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April 29, 2007
Why That Same Benediction all these Years?
Isaiah 42: 1-3/Hebrews 13: 1-21
April 29th, 2007
Before offering you the message that is on my heart this morning I want to publicly thank Rev. Ralph Smith for serving as Parish Associate here the past five years. Many of us have enjoyed the benefit of his visits when we were in the hospital. He has acceded to my request every time I’ve asked him to preach when I was away. After I leave, Ralph has made clear his willingness to continue being useful here. Thank you, Ralph.
There are many of you I would like to recognize for your ministry to me as well as to the congregation as a whole. Nadya with the choir and Marilyn at the organ have blessed us week after week with their ministry of music. I’m amazed at how Nadya creates such music, whether the numbers on the Lord’s Day be at full strength or somewhat less. Marilyn spends hours during the week at the organ—a labor of love that she testifies to for us all on Sunday morning.
Your Session with Jurgen Honig its clerk and Deacon Board with Charlie Short its moderator have not only taken their work seriously, but they have become two small groups within the congregation of mutual encouragement. Stephanie Cardwell, our administrative assistant, has been a beloved help to me and to us all in the church office. Many of you don’t see Tish, the effervescent and industrious lass who keeps the building tidy week after week. She and Stephanie are a cheerful and faithful duo I have enjoyed immensely and will miss in days to come.
I think many of you are aware that there are a number of people in this congregation who respond instantly when they see a need. I hesitate to begin naming these because I feel bad to omit anyone. But you know who they are. These have made the title “church lady” a great honor that includes men as well as women. They exemplify what it is to be a member of the body of Christ. These testify by life what it means to be a “member” of the body, everyone using the gifts they have usually with no word of thanks—neither do they seek this. I have benefited immeasurably from your shared care within this congregation. I pray the ranks of the “church ladies” will grow until it includes everyone.
But now I must get into the heart of my final word from this pulpit. I remember when I first stood here after being invited to come. I wondered then what should be my first word, as I have pondered the duty of offering my final word.
I chose for the first Sunday in August, 1986 the passage from Isaiah 6 where the prophet sees the Lord in the Temple. It was a total religious high, we might say. But the purpose of this encounter with God in the Temple was not a thing in itself. The Lord asked a question that others beside Isaiah in the Temple may have heard. “Who will go for me? Who will I send?” Isaiah replied, “Here am I, send me.” And the Lord sent him on an urgent errand to his people. The point of this encounter with the Lord was heavy in my heart as I began with you. What happened with Isaiah in the Temple seemed to me parallel to what is to happen each Lord’s Day in every church. Here we want to encounter God, not just for a religious high, but in order that we may leave this place about the Lord’s business in this horribly troubled world. What goes on at church has a purpose higher than feeling uplifted for one hour in the week.
George MacDonald remarked in one of his sermons, “Life and religion are one, or neither is anything.” I believe this utterly. There is no value to religious highs if they do not translate into high character and high usefulness for God in a life well lived to the glory of God.
This was the goal of our Lord Jesus with people when He began His ministry. Mark tells us that Jesus began with a simple message: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel.” Repent means turn around. It was a message everyone needed to hear and everyone who responded was fortunate. Repentance has a beginning point, but it shows that it has happened in the trajectory of life afterward. There are those who “repent” momentarily. They are like those who start off on a journey, but turn again to where they came from time and again because where they came from is familiar, and the way ahead is unfamiliar. True repentance displays itself in leaving where we came from for places unknown to which God will lead us.
Our Lord ended the well-known parable of the Lost Sheep with these words: “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Jesus told this parable for the benefit of some folk who thought well of themselves who had chided Him for receiving sinners and eating with them. They didn’t realize that they were as much in need of change as the one’s whose behavior got them labeled, “sinners.”
It is very hard to change the depths of a person, that engine inside that drives a life. When Jesus said, “Repent and believe the Gospel” He was pointing to this deep change at the deepest depths that alters a person’s way of life. Often we are suspicious of those who, in dire stress, seem to have repented. Mike and I value our ministry at the Work Release Facility so much partly because we feel we are with people who really feel the need to change. Indeed, it is often personally challenging to see the desire to change, to repent, among those who share that time with us on Tuesday evenings. Yet we encounter skepticism among some people about the honesty of this desire in those who are incarcerated. This skepticism accuses them of just trying to impress someone enough to get them released. We don’t do anyone much good by being skeptical when their hearts are moved to change so that they desire to live according to the precepts of the Gospel.
Friday night I awoke very early thinking of a moving story that Cheri and Glenn Sparks shared with us about an English aristocrat, a peer in the House of Lords, who befriended a serial killer in prison, was used by her for selfish ends. He became aware of this, yet he bore his grief silently and never gave up on her. He was jeered in his obituary when he died two years ago at age ninety-five, as Lord Wrongford. And yet, despite having used Lord Longford at first, this woman in the end genuinely repented—or so it seemed to me in the story. He visited her in prison as she was dying of emphysema and she apologized, now with nothing to gain except his forgiveness. And who are we to presume to doubt the sincerity of another person’s repentance? The words of Jesus came to my mind, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Why? Because repentance was the entire purpose of Jesus’ work. Jesus came not just to suffer and die for our sins, but to then “finish then the new creation” that is to attain God’s will for each of us. This will is that we turn from what we have become with all our unfortunate choices, our sins that so easily come to us, and discover the high road which Jesus walked before us.
I wonder how much genuine repentance Jesus saw as the result of pouring out His life in behalf of people. How many people came to Him only to get a quick fix of their disease, or because they were hungry. Yet He kept on pouring out His grace on all sorts of needy people.
Jesus believed in people. He trusted that God don’t make no junk. His ambition even for people society reckoned “sinners” was very high. God’s ambition for us all is so high. In fact, God’s ambition for you and me makes shambles of the ambitions advanced in some theological estimates of God’s expectations. I am often bewildered at the self-confident things bright people have said about the ways of God toward us. I’m convinced God believes in us, and asks us to meet Him by believing in Him in return. God is committed to us. He welcomes our commitment to Him. This is the purpose of the Gospel, to draw together God’s and our commitment to one another.
Each Sunday at the close of the service I remind you of God’s ambitions for us. After hearing my father intone Hebrews 13: 20-21 as a benediction over the years after preaching, it struck me that these words carry God’s ambitions for us. Here is found Jesus’ hope and expectation of the benefits of the Gospel. Repentance starts the path toward perfection in every good work to do God’s will.
What does repentance look like? This chapter of Hebrews spells out some of the answer. “Show hospitality—ordinarily we don’t because the common view is that our homes are our castles.
Remember those in prison—the normal instinct is to steer away from “criminals,” as though they were a unique breed of people. Keep marriage exuberant and faithful—I believe we err in not letting our marriages grow in delight by pouring into them all the energy of affection we offer in when we begin our in-loveness. Don’t be greedy for money—when our native survival instinct is to horde against tomorrow. Trust your leaders in the faith—something that comes hard in our day of such independent-mindedness. And then, that benediction—that blessing with its impossible line pointing to the quality God expect out of “new creations in Christ.” : “Now may the God of peace make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight.” I’m so glad many of you now know this by heart. It has been fixed in your hearts, the last words you hear on a Sunday morning. Let it be your ambition to see God’s ambition fulfilled in you.
Having observed myself for all these years I’m very aware how short of perfection I am. And I might be tempted to think that the word “perfection” is for that reason over the top. Not 100%, not even 90% or 80%. Maybe an honest bare pass of 60%, an honorable D in the sight of people will do.
Because the higher the standard is set the more is expected of me. If the standard of behavior and faith is kept low then I may appear above average.
I have come to wonder if our emphasis on the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone has a different motive that Paul had in his great Epistles. After explaining the marvel of grace he asks, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” He answers emphatically, “God forbid.” But it is my perception that when we stress the grace of God it is in such a way that we minimize trying hard to live out the new life we have been granted by grace alone. How the Church universal suffers from this. I imagine what impact on this troubled world there would be if all of us who claim Jesus as our Lord lived a life of deliberate repentance. How could the world resist a Savior and Lord who makes such remarkable people, who bring so much joy and healing?
It was as an antidote to our lassitude of heart that the great benediction at the end of Hebrews is aimed. It is God’s intention that after having created us in His image, we should move by the process of repentance toward conformity inwardly to the character of Jesus.
I hope there may be lasting benefit for you as the words of that same old benediction have found a place in your heart, working from your depths, making you desire to see its exhortation fulfilled in you. I pray that those who serve you next from this pulpit will help to nudge you still more along the way of this unspeakably grand pilgrimage. And at the last I pray that God will say to you and me when we stand before Him at the final assize and say, beaming broadly, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord.”
Let us pray: O Lord God, grant that it may be so. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 29, 2007 11:51 AM