceful life in the presence of God. To the one who lives a quiet and peaceful life in the presence of God, it is obvious that salvation has come. Because there is soundness, health, and gratitude overflowing.
Each of us here would be glad to claim such a life. But it does not come to us as a deposit. Three hundred years ago John Bunyan wrote in prison his remarkable tale, The Pilgrim’s Progress, that so well displayed his awareness that after having come to Christ and received His forgiveness of our sin, he had entered on a pilgrimage. The Christian life is not holding onto a deposit of truth, but walking a long and difficult path.
In Bunyan’s story the pilgrim Christian could not see the wicket gate leading into heaven, but he could see faintly a light that shined through it. Evangelist tells him to follow that light. And so he tries to follow though he is distracted by his family, by Mr. Obstinate, by Mr. Pliable, by despond. Indeed, life is filled with distractions, which is why there are many people who realize they are “backsliders.” The popularity of Bunyan’s story since it was written in the 17th century has been because he taught us that the Christian life is a pilgrimage. We are either on our way or we are not.
Some of the troubles we experience either within ourselves or as we live in a community of faith such as this are due to the fact that we have not yet arrived at our destination. We’re still on our pilgrimage. Remember that salvation has three aspects. Our salvation was won long ago by Christ on the cross. But also we are being saved by the power of His life. And we shall be saved when we see Him as He is. This is the hope we have in the Gospel.
In conclusion may I say two things. First, if you have not trusted in Christ to forgive your sin and begun to call Him your Lord and Savior, I hope you will begin to be a Christian by doing so today. Second, if you are on the pilgrim way, be a faithful pilgrim, and a friendly fellow traveler to other pilgrims. Keep looking at the light. Be aware of how you can stumble and fall. And if you have stumbled and fallen, get up, claim again your forgiveness in Christ, and keep on going.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank you for the promise of the Gospel, that in Christ we have forgiveness of sin, and that we have in Him a way to walk, a life to live, a truth to trust and tell. Grant us not only to begin well but to continue the pilgrimage to which you have invited us. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
What Must I Do to be Saved?
Psalm 24 / Numbers 21: 5 – 9
John 3: 1-19
October 9th, 2005
For the next several weeks, I’m not sure now just how many, I want to change my preaching from its focus on books of the Bible or on great doctrinal statements such as the Nicene Creed, to explorations of great questions that arise from life. This morning I want to explore the question, “What must I do to be saved?” This question marks the start of the Christian way. We will think of it along with the question, “Have I been born again?”
We have all heard the terms “born again” and “saved” used frequently in this land. You have heard the term “born again Christian” that tries to distinguish between a real Christian and a Christian in name only. Perhaps you’ve been asked by an ardent Christian friend, “Are you saved?”
Both “born again” and “saved” are good Bible terms. Paul wrote, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, it is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast.” In a sense might say the answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved?” is, “There is nothing I can do to be saved.” Salvation is a gift of God. The “doing” part of being saved is simply receiving it, of accepting it.
But it is fair to ask, “How do I receive salvation, this gift of God?” To receive it is to do something, even if it is simply to extend our hands to accept the gift. When I reach out my hand and receive it, I take it to myself. What happens when I do that?
In the passage from John that we listened to a few moments ago Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again, [or born anew], you cannot see the kingdom of God.” Being born is something that happens to a baby. The baby is totally passive. It doesn’t do a thing except move along the birth canal as the mother pushes her out. Then the baby starts to take part in life. It must feed. It must breathe. It must move its little arms and legs. We are somehow pushed out when we are born again; it is a new start. But we must then do something too.
The term “saved” makes it seem that God does everything. But “born again” puts us in the role of the newborn child. The baby plays a significant role in its own life from that point on. Some babies don’t thrive.
One day back in the mid nineteenth century an ardent layman approached the Bishop of the local cathedral on the streets of Durham, England and asked him, “Brother, are you saved?” It was a day when evangelicalism was surging in England and there was no little suspicion of the established Church in England. This ardent fellow saw the bishop’s attire and wasn’t impressed. He wondered, “Is he even a Christian?” So the layman asked the bishop, “Are you saved?” He expected a simple yes or no answer—and probably expected to be rebuffed.
The bishop happened to be Bishop B.F. Westcott, one of the giants among those who have written commentaries on the Gospel of John, a copy of which I’ve owned for years and cherish. He replied, “My friend, I was saved when Jesus paid the penalty for my sin on the cross; I am being saved by the power of His life; I shall be saved when I see Him as He is.”
What a good answer. Because the Bible speaks of salvation in all three ways. There are three aspects to this relationship with God called “salvation.” It shows how close is the connection between “salvation” and being “born again.” It’s not strictly correct to say that these three aspects refer to something past, something on-going, and something yet to come, but maybe it is helpful to think of salvation in this way.
If I have trusted in Jesus Christ, I was saved when Jesus died for my sins on the cross. I am being saved being made more healthy, sound of soul by the power of His life. I shall be saved when I see Him face to face—for then I shall be changed completely. And I enter into all of this when I am “born again.” This is the promise of the Gospel.
Something indeed happens when you or I pray to receive the gift of God’s forgiveness. No matter how helpless our prayer, a transaction is made between heaven and earth when with helpless faith, so helpless we feel we don’t even have any faith at all, we pray, “Lord Jesus, forgive me of my sin. I accept you as my Savior and Lord.”
But then we enter a new life that is a way of life. And this life makes demands of us. When we call Jesus, “Lord,” it means starting a discipline of life where we impose on ourselves ways that do not come naturally. It can lead to remarkable community and personal life. But it is not like falling off a log. NOT AUTOMATIC. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” Paul wrote, “for it is God that is at work in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” The fear and trembling is not because God is not to be trusted, but because any of us who try, realize how the old self is still alive and fights tooth and nail with the new self that God is beginning to reshape from the old self—as we try to obey Him. Almost no part of reforming our ways comes easy. Paul wrote at one point, “I pommel by body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Disqualified? Are God’s expectations so high of how we live as new creations that if we do not try we may be disqualified—after being born again?
It is good that we ask questions like this. I get the feeling that it is unwise and unbiblical to create airtight doctrines from selective use of the Bible that does not include the cautioning words the Bible includes too.
Charitably we like to think of the Christian way as a way with a very wide gate. We love the word “inclusive.” And indeed, all kinds of people may go through the gate that leads to life. But Jesus taught us that the gate is narrow and few there are that find it. This is a sobering word. Will we listen to it in terms of how we have thought of entering the way of Christ?
Perhaps it is, as C.S. Lewis proposed, that to the presumptuous person the Bible speaks severe words of warning, and to the fearful person the Bible relieves the fears by saying, “This is the will of my Father who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.”
But Jesus also said at least twice of those who face difficulty in following Him, “the one who endures to the end shall be saved.” Then what of those who do not endure? What of those who give up? What of those who want the label, “Christian,” but are interested in the demands of the Christian life?”
Jesus said, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but the one who does the will of my father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord Lord’ did we not prophesy in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.”
What Jesus said He said of those who thought that calling Him “Lord” was spiritually significant. While it is true that the New Testament tells us that we may know that we have eternal life, the basis of our certainty is not just the promise of God and the certainty of our trust in God. It is a knowledge based on the evidence of our love of brothers and sisters in Christ as well as His promise. The two cannot be separated if the Bible is our guide.
My dear people, there is not a problem that can arise between us that cannot be solved if we take this to heart. There is not a difficulty within a family or within a congregation that cannot instantly dissolve if we take to heart that we prove we love God when we love one another—and act like it.
The third aspect of salvation is the promise of being made fully as we ought to be. Once again we read in I John 3: 2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” This is what Bishop Westcott had in mind in saying, “I shall be saved, that is, made fully healthy, when I see Him.” Then will come the love between one another we’ve looked for all along.
Well, these are the three aspects of how the Bible teaches us about being saved. But I have not mentioned in particular the passages of Scripture we have read. Jesus referred to the passage in Numbers when He spoke to Nicodemas in our reading from the Gospel of John.
In the course of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemas when he told him about being “born again,” he illustrated what belief is by referring to the time in Israel’s wilderness wandering when God sent fiery serpents in response to their incessant complaining. It must have been a bit like living in Arizona as suburban sprawl invades the territory of rattlesnakes. Everywhere the Israelites walked there was the danger of being bit by a poisonous snake. God told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Anyone who simply looked up at that bronze snake was instantly healed of the poison.
Nicodemas knew that story well. But he had never thought that it had anything to do with Jesus. Nor could he have known anything about this. He did not know that Jesus would be lifted up on a cross, on a pole, the way Moses put the bronze snake up on a pole. Jesus was telling Nicodemas that trusting in Him for the “new birth” was as helpless an effort as looking up at that snake on a pole.
And so it is. But we read of this story much later, after Christianity has become a great part of our culture. In the years since Jesus spoke to Nicodemas that night, a great society called Christendom has developed and the simple things Jesus taught us have often gotten lost in the shuffle. We have joined our societies called “Presbyterian,” “Methodist,” etc., but have we taken to heart what Jesus said? We have asked great questions of the ways of God and tried to put together answers to our questions based on the Bible. But the big question that we must all answer is, “Are you saved?” “Have you been born again?”
Today in Chicago, at this very hour, thousands of men and women are running the Chicago marathon. Once again, our son is in that number. To be allowed to run that marathon you must start at the beginning, and be registered, and have a computer chip on you that is read by devices placed along the way. These make sure that runners take no short cuts but run the prescribed route from beginning to end. It is easy to start. It is hard to run. It is a great joy to finish.
I wonder if we have all started, or perhaps if we have thought we could slip into the number of those who are running, and then run by our own rules what we want to call the “Christian life?”
One of our members called me this week after reading the title of this morning’s message, to tell me that it wasn’t until one of his children realized he had to start the Christian life at the beginning, by actually asking God to forgive him his sins, and to receive the gift of salvation—that he did so. It is possible to merge into the crowd of those who attend church and never personally get into the race of the Christian life at all.
And so I ask you this morning as I asked myself one morning when I was nineteen years old, “What must you do to be saved?” Trust in Jesus Christ to forgive your sin—which means acknowledging that in fact you are a sinner. And then run with endurance the race that is set before you. And in due time you will wear what the Bible calls “the crown of life” which God has prepared for those that love Him.
Until we have begun this race, we are not in it. Unless we are running, we have removed ourselves from it. And only if we continue do we have the assurance of receiving from God the great gift of wholeness that He offers us. I pray that I have well begun, that I am in the race for the duration, and that I shall receive the crown of life. And I pray that you may too.
Perhaps you need to begin because you have not yet. Perhaps you have lapsed in the running of the race. If so, let this prayer be yours: O Lord, our heavenly Father, thank you that Jesus died to grant me forgiveness of my sin. Forgive my sin and give to me the will to follow Jesus so that He is my Lord and Savior. And grant me the grace to continue to follow Him my whole life long so that at the end I may find wholeness. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 02, 2005
The Life of the World to Come
Isaiah 66: 18-24 / Revelation 21: 1-8
World Communion Sunday
October 2nd, 2005
The great old Nicene Creed that has guided our thoughts on Sunday morning for a while ends, echoing Scripture. “We believe . . . in the life of the world to come.”
It is pertinent that we should have these words before us on a Sunday when we take together the Lord’s Supper with Christians throughout the world. World Communion Sunday points our thoughts ahead to the great marriage feast of the Lamb that will be attended by people from every nation, speaking all the variety of languages, wearing all varieties of clothing.
This sacred meal also points us back to Jesus’ painful death for our sin. In this holy meal such a mix of the promise of great happiness along with a reminder of the grim reality of our sin that made Jesus’ death necessary.
The very idea of “the life of the world to come” is filled with longing, hope, and promise. That world won’t have the sadness and disappointment of this one. The life of the world to come will fulfill far more than every hope. God promises it. The Prophet Isaiah wrote God’s promise:
For as the new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before me, says the Lord; so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord.
This promise includes the continuing blessing of your reputation and your family all gathered up in worshiping God. How you and I value our reputations. How dear to us are our families. But more precious still is that kind of life the Bible calls “worshipping God.”
This end note to the prophet Isaiah reflects an earlier promise:
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains . . . many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths . . .the nations . . . shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Walking in God’s ways—this is the good promise that translates into beating swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, fighter-jets into passenger planes.
Not only that, but nature itself will enjoy the benefit. When the Messiah comes, Isaiah foretold, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.”
It is a happy prospect. Turn your mind loose.
Isaiah anticipated the forecast at the end of the Book of Revelation where John writes:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more . . . and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men, He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.
John remembers the Garden of Eden when God walked and talked with our first parents. The evenings
were cool as these autumn evenings are now. The harmony of people with one another and with God made of every moment a joy.
John tells us in the great Apocalypse that when God redoes everything the holy city of God, the new Jerusalem will descend from heaven “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
What a picture! Every husband here can remember the time you stood at the front of the church awaiting your bride. Standing where I have stood for many weddings—including the weddings of many of you, I’ve watched the glow on the face of many a bride and groom. Sometimes they are so happy they cry! Sometimes they can’t get their vows out for either tears or laughter. It is a remarkable happiness.
I remember with enthusiasm when my own bride walked down the aisle. I could not remember her ever looking lovelier. Her face radiated more than momentary happiness. She was expectant of the new life together we had discussed so often. We were poor as church mice.
And so God tells us of the joy that awaits the descent of the “holy city of God” in terms of one of the happiest moments possible to us as people. This is what the life of the world to come will be like. It will include the end of all tears of sadness. No more death.
No more AIDS epidemics. No more Viet Nam wars, or suicide bombings in Iraq or Al Qaieda or drugs or family squabbles. And that’s just the start. The world to come will not only offer the end of what is bad, but the flourishing of every delight God created for His creation to enjoy.
But the end of the game, the life of the world to come involves a lot more than everyone being forever happy. God does not force this on anyone. There will be those who don’t want to focus on God. Isaiah writes so grimly of the end of those who have rebelled against God. This too is part of the end, the world that is to come. The Bible speaks not only of life with God, but of life in separation from God. God is so courteous. He does not impose Himself on us. We are free to reject God—and we can get away with it for a while, we think, in our self-sufficiency. It is quite possible, in fact, to reject God while speaking a lot about Him. Talk is cheap. Even talk of God may be cheap.
The Gospel we believe, with all these images of things to come, is not just about “pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.” What about now? Every image of the world to come begins with some analogy to things here and now. It will be an earth, not a new kind of planetary life.
In the world to come worshipping God will be natural, as natural as self-interest is to us now. Worship will not be forever kneeling and bowing, but every aspect of life will be an act of worship. When we do all that we do to the glory of God our worship will be totally unlike the sacrifices in days of old, or even like our solemn worship services now. God gets greatest joy now when we live in these bodies to His glory—that is, giving glorious examples of the goodness of His ways.
I wonder what formal worship will be like? There will be no need of preaching because God’s word will be so fixed in our hearts, translating into remarkable living. There will be no offerings—because there will be no need—or money, for that matter. There will be plenty of music, I expect. And our prayers will echo through every day as we talk with God—endless thanksgiving.
How will we be different then? Will we be like pawns that God will move around on the chessboard of eternity, finally placed so that we’re not forever prompted by self-interest? Will sin and death and the devil be in checkmate? Or will God somehow so re-order our wills so that we finally will choose only what is good, only what best fulfills every purpose God had in creating us?
One of you sent me this week a very thought-provoking article published in the Journal of Religion and Society, that deduced from a large body of evidence that “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD-infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.” Gregory Paul, the author of this study, used data from some highly respected sources.
This is not the kind of evidence we like to hear. It correlates with some of the less scientific evidence that troubles many of us. I am deeply troubled at the divorce rate among Bible believing Christians. I am distressed at the disparity between our most cherished beliefs and our behavior. I get the feeling that bearing grudges is seen as a sacred right, a duty one owes to oneself and family. Yet, every week we pray together to God, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I am deeply troubled that talk has become very cheap in the Church.
The inference Gregory Paul drew that religion is bad for people is hardly reassuring. What it tells us is that where the great ideals of our faith do not regulate how we live, we may sink to a level of living that is worse than the way of life of those who profess no faith at all.
What needs to happen in the Church is a new birth of being guided by what we say we believe. As a blind person needs a guide through unfamiliar terrain so we need a guide through the terrain of the world to come—as we are in it here. C.S. Lewis suggested that there is a continuity between our lives now and what our lives will be in the hereafter—even in heaven. Those who have cultivated our lives richly will have a greater capacity for joy in heaven than those who have responded essentially to momentary impulse. When the Book of Revelation tells of people casting down their crowns before the Lamb who sits on the throne, these crowns represent the laurel wreathes people have earned in life. They are God’s “Well done, good and faithful servant” that we will enjoy most by returning to God, whose service was our greatest joy.
We can forgive, but to do so we must let God guide us through the unfamiliar terrain of a forgiving spirit. We can do what makes our relationship to others here flourish with joy if we will live together in humility. We can be lavishly generous with our bounty so that we do not exemplify the rich and foolish man in the parable Jesus told—the rich man and Lazarus. We can make of mutual service virtually a sacrament. We can love sacrificially.
Jesus taught us, “Greater things than these you will do because I ascend to the Father.” He gave us His Spirit. And we will either turn ourselves loose to do as the Spirit of God prompts us, or we will sit on every right impulse God arouses in us so that it withers and dies—despite how much we talk about God.
Here and now God has given us the chance to participate with him in rehearsing how it will be in the new heaven and new earth. Think of the role your children play in the life of your home. The parents are analogous to God; they create the outlines of the environment—they provide the house, the food, the clothing, the rules to live by. But the input of the children is immense. Their personalities, their desires, their response to our love and direction have much to do with the life of the home. And we count the home happiest where parents and children live together in loving harmony, and then there spins off into new homes the delight that has been forged in the original home. Children shape new homes informed by all that they learned in their homes growing up.
In some similar way our heavenly Father tries to lure us into participating in the shaping of heaven and earth here, with the goal of enjoying the new heaven and the new earth which He will bring eventually.
In the local church we participate on a small scale in God’s plan that moves to a goal, a consummation in the new heaven and new earth. We are rehearsing the life of the world to come. What does this mean for us?
We should do a lot more things together. This place should be packed on the Lord’s Day with people seeking sustenance of spirit for the work of the Lord in the days ahead. We should mingle with each other often, sharing each other’s lives. At each gathering, whether it be of two families getting together for dinner, or of a large study group in its weekly meeting, our time should end with prayer for the congregation as a whole that we lean more closely together.
Then, when the gathering dismisses it should be with the understanding that we will lean toward each other continually. And as we lean toward each other, and come together on the Lord’s Day like this, our joint enterprise is worship. This is the cycle of life for God’s people in a congregation—looking forward to the life of the world to come in the living of our days.
We listened to Scriptures this morning from the Prophet Isaiah and the Book of Revelation that were very similar. We heard these happy words about a new heaven and a new earth where there is not sadness, about nations coming together to God.
We will presently take together the bread and wine that represent Jesus’ presence with us now, that represent His death for us, and that represent the feast we will share with Him in days to come.
What can you and I do this very day, this very week that makes of life of this community of faith a rehearsal for the life of the world to come. Let us make deeds cheap and words expensive. Let us rehearse the life of the world to come today and tomorrow. Let us join together in doing this, nobody left out. God needs us all. We need us all. I with you and you with me and us all together—let us rehearse together the ways of the life of the world to come.
Let us pray: O Lord, we thank you for the promise of the life of the world to come, for the new heaven and the new earth, for the end of tears and death and every ill. Grant, O God, that we may desire to be welcome in the world to come, and that we may rehearse its ways today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM