Stay Ready

Matthew 25: 1-13

 

 

          He was 41 years old. His batting average was 100 points below his 250 pound overweight body. He wasn’t a Yankee anymore. He wasn’t much of anything anymore. He was a wanna-be manager playing for the Boston Braves of the National League, a league he wasn’t used to playing until the World Series. It was May 25, 1935. The Braves were in Pittsburgh to play the Pirates at Forbes Field.

          Paul Warhola and Sam Sciullo didn’t much care about all that. They were 12 and 13 years old, they loved baseball and their hero was in town. No matter that he was washed up. He was there and they went to see him. They were awfully glad they did. It was an afternoon game. There were no night games in 1935.         

          In the Parable of the Ten Virgins, Jesus tells of a group invited to a wedding. It was common in first century Palestine for the groom to proceed to the home of his bride, where they would be married. Usually it was a night ceremony. It was also common for the wedding party to return to the groom’s house for a banquet and celebration.

          His first time at bat, he hit a home run into the lower deck. Some folks got up and left. They figured they had gotten what they came for. Paul and Sam stuck around. It wasn’t long before their patience was rewarded. His second time up, he hit another homer into the upper deck. That was pretty high cotton for any hitter to hit two home runs in one game. More folks left. It couldn’t get any better than that.

         It was nighttime and the ten virgins brought their oil lamps to see. Half of them came prepared with enough extra oil to trim the lamps as the night wore on. The other half came with only the oil in their lamps, sort of like the fans who left Forbes Field early that day in 1935.

          His third time at bat, he hit safely for a single. 3 for 3. Pretty slick for a washed up old ballplayer. It was the middle of the game and no one was paying much attention.  Paul and Sam had seats down near home plate. Normally they would have been in the right field bleachers…the cheap seats. But that day, right field seats had gone fast. The old man was a lefty and a dead pull hitter.

          The ten virgins had settled down in the street near the groom’s house. The wedding had run long and they became drowsy waiting. They finally fell asleep as they waited. Their lamps began to go out from lack of oil. Jesus tells us that at midnight there was a cry, “Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” The virgins rose and trimmed their lamps, but some had no oil with which to trim them.

          It was the 7^th inning. He came to the plate for one more at bat. The people that were left cheered his performance of the day. Sam remembers that he pointed to a group of old guys in the right field bleachers and said he’d hit the ball over the roof. He was always sort of a grandstander. It was cute. Many didn’t see that gesture, for it was late, the game was not in doubt, and they were headed for the gate.

          So the five unprepared virgins had to leave. They went to the dealers of oil to get more. While they were gone, the bridegroom and his company arrived. Those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast. They shut the door for the night.

          They talked about it for years. Baseball fans still talk about it. Sam and Paul remember it like it was yesterday. He did what he said he would do. He lifted that pitch over the 86 foot roof of Forbes Field and cleared the stadium, the first time it had ever been done. The washed up, 41 year old overweight man hit his third home run of the game.  His name was Babe Ruth. As the roar went up, all the fans whom had left prematurely were confused. They knew they had missed something truly important, but they were not given a second chance. It was the last game he ever played. Five days later he retired.

        The unprepared virgins came back to find a locked door. They called the groom “Lord.” They called out to him and he did answer. His answer was this: “Truly I say to you, I do not know you.”

          As they were being interviewed about attending that now famous game, Sam and Paul expressed gratitude that they had been able to partake in a piece of baseball history in the making. It was a huge moment in their lives. They had been able to attend, and they were not about to pass up the chance to see their hero, washed up or not. They were ready, and they saw Babe Ruth in one of his greatest performances.

          I’m guessing that if Sam and Paul had been invitees to that wedding, they would have come with their lamps trimmed and with extra oil for the evening. They would have been ready. Well, it’s only a wedding, one might say. But what if the groom is our Lord and what if the invitation is to the kingdom of heaven?

          Second chances don’t always come along. Are you ready? Last week, we heard Joshua warn the people of Israel to prepare, for they were about to see the Lord do wonders among them. This week, it is our Savior warning us to be ready. He tells us to watch, to be ready, to remain prepared, for we will know neither the day nor the hour when he chooses to return.

         On that May afternoon back in 1935, Babe Ruth hit three homers in one game and as he crossed home plate after the last one, he kept right on going into the dugout to the showers. He was done. It’s an exit not unlike the entry our Lord will make one day. We won’t know he’s coming until he arrives, any more than those fans know that they were seeing their hero for the last time. And Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like this.  Are you ready?

Crossing the Jordan

Joshua 3: 5-17

 

 

          If it seems like I’ve been talking a lot about leadership lately, it’s probably because I’ve been talking a lot about leadership lately. I can’t seem to get away from it. Today’s Scripture is no exception. One of the first lines starts with God talking to Joshua and he says “Today I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, that they (the people of Israel) may know that as I was with Moses, so I will be with you.” It’s curious that although the word leadership is never used in the Bible, it is nevertheless a subject which receives quite a bit of treatment. 

          The occasion is the crossing of the Jordan River into the Promised Land. It is about 1406…B.C. After forty years of wandering, forty years of purging the old and preparing a new generation for God, the time has finally come. The land flowing with milk and honey awaits, but it is not without its hardships. Ahead lies the land of Canaan and it is already populated with many tribes. This land may be promised, but the promise must be claimed.

          It had been a long time in the making. Moses had died. The greatest leader of the nation of Israel was gone. A whole generation of disobedient grumblers had gone the way of all flesh. Joshua and Caleb, always faithful, were almost eighty years old. A new generation had sprung up. Children born into the Exodus were forty.  Imagine their anticipation to stand at the gates to the Promised Land, the land promised so many years ago. The book of Numbers tells us in Chapter 26 that a census was taken of those men twenty years of age and older in order to know who was able to go to war. They numbered 601, 730. Add to that younger males, women and children and it is estimated that between 2.5 and 3.5 million people stood at the banks of the Jordan River. A mighty event was about to happen.

            The first time I stood in front of a congregation to deliver the message, I remember saying out loud, “What am I doing here?” It was too awesome, too incredible, to think that I could be God’s messenger, to think that he had a message for me to deliver.  How must Joshua have felt! He had the word of God himself that he would be exalted, that the people would be able to see that he was God’s messenger. But in spite of even the reassurance of God, Joshua had to lead. He had to stand in front of God’s people, deliver the message and then live it. Thank God for us, that’s exactly what Joshua did.

           Joshua gathered the people and the first thing he said was “Consecrate yourselves.”  Consecrate: to set apart, to prepare. The first thing Joshua said to the people of Israel as this great and miraculous event was about to unfold was “Get ready. You each have a personal responsibility here. You have your own cleansing to do in order to be ready for what God has in store for you.” Then, Joshua said to the people: “for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” Listen to that. “For tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” Joshua was telling his people to expect a miracle…not just to hope for it.

          The Ark of the Covenant was to go before the people. This was the equivalent of the person, the promise, even the presence of God. The crossing of the Jordan was nothing less than a religious procession. The priests carried the Ark on a mission led by God. The people were not asked to go first. God would do that for them. The people were asked to follow.  

          God, through Joshua, asked the people of Israel to do a great thing. Not only were they about to cross a river which was overflowing its banks, but they were to be prepared to follow God against nation after nation as they entered the Promised Land. The people of Israel were not warriors. They were barely removed from four hundred years of slavery.  And yet, God did not ask Joshua to lead alone, nor did God ask the people to go alone. He only asked that they follow him. He asked them to go where he would lead them. So Joshua says to the people: “Here is how you shall know that the living God is among you…” Don’t miss it. God wants us to know who he is. He is the living God.

          You know the rest of the story. The priests touched the water and it stopped flowing. They walked out to the middle of the riverbed and stood on dry land. About a half mile upstream, the people of Israel, millions in number, stepped into the river and began their participation on yet another of those mighty acts that tell us something about our Creator. In order to participate in that miracle, they had to believe. They had to have faith. They had to trust God that not only would the waters of the Jordan cease to flow, but that those waters would continue to be held until all had safely forded the river.

          It must have taken a long time for so many to cross, but cross they did. They crossed not only to get away from the desert where they had wandered for so long, but also to go forward in faith to an unknown future. They were in the hands of God. It was God’s presence that sustained God’s people. Whatever life brings our way, we can focus on God’s presence and rest in him. He will sustain us just as he did the people of Israel at the Jordan River.

          Joshua, chosen by God to lead his people, would have his moments. He was far from perfect, as events in the near future would prove, but he followed God. Such was the essence of his leadership. He followed God. When it comes to Christianity, our leadership emanates from our example. We evangelize as much with our hands and feet as we do with our words. Joshua followed God and his people followed him. It is God who does the exalting, not us.

          The great apostle Paul writing to his beloved church in Corinth, had this to say about ministry. “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all…Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but the Spirit.”

          What can we take from this crossing? There is more to this story than a miracle from God, as wonderful and awesome as that is. We should first notice that leadership comes not from inner power nor from outer strength. Leadership comes from washing feet and following the living God. Leaders serve. Servants lead. That’s the way of God. As minister and religious writer Hampton Keathley once said, the authority of leaders among God’s people needs to be Scripture rather than their personality, charisma, or whatever happens to be appealing to people at the time. Secondly, we should keep in mind that each of us must come prepared. We must consecrate ourselves to the Lord or our witness will not work. Next, we must step out on faith, but we will never be in front, for God always goes before us and prepares the way. It is only when we are willing to take that step of faith that we will be able to see that God has opened that door for us.

          It took a lot of courage to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. It was also the Unknown Land. It also took a lot of faith. Perhaps it was that faith which endowed God’s people with the courage they needed. But God was there then and he is here now. Christians today have their own Jordans to cross. For us to do God’s will, sometimes we will have to enter into spiritual warfare much as the nation of Israel had to take on the Canaanites. It will not be our human effort that sustains us, but rather our faith in and our obedience to the living God. We must step out in faith. We must follow the living God. We must be ministers of that new covenant to which Paul referred…the new covenant of grace…the grace of Jesus Christ and the life given us in the Spirit.

          The only leadership that really matters is that which directs us to God. If that is our beacon, then the Lord will do wonders among us, too!

Entrusted With the Gospel

1 Thessalonians 2: 1-8

 

 

          I have a friend who is about to retire from many years as a Superior Court judge. Before that, he had a distinguished career as a trial lawyer. Even before that, he served in the Navy, where he was a Naval Courier. We have talked about it more than once, because he likes to talk about it. He is probably as proud of that job as he is of the career he has carved out as a lawyer and judge. I think I understand the reason. He had a job that involved the ultimate in discretion and trust. He was, in a sense, just a carrier of a message, and not the message itself. But in that job, he was entrusted to get the message from the source to its destination…to see to it that its intended audience received not only a message, but the true message. My friend is proud to this day of having been selected for that job, for he was trusted with the most important news of the day. It was his job to get it delivered.

          When the Apostle Paul and his friend Silas arrived in Thessalonica, a bustling Macedonian city of 100,000 people with a natural harbor on not only the busy east-west Egnatian Way, but also located on the north-south trade routes, he was in a good place to spread the gospel. But he was not in such good shape to spread it. He had come from Philippi, where he and Silas had been beaten and severely flogged.  They had rescued a Christian slave girl in the name of Jesus Christ. Their reward was to be unjustly arrested, stripped of their clothing and treated like dangerous fugitives. They were put in prison with their feet in stocks, those wooden contraptions with holes in them to hold one in captivity. All of these actions were in violation of Paul’s Roman citizenship, but that didn’t stop the locals at Philippi from mistreating him and Silas.

          So Paul and Silas turned eastward, following the Egnatian Way along the coast of the Aegean Sea for 160 kilometers, or about 100 miles, to Thessalonica. Today, that is estimated as a thirty two hour walk, or about four days and three nights. I expect it took longer in first century Macedonia. Think about it. You have just walked 100 miles while you are beat up and hurting. You have been thrown out of a city and now you find yourself in another city down the road. Wouldn’t you be likely to remember what got you thrown out of that first city? Wouldn’t you be likely you keep your mouth shut and just talk quietly about your mission? If you did, you would not last long with Paul. Paul was carrying the message and he intended to deliver it.  Deliver it they did, but it wasn’t long before they were thrown out of Thessalonica as well. They left behind both men and women converts and from that visit grew a church.

         Paul probably wrote 1 Thessalonians on his second missionary journey. He wanted to get there in person again, but he never made it. Silas and Timothy were with him when he sent the letter to the church as an encouragement and a warning. In the second chapter, Paul talked about the purity of the gospel and the difficulty with knowing whom its real messengers were.

          One of the reasons of Paul’s letter, apparently, was that there were those who were disparaging not only Paul but the message he brought. Most likely, at least some of them were Jews who were not satisfied with just throwing him out of town. We really don’t know their identity for sure, but Paul talks about conflict and error and even deception in his letter.  When he addresses the church there, he writes as a friend, gently and concerned. He addresses his audience as brothers and tells them that they are very dear to him. Then Paul does something that my friend the judge probably used to do as a courier. He authenticates himself. He aligns himself with his mission. He says this to the Thessalonians: “…Our appeal does not spring from impurity…just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God, who tests our hearts.”  Paul had a message for the church at Thessalonica. It was undiluted. It was pure. It was straight from the source. The message was approved by God and Paul had been entrusted with it. He was the courier, the mailman with the news that all the world needed to hear.

          Paul and Silas had suffered to get that news out. Paul says they were shamefully treated at Philippi, but they “had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict.”

          In our denomination and in our nation and in our world, we are in a time of conflict. While those words would ring true in any time or place in history, they are nevertheless the truth today. What may be a bolder and higher truth is that the way in which we as a church, we as a denomination, we as individuals, choose to deal with and act upon that truth…will be the standard by which we are judged and, more importantly, that position which our posterity will inherit. There is much at stake.

          As in the time of Paul, nations, states and peoples stand looking for the truth. Our secular world, in an attempt to go along and get along, looks, as it should, to conflict resolution, to compromise. In the case of the Christian church and particularly in the Western nations, culture and traditional religious views have clashed in epic proportion the last several decades. Culture has succeeded, and rightly so, in reforming our view of some Biblical positions. Our time on this planet has yielded good fruit in many areas of Christian thought. For all this progress, the Bible never changed, nor did its message. What changed was our ability and discernment to see its message in a different and more Biblical light.

          But, as is the message of the Berenstein Bears of kids’ book fame, we can have “Too Much Birthday.” Too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing. Sometimes too much interpretation is no interpretation at all, but rather imposition of the new upon the old. In some of life, this might be called progress. In the case of the Bible, it is error or deceit or just plain trampling upon the truth.

          The Christian church has been entrusted with the gospel. What will we do with that trust? We must first know what it is…and what it isn’t.  For that, we may look to God’s written Word. If the Bible clearly proscribes it, bans it, then we should not dilute that message with so-called interpretation. If the Bible seems vague, then we should look elsewhere in Scripture for Scripture to illumine itself. As Paul worried about his flock and the messages it received, he strove to present that with which he had been entrusted. The message came from God and Paul was the messenger.

          Today, we are constantly presented with mixed messages, even from those entrusted with church leadership. We must always look for the truth, for the true message. It is not embedded in some mysterious code. It is clean and clear and unambiguous. It is the gospel that Paul brought to the Thessalonians and Corinthians and Galatians. It is the gospel of Mathew and Mark and Luke and Peter. It is the written Word of God and we the church, the people of God, have been entrusted with it.

          The torch has been passed. You are the church. The church is Ekklesia, the “gathering” of God’s people. Will you be a messenger? Will you bring the truth of God and not some watered down politically correct version? Can you be entrusted with the true gospel? Just as he did for Paul, God will give you the boldness to declare it, even in the midst of conflict.  Be ready to share the gospel…and yourself.

So That You May Know

2 Kings 19: 14-19

 

 

          People like to look up to someone. That’s our culture. We start out looking up to our parents or to that person or persons who act in their place.. As our world gets bigger, we are exposed to school teachers and Sunday school teachers and aunts and uncles and siblings. As we grow, we begin to notice others, like nurses or firemen or sports figures. We look for heroes. They represent something that we want to be. We want to be like them. Usually, along the way, we temporarily discard our parents as our role models. Usually, further along the way, we re-establish our parents or someone in that role as our top role models. We do that so often because, for most of us, we discover that they give us unconditional love. They don’t abandon us. They usually don’t coddle us either. If we have done something wrong, there will be a price to pay. Most parents will make sure we face the music. But they don’t leave. They are always there. We know that they will be our parents through thick and thin. That’s why for most who are asked, a parent is their favorite role model. We know who they are.

          The Old Testament is a whole series of books…thirty nine books…designed in part to tell us one simple thing. It tells us who God is. Now I know that sounds sort of silly. After all, we know who God is! We have the Bible. We have the church. We have Jesus. We know who God is.

          Well, that may be true. But even if it is, think about this: In the days of Noah and Abraham and Jacob and Joseph and Moses, who was God? Was he the same God we know now? Was he different? Who is God? There was no Bible. The church was an outgrowth of Jesus and he wasn’t due for another 1600 years or so. So how did the slaves of Egypt, the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel, come to know God? You might say one step, or one miracle, at a time.

            In Exodus 6, God tells an eighty year old Moses to liberate the people enslaved in Egypt. He makes a promise to deliver the people from the bondage of slavery and he tells Moses to tell the nation of Israel. His reason? To tell Israel this: “And you shall know that I am the Lord.” This same language is used at least seven more times in the book of Exodus. Each time, it is used during one of the plagues. It is used for both punishment and protection. God turns the waters of the Nile to blood to send Pharaoh a message that he is the Lord. God delivers Egypt from the plague of frogs, saying “so you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God.” God sends a plague of flies, but not to the land of Goshen where the nation of Israel lives, saying “so you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth.” He sends thunder, fire and hail, destroying crops and trees, but again not in Goshen and he says “so that you may know that there is none like you in all the earth.”  Then he delivers Egypt from the hail, saying “so that you may know that the earth is the Lord’s.”  When the people grumble for food to Moses, God delivers them from their hunger, sending manna from heaven saying “Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” As the people of Israel commission the tabernacle they have built for God, he promises to live in it among the people, saying “And they shall know that I am the Lord their God.”

          Eight times in the book of Exodus alone, the Bible reports that God is saying something to the effect that they shall know who God is, how powerful he is, where he is.  There are at least fifteen additional passages spread throughout the Old Testament in the books of Leviticus, Joshua, 1 and 2 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Joel. Not only did the nation of Israel and the nations of the known world not know who God was, apparently even if they did, they didn’t give God the respect he was due. And God makes it abundantly clear over the history of the Old Testament that it a mistake not to know who God is. God really wants us to know who he is.

          In ancient Egypt, where the nation of Israel was in captivity for 430 years according to Scripture, there were about forty different gods. There was Isis, the goddess of magic, marriage, motherhood and healing. There was Ra, the son god, who was king of the Egyptian gods, until Osiris, god of the underworld and the afterlife, took over. Pharaoh himself was thought of as divine. Pharaoh was unimpressed with this God that Moses carried on about. He was unimpressed even after a series of plagues beset the country. After all, wouldn’t one plague lead to another? But then, there were those plagues that didn’t come to the land of Goshen. And there was the plague of death to the firstborn. Whoever this God of Israel was, he was powerful….more powerful than the gods of Egypt.

          And yet, God’s people were slow to be convinced of the real identity of God. He was still the God with no name who claimed his people and delivered them from bondage. Was he just for the nation of Israel? Hardly! The book of Joshua records three more instances of the same phrase. God promises to exalt Joshua, the new leader, saying that he will be with him. In another instance, he calls himself the living God. When Jericho falls, a memorial of stones is erected and Joshua says it is so that “all the peoples of the world may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty.”

          The phrase is used twice more in the books of 1^st and 2^nd Kings. Although Ahab may have been the worst king in the history of Israel, he was handed a victory over the Syrian army. The deliverance comes from God, who says “I will give all the great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” Later, King Hezekiah, one of the few good kings of Israel, is besieged by the great Assyrian armies. Like all the cultures of those ancient times, the Assyrians practiced polytheism. They had about thirty gods, including Ishum, the god of fire and Ashur, the god of war. Hezekiah  prays to God for deliverance. His famous prayer is later quoted by the prophet Isaiah. Hezekiah prays “save us…that all the kingdoms of the world may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.” Hezekiah understands that the gods of Assyria are constructs. They are not real. There is only one God.

          All through the Old Testament, God goes to a lot of trouble to tell us who he is. He uses men and women and disaster and war and nations and kings and prophets to tell us that he is Lord. Throughout history, God judges. Throughout history, God forgives and restores. When Israel is judged, so are the nations. When Israel is restored, so are the nations. These sequences of judgment and restoration are intertwined with one another. As God reveals himself to his children through both judgment and restoration, the aim for all is the outworking of God’s covenants with us. The aim is redemption. God is not a Sunday morning God. He is a 24/7 God who walks with us, cares for us. God wants us to know who he is…and who we are to him. As David prayed so long ago, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

          If we can manage to be still in this environment of living on a schedule, we might improve on the record of the nation of Israel.  When God came knocking as a man, he was mostly ignored. The story of the life of Jesus is the story of yet one more rejection. Do you know who God is? He certainly has been patient with you. Be still. Listen. He’s still revealing himself…every single day.

Common Grace

Genesis 8: 20-22 et al

 

 

          I spent two years getting up every morning at 5AM to report to my ship’s captain that all the ship’s guns were ready and able to fire. He believed in being ready. The great by-product of those daily reports was that since I was already up, I would go outside to the forecastle (pronounced foc’sle). The forecastle is the bow or front of the ship. Particularly at sea, it was my time with God to start the day. It never failed to register with me that the ocean was so much bigger and more powerful than even that big ship. I could feel God’s presence in all that vastness. This week, Cindy and I took a few days to go to the beach. The night we got there, we went out on the pier and enjoyed the full moon coming up. As we stood at the end of the pier, I remarked to her that it reminded me of all those days at sea, looking out at a world of ocean.

          Do you ever wonder what stops that ocean from coming all the way to your front door? What stops the volcanoes of the world from blowing sky high? What stops cyclones and tornadoes and tsunamis and windstorms? What stops epidemics and plagues? What stops war?

          God does.

          Think of the tides. Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth. Isaac Newton discovered this about 300 years ago. Newton said that every object exerts a pull on every other object. The moon pulls on Earth, causing water to move toward it. The effect is a high tide. Since the moon rotates around the earth and turns on its own axis, tides have more and less gravitational pull. Newton knew a lot about this stuff, for he also provided us with his theory of gravity, a fairly significant scientific concept.

          This might be a good time to be reminded of all the science we now have at our disposal. We should take notice that when we give credit to these various scientists throughout history, we are paying homage to the men and women who discovered something about the universe we live in. Newton discovered gravity. Franklin discovered electricity. Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, Jonathan Salk a vaccine for polio, Christopher Columbus, or Leif Erikson to be more accurate, the new world. All of them were discoverers.  They discovered something already in existence. Nothing on this planet has ever been made from nothing by man. Only God can do that.

          When God decided to create, the year was…oh that’s right…there was no year. There was no earth. There was only chaos. God formed it all from the nothing.  The earth had no form. It was not. God made it from scratch.

          The creation story is what it sounds like. It is a story of God creating. For five God days, he created and found it good. On Day 6, God created mankind. God created man and woman and gave them dominion over all the earth. He created mankind in his image (literally “our” image--as in Trinity). This passage and those in Genesis 5:1 and 9:6 refer to that fact. This has been called the Imago Dei, the image of God.  The Bible says Day 6 was very good.

         As you know, we no longer live in Eden. Actually, we were evicted in the time of Adam. Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden. God cursed the serpent who tempted them and the ground from which they drew their crops. And yet, we are still here.

          Not too long afterward, Adam and Eve were blessed with children. The first two were Cain, a man of the field, and Abel, a herdsman. You will remember that Cain, in a fit of temper and rage, murdered his brother Abel. He was banished. He carried a mark that protected him from the violence or punishment of others. He was allowed to live out his life. He murdered his brother. And yet, we are still here.

          As the story of mankind goes forward in Genesis, the worst is yet to come. Genesis 6 finds God declaring that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, so great that God decided to blot out man from the earth. Only Noah was righteous and only Noah and his family were saved in an ark carrying all the earth’s animals for re-population. The earth was destroyed by flood. And yet, we are still here. How can all that evil and disobedience take place and find mankind still alive?

          There are those who would argue that grace is the province of Jesus, that we were only introduced to God’s grace when Jesus died on the cross. Is that grace? Of course, it is. It is by grace alone that we are saved through faith, a faith revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. Of that there is no doubt. But no grace in the Old Testament? Without the common grace extended to mankind by God in the days before the coming of Christ, there would have been no world for Christ to enter.

          Common Grace is the term coined to indicate the God-given grace to all mankind. It is not just for believers. It is not just for the elect. It is for all. It is God’s adorning of Adam and Eve with the skins of animals when they found themselves in sin and disobedience and apart from God. It is the rehabilitation of Cain in allowing him to live, to raise a family, to build a city. It is the saving of a remnant family and animals with which to re-populate the earth. It is Common Grace, grace common to all.

          While preparing for this message, I came across an author who will remain unnamed, who espoused that there is no grace in the Old Testament, that the God of the Old Testament is a God of justice and judgment, that he hates sin and punishes it, that there is no grace until Jesus. I’ll give the fellow this much. He could be right, but only in this sense. Jesus was there is the beginning. Jesus was never not, any more than God. Even Genesis 1 says that we shall make man in our image.

          How do the mountains not come crashing down on us, or the oceans drown us in our own homes? God cares. He cares even if we don’t. Isaiah 45: 4 tells us that “For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by name. I name you though you do not know me.” Why do the seasons continue to come and go, planting and harvest abound? Why does the world continue to work with all the evil that seems to be present? Because God gives us all Common Grace. In the 8^th chapter of Genesis, God covenants with Noah that “while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

          Grace is a big term. The Bible doesn’t talk about common grace or special grace. Those are man-made terms. The Bible just talks about grace. Don’t worry about remembering what the terms are. but never forget that God has not left the building. He loves his creation. He allows us great leeway in the evils we bring on ourselves, but he never leaves us. Elihu’s speech in Chapter 34 of the book of Job reminds us of what could be: “If he should set his heart to it (says Elihu of God) and gather to himself his spirt and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust.” But God has not so set his heart. Instead, he sends Common Grace to mankind every day.

          It’s Homecoming for this church. Someday it will be homecoming for Jesus. Until that day, we have kind and unswerving protection of God throughout the ages. He has promised he will not leave. For us as Christians, we also have the Special Grace of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ.  “And God so loved the world…”  You know the rest. That message is for another day. But today, let’s thank God for Common Grace.

Messages from an Avocado

Isaiah 11:1, et al

 

 

          Occasionally, something happens on the way to the pulpit, and it becomes necessary to go to plan B. Plan B is never my idea. It always comes late in the week and completely disrupts my intentions for the message on Sunday. This is one of those weeks. My daughter sent me a copy of an email she received from a friend. Her friend’s name is Jocelyn, and she is a Canadian midwife working in Rwanda.. Here is what she wrote:

              So today, I enjoyed a fresh, creamy avocado

              from a Rwandan avocado tree in our yard that

              we discovered as a shoot growing out of our

              compost heap. Five years ago, we transplanted

              it to our front yard and have since been waiting

              patiently for fruit.  Kingdom lessons on display

              for me today:

 

1.    Redeeming things from the compost pile is worthwhile.

          I’m reminded of a headstrong Jacob who became Israel, the patriarch of the twelve tribes …or a persecutor of Christians named Saul who became Paul the thirteenth Apostle. With God there is no such thing as too late. Sometimes things or people just need to be fertilized to realize their real potential.

2.    Seeds planted in fertile soil produce much fruit.

          In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus reminds the crowds gathered on the beach that when seeds are planted not among thorns or rocks or shallow ground, but rather in good soil, they produce 30, 60, even a hundredfold [Matt 13:8, Mk. 4, Lk.8].

3.    Just like the fruit we wait for takes time to mature for harvest,

        the spiritual fruit in our life takes time to ripen.

          Jocelyn refers to the fruit of the spirit recited by Paul in Galatians 5: 22, 23, the fruit of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Spiritual fruit is the basket of traits given us by the Holy Spirit once we have given over to the truth of the gospel. It is a convicting way to come to our lives. Paul says further in that passage that “if we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.”

4.    The harvest comes at God’s appointed time…(this one, strangely

        enough, is right in the middle of rainy season). Do not lose heart.

          At first, it might seem strange to think of a fruit tree coming to harvest in the middle of the rainy season. We in the West have little dealing with rainy seasons. We have learned when to plant based more upon warm weather than rain. But here we speak of an annual yield that comes in the middle of the rains. God’s world is like that. God has his own timing for his creation, and that includes us. 2^nd Peter was written by Peter probably from Rome not too long before his martyrdom in the mid 60’s AD. It serves as a brief, final reminder to the churches that by God’s grace, they will live a life pleasing to him. In the third chapter, starting with verse 8, Peter tells us that   

               “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years,

               and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is

              …patient toward you, not wishing that any

              should perish, but that all should reach

              repentance. But the day of the Lord will come

              like a thief…” [2 Pet. 3: 8-10]

 

5.    We may plant or water, but it is God who makes things grow. He

        is the ultimate One.

 

          Emily’s friend Jocelyn refers to 1 Corinthians 3:5-7, where the apostle Paul reminds a fractured Corinthian church that neither he nor Apollos nor anyone other than God himself is the author of the harvest. Paul says: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted. Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives you the growth.”

6.    Harvesting happens one fruit at a time with avocados. The tree is full of fruit that’s not quite ready yet…be patient.

 

          Jocelyn poetically expresses the doctrine of Sanctification, the process of a believer coming ever closer to God. Paul expresses it for us in Romans 6:22 in this way: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. Jocelyn tells us to be patient as the fruit readies itself, and Paul tells us in Philippians 1: 6: “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

 

7.    There’s more than enough to go around…there’s a lot more avocados than any of us can eat…rejoice at harvest time and share the joy.

 

          This Rwandan medical missionary sees the majesty that is the kingdom of God. It is big enough for all who would believe, for all who would come. In Matthew 9: 37, Jesus tells his disciples as they go throughout the cities and villages of Galilee that “The harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few, therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”  

          As it happens so many times to us in life, we walk down the path, sincerely trying to stay in step, looking for the message that we need to hear that day, and if we pay attention, we sometimes find that God has another errand for us to run, another way to look at the same day, the same walk. That happened to me this week. I was blessed with the forwarded email of a friend of my daughter, and for me, God’s message for this day was unpacked from the fruit of an African fruit tree. The message is so sublime that it is also profound. What can we learn from the avocado tree to apply to our lives? Fruit comes from droppings as well as cultivation; much can come from little; the fruit of the Spirit takes time to mature; God decides the harvest time; we are only seed planters; be patient; sanctification is a process, not an event; God’s harvest can include everyone who believes.

         Since I have borrowed so heavily from Jocelyn, I hope she might permit me to add this one observation. It is one more message from a tree and it involves a prophecy made long ago. The prophet Isaiah utters this prediction in the11th chapter of the book bearing his name: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit…” [Isaiah 11: 1]. We know that root today to be King David, a man after God’s own heart, from whose line Jesus himself was yet another branch.

        Can a tree have a mission? Of course it can. All God’s creation has a mission. The mission of the avocado tree is simple, but profound. It is the same message that God gave to Adam in Genesis 1:26. It is the same message he gives to us today. Grow, be fruitful and multiply. Our fruit is not avocados. It is disciples [Matthew 28: 19, 20].

I Wanna Be Like…

Philippians 2: 1-13

 

 

          When he played, he was something to watch. There are the famous images of him taking off at the foul line and dunking the basketball before his feet ever touched the floor. They called him His Airness. In 1991, perhaps the most famous sports commercial of all time was coined. Gatorade signed arguably the best basketball player of all time to an ad campaign and before the year was out, everyone was singing “I wanna be like Mike.” You don’t even need to be a basketball fan to remember Michael Jordan and those famous commercials. We all wanted to be like Mike. He was that good! There were many other great sports stars, but there was only one Michael Jordan.

          There have been other men and women in history who inspired us to think great thoughts, motivated us to dream big dreams. I watched the video biographies of the Roosevelts last week on PBS and was again enraptured by the energy of Teddy, the vision of FDR, the humanity of Eleanor. They were some of the best this country ever produced. They did magnificent things in magnificent times and we all watched with awe at their achievements.

          There have been other men and women who also did great things, but were not thought of as great or famous until late in life or even at death. There was Mandella of South Africa, 29 years in prison, or Gandhi of India, whose fasting and hunger strikes made him a pioneer in passive resistance, or Theresa of Calcutta, India, a Catholic nun who fed the hungry. These men and women came to their fame mostly by their modeling of humility.

          There is another slogan which caught on fairly well for a time. We still see it around. It’s called “WWJD” or What Would Jesus Do? Started as a grassroots movement by a Christian youth group from Michigan in the 1990’s, it caught on through the sale of bracelets with the initials on it. The bracelets honored the model of yet another man who showed us the face of humility…humility and obedience. He was, and is, the most powerful figure in world history. In fact, he authored it… history, that is. His name was Jesus and we call him Lord.

          Americans like heroes. We like our heroes big. We like our heroes strong. We like them good looking and successful and full of themselves. Look at the heroes we pick. Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, people bigger than life. Was Jesus like that? Well, he did many miracles and mighty acts. Was Jesus bigger than life in his actions? Well, he walked on water and calmed the sea. Yes, that is pretty high cotton, but did he act the part? What kind of example did Jesus set for us?

          Paul, writing to the church he had started in Philippi, was worried about their spiritual progress. He knew full well that the church would be tempted by many forces in the world and that the option of staying still was not really viable. The church must grow spiritually or wither. Paul knew the importance of unity and harmony, and he had the example of Jesus to illustrate it. Paul wanted the church in Philippi to be like Jesus.

          What does it mean to be like Jesus? Count others more significant than yourself, said Paul. Look to the interests of others. Do these things in humility.  Wanna be like Jesus? Put others first.

          Paul tells us that Jesus was in the form of God. What did he mean? He meant what it sounds like, that Jesus was divine. Try to imagine what it might be like to be divine and to voluntarily take on the form of man. Movies of various kinds, from those about God to those about angels, have tried to capture this idea on film. It’s hard to grasp. Imagine if you will, what comes to mind when you think of heaven—that sort of eternal indemnity from pain and sorrow and want—that forever happy, invulnerable sort of nature. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to picture the way it will be. I do think that whatever it is, I would never want to go back.

          Imagine giving that up on purpose. That’s what Jesus did when he took on the form of man. He didn’t stop being God; God is never not God. He did not empty himself of his deity. But he did lay aside any manner of existence that was equal to God.  He layered up this humanity on a level with you and me.  He put on the clothes and skin of mankind and walked on the same stones that we did. He had the bruises to prove it. Yes, he performed miracles and mighty acts, but always under the direction of the Father and the Spirit. The Scriptures remind us of this. For example, John’s gospel finds Jesus saying to the Pharisees: “I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.”

          He who was in the form of God took on the form of a servant. It wasn’t enough for Jesus to become human. He went much farther. Paul tells the Philippian church that Jesus humbled himself. How? He became obedient. He who was God became obedient. He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. This was no ordinary death, but no matter how much we describe the pain, torture and humiliation of the cross, we cannot do the description justice, for it omits the very act for which Christ’s coming was directed, that of taking on the sin of mankind in substitution for you and me. He shouldered that for us as well on that cross.

          On the night of his arrest, Jesus had a final meal with his followers. He took a towel and a basin filled with water…and he washed the feet of his friends. Can you think of anything more humble? The Son of God got down on his knees and bathed the feet of each and every man. He not only took the form of a man; he took the form of a servant.

          We live in a culture which craves superheroes, but they cannot provide what we really need. There is a story about Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion. He was aboard a jet ready to take off. The flight attendant noticed his seatbelt was not fastened. When she asked him to buckle up, Ali said “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.”  The flight attendant responded: “Superman don’t need no airplane.”

         The church does not need superheroes.  In fact, if you want to be of value to yourself and your church, that is the last thing you want. The church needs spirit-formed leadership which takes its cue from how it will serve. Jesus was the Son of God. He sits on the right hand of God today. He will come to judge every one of us. He is Kurios…Lord. He is the most exalted of all, and his tools are a towel and a basin. His credentials are obedient servant.

       What are yours? Do you wanna be like Jesus? God on earth could take any form he wanted. He chose to take the form of a servant obedient to the will of his heavenly father. 

           How do you come to your life? Are you ambitious for a corner office? An expensive car? What are the earmarks of your life? How would people describe you? Would they say you are successful? Talented? Smart? Would they say you are humble?

          As they were about to finally enter the Promised Land after forty years of wandering in the desert, the people of Israel stood and listened to their leader Joshua, and this is what he said to them. “Choose this day whom you will serve…But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” [Joshua 24: 16]. Who will you and your house serve? Will you follow the ways of the world, or will you be like Jesus?