Audio version coming soon!

I have told a cute story over the years about a man who met one of those folks who had one of those huge travel trailer type things, you know, when you go on vacation, like a Winnebago. He was out in the parking lot talking to this guy and the guy is all excited about his Winnebago.  He says, “Yeah, it’s great!  We go all over the country; and it sleeps eight.  By the way, what do you do?”  The pastor said, “Well I pastor the church over there, and it sleeps about one hundred and fifty.”

As you know, I have been preaching through the Apostles’ Creed.  The problem is when you do doctrinal preaching, sometimes, it can be rather boring.  In other words, we might literally sleep one hundred and fifty.  But, you know what?  I like to preach about doctrine, about Christian truth.  It excites me.  It might sound strange, but what I am hoping is that as we go through this that some of my enthusiasm will rub off on you, and we can all learn something.  These are things we already know, in most cases. But it is good to revisit them because they do form a kind of helmet around our head to help us when we doubt. We hear all kinds of things out there on television or people who argue this and that, all kinds of books that are written about “what really happened.”  They form a shell around our head to help us to ward off these things.  Or, another analogy, they are our foundation on which we stand which will take us into eternity.  So, these things are exciting.

Now, we have gone through the Apostles’ Creed and learned several things.  We started out by saying that “I believe in God.”  That is what the Apostles’ Creed starts with.  “I believe in God;” notice it doesn’t say “We.”  We noted that when we believe in something it starts with you, the individual.  Your faith doesn’t depend on your grandparents, your parents, your children, or anybody else.  You have to come to faith.  You have to believe these things.  We all do, as individuals.  Yes, God brings us together as a Church, but our faith is our faith. One of the dangers of being a pastor is, and for a pastor’s child (PK’s we call them – preacher’s kids), you know, sometimes pastors get so wrapped around the axle because their kids are an example of him or her.  “Well, they have to believe, too.”  It is hard.  I have always known that my children have to come to faith themselves.  I have tried not to be too strict.  Kathy might be able to tell you different, I am not sure, but…  But it is a tricky business.  I prayed when I saw them come out of the womb.  “Lord, bring them to faith, their faith.”  You know, I criticize the Church, I am not talking about church with a little “c”, I am talking about Presbyterian Church, and the American Church.  We don’t do enough evangelism.  We are not doing enough evangelism. But you know what?  God brings the Church together every generation.  The Holy Spirit is still working.  People are still coming to Christ.  People still show up to Church, because people are coming.  We would like to see more.  But, people are coming; and that is encouraging, that’s encouraging. 

We have learned that faith starts with ourselves.  We believe.  We say we believe in God. Well, what kind of God do we believe in?  We “believe in the Father Almighty.”  We noted that Father has little to do with gender, very little to do with gender.  People get wrapped around the axle again with this idea of:  Is it a she or a he, or whatever, that sort of thing.  God doesn’t have gender like you and I do.  But, he is a Father.  It points to the fact that God is a personal God who can be known.  It points to the fact that God is the Creator of all things and we, and all things aside, depend on him for our existence of every moment.  There are a lot of wonderful theological things about God as Father, who is also Almighty.  The Christian view of God is that God is not only Maker of Earth and Heaven, all of the Earth and all of his details, but the entire Universe and the billions of galaxies and stars in every detail.  I have said a couple times to you that when I think about that, I feel like Winnie the Pooh, a bear of little brain, because it is so much bigger than any of us can understand.  But, that is good, because if we could understand God, God wouldn’t be God.  I would be suspicious of a God I could understand, totally.  Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t know him; we can.  But God is a God who is the “Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.”

We learned that Jesus Christ is his only Son.  That is, again, it doesn’t mean that Jesus is his son like Thor was the son of Odin or Hercules the son of Zeus.  It is pointing to the fact that Jesus is God walking on the earth.  Yes, it does say that Jesus is the Son.  He was born of the Virgin Mary, the son of a human woman, through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Again, the Incarnation, bigger than we can understand but we affirm that Jesus was God walking on the earth.

And that this Christ, the Messiah, died for us on the cross, died a real death on the cross.  You know, we have seen so many people who want to deny that Jesus actually died, that Jesus really, really died, that it means something; but he did.  The Bible affirms and says very clearly that if Jesus didn’t really die, you can’t be saved.  Two weeks ago when I preached, remember I pointed to that cross.  The cross is the centerpiece of Christianity.  And yes, it is strange to people.  It is strange to hang an instrument of torture on your neck as a necklace.  It would be like having an electric chair there in modern times.  And to put it up on our churches, but we do that.  Why do we do that? We do it because it is a sign of God’s love.  It is a sign of God’s justice.  It is the way we are saved.  The Bible says “without the shedding of blood, you will not be saved.”  Some people today in the Church deny that.  They say “Oh that is too violent.”  Well yeah, it is because it was necessary.  Our sins are bigger than we think and we are not going anywhere without that cross.

Well, what happens next, that is where we are today.  That’s where we are.  What happens after the cross?  It is like a chronology, if you will.  “He died on the cross and then he descended into hell.”  Now we have gotten to one of those places where it is really hard.  What does that mean? I took a church, actually two churches, when I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee.  One church was called Eastminster Presbyterian.  It was about three hundred plus members; but they were yoked with a smaller church of about fifty.  They had an interesting arrangement.  The bigger church paid me and the smaller church paid the youth pastor.  So we got along pretty well.  But, the funny part about it was, I would preach in the little church early and the second church late.  The early church, when they said the Apostles’ Creed, they “descended into hell.”  When I got to the other church, they didn’t “descend into hell.”  For the first three or four months I was confused.  I would forget to say we “descended into hell” at the first church and then remembered and then I would do just the opposite.  I would “descend into hell” and then I wouldn’t “descend into hell.”  I’m trying to be silly here a little bit.  But, it was a little bit confusing.  Now, why do some churches have it and some not?   Well, because this phrase, “descended into hell,” for one thing it is confusing, and the other is it wasn’t in the original Apostles’ Creed.  It was added a little later, about four centuries.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it.  What is going on?  What does it mean to us?  Well, first, in the Creed, hell is not really hell.  I am not swearing when I say “hell.”  Hell is not really hell.  Now, it changed along the way.  After the seventeenth century, “Hell” became the state of eternal retribution.  It changed from something else.  Now I don’t preach on “Hell” enough, I probably should.  I remember at another church I served down in Texas, I preached on an

August Sunday morning when the air conditioning was out, and I remember getting up and saying, “You are allowed to get up and take your coat off.  I am going to preach on ‘Hell’ and it is going to be very short.”  I actually didn’t because I wasn’t prepared, but….  …The state of eternal retribution. In the Bible the word is Gehennaand it refers to the Valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem.  Back in the day this little valley just outside of Jerusalem was the place where the pagans of the Jews, but they were pagans, all around, would come to this valley and they would worship the Ba’als, or the god, Moloch, and they would sacrifice their children in fire.  Burn them alive!  It’s terrible.  There is a place near there where they have found a football field sized in which the bones of the children are stacked up three foot deep.  It became the place, literally, of hell.  Later in history, people would simply dump their animals there, or in some cases, human beings.  The legend had it that there was always a fire going there and it became a symbol of this place of eternal retribution.  It exists.  It was a putrid, horrible place.

Now, in the Bible, I feel like, in some ways, doing a series like this that I am doing, it is kind of like 24, on television.  You know, you bring up things and then you resolve them later.  Well later on, the very last sermon in August, we are going to talk about “the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting,” and we are going to talk about some of these things; but the Bible says that there is a state of being after we die – in the Old Testament they called it Sheol – where we go and Jesus has transformed this place into a kind of paradise, not the Muslim Paradise with lots of virgins; but, a paradise, which is a wonderful place; but it is temporary.   At the end of history we all get a new body.  I will talk more about that.  I am maybe whetting your appetite, or in your curiosity, going, “Huh?”  But that is what is going to happen.  But the whole thing about Jesus descending into hell, lots of different interpretation, but the thing we need to remember about it is this:  that Jesus has gone there before.  Jesus has been there before.

When you are a soldier in the Army, if you go overseas and you serve in a war zone, you get a patch on your right shoulder of the unit you served in.  When people see it, they know you were overseas and served in a war zone.  We don’t say it, but it is kind of a mark of pride, a little bit.  Sometimes people get up and they talk to you about being deployed and all those different kinds of things and I try not to, but since I have been deployed, I sometimes say in my mind, “Who are you to talk to me about being deployed?  You haven’t been there yet?”  And it is not fair.  It is not fair.  It isn’t fair.  But it still is there.  Well in some ways we could say that to God?  “Who are you to talk to me about death and resurrection?”  But God’s been there, you see.  Jesus really died.  You know there are people who say that Jesus didn’t really die.  They got him off the cross.  We have the Dan Brown thing, you know—he went and got married to Mary Magdalene and produced children—all that kind of thing.  I had somebody tell me, “Oh, that’s great.  We should talk about those things and learn new truth.”  It was a member of a church and I am going, “We should certainly talk about these things but the implications are that if you believe that,” well I will talk about that in a minute, “but we shouldn’t be here.  It undercuts everything we believe.”  But God’s been there before us.

Jesus is our trailblazer.  Look at this wonderful verse.  Jesus is talking to his disciples, right at the end, and he says, “And if I go, I am going to go, and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”  (John 14:3)  See the picture is that Jesus is going to lead us through when we die.  He is going to lead us through.  I love that.

Another way of thinking of it is an example I read, a man named Soren Kierkegaard used to tell this wonderful tale about how a father and his daughter got caught in a burning building.  They were in the second story and the father was able to leap out the window and land safely on the ground and then he turned and said to his daughter, “Honey, jump.”  And the daughter cried out, “Daddy, I can’t see you!”  And he said, “Don’t worry, I can see you.  Jump.  Trust me!”  That is what God says to us.  We can’t see what is going to happen in death.  We are not able to see that; but Jesus sees us.  So don’t worry. Don’t be afraid.  That’s the truth.  Jesus has been there before.  So when we say “Descended into Hell,” we probably should change the wording—that Jesus simply walked in the path of death, because that is what it means.

Then we come to the most exciting part of all.  I have to admit, I love preaching Easter sermons. If you can’t preach an Easter sermon as a preacher, without notes, with just getting up and talking, because that is what it is all about.  “The Third Day He Rose Again From the Dead.”  Now what is this “third day” thing?  I used to think, let’s see.  I am thinking in the modern ways.  Seventy-two hours, well, no, that doesn’t quite work.  Well, it is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That’s how ancients would think.  So it is the third day he rose again. 

But there is something we have to remember:  If there is no Resurrection, we should all be doing something else.  Jesus rose from the dead. Now remember I said the cross of Christ was the center of Christianity. Well I didn’t lie to you but there is something more.  You see it is the Cross plus the Resurrection.  Without the Cross there is no eternal life.  But, without the Resurrection, Jesus would have been dead and wouldn’t have completed the work.  Now, I would just ask you, what if Jesus was like Confucius or like Gandhi or some other great teacher.  If all we had were the teachings, would it make any difference?  And the answer would be a resounding “no!”  Actually I would say, “yes, it would make a big difference; because if he didn’t rise from the dead, why are we here?”  If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead it actually would be o.k. for you to sleep in on Sunday morning.  It actually would be o.k. for you to play golf on Sunday morning.  It would even be o.k. for you to leave church early and go to a Vikings game this fall.  Whoops, I am stepping on toes, I know….  You should eat, drink and be merry because it doesn’t matter any more, unless church is for you just having donuts and coffee and fellowship.  If there is no Resurrection, we all shouldn’t be here.  Paul himself says the same thing.  He says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”  (1 Corinthians 15:17)  You see, the Resurrection is like the completion of something.  It is like when a general surrenders to another general.  You know, the war is all but over but it isn’t complete until the surrender is signed, or the sword has been given over.  It completes it all. 

We believe, because the Scriptures say, that Jesus rose from the dead.  Well you might say, “Well how do I believe that?”  That is a legitimate question.  “How do I believe that?”  Well one is what I have been trying to say to you, it is absolutely necessary to believe.  If you are going to be a Christian, you have to believe in that.  Your faith is futile if you don’t believe it.  But even more, there is lots of evidence, lots of evidence.  Now, it is courtroom evidence, not scientific evidence.  Scientific evidence means you go back and try to recreate it in the laboratory.  That is not going to happen. But if you take this as courtroom evidence, there were five hundred witnesses to Jesus rising from the dead.  He appeared to people multiple times.  It doesn’t have the sense of being hallucinations.  You know I have seen people with hallucinations. I have had a few myself.  It doesn’t work quite that way.  It doesn’t work that way.  And then the lives of the disciples themselves were so completely changed that they would walk up to people and say, “Jesus rose from the dead.”  That was a threat of death but they didn’t care.  Plus, the Church…  You know, I am getting so sick of these books that are written that say the Church is cause of all the wars and suffering of the world.  If it weren’t for the Christian Church, we wouldn’t have half the hospitals in the world, half the educational institutions, and untold people who are helped and fed.  And even today, some of the best relief organizations are run by Christians.  Now we have the United Nations, I am not saying they are bad; but the best ones are run by Christians.  If it weren’t for Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ, this world would be a really horrible place, more than it is. More than it is.  Plus, the nature of God…  Remember I talked to you about the virgin birth and how some people have a hard time with that?  But, if you have already accepted that God is Father Almighty, and could make this whole universe, why can’t he reverse the things he has done?  You know, we think death is natural only because it happens to everybody but it wasn’t original.  God can reverse the natural order of things, because he is God.  Once you have accepted God Almighty, a virgin birth or a resurrection isn’t that hard.  It isn’t that hard.

We should have a healthy anticipation of what is to come!  Now this is a little precursor to some of the stuff we will talk about, but the practical idea of believing in a resurrection is, you know, we ought to have a little dance in our step all the time.  You know, I have told you a couple times that sometimes I, maybe not cringe, but you know when people talk about, well, they are talking with one another and they say, “How’s your life going?”  And they say, “Well it is better than being under the sod.”  “At least I’m on top of the ground and not under it.”  You know, it is o.k.  It really is o.k. but you know to some degree, if you want to be consistent, where would you rather be?  With Jesus in Paradise, or here?  Hmmm?  Well, you might say here.  Now, I know, I know.  I’m not afraid of death and I’m not trying to lift myself up.  I am not terribly hot on the process.  I have seen people die and sometimes it is o.k. and sometimes it is not. So I understand that.  I do.  I do understand.  But, as Paul says, “I count almost as nothing the trials and the sufferings of this time compared to what awaits us in glory.” “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared…” (1 Corinthians 2:9)   There is some sense in which you should be looking forward to this time even a thousand times more than your greatest vacation, or the birth of your grandchild, or whatever you can think.  Of all the wonderful things in the world, this is going to be much better, so much better, because you, you, have eternal life in Jesus Christ.  Indeed the story of the whole Bible is a reversal of what happens.  We lost Paradise and God is giving it back to us in spades.  We can’t imagine what it is going to be like but it is going be wonderful.

I’ll close with a story I told my first Easter here, my first Easter here, seven years ago.  In a Sunday school class a teacher asked, “What did Jesus say after he walked out of the tomb on that day?”  And one of the little girls stood up and said, “Tada!”

What are you going to say when you see him for the first time?

Would you pray with me?

Lord God, thank you for going to death for us, real death that you actually did it and that means something because we know because you did you will be with us.  You have been there before.  You are our trailblazer.  You walked the path.  You will guide us through.  You have promised that.  Thank you.  Thank you for what awaits us because we too, because you were raised, we will be raised.  It isn’t just a vain hope.  It isn’t just pie in the sky.  It isn’t just believing something we know isn’t so.  It is real.  It is true.  It is great.  Help us to believe it.  Help us to look forward to it.  Help us to live our lives as people who know where they are going and it is not bad, it’s great.  Help us live that way in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

We are picking up where we left off and we are in the process of memorizing some Scripture.  So we want to take a few moments and see if we can remember that.  We will continue to do that when I am speaking throughout the summer.  We have already learned a couple different Scriptures.  Anybody remember the first one?  2 Corinthians 5:17.  O.K.  Rhonda’s got it.  Here we go:

2 Corinthians 5:17

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

2 Corinthians 5:17

Very good.  That’s what we learned in May; so that is an opportunity for you to review it and continue to stay on it.  We moved on after that to Romans 12:1.  

Romans 12:1

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—which is your spiritual worship.

Romans 12:1

If you turn your order of worship over, today’s Scriptures are there.  What I have done is I have given you a couple different versions.  We are going to actually say it here as part of the New Revised Standard but it is our next Scripture and it refers to Scripture itself.  So we are going to say that together and then we will say a prayer and then we will get into our message.  This is 2 Timothy 3:16.

2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness.

2 Timothy 3:16

I invite you to take and embrace that this week.  Would you pray with me once again?

Lord we thank you for your word and Lord we ask that you would continue to use it for good in our lives.  Thank you Lord.  Quicken our hearts to hear what your Spirit is telling us this day.  Amen

Well, I recently had some work I had to have done on my car.  It was part of a manufacturer’s recall to repair the brakes on it.  So I took it in and as I took it in I wanted a technician to work on it that knew what he was doing.  Right?  Don’t you want that?  Don’t you want someone who knows what they are doing?  I didn’t want a technician that believed he or she knew what they were doing or had read about it in a technical manual, I wanted someone who knew, right?  Maybe if you are facing surgery, you know where I am going….you want a surgeon who knows how to perform the surgery, right?  You don’t want one who believes they know how.  That probably wouldn’t be a good thing.  There are just some things in our lives that we want and we need to know.  Knowledge is an important part of our lives.  It is something that is critical to who we are.  Imagine if we didn’t have the knowledge to build a bridge correctly.  Would you want to drive over it?  I wouldn’t.  Knowledge can be defined as, putting yourself in touch with what is true, putting yourself in touch with what is true.  When you know something, you know the way things really are.  It brings an element of truth and reality to it.  We know that two plus two equals four, right?  Mathematics is built on that knowledge.  When you know that two plus two is four, you know that’s the way it really is.  Right.  Having knowledge around a topic, whatever that topic may be, will help you navigate that topic and the reality of that topic; whether that topic be auto repair, whether it be medicine, whether it be physics, whether it be literature, it doesn’t matter.  If you know that topic it helps you navigate that topic effectively, with reality. 

And you know what?  That also applies to the study of God called theology.  It also applies to Scripture.  For when people lack knowledge it can lead to problems, right?  Think about what happens when we don’t know something, where it goes, whether it be medicine or any of those topics it can lead us astray and it can cause trouble.  The prophet Hosea knew this.  He said in the Old Testament, “my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.”  My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.  When there is a lack of knowledge, chaos can ensue.  This knowledge that is needed for a spiritual life is just as important as the knowledge that is needed for any other part of your life whether it be professional, relational, or whatever.  We need to have that knowledge about our spiritual life and Scripture is the source of that knowledge.  Scripture is the source of the knowledge that is needed for a spiritual life.  Too many people in the Church today, I hate to say that.  Too many people, including people in the Church today, do not have a good grounding in Scripture.  Our lack of ability to navigate spiritual truth very well can lead us off course very easily.  We see that time and time again, don’t we, in the T.V., in the papers, all around.

In 2007 Time Magazine conducted a survey and they said only half of the U.S. adults could name one of the four gospels.  And that less than half could name Genesis as the first book in the Bible.  Now, that is all of the U.S. but when they did it for those who attended Church, it wasn’t much better folks.  In 2005 a study found that English teachers in both public and private schools said that students who were familiar with the Bible had a distinct educational advantage over those who did not.  There is something about having knowledge of the Bible.  So the Bible brings a knowledge that is important for all of us to have.  I think that our Scripture speaks to that, doesn’t it?  It speaks first to its source, it is “inspired by God;” and then it tells you what it can do once we have that knowledge.  It “is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training.”  That is what it can do once we know it.  But that still leaves us hanging, doesn’t it?  Because many of us want to know, how do we gain that knowledge?  How do we gain knowledge about the Bible?  How do we get it into our hearts, our minds and ultimately our souls.

Well it may sound trivial, but the starting point for it is simply to read it.  Read the Bible.  As we read, and I want to encourage you to do that, as you read, look for the ways that God reveals himself beyond just the story that is going on, look for how God reveals his character, how he reveals his soul through the pages of Scripture.  As you read Scripture, the ebbs and the flows of Scripture, especially if you are new to Scripture or if you are unsure of the Scripture or unsure of your knowledge.  I lately have been reading through the story of David again, just enjoying it and seeing all the ups and downs that have gone through David’s life.  It is a great story.  That is the way we kind of get a piece of how God is working, how God works through peoples lives, what it tells us about God, as well.

I want to invite you that if you are not sure of your Bible knowledge, and it is O.K. to say that, then what I want to invite you to do is to maybe, what I say, zoom out a couple stops to get a bigger picture of God’s work.  What I mean by that, if you have ever had to Google something on Google maps, you know you type in the address and it takes you right to the address and you have it on a map; but you are not really familiar with it and you don’t know what the cross streets are, what do you do?  You zoom out a couple stops, don’t you?  Until you can get a highway or a major intersection that you recognize and then it helps you orient yourself for where you need to go.  That is what I think we need to do with Scripture.  I think too many of us, particularly those of us who have grown up in the Church, have learned to start too small, or to stay too small with things like word studies or verse by verse Bible studies.  Those things are good.  Those things are needed.  But lots of times when that is all we have, we fail to see the forest from the trees.  So what I want to encourage us to do is to zoom out a couple stops and look at the bigger themes that go throughout Scripture, things like the Abrahamic promise that God gave to him and how that carries through the pages of Scripture, why the prophets were needed, not just what they said, but why were they needed. Beyond that, why did Jesus stay focused on his purpose?  How did he do that? Or, how the Church spread across Asia Minor?  Those are things that will help us absorb and gain knowledge about Scripture.  That is what happens when we read it.  When you read or you study Scripture, how many of you have ever had that opportunity where you read a passage and you go back to it again and it says something completely different to you?  Have you ever had that happen? Yeah.  That is the Holy Spirit working though Scripture in your heart, leading you to where you need to be. That is many times where the reproof and the correction come from.  It is the work of the Spirit moving in your spirit with God speaking to you.  I think that is what is meant when it says that Scripture is active and alive and sharper than any two-edged sword.  That is what happens when you read, when you take it in and allow yourself to hear God’s voice in the midst of it, and when you do that, Scripture says about itself it will not return void.  It will have a positive impact in your life.

So read, read the Scriptures.  Read them devotionally, read them for study, read them to reveal God’s character, read them to follow the major movements in Scripture, as well.  Read.  It is a great way to gain knowledge about God.  And if reading gets us started toward knowledge then we must also take the time to meditate on Scripture, as well. If reading is what helps bring understanding, then meditation helps bring depth to that understanding.  Think of it like studying a great work of art.  I mean, I know that I can tell you about the statue of David.  I can tell you where it is, I can tell you a little about it; but if I were to go there and spend some time and study it closer, to absorb it, take time to reflect on it, what would happen?  I would have a greater knowledge of the statue, wouldn’t I?  That is kind of what happens when we meditate on Scripture.

Another way to think about it is when we read Scripture it is like a square.  It is important, we need it and it is good for us.  But when we meditate on it, all of a sudden it goes from being one dimensional to almost three dimensional; it’s in perspective.  It gives us perspective around it and that is what happens, I think, when we meditate on Scripture.

Understand the biblical meditation is about filling yourself with God’s word.  We have to make the differentiation that that is different than when you just hear the word meditation, which really means Eastern meditation.  Eastern meditation is about emptying yourself.  Biblical meditation is about filling yourself with Scripture, and that is a huge difference.  It is the idea that biblical meditation gets the Bible into you.

One of the great exercises to do that came from a man by the name of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  He taught his followers an exercise that he called “imaginative meditation”.  He encouraged his followers to enter the gospel story.  What he said was “take a story out of Scripture and become one of the participants in the story.” So let’s take the story of the crucifixion.  You pick a character that was in the crucifixion story, whether it was one of the thieves on the cross, whether it was Mary watching her son die, maybe it was one of the Roman guards, maybe it was one of his disciples standing from afar.  You read the story and you reflect on what it would have been like to be that person in that story. What did you see?  What were you feeling?  What were you experiencing as that was going on?  And it moves you into the story.  It allows God to speak to you as you enter into that story, and the pages of Scripture come alive at that point.

A couple years ago we taught a class called “Eating your Bible.”  This is one of the exercises we did.  We will probably, maybe, offer it up again this coming year.  So be watching for that.  But meditation is the next step that allows us to think deeply about the words that are on the printed page before you.  I want to invite you to do that.  Take time to enjoy and to meditate on those words, and if meditation adds another layer to that knowledge, then so does praying Scripture.  You have probably heard of “let’s pray Scripture.”  Well, I want to talk a little bit about that.  The idea here is that you take the words of the Bible and you turn them into prayers, prayers to God.  Now what I want to invite you to do is to take the red pew bibles that are in front of you and we are going to do a couple examples of this.  What I want to invite you to do is to turn to Psalm 25, which is page 502 in your red pew bible, and we are going to start by looking at the first three verse of Psalm 25.  This is a very easy, very direct way to pray Scripture because it is all laid out for you.  All you basically have to do is to pray the words back instead of reading them.

Psalm 25, the first three verses.  As you look at these words you can see how they can become prayers very easily. 

To you, O Lord, I lift up my

          soul.

O my God, in you I trust;

    do not let me be put to shame;

    do not let my enemies exult

          over me.

Do not let those who wait for

          you be put to shame;

    let them be ashamed who are

          wantonly treacherous.

A very easy, a very direct way to just say, “I am just going to recite these back as prayer to God,” a very easy way to do that.  The Psalms are probably one of the easiest books to do that in; but you can also take another Psalm which is not necessarily direct as this and just basically rephrase that.  So what we are going to do with that one is Psalm 24; it is on the same page.  Look at Psalm 24, verses 3 through 6.  It says:

Who shall ascend the hill of the

          Lord?

    And who shall stand in his

          holy place?

Those who have clean hands

          and pure hearts,

    who do not lift up their souls

          to what is false,

    and do not swear deceitfully.

They will receive blessing from

          the Lord,

    and vindication from the God

          of their salvation.

Such is the company of those

          who seek him,

    who seek the face of the God

          of Jacob.

O.K., so how do you turn this into a prayer?  Maybe you start by saying, “Lord, Lord I want to ascend your hill.  I want to ascend your holy hill.  I want to stand in your holy place, God. And Lord I know I need clean hands and a pure heart, God; so clean my hands, purify my heart, God, that I might stand before you.  Lord help me not to lift up my soul to what is false, help me not to swear deceitfully.  Lord, thank you, thank you that you will give me that blessing as I stand in your presence and I will be vindicated because you are the God of my salvation.  See how that goes?  Is that hard?  It is not real hard, is it?  That is what I want to encourage you to do.  Now we are we are going to try one that maybe you had not thought of as something you could pray, but we are going to do it anyway.  I want you to turn to Acts Chapter 12, verse 6 through 11.  It is on page 131.  And this is actually a narrative.  This is part of a narrative story.  So how do you pray a narrative? Alright, it is a story of Peter being released from prison.  I will read the story and then I will give you an idea of how it might go.  This is Acts, Chapter 12, verse 6 through 11:

The very night before Her’od was going to bring him out, Peter, bound with two chains, was sleeping between two soldiers, while guards in front of the door where keeping watch over the prison. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell.  He tapped Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.”  And the chains fell off his wrists. The angel said to him, “Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.”  He did so.  Then he said to him, “Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.”  Peter went out and followed him; he did not realize that what was happening with the angel’s help was real; he thought he was seeing a vision.  After they had passed the first and second guard, they came before the iron gate leading in to the city.  It opened for them of its own accord, and they went outside and walked along a lane, when suddenly the angel left him.  Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Her’od and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.”

(Tape is blank for a short time but picks up with the following:)

God rescue me.  Send your angels.  There are no guards, no gates that can hold your power, O God.  Come, rescue me.  Free me from whatever it is that is holding my back and Lord I will give you glory and I will know it is for you and for your kingdom.

Something as simple as that is a way to pray Scripture.  That is what we want to do. That is a way to do that in a way that makes sense and in a way that can allow you to absorb Scripture in ways that you have never before.  So we have been talking about the getting the Bible into us and it is important to do that because we need to have that knowledge, don’t we?  But we can’t stop there; that is not enough. 

James says we must be doers of the word not just simply hearers of the word.  In other words, we need to act on what we know.  In Jewish thought there was no separation between knowing and doing.  They were exactly the same.  So in other words, you know something by doing it.  So knowing was doing, doing was knowing.  The proof of whether you knew something or not was whether you did it.  So if you weren’t doing something that you said you knew, in the Jewish way of thinking you really didn’t know it.

So we need to do something with the things that we know.  Well I am a graduate of Bethel Seminary and, as such, I have the ability to audit any class at the school that I want to.  What is auditing a class?  It basically means you get to go to class, sit in there, you can listen to the lectures but you don’t have to do anything in the class because you are not graded on it.  You get lots of information but you don’t have to do anything with it.  And I think that is what many of us are doing.  We are auditing the Bible.  We have lots of information but we are not doing much with it.  What do you say we change that, huh?  What do you say we change that?  Imagine what might happen, if you, as you read through the Bible, made a commitment that every time you came across something that the Bible told you to do you tried to do that as best you could in your world today, whatever it might be.  What might happen?  How might that change you?  You might that change your attitude?  How might that change your faith?  And what would happen if all of us as the Church here at Faith did that?  What might happen here at Faith? 

Well, I like airplanes and someday I would actually like to learn to fly one.  Let’s say someday I decide I am going to do it and I am going to go to ground school and I am going to learn everything there is to learn about airplanes. I am going to learn about the dynamics of flight, and how you get a heavy piece of metal up in the air, how that happens.  I am going to learn about all the weather factors that can complicate flying and I am going to learn what to do in all those situations.  I am going to learn all the controls and electronics of an airplane so I can take off and land and learn how to fly through the air.  I am going to learn everything there is to know about flying an airplane; but never get in a cockpit.  Who wants to go up on a flight with me?  (Laughter)  Exactly.  Exactly. 

Well I want to encourage all of us to learn to fly, learn to fly with God.  Get his word into you and you will be soaring before you know it.

Let me pray for us.

Holy God thank you for your word, thank you for the way you watch over us and you are so gentle and tender with us, Lord, God. Lord we thank you that you have given us your word and it is alive and active and it is something that can change us and move us closer to you because that is really the end result.  That is our end goal, that we might be closer to you, Jesus.  So Lord thank you for the gift of your word, may it bear fruit in our lives as we grow in its knowledge and its application in our lives, in your name, Jesus.  Amen. 

 As we begin the Sermon what I would like to ask you to do is let’s stand and recite the Creed and say what we believe.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
    Maker of heaven and earth,
    and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the virgin Mary,
    suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
    from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
    the holy catholic church;
    the communion of saints;
    the forgiveness of sins;
    the resurrection of the body;
    and the life everlasting.

Amen.

Would you pray with me?

Father, thank you for our Lord Jesus; thank you for your work in history; thank you that ancient Christians formulated doctrinal belief and did it in such a way that we could understand, short and sweet, yet powerful.  We ask you Lord today that, as we look at a part of that Creed, we would understand a little bit more of what it meant for you to go to the Cross through Jesus Christ, what it means for us and what it means for the world.  Be with us Lord as we listen and here.  We pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

The story of an older minister who had done some services at his church and right after church he went out to dinner.  He had his bible in his hand as he sat down and ate.  There was a man who was kind of a skeptic who observed the minister as he came in and he thought he would have a little fun with the minister.  So he went up to him and he said, “Sir, do you believe that book?”  The old man said, “Yes I do.”  “Do you believe everything in it?”  He said, “Yes, I do.”  “Well, don’t you have any doubts or questions about what’s in that book?”   And the older minister opened up his bible and showed the man some of the passages he had been reading that had question marks in the margin, and he said, “Yes, I have many questions.”  “Well, what do you do with those questions?  What do you do with your doubts?”  The minister answered, “Well, it’s just like this fish I just ate.  I eat all the meat and I let any fool who wants to, choke on the bones.”

I guess he had a bad night….  That is not to say that we shouldn’t have doubts.  Everybody has doubts about things.  As a matter of fact, doubts are pretty good, I mean, we should be skeptical about some things that we hear.  I think sometimes we are not skeptical enough.  Everybody has doubts.  I like the old sign in the barber shop I go to up in Glen Lake.  It has on the wall, it says:  I’d like to be an optimist, but I doubt that it would work out.  But there is kind of a problem with doubts particularly today.  I don’t know about you, but when I went to college and to graduate school it was almost expected that you weren’t intellectual enough if you didn’t have doubts.  As a matter of fact there was a badge of honesty: ‘I have doubts.’  And the unwritten sort of thing was, because I have doubts, I am more honest than you are if you don’t have doubts.  But doubts are good in one sense and not so good in another.

Everybody has doubts, even people in the Bible.  Mary had doubts.  I love the passage about Mary, and here is a young girl who is told by an angel…  You know at first she is awakened by this angel, or she is minding her own business, this messenger of God comes up and says, “Guess what’s going to happen to you?  You are going to have a baby, out of wedlock.”  Of course, back then that meant something; around here and today, not as much.  “But you are not going to have the benefit of male presence in this.”  Now if it had been me, I would be going, “What?”  I think that was what she was doing.  “What?”  But then: “Well, how?  This isn’t normal.”  She had doubts.  But Mary had something going for her that we need, as well.  She believed in the God of the Bible.  We have just gone through the Apostles’ Creed.  What’s the thing it says about God?  “I believe in God the Father, Almighty,” El Shaddai.  She believed in that kind of God who could do anything, who had made the universe and all its detail, everything.  She didn’t understand all of what that meant, but she really didn’t have to.  Sometimes all you have to do is look at the creation around you and go, wow!  That kind of God can do anything.

The rationalism that doubts the virgin birth is still alive and well, which started a couple hundred years ago.  I still hear people say, “Well, I can still be a strong Christian but not believe in the virgin birth.”  Well, technically that’s true.  God’s grace extends to our doubts and everything else.  But it says a lot about what we believe about God.  The world believes in God if it believes in God at all, a god who is impersonal, a god who is not really involved, or a god who is part of nature.  And if you believe all that, it’s quite logical for you to doubt that this god has anything to do with doing miracles. But if you believe in the God of the Bible, it is not a problem. You see, if you believe in the God of the Bible but don’t believe in the Resurrection or the virgin birth or whatever miracle, you have already swallowed the camel.  You believe in an unseen Being who is in control of everything.  You swallowed that.  The virgin birth, that’s hard. So the Creed says, “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.”  It isn’t so much about Mary, but it is laying a foundation, and the question for all of us is: How firm is that foundation of our faith? 

It also mentions the virgin birth, again not really about Mary, and it is not just about the miracle.  It is not just about that.  You know sometimes it is explained in theological books, well Jesus’ birth is kind of like all the other miraculous birth stories in the Bible.  It is about the miracle.  It is not just about the miracle; it is a little bit, but not that much.  It is really making a statement about who Jesus is and why he had to do what he had to do.

Who is Jesus?  Well Jesus is the Son of God.  We talked about what that meant.  We talked about being the Son of God and how hard that is for us in terms of, well, it sounds like he is the Son of God kind of like Hercules is the son of Zeus.  That is not what is going on. He is the second person of the Trinity come to earth and took on a human nature.  You know, we talked about that too, how hard that is for us.  It is hard to explain the incarnation.  It is impossible to explain the incarnation in ways that our small brains can understand.  But we affirm that Jesus came to earth, who was God in the flesh; that is what this little phrase means: “Born of the Virgin Mary”— God who took on human nature.  Therefore, pay attention, this is someone we need to pay attention to, and as Christians we celebrate.  But it is more than that.  It is what Jesus had to do.  The Bible regards Jesus as sinless, as perfect.  Now, you ladies, I have some good news for you.  You know, often, Eve is blamed for everything.  “It’s all her fault.”  You know what the Bible really says? We have a problem called sin and it was handed down from Adam. 

You know I wore a relatively new shirt last week.  I like new shirts because they aren’t faded, they look really good for a little while.  I liked this shirt.  It was green, that is my favorite color.  And you know what I did?  I put a pen in my pocket without the cap on.  And it was stained.  You may have a secret ingredient about how to get that out but I’m skeptical.  It doesn’t matter how often you wash, it’s there.  That stain is there.  I had to throw it out.  The Bible says that you and I have a stain in our nature.  We don’t like to talk about it much, but it’s there.  It is not what you do.  We have a congenital defect called sin: a congenital pride, a congenital selfishness, a congenital rebelliousness, a congenital lust, anger, hate.  It’s there, we all know it is.  The Bible explains human life very well, even though people don’t believe it.  It is something we are born with.  We don’t like to talk about it much.  Jesus had to take on a human nature without taking out the stain because that stain is handed through Adam.  It is handed through the male line.

It isn’t all Eve’s fault.  So Jesus took on human nature through his mother and was therefore sinless.  I know that is hard, but it is true.  I know it is difficult to understand.  I don’t understand it all.  But that is why the Bible talks about Adam being our representative and that we needed another one named Jesus.  Read 1 Corinthians, 15 and you will see it in other places as well, that Jesus was a new representative, a new man, and he is ours and we attach ourselves to him and so are forgiven.  But in order to make that sacrifice, a perfect sacrifice, he had to be sinless, and he was.  Tempted in everyway, as the writer to the Hebrews says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize… we have one who has been tempted in every way –yet without sin.”  Without sin.

So we believe that Jesus was born of a virgin because he is God in the flesh and because he is the perfect sacrifice to deal with this thing we have in ourselves called sin.  Then the Creed moves on.  Maybe one of the glaring omissions of the Apostles’ Creed is it doesn’t say much about Jesus’ life and that was very important, very important; but it wanted to get to the real important stuff.  And Jesus came to die on a cross and that’s what it is about.  Now, we often don’t think about it, but the cross is incredibly offensive to human beings.  I mean imagine the members of a political party or a social organization, or a group of philosophers, or even a church which was constantly repeating that their founder was put to death by the government as a threat to law and order.  Imagine also that that group decorated their buildings with electric chairs, or wearing hangman’s ropes as earrings or jewelry pins.  What if that was a water board?  An instrument of torture. We don’t think about it because we are used to it.

I read a quote from a man named Arnold Toynbee who wrote a book called Christianity Among the Religions of the World.  He tells the story of an English family living in China who engaged a Chinese nurse.  It was pretty apparent that she was bothered by something as she worked for them, but they couldn’t get her to say.  Finally, she broke down and said, “Well, there is something I cannot understand.  You are obviously good people.  You obviously love your children and care for them; yet in every room in this house, and on the staircase, I see reproductions of a criminal being put by death by some horrible form of torture that we have never heard of in China.  I cannot understand how you, responsible and loving parents as you obviously are, can expose your children to the dreadful effect of seeing this awful picture at this impressionable stage in their lives.”  The cross, as Paul says himself, is an offense.  You know, that offense is growing.  We have this kind of philosophy of non-violence that is out there in our modern world and people use it to say “we don’t need the cross any more,” even people who are in the Church.  There is a whole movement out there to take the cross out of Christianity because “we just don’t need that bloody thing anymore;” but as Paul says “I preach the cross of Christ constantly.”

Why?  Because we need to be reminded, and the world needs to be reminded, that God is also offended by us.  You know there has been a reaction in the world among churches to people who preach “fire and brimstone.  We can’t have that kind of judgmental preaching.”  I agree with it to some degree, I really do.  But in the process of simply, only talking about God’s love and God’s acceptance and all those things, we forget that God is offended by our sins and that is why there is a cross at all, because we can’t deal with that offense ourselves.  God dealt with it for us.  The cross is the intersection, if you will, of his judgment and his love.  Indeed, it is an opportunity.  There is an old, old story that I like to tell about a family that moved out to the prairie.  One day the father looked up and saw in the vast distance a huge smoke column and it was a fire coming toward them.  He thought very quickly and he said to his family, “Let’s start another fire,” and they did.  They burned out the area around their building so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the flames.  When the fire got to them, it went around.  The cross is that burned out place for you and me. You see, God judged our sin on the cross and when we stand on that we will escape the judgment that is coming, and it is coming. You know that song, the last one we just sang about the judgment.  You know we don’t realize… just read the words.  It is really talking about God’s judgment on the United States for slavery.  “The vengeance of God,” “ the grapes of wrath,” almost every verse is about that.  We don’t believe in that any more, as much.  We like to put it aside.  Was the Civil War God’s judgment on us?  Well, that’s a debate we could have.  God does judge no matter what we would think about that and will judge.  Therefore the cross is necessary, is necessary.  Look what Peter says in his very first sermon.  “This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put Him to death by nailing Him to the cross.” (Acts 2:23)  Who killed Jesus?  The Church has concluded that the Jews killed Jesus, and that has resulted in terrible persecution, for which we should repent. And Certainly the Jewish leaders had a part in it; but then there was, of course, Pilate and how interesting the Apostles’ Creed only mentions Pilate.  But I find it interesting in the story itself that also the crowd, and it was Passover, and there were people from all over the world there that day.  Every representative of every creed and every race was there saying, “Crucify him!”  And in the end, vicariously, we too, we too nailed those nails to the cross.

But in the end, the bottom line is, it was all part of God’s plan, another mystery.  But you know what?  It gives me hope.  Here’s a wicked event, a horrible event, one of the worst of history and God in his power is able to turn that horrible thing into something that is wonderful:  our salvation.  Our salvation.  Without the cross, there is no salvation.  There is no forgiveness.  Without the cross, we shouldn’t be here.  We would just be another social organization.  If Jesus didn’t die on the cross, and by the way, we will get to it, without the Resurrection, Jesus would have been just another Ghandi, nice guy but not able to save you.

The cross is necessary, and the cross is about love.  That is really the whole message.  “This is love (as John said): not that we loved God (because we didn’t), but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin.”  (1 John 4:10)  He died in our place.  He took the judgment we deserve and he did so out of pure unadulterated love.  It is what the cross is all about.  It is the heart of Christianity.  J.I. Packer says this, he says, “If the incarnation is the shrine of Christianity, the Atonement is certainly its holy of holies. The reason why the Son of God became man was to shed his blood…. God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all and that was the measure of his love.”

So what are we to do with it? I will close with one more story.  It is about young children who were bored until one of them suggested that they play church.  They played for a while but got bored again soon and then one little boy said, “Hey, I got it, let’s play Jesus.”  The other little kid said, “Well, how do you do that?”  And the boy said, “First, you would be mean to me and tie me up and then you would pretend to hit me and spit on me and call me names.”  And the children decided to try it for a while but they quickly got repulsed by their own actions.  They stopped, uncomfortable with this game, and the boy playing Jesus called the game to a halt and said, “Let’s not play Jesus any more, let’s go back to playing church.”

So often we play church and we really are called to follow Jesus.  That is what our lives are about.  We are called to take up our own cross, not because it will forgive anybody of their sins, but that is because we are following our Lord.  I want you to think about it as we take communion this Sunday.  Are we playing church, or are we following Jesus?

Would you pray with me?

Lord God, thank you for the cross.  We do not forget that the cross is followed by the Resurrection, but right now we ask you to help us to remember all that the cross means, particularly as we partake of the supper which speaks to us once again of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus for us.  Bless us with your presence, with the meaning of it all.  May we walk away from here stronger in our faith, stronger in our relationship with you and stronger in our willingness to follow.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

There is an old line about a Scottish preacher who was described as invisible during the week and incomprehensible on Sunday.  Well, I have tried over the years never to be invisible and certainly not be incomprehensible; but when you do a series of sermons, a series of doctrinal sermons, you run the risk of being less than understandable.  We have been doing a series on the Apostles’ Creed and we have been talking about God. God might be said to be an incomprehensible subject.  Now that doesn’t mean nonsensical.  It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t make any sense; it just means that we sometimes have a hard time understanding who God is and what he is and it is difficult.  That doesn’t mean we can’t say things about God; as a matter of fact, we can say many things that are true about God.  But, of course, “God is so big and so strong and so mighty,” so much bigger than we are, we have a hard time, especially today, to some degree.  We are talking about God as the Maker. 

We started out by talking about how the Creed says, “I believe,” that means you, individually, have to come to faith.  You can’t depend on others’ faith.  You believe in “God the Father.”  We learned last week that Father has nothing to do with gender because God, though we might describe him in a way like this, he is not really “the man upstairs.”  God is a spirit. We also talked a little bit about how right at the beginning it said that “God created man in his image, male and female he created them.”  So, somehow masculinity and femininity together makeup the image of God, in a sense.  Now that is a mystery, a little bit of a mystery; but it is kind of cool to think of it in that way.  I think it is, anyway. And we learned quite a bit more.  But today we are moving into “I believe in the Father, …Maker of Heaven and Earth,”  Maker of heaven and earth. 

Let’s pray together as we begin.

Lord God, help us to understand you more and as we understand you we might learn more about you and also how to serve you and to live for you and learn more about ourselves and our own life and what we are supposed to be doing. We pray these things in Jesus’ name, our Savior. 

Suppose that you were attending a funeral of a loved one.  You get into a car, you go to a chapel or a funeral parlor, or wherever it happens to be and you are there with all kinds of people to honor your loved one, relatives, friends from all over the place.  A line is forming up to the front of the casket and they are paying their last respects.  When it comes to be your turn, you look into the casket; and, lo and behold, the person in the casket is you, several years from now.  You sit down, you look into the bulletin.  You notice that several people are going to speak— one is your best friend, another is your wife or your husband, or son or daughter, someone in the family, another is a coworker or fellow student, maybe someone from your church.  What would you want them to say about you in that moment?  What would you want them to say is the difference you made in lives, or the effect you had on people?  What would they say about you?  Were you more interested in your career than people?  or you really cared?

We have all heard about the ladder of success, how people spend their lives climbing that ladder or doing something, achieving something; sometimes throwing others off as they climb to the top.  Yet so many people in the world today are climbing this ladder achieving things and they get to the place where they look around and they find that the ladder is on the wrong wall.  They haven’t done what Stephen Covey talks about, that is “beginning with the end in mind.”  That is an important principle to live by: beginning with the end in mind. I find in so many ways all of us fail to look ahead and see what exactly the purpose is in what we are doing.  Because we haven’t begun with the end in mind, we don’t know why we are doing it.  I’ve been the pastor of several churches in twenty odd years of pastoring and I often have been asked when I am interviewed with a church, where do you want your church to be in five years?  And you know what?  It is surprising how few people can really answer that question, and it even makes them real uncomfortable.  Now when you are looking for a job, don’t make people feel uncomfortable, that is not a good thing.  But it is interesting.  We all do that.  I do it.  We don’t begin with the end in mind.  And that is important.  On the other hand there is another principle which I want to tie in with this and that is: begin with the beginning in mind.

Author Dorothy Sayers, who wrote a lot of mystery novels, used to say in describing— as a matter of fact, in one of the who done it at the end of the chapter books she wrote, she said, “If you know the how, you know the who.”  There is some truth to that but when it comes to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, the Apostles’ Creed and the Bible are more concerned with Who than how.  The first two chapters of Genesis are often criticized as being mythology or whatever you want to call it; but its purpose is not to talk about the details, it is to talk about the who.  In the beginning, GOD created the heavens and the earth.  Today, though, the scientific preoccupation is just the opposite.  It is with how things work and came to be.  There seems to be no interest, at least publicly, for who is responsible at all.  For Christians it seems so very strange to spend so much time and money and effort to know nature and how it works, but ignoring what we think matters most, namely, who the Creator is.  Now, I know people will tell us, “We already know the answer of who, it’s chance,” or evolution, or whatever it is.  That is not an answer, it really isn’t.  Whether you believe that God said it happened and it did, or if you believe in evolution, who started the process in the first place?  And that is the answer of the Creed.

So with the Bible, we begin with the beginning in mind, who started it and the Creed and the Bible answer that question.  It is none other than God.  The Bible says, this is so typical of everywhere in the Scripture, the idea:  “Know that the Lord is God.” (Remember we talked about how there is only one God in the Creed and the Bible and he has a name.) “It is He who made us and we are His.”  (That is very important.  We will talk a little bit about ownership in just a minute)  “We are his people, the sheep of his pasture.”  (Psalm 100:3.)  He made us.  God is the one who made us.  “In the beginning God made” or “I believe in God the Father, who made heaven and earth.”

Now what did God do? I have a book that I have been reading, a small book by J.I. Packer who is a great author and talks a lot about doctrinal issues in a very clear way for Christians and I really recommend him as a writer.  He has a book on the Apostles’ Creed and he talks about “introducing the Artist.”  I like that concept.  You know, with some limitations which we will talk about in just a minute, you can tell a whole lot about who God is by looking at the creation and God and his artistry of doing that.  Now I mean Artist with a capital A in every kind of way, not just a painter or a dancer or a poet, though God is all of those things.  God tells stories, he tells the best stories and we do, too.  Every human being from the beginning; little babies are creative; everybody is.  You might say, well wait a minute I don’t know how to draw a thing.  I’m in that boat.  I do very well to draw stick figures.  But on the other hand, all of us are creative.  You know some of us are creative, some of us are creative in the ways we are able to organize things.  Some of us are creative because we can build cars and work on them; or we can build houses or we can organize an office or we can manage things, not just draw things.  All of that is being creative and every human being is creative.  And that is who God is.  We can look at the creation and see just how incredibly complex it is or how big God is.  Theologians call it immensity, fancy word, but that’s what they mean— is that God is so big.  You know the big storm we had the other day, right after it was just a gorgeous sunset—the beauty of the earth in so many ways.  God, we can say truthfully is beautiful, even though we don’t really know what he looks like.  There is beauty in God’s heart and mind because God made all of it.  And on and on we could go.  God is the Artist.

Here is what J.I. Packer writes.  He says, “The message of Genesis 1 and 2 (and the Creed) is this:  ‘You have seen the sea, the sky, the sun, moon and stars.  You have watched the birds and the fish.  You have observed the landscape, the vegetation, the animals, the insects, all the big things and little things together.  You have marveled at the wonderful complexity of human beings, with all their powers and skills, and the deep feelings of fascination, attraction, and affection that men and women arouse in each other.  Fantastic, isn’t it?  Well now, meet the One who is behind it all!’  As if to say: now that you have enjoyed these works of art, you must shake hands with the artist; since you were thrilled by the music, we will introduce you to the composer.  It was to show us the Creator rather than the creation, and to teach us knowledge of God rather than physical science, that things were written.”  Amen.  I have always found that…I have told you before that I love science.  I am an amateur reader of different things that go on and I keep up with a few things, here and there, as much as I can understand.  But it has always struck me as incredibly curious how there isn’t that question.  “Well this is how things work and this is this that and the other.”  It’s great.  I love that stuff.  But who?  Who are we dealing with here?  Is chance really the creator of the universe? Give me a break.  Meet the Artist, that’s what the Bible wants to say. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Genesis 1:1.  It is to introduce us to the person, the details.  You know what is interesting about Genesis 1 is that it roughly does seem to follow what we are discovering.  That is another issue, but it is very interesting.  But that doesn’t really matter.  That is the point, right there.  “In the beginning was God who created…”  Now how are we to understand this? 

Well back when I was in seminary, I wrote a paper on some theologian.  There was a famous professor who had longed since retired and as an excuse to speak to him I put my paper in his box and wrote a little note, and he was kind enough to do this with students. “Would you please read it and comment on it?”  The famous man, the great man, invited me to his house and talked to me.  He was so kind, I will never forget it.  Of course, the paper was garbage, but…. or just so far beneath the great man.  But he was famous for illustrating what theologians called the Creator-Creature Distinction.  Now hang with me for a minute. I will show you what he did. He used to draw a circle and a little circle on a blackboard, just like that.  Now of course the big circle is God.  If we were to really think about God, it would be much bigger!  But that is what he would do.  Then the little circle is creation or us.  God, the arrow coming down, is the one who makes the little circle and we reflect, the image of creation, reflects God.  The Creator-Creature Distinction is very, very important in Christian thoughts.   It is exceptionally important for a variety of reasons. 

First it reminds us of who God is.  That God is the Creator, the Maker of everything.  That God is not a part of the Creation.  Notice the circles are separate.  It is hard to understand sometimes why that is important, but everywhere you go there are different ideas about God.  One of the very strong ideas of God is different kinds of pantheism, which means that God is part of the trees and part of the earth, and we are all one and all is one.  You have heard that idea, I’m sure.  No, God is the Maker of it all.  He is separate from his creations.  If creation didn’t exist, God would be happily moving along doing whatever God does.  God in his mercy and his plan made the creation, the heavens and the earth, not only the earth but the billions and billions of stars that are out there.  All of it, but he is immense, and God is so big, God made it.  That is very important.  There are so many ideas that sort of infiltrate; they are very popular today.  I have used the illustration many times of Star Wars, you know “The force..”  Well, if you really watch it very carefully, they explain what the force is in one of the movies, and how the force creation creates it, it is all around us.  Then there is that yin and yang idea of the light side and the dark side, and all that kind of thing.  It’s fun.  It is interesting, but, not true.  But yet a lot of people say, ‘Yeah that’s what it is like.  Isn’t it cool?”  No.  The truth is truth.  God is the Maker, he’s separate.  Now the creation does reflect God, I said that.  We have to be careful with that, but it is true.  We reflect God in a way.  And that is very true.  The wonder of the creation tells us a little bit about who God is.  The wonder of you.  John Calvin even said once that “the way we know God first is to know ourselves.”  Interesting idea.  He starts that at the very beginning of the Institutes; that is what he says.

Yet, of course, God is bigger than all of us and that is hard to understand but we have to remember that God is who God is.  I have said before but I am quoting Steve Brown who is a great preacher and he says, “You know, it is interesting how so many people have different opinions about who God is and think that they are all valid.”  But Steve goes on to say “You know it is like having the opinion about the multiplication table.  You might have an opinion that two times two equals five, but does it matter?  Does it really matter?”  See our opinions don’t determine who God is. God is who God is and our job is to figure out who God is, and to learn who God is, and accept that and learn more about it.  But one of the modern themes is that we make God who we want to be for ourselves. God is made in our image.  No, that is heresy.  That is more than wrong.  It becomes very bad when people take that idea and they run with it and they use it sometimes to dominate others.  But that is part of another sermon.  It can be very evil.  God is who God is.  So it reminds us who God is because God is God.  “To whom will you compare Me?  Or who is My equal? says the Holy One.  Lift your eyes ad look to the heavens: who created all these?  He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls them each by name.” (Isaiah 40:25-26). God has name for all the billions and billions and billions of stars and galaxies.  That is quite a computer database, don’t you think?  Because of his great power and mighty strength, incomprehensible power and incomprehensible strength but not one of them is missing. 

It also reminds us, the Creator-Creature Distinction reminds us what the creation is. That it is good.  Now again, the creation stops a misunderstanding.  You know sometimes people think that the world came into existence through natural processes, through chance. Now, I am not going to argue evolution or not.  All of those kinds of different things; if you are in school, learn all those things, figure it out.  We can debate that.  That isn’t really the point.  But what I have trouble with is the philosophy behind some of it; which is, it all came about be itself, by chance.  We can’t accept that.  For the Bible asserts first and foremost that the world exists by the will and power of its Maker and that history is His-story.

You know, in the last few weeks, of course, we have seen this oil spill and all those kinds of things, and the question of environmentalism has come up big time.  You know, I really think there is a Christian environmentalism, but, hear me for a minute.  What does that mean?  Well, it starts with the idea that God is the Maker and that we as human beings, created in his image, have been given authority over creation as stewards.  Remember, stewardship doesn’t just mean we want your money.  It is the idea that you take care of somebody else’s property.  So we are responsible to God for taking care of the creation that he has made and that is good.  We need to be aware of the creation, not just abuse it, because God doesn’t want us to do that.  Some of the environmentalism that is out there today doesn’t have God as its center and almost becomes religious in its self. We have to be very careful with that, making the world our mother.  Or it is almost a religious fanaticism.  We have to be careful with that. We have a tragedy in the Gulf, there is no doubt about that; and we have to be careful as Christians to be for the creation, but it belongs to God, and it exists the way God made it.  It is bigger than we are in so many ways, and there is so much about the creation that we don’t know; we probably know one-millionth of one percent of it.  I don’t know what the percentage is, we don’t know a whole lot; but it is that God is the Lord of it. No asteroid, no act of man will end it unless the Maker wills it.

Again, and second, it is his world and we are not the owners.  And third, that we must not depreciate it. I love this phrase:  “God saw everything He made and it was good.”  (Genesis 1:31)  You know there is a lot of theology out there, both pagan and Christian, which depreciates the creation.  It says, “Do you know what being spiritual means?  It means to be aesthetic; it means to not have anything to do with the Creation.”  It is a strong stream in Christian theology and it is not right.  God gave us the creation to enjoy, and to take care of it, because he said “it was good.”  God will remake the heavens and earth.  It doesn’t say that God is going to make us all spiritual beings and we will all sit around on a cloud going mmmmm, singing hymns; no God is going to remake the heavens and the earth.  I do not know what all that means but there is a physicality to what God is going to do. He is going to re-create everything.  And God can do it because he is God.

Last and not least, the Creator-Creature Distinction reminds us of who WE are.   There is an old story, you may have heard it before, about a group of scientists who came to God and said, “You know, we don’t think we need you any more.  We can do everything that you do. We can create human beings if we need to.”  God said, “O.K. lets have a contest.” “Fine.”  So they all met at the appointed date, the scientists on one side and God on the other.  The scientists brought out a box and God said, “What’s in the box?” They said, “We brought dirt so we could make a human being.”  God said, “Wait a minute. You have to make your own dirt.”

J.I. Packer says that “one of the first things we have to come to grips with in our lives is that we must face the fact that God is the boss, that God is the big cheese, that God is the Lord, and we are not.”  We are not our own makers and since God is the Maker, he is also the owner.  You know if I had enough time to talk with someone, particularly someone who is intellectual, and had a lot of questions about the faith, and we had a chance over coffee to talk, I would talk about faith and what it meant and that it was not just an intellectual thing that believed that God exists but it has to do with trust.  It has to do with putting our trust in God but there is more to faith than just that. It also has to do with surrender.  We have to surrender back to God what’s his, and that is ourselves because God owns us.  It is just the way it is!  It is the way it is. Sometimes, what I have found as I have lived long enough, I have found that there are some things that I just have to accept, that I can’t do anything about.  I started out my ministry I am going to change everything.  I am going to do this.  I am going to do that.  Now I am lucky if I can just change myself.  A friend of mine says he has reduced his goals to just improving his golf swing, and he is not doing very well at that.  I can relate. I think Phil Mickelson can too…

The Creator-Creature Distinction reminds us of who we are.  (Isaiah 40:6-8), famous passage:  “All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.  The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them. Surely the people are grass.  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.”  You know, I have known many people who are immensely talented and they dedicated their lives to becoming famous or dedicated their lives to reaching the top of that ladder, or whatever it happened to be; and there is some goodness in that.  Being famous is O.K.  To do well in whatever you do, there is nothing wrong with success.  But you know what every famous person, every ruler of the earth, what every person in the world has in common?  They are all dead, or they are going to die.  They may have had a great effect on life, while they are living, but they are all going to die.  I am not being negative. It just is.  We have to remember who we are.  God is the one who lives forever.  God is the one who owns the world, who made the world, who made us.  Isn’t it logical to sort of hook your life into the one who is going to be around for a while?  Maybe that is crass.  It is more than that.  It is believing and loving and following and serving, but we have to start with humility.  It is just the way it is and sooner or later you are going to come to that place.

I had a friend of mine who was quoting Philippians, Chapter 2, where is says, “It all, in the end, every knee will bow …and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord.”  He said that includes people who never believed in it because sooner or later we will all bow the knee one way or another.  Better to do it in life in faith and love and joy. Better to do it because we know who we are and who God is.  As you go through life this week, think about that.  Think about your relationship and maybe the parts of your life that you need to surrender back to him.  We all have them.  I think life is a process of surrender, truthfully, one thing after another.  But ask God what are some areas in your life that you need to give up so that you can receive them back again in a way that he wants you to have them.

Let’s pray.

Lord thank you for being who you are.  We don’t know all about that.  We pray that you would help us understand more as we go along, both now and our whole lives, because our whole lives are spent getting to know you a little better.  Help us understand the things better that we don’t understand, help us appropriate the things we do understand.  We pray these things in your name, your glorious name. Amen.

One day a little girl came up to her father and asked the question, “Daddy, what is God like?” The question sounded innocent enough until the father tried to put in to words what God was like in a way a five year old could understand. So he said the phrase that many fathers are famous for, “Go ask your mother.” So she did. “Mother, what is God like?” and she found the same problem and she finally said, “Go ask your Sunday school teacher.” And so the little girl went to her Sunday school teacher with the same question, “What is God like?” The teacher said simply, “Why don’t you go ask your parents?” The little girl thought to herself, if I had lived with God as long as my father and my mother and my Sunday school teacher, I think I would be able to tell a little girl what God is like.”

But it is not that easy, is it? What is God like? How do we describe someone who is so much bigger than we are? Well, of course, we need to read the Bible, that is the source document for all of it; but today we can look at a synopsis, which is a very good one and a good place to start, and that is the Apostles’ Creed. Over the summer I am planning on preaching through the Apostles’ Creed, nine, ten, eleven sermons; I’m hoping to end with ten, we’ll see. There could be a lot more, believe me. It is a way to affirm the essentials that we already believe. We need to review occasionally, and this is a good chance to do it.

Last week we talked about God, “I believe in God,” that’s what we said. And yes, we got a whole sermon out of that. By way of review, what did we find out? Well we found out that the Apostles’ Creed really is about us in some ways because it starts with “I”. Yes, being a Christian means being part of a community but faith starts with “I”, with each individual making a confession of faith. There is no such thing as a second generation Christian. You can’t depend on your grandparents or your parents; you have to make a decision and a choice. We learned also that believing is not just about the facts, though believing, having faith, includes facts. We should reject this separation between scientific faith and faith knowledge, because, yes, you can believe in God in the same way you can believe that two plus two is four. But it is more than that, isn’t it? because, biblical faith comes from the word pistuo, to believe into. We trust God. It is not just believing facts; it is more than that. We also talked about how God is one. It is popular today to believe that all gods and all religions are basically the same, but that is not what the Bible says. The first commandment is “you shall have no other gods besides me.” And this God has a name, he is personal, he is a God that makes promises, who keeps promises, who enters into relationships; and his name is Yahweh. We learned that. And we learned that God is bigger than we can imagine, not nonsensical, that is, it doesn’t make sense; just we can’t comprehend everything and that God is three persons in one being.

You know one of my favorite children’s books is Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh describes himself as a bear of little brain. I feel that way sometimes myself when I am thinking about God. When it comes to God we are bears of little brain and there is only so much that we can understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t understand anything, we can understand a lot, but there is a lot more.

So now we come to “I believe in God, the Father Almighty;” that phrase, “God, the Father Almighty,” what can we say? We can say a lot, but what do we say about that? I think it begins with God first; us second, in that order, always. I’ll tell you what I mean. When I first came into the Presbytery of the Twin Cities area, you know Presbyteries are kind of gate keepers and when you go to a different Presbytery, they examine you, find out if you are O.K. or whatever. Well I had a nice couple of folks, couple elders, that came and talked to me and the woman section said, “You know we have a rule in our Presbytery. You are not allowed or you must, there is a rule in our Presbytery that you must use gender neutral language when you talk about God. No hes or shes, all gender neutral.” And I politely said, “I don’t agree with that.”

Now, contrary to popular opinion, I can keep my mouth shut. What I really felt was, I am very offended at that, not because of any gender issues but because you just ditched two thousand years of great theology because some people got offended. Now, it is hard. I am sure it is based on good intentions and we ought, and I want to make it very clear, we ought to be concerned about discrimination and we ought to reject it. I think that is what it is all about, but, first and foremost, this is based on bad assumptions. Now, let me ask you a question. Why do you think ninety-nine percent of the Bible uses male terminology for God? You don’t have to answer, it’s O.K. Well, the standard answer is: Well those people who wrote the Bible were all male chauvinist pigs. They were in a male dominated society and they didn’t know any better, therefore, they were sexists. Now they were in a male dominated society, but this does not go with the facts. Consider this. The Hittites, the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Philistines, every people around the Israelites, all had female gods and goddesses, every one of them. So you’re telling me that the Egyptians were more sensitive to sexist language? Or the Canaanites? Really? who regularly sacrificed little girls in the fire? I mean they found a field, at least an acre, knee-deep in bones of children who were burned in sacrifice. Well, we will get into that later, another day.

Now, calling God he has nothing to do with gender. We have to start there. It has nothing to do with gender. The reason the Israelites used the word he is because all the gods and goddesses of the time had to do with the locality, a certain area. Not only that, they were kind of connected to the earth, I mean, they had rights. If you wanted to have a good harvest you went through certain kinds of rights. They were pagan, and we won’t describe them; they did all kinds of things. It was all about localness and the biblical view of God is that God is transcendent. He is not a god of any particular place. He was BIG god, not little god, not humanoid. There is no statue of God anywhere in ancient history, but there are lots of these others. Anyway, it is to preserve God’s transcendence. It is not about gender. It had nothing to do with it.

Second, it misses the point in the sense that it makes the point about us. You know if we all start running around going: Well I am offended by the way we describe God, it makes it about me. In the Bible, we believe, hopefully it is still believed, it is revealed truth. It is revealed truth. It is not about us. You know a good rule of thumb is that it is about God first; us second, in that order, always. That’s a good way to live your life in every area. You will stay out of a lot of trouble that way. You stay out of a lot of trouble. It is really much more than those things.

And third, it misses the theological point of what is God like. God is a spirit and God has no gender like you and me. You know I hear all the time people talk about “the man upstairs.” I have to admit I cringe just a little, I try to be very…I mean it’s O.K. It really is O.K. but it makes me cringe a little bit. First, God is not upstairs, and God is not a man. I know it is just using language…it’s O.K. I don’t like it. I understand. God is a spirit who has no gender and it is right there at the beginning. Look at this verse: (Genesis 1:27) “So God created man in his own image (that’s mankind, humankind in his own image) in the image of God he created him, male and female.” It is right there at the beginning. Masculinity and femininity are God’s idea. It doesn’t say 60% male and 40% female; it doesn’t say 90/10; it doesn’t even say 50/50. It affirms that male and female are made in God’s image. It starts with that. It starts with that.

I had a professor who said, talking to the class, he said, “You women reflect God in a way I can’t because you are female, and I reflect God in a way you can’t because I am male.” He didn’t mean anything one better than the other. He may be right, but the point is that they are together. It is they are together. You know what, we ought to not discriminate against women, or black or white, or yellow or brown or red or any other color because all human beings are made in God’s image. That’s why we don’t discriminate. That’s why, because there is something about human beings that is amazing, male and female. That’s good theology and we should think about that more.

Now we should rejoice because God is the Father. Now I am going to feel a little bit like the guy on the television who says, “Stay tuned next week!” because we are going to talk about that later. God is Father in the sense of being Creator and we are going to talk about that, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” so stay tuned. We will talk about that, but fatherhood is related to the idea of being creator. It is also related, as we talked about last week, to this amazing idea of this relationship between the first and second person of the Trinity. Jesus regularly calls, actually not regularly, always calls God, “Father;” in some cases calls God, “Daddy,” the Aramaic equivalent of “Daddy,” he says “Abba.” “Abba.” Again, when we say “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,” we will talk about that. So I am not really putting you off…I have so much to talk about, I just can’t really do this one right now. So hang in there; but that’s what it is related to, as well.

The one I want to focus on is the fact that we are God’s children through faith. Notice what John said, (John 1:12.13) “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” Then Paul says, (Romans 8:15) “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, buy you received the Spirit of sonship (that’s generic). And by him we cry, ‘Abba Father.’ ” The reason God is our Father is because we are his children. Again, this gender neutrality stuff misses the point because God is a personal and not an it.

You know, Pat Mahin was up here talking a minute ago. Can you imagine if I said to Pat, instead of calling him Pat, I always said to him, “Hey, you.” Now he has been in the military, he may be used to that… On the other hand, gender neutrality sometimes talks about it in terms of, well we will just use words like Maker or Creator. Those are all true in the same way Pat, in the military, was a Commander. He was Commander. But what does that do? If you call somebody by their title all the time, it keeps them at arms length. There’s nothing personal about being a Colonel or Commander. Maybe true. But God is our Father. Not an it. One of the things that drives me crazy for myself is when I can’t remember a name in the church, and I know that means so much to people, and it just pfffft, pfffft, right out. I may have known you for six years and I am going “who are you?” It has nothing to do with you, and I hate it! I hate that! I hate it! …because I want to be able to say people’s names. I apologize to you. God is personal and he adopts you. Now I realize calling God, Father, is painful to some people because some people have not had good fathers.

I read a story by Bruce Larson who attended church with a friend who had an abusive father. The preacher that day was talking about how God was a loving father, or, God is like your father; and the woman said, “Oh, I hope not.” I understand that. I had a great father and it is easy for me to think of God as father; but I understand it is not for some people. If you are one of those people, God can be the father, we all long for a father, a good one. Every human father messes up; we all abuse our children, in one way or another. God is your father and he adopts you through Jesus Christ. So rejoice. Try to get there. If you can’t, I understand. It is hard. But, try to get there.

Third, I am trying to stay on time here. I am losing all our time, but just very quickly… You know the children song I love, “Our God is So Big, So Strong, So Mighty…” We need to just believe that. In the Bible, Abram, which means father, has no children; and he and Sarai are promised that they are going to have lots of children. Then they wait. Then they wait. Then they wait. They wait twenty-five years for the promise to be fulfilled. Finally when Abram is ninety-nine years old, God appears to him and says “I am El Shaddai! God Almighty! And I am about to make good on my promise because I am all powerful. I am God Almighty.” That is what God Almighty means. It means that God is sovereign and he can do whatever he intends; he is the Lord; he is the King; he’s all powerful.

Now for many people this is a point of controversy because if God is all powerful and he is absolutely good, why does God not do stuff? Why do we have this guy who has a car wreck who is going to be paralyzed? All of you know that I got back from a war zone last year in Afghanistan; but it is not the first one I have been to. I was in Uganda twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago, two years after Idi Amin had left. I’ll never forget it. By some estimates, Idi Amin killed 500,000 people. You should have seen what was left behind. You should have seen it. It is better, by the way, when you go back there; thirty years later. Still, it was a war zone, and I have questions. That doesn’t even touch the surface of the evil in the world. But by faith, we believe that God is absolutely good, and absolutely all powerful.

J. I. Packer puts it this way. He says, “Through Christ, God is doing something.” He says, “Bad folk like you and me are already being made good. New pain and disease-free bodies are on the way, and a reconstructed cosmos with them. Paul assures us that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. Amen.”

Our God is big and he will take care of it. In the meantime we trust him for who he is as best we can.

Just read that and think about it. (Screen shows the following:)

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of Him, the son of man that you care for Him? (Psalm 8:3-4)

The LORD does whatever pleases Him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths. (Psalm 135:6)

God is so big. This is the biblical view of God. “The LORD does whatever pleases Him.” We must believe that.

I am running out of time. (Screen shows the following:)

In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will…. (Ephesians 1:11)

I am tempted to skip this one, except to say that one of the questions about God’s sovereignty is, does God overrule our will? It is a great question. You know, the only thing Presbyterians are known about is being predestinarian. I get that all the time. “You guys believe in predestination.” Yeah, but it takes go long to explain it. But does that mean that God gets rid of our will? No, it doesn’t. I read a great story; I have to tell you this one, about two gentlemen that weren’t that bright. They came to a town, they were driving a truck, and they came to this bridge that said “Clearance 11’6”. They got out and they measured their truck and it said 12’3”. They both got back in the truck and one looked at the other and said “There aren’t any cops. Let’s try it.” God doesn’t keep us from doing stupid things, or evil things. Now God does restrain things. God does so much behind the scenes that we never know about in our lives and the world, everywhere, he is working. So to say that God is in control doesn’t mean that God overrules all choices, but when God made the world he included free choice within it. You say, “Well how can that be? Doesn’t that overrule it?” You know God created a hundred million galaxies with a hundred million stars in them each, thereabouts. When it comes to some questions about God, we are bears of little brain. We are bears of little brain.

Last but not least, and I am going to go through it quickly. I had way too much to say today. God really does win in the end! We have to have that as an article of faith. It is interesting to me that people talk about the end times all the time today. You know, end times this; end times that. Oh by the way, we are going to talk about how Jesus comes back and will “judge the quick and the dead.” …quick meaning living. We will talk about the end times in a little bit. Stay tuned. But you know everybody in the last two thousand years thought that their lives were the end. Jesus is coming back. Paul sort of thought it. Luther thought it. Thomas Aquinas thought it. Everybody thinks it today. But just suppose that God answered that prayer three or four centuries ago, what would have happened? Well, first and foremost, you and I would not be here. We wouldn’t be here, would we? I am not saying we should wish evil because we are here, or be glad about it, but God has a plan and he is bringing everybody who belongs into the fold over time. When it ends, it will be ended. That is what we believe. That God is in control. He is going to bring history to a conclusion that he has ordained. And you and I can’t mess that up. Thank God! If I thought I could mess up my salvation I would have done it a long time ago. So in the end, as J. I. Packer says, again, “The truth of God’s almightiness in creation, providence and grace is the basis of all our trust, peace and joy in God; it is the safeguard of all our hopes of answered prayer, present protection of final salvation. It means that neither fate nor the stars, nor blind chance, nor man’s folly, nor Satan’s malice controls this world. Instead, a morally perfect God runs it and none can dethrone Him or thwart His purposes of love.” Now we may not understand everything that God does and does not do or the timing in which he does it; but what we do is we do know is God himself and in the end, that is enough.

As we move forward, think about that. Think about that, and rejoice, because God is Lord.

Let’s pray together.

Lord thank you for being so big and in some sense so big we can’t understand, because that makes you God. Help us understand a little bit more about who you are, most of all, that we can know you and that you know us and that we are your children through Jesus Christ. Help us grow on that foundation, that solid truth, that you are indeed our Father who is almighty. We pray in your name. Amen.

Audio version is unavailable at this time.

Many years ago Charles Schultz, the author of Peanuts, did a cartoon for a church magazine and in that cartoon there was pictured a young teenager who had a witch doctor’s mask on. The caption of the cartoon read: My program tonight is entitled “It matters not what you believe only whether you are sincere or not.” Now, we laugh at that, maybe a little uncomfortably, because we know that sincerity has nothing to do with the truth; and yet often that is what we ask. As long as you are sincere, it is O.K. We laugh a little uncomfortably because we also know that deep down inside it matters tremendously what we believe; belief, what we think is true, informs everything that we do. Every decision we make is based on whether we think something is right or wrong, or whether it is true, whether it will benefit us, or something. We get married. We move. We do all kinds of things. Sometimes we do horrible things, sometimes we do great things, all because of truth that we believe in, or not. It forms a foundation of everything that we do.

Some people today have a strong belief that there should be no strong beliefs. I mean, how many times in recent years have we heard “More people have been killed in the name of religion than anything else.” Have you heard that? I have, many times. Well the answer is, get rid of religion. “Imagine there is no Heaven, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill and die for, and no religion too.” You know that was voted one of the greatest songs in rock and roll history. (gag) Oh, excuse me. It is just so, I’m sorry. … I had a hairball with that one… I shouldn’t do that in a sermon, should I? But you know what, it is patently false. Do a little research. You know, in Wikipedia, look up genocide in the twentieth century or something like that. You’ll find literally dozens of instances, I mean more than you could ever imagine, of not just a few people getting killed, but lots of people getting killed all at once, and you know what the reason were? 99% have nothing to do with religion; 99%, or more. I couldn’t really find one. Yeah, Hitler killed the Jews but it had nothing to do with religion, it was all racial. All kinds of things like that. It’s patently false. Patently false. The fact is everyone has beliefs, and we do everything we do because of beliefs. So it behooves us as Christians to review, if you will, what we believe. So this summer I am going to preach through the Apostles’ Creed. It is sort of the foundation of doctrinal preaching and I will try not to bore you. When you hear doctrine everyone wants to snooze. It’s like, oh my gosh! It really does apply of your life. It informs all of what we do, what we believe about God. So, I’m not giving up on John, by the way; just pausing with John a little bit; just this summer, eight to ten sermons probably, on the Apostles’ Creed.

This morning we are going to start with the first phrase, “I believe in God…” There is a lot in that, believe it or not. There is a whole lot in that. Well, let’s begin. The Scripture will be in the points that we look at. I have used several bits of Scripture. My first point is that the Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, is really about you. Now hang with me for a minute. What does that mean? Well the first word is “I” not “We”. When we recite a creed, when we recite the Apostles’ Creed, it is “I” believe. Now that is important. It is very important. We do live in a society right now that is very individualistic, so a lot of people believe that you can be a strong Christian, or strong believer, without church, without a group, without a community. I don’t agree with that. But in the end, it does start with you. It does start with you. And even in the Bible itself, there is this strong, strong idea that you need to confess what you believe as an individual. In fact, Paul links it to salvation. Romans 10:9-10: “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That heart is not a beating heart. In the Bible the heart is everything about your being. So it says “and believe with everything you are that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” So you confess with your mouth. So you believe and yet there is something about confessing. Faith is a personal journey. It is a personal thing. Each one speaks for his or herself.

You know I have had the privilege of serving several churches in my pastoral career and the first two were over two hundred years old. The first one was founded in 1756. The second one was founded in 1745. There is something really cool about that. This church is almost 125 years old. I think it is in three years. We are going to have a celebration. 125 years, that’s just great. I have met many, many people who are in there 90’s, very chronologically blessed, who said “I was baptized here in this place.” I just visited Albert Picha, who is in hospice, who is 99. He is probably not going to make one hundred. He told me, “I was baptized there.” Cool. It is so cool. There is something powerful about that, but we must remember something. Every generation is new. There are no second-generation Christians. Just because you are member of a church, just because your grandparents are members of a church, wherever you happen to be, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Just because you were baptized in a place, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Just because your parents are Christian, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Every person comes to faith themselves. It is not transferable. It is influenced. Next week we get to have a baptism. We influence, we pray for. Every child that was born in my family, I prayed for them, that they would come to know the Lord. I pray the same thing for Jake and will continue to pray for my grandchildren. We all should be praying for all of our children that they may come to know the Lord. It is not transferable. We all come ourselves. “I” believe.

The second word is “Believe”. My point here is, believing is not just about the facts. Now, we have all heard over the years the to-do, if you will, about the difference between scientific fact and faith fact. There is this idea that science is true and faith is just what you believe, whether it is true or not. Someone once said that faith is believing what you know isn’t so. But you know what? I have something to say to you. I believe that God exists. I believe in Jesus. I believe in His church in the same way that I believe in the multiplication table. I believe it the same way that I believe that water freezes at 32 degrees, in the same way I believe that gravity is real. We should all believe that. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for faith. There is… a tremendous amount of evidence for faith. There are people who have written books about the evidence for faith who actually started out not believing and came to faith because of the evidence for it. It is based on facts. Yeah, the facts run out after a while and you have to make a choice, but it is based on fact.

You know my wife is wonderful, and I am not going to try to embarrass her today; but she doesn’t say a whole lot about my sermons, especially after Sunday. She gives it a day or two. She knows I am not in the mood for that, but, bless her heart. But she did say something to me the other day. I came home after giving the illustration about jumping out of airplanes, as an illustration for faith, and I have done it so many times here, and she said, “You’ve got to leave that one alone for a while.” But it is a great illustration about how… Well that is why I brought this stick today, by the way. It is another illustration for faith. The word in the Bible is pistuo, which means to believe into something; not just believing a fact. So, biblical faith is all about putting your trust in someone or something. We don’t just believe God is there, we acknowledge God is there, that he is the boss, he is the Lord. When we believe in Jesus we are not saying, “Oh we just believe you are there.” We believe you are the Lord. We will talk more about that as we move along with the Apostles’ Creed. Believing is believing into. So those two first words are so important. It is about me, I; I have to believe it. The question for all of us is, do we? On a scale of one to ten, where is that faith that I have? Is it a two or a ten? Is it somewhere in between? Some times it goes up and down.

James’s point here is just this: (James 2:19) “You believe that God is one. Great. Even the demons have faith.” What is the difference between you and a demon? It means when you believe into, when you align yourself, when you confess that God is Lord, it is a very different thing.

Now what kind of God do we believe in? We say we believe in God, but what are we talking about? Who are we talking about? You know, it is interesting to me that the very first commandment, number 1—it’s number 1 for a reason— is this: “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) I have been interested, and it may be true, that it is procreating in other places in the country, but since I have lived in Minnesota I have been amazed at how many in your face bumper stickers there are. I don’t know if it’s because as Minnesotans we don’t like to say it out loud; but we have to say it somehow, so it is on the bumper sticker. Some of them are pretty good. Have you seen the one that says “coexist” in different religions? I want you to know, I don’t have any trouble with that. I really don’t. I think as Christians we are to be good citizens and we are to work with others whether they agree with us or not for the betterment of society. We should all get along; but at the same time, at the same time, we should never ever forget who we are worshipping. You know, it is interesting in our society right now, the enemy seems to be said to be atheism. You know, we all band together as people of faith against those who don’t. There are a lot of books out there right now that are just atheistic; there is whole society that is supposed to be atheistic, you know the communist, and all that kind of thing. But, lo and behold, there aren’t that many out there, are there? They don’t believe in a god of some kind. Now in biblical times there were no atheists. Everybody believed in something. The idea was the real God over against all the other gods. The same is true here. We must avoid syncretism, that is, we just all lump it together. I know that is not very politically correct, but we can believe what we believe without being nasty to anyone. We can be kind, we can persuade, that’s what it is about. I admit, the church, or the people who were purported to be Christians in history, have done a horrible job of that. We need to repent of it. Sometimes it has been supposedly forced conversions and people who have done who knows what. We need to put all that aside and we simply persuade.

When I first became a Christian that was what I wanted to do most of all. You know, it wasn’t as though, I’ve got God now and I am better than you. It was, I’ve got God now and I want you to have him too because he is pretty big and you can have him too. It is good stuff. That is what we need to be about. People need Jesus. People need God, the real God. It is not that we hate anyone else. It is that we have something that you know doesn’t really belong to us, and God has said, “Go tell.” “You shall have no other gods before me.” When we confess “I believe in God”, we are not only proclaiming the God in whom we believe into, we are proclaiming decisively that there are many other gods that we reject and we do not and cannot believe into. There is a sense in which we actually do take sides. And that is O.K.

What is God like? We will talk a little bit about that and next week we will talk about “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” What is this Father thing, anyway? Well, just come back next week and we will talk about it. What is this Almighty thing? What is it about God? Well, maybe that is a teaser, but come back and we will talk about it.

But the first thing we need to acknowledge, the first thing the Bible talks about that is very different from any other faith in the entire world, is God is absolutely personal. I may have told you about my last church. When I first arrived in Texas, my first year there, the first wedding I got was a couple who were, they were actually dwarves. He was about this tall, I think, and she was just a little taller. I asked them, I always do marriage counseling, and I said, “How did you meet?” “We met online.” Now this is 1999. I remember going, “Oh, that’s weird.” And ten years later, more people, they say, are meeting online than any other way. It is a big different world out there. And it is O.K. And you know what? I got an email from her just a little while ago. Ten year anniversary; two children; happy as they can be and doing well. They thought of me and said, “Thank you.” Wow! That’s cool.

Why do people… they always pair off, they are always looking for relationships. We all want, deep in our hearts, intimacy. It is because we are made in the image of God. It is because God is that way. It is because God is that way. God is personal. That may seems too obvious to us but it is so different. Again, it is instructive to do comparative religion. You know what I believe? I believe that it is really good to explain differences between all of us in any issue. If you are talking with someone and you have a difference with them, it is really good to take a piece of paper and say you believe this and I believe that. To clarify differences is a good thing. Sometimes it gets rid of misconceptions. At least we know where we stand. You can do it in a nice way. You know, its funny how we sort of don’t like to do that. We start clarifying differences and people start getting out the knives or something. I got a letter from someone a while back and I had said something in a sermon about clarifying a difference between Christianity and Islam and it was almost as though I had declared war. No, we have to know these things. The fact that God is personal is so different from say the Eastern religions who believe that God is totally impersonal. You are like a drop of water in a bucket— there is no personality. Even Islam, you know, Allah is very interesting. There is a connection between the biblical word Elohim and Allah, and there is a connection there. But we go further and acknowledge that God actually has a proper name: Yahweh. I AM WHO I AM. That is what it means in this culture. Moses said. “Who shall I say sent me?” And God said, “I AM”, Yahweh. That is my name. It will be my name forever and ever and ever”. (Exodus 3:14) To have a God to lower himself, if you will, to give us his proper name; amazing, because God is personal. The whole story of the Bible is about how God has a relationship with people. It is so different and we should be proud of that difference, not in a prideful way. But that is different. God is personal. God has a name. And God has entered history and loves through the person of Himself and the person of his Son and the power of his Spirit, and we will talk about it as we go along. God is personal.

And last but not least, we say that God is three in one. (Matthew 28:19) You know what? If I were an advertiser, and I was charged with creating a new product line, a new god, I would not start with the Trinity. The Trinity is hard. How is it that we have one being and that being is three persons? Yet that is part of the Apostles’ Creed; it is a part of Christianity; it is the bone of contention between ourselves and Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses and all kinds of different groups. It is what we believe. Now, the first thing we really need to say is that there is a lot of things about God that we do not understand everything about: his infinity, his omniscience, his providential control of free actions, all those big questions out there. But at the same time, you know, we have entered relationships with people all the time without knowing everything about them. I mean, how many of you who are married knew everything about you spouse before you got married? After years later, do you still know everything about them? Men, do you know everything about your wives? Have you understood that manual for that yet? I’m sorry. I’m getting personal here. There are a lot of complex things in just individuals, right? God is way too big and complex to understand. So we affirm a truth we don’t totally understand and yet it has formed the foundation for what we believe.

And I will leave you with this. I will leave you with this. That God in his being is also relational. God didn’t really need us. He had fellowship within his self, through Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is a person, is personal. I am not saying it is the total foundation of who God is. It is one of the major aspects of God, but God is personal and he didn’t need us. Yet, the marvelous thing is, he has made all of us, and one of the biggest reasons he made you and me and all of us is to have relationship with us. God is such a Big God and he can have a personal relationship with each person here and billions of others; and it still can be personal. I don’t know about you but I lose track after about ten. We all do. It is hard, but God can do it; and he loves you, and wants to know you, more and more and more. When I first became a Christian I said I wanted to share Christ, but I wanted people to know Christ. As a pastor, what I wanted most of all for people in the church is not only to know Christ but to know him better. I wanted to know him better. That is the motivation for my ministry. It is one of my biggest things, is I want you and me, all of us, because we are all growing, to know God better. And we do that by knowing about him, but most of all knowing him. And God at heart, and Trinity, is relational. There is love between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit but there is love for you. Think about that during the week. Now we are going to talk about some big theology things next week but we will make it interesting, I hope. A little bit more about who God is. But let’s start with the idea, God is a person and loves you and wants to know you more. He wants you to know him.

Let’s pray together.

Lord God, thank you for who you are; that you are bigger than we can understand and that is good because you wouldn’t be God if we could understand you. And yet at the same time we can know you, we can know you. You have come to our level that we may know you. Help us to understand a little more about who you are and the commitment you ask from us and through faith, and the growing in our relationship with you. Now be with us Lord as we partake of the communion. May we experience your presence in a way that is very powerful. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.

Once again, let’s start out with a word of prayer and ask God to bless our time.

Lord, we do come before you and we ask that you will bless our time around your word. Encourage us, just strengthen us, challenge us, Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit. We ask that because you are Lord over all.

Well I want to start with a question this morning. The question is: What is a reasonable response when you receive a gift? What is a reasonable response? Maybe it is a “Thank you.” Right? Maybe it is a handshake, maybe it is a pat on the back, what is it? Well that is what I want us to be thinking about today as we begin to look at our text from Romans 12. That is what Paul is trying to answer for the Romans—what is a reasonable response? That is what we want to unpack today, but before we do that, obviously, we want to continue what we have been doing. So we want to look at our Scripture today. It is the second week of memorizing our Scripture, so you know that there are three different versions on the back of your bulletin. You are welcome to use one that you like, cut that up to help you remember it, take it with you; but today we look at Romans 12 and this is again the NIV version. Alright, here we go.

Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Romans 12:1

Alright, very good. O.K. That’s this week’s. How did we do on last week’s?

2 Corinthians 5:17
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
2 Corinthians 5:17

All right!! All right!! Nicely done, Rhonda. Nicely done.

O.K. If you are new and you are going, “What the heck are we talking about?”, we started this summer when I have been speaking, memorizing some Scripture. So, we started last week with 2 Corinthians 5:17 and we started memorizing that; and, today, we are moving on to Romans 12:1. Part of memorizing this Scripture is to continue to review what you have already memorized. So that is part of what we want to be about as we go forward, is now you have a couple weeks off because I won’t speaking for a couple weeks. So you have two verses to memorize and continue to review until we meet again, up here. So Romans 12:1. Do you want to say it again?

Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Romans 12:1

Alright! Very nice. Well, what we have here is right at the beginning obviously because it is verse 1 of Chapter 12 of Romans and at this point in Romans, Paul is making a major transition. He is moving from what the gospel is about, what Jesus is about and what he did, he is moving it now to what do we do, how do we live out this discipleship that God is calling us to in every day life in the context of Christian community? Paul is laying out for us kind of an overview in this verse. So if you want to take notes, if you turn it over, I can give you three little points that you can follow along in your sermon. If you want to write these down, great; if you don’t, you won’t hurt my feelings.

But really what Paul is talking about here in this verse, he is talking and he is beginning with attitude. So the first point would be attitude. Out of that attitude we find our life of action, and that is point two. And that results in adoration, which is point three. I know I don’t usually use alliterations, but it seemed to work in this case. So, here we go.

Paul has just spent the previous eleven chapters of Romans unfolding God’s mercy on all of creation. He has talked about how all of us are guilty before God. He talked about how the Gentiles, which are all of us, are guilty before God. The Jews are guilty. All of creation is guilty, and he brings that to a climax in Romans 3:23, another great verse to memorize, very simple, very short. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So Paul, in that, is making a case that God’s mercy is found only when we put our faith in Christ and Christ alone. When we believe by faith that Jesus was enough, he makes us righteous and God’s mercy gets poured out on us. God’s mercy gets poured out on us and we are saved. We should have received the wages for the result of our sin, which is Romans 6:23, which is another great verse to memorize, which is, “..the wages of sin are death.” That is what we should have received from God. We should have received that separation from God but because of God’s great mercy, because of who he is, we are saved from what we deserve when we put our faith in Christ.

Now my question to all of us is, how does it work? How does that work? Does that change your perspective as you go through life? What is your attitude as a result of God’s mercy that has been shown to you? I think all too often we tend to blow by this idea of God’s mercy to get to the gift, to get to the 2 Corinthians:5-17, to get to salvation, to do life in Christ. That’s a good thing; we want to get there, for sure. It is a good thing; but I think it is also important for us to internalize, to process this idea of God’s mercy and how we receive God’s mercy. What I am thinking about here is not so much how bad our sin is, we like to go there. Really what I am talking about, really, is how good God is. This new gift of life is a result of God’s mercy— God’s mercy being poured out on you, God’s mercy being poured on me. We are the objects of his mercy. We are the recipients of it and that is just part of the picture because God’s mercy also really reveals who God is; or probably a better way to think about it is what is God’s attitude towards you and me? Think about when someone throws himself, or herself, on the mercy of the court, what are they doing? They are asking for unmerited favor, aren’t they? They are asking for some kind of leniency. When you receive mercy, you are experiencing God’s attitude towards you, his generosity, his compassion, his grace that has been poured out on you. So back to our question: What is your attitude towards the mercies that you have received from God? What is it? What is your attitude towards those mercies, which is really the gospel? Whatever your attitude is, that becomes the foundation, or if you will, a springboard, for how you live your life. So, if we are unmindful of God’s mercies, we just haven’t thought about it, we haven’t put that piece together in our heads, or, if we are unappreciative of it, we don’t realize what it is we are asking for, then our conduct will reflect our understanding of the mercy we have received. If it is not a big deal then our conduct will be reflected in that also. And the way that works itself out in our world today, honestly I think in the sense of entitlement: I do this. I earned this. I am supposed to get this. Or, it is the other side which is self-centeredness: I am the center of my universe. Everything that happens in my life has to revolve around me. That is how, I think, when we don’t understand God’s mercy that is kind of how it works itself out in our lives. The other side of that coin, then, is if we do understand that attitude for the mercies we receive, it changes our attitude. When we understand that we have received an undeserved gift, our conduct will reflect that attitude. It is out of that attitude towards God’s mercy that Paul says “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”

Pastor Erwin McManus says “the apex of generosity is sacrifice.” When we understand the mercies we have received and it comes to its point with climax, it results in generosity and that apex of generosity gets itself worked out in sacrifice. And that is a statement of action. Now think about that. God’s attitude towards us is one of generosity. So what did he do? He sent his Son to be sacrificed. When we understand our lives and the mercies that we have received, our attitude is one of generosity. Exactly. Exactly.

And Paul here purposely uses the word bodies, here, as a living sacrifice. He purposely uses that because he is trying to counteract a thought that was going on at that time from the plutonic kind of philosophers of his time that said, basically, the body is an embarrassment that we must live in. So Paul is speaking to them when he says this. Those who had that philosophy actually had a saying, they said, “The body is a tomb. The body is a tomb.” What they are referring to is simply our spirit is encased and imprisoned in this body and the goal is to escape the body. That attitude, I think, continues to filter down through history and finds itself, I think, in lots of ways in our world today. But one of the ways that it shows up is when we typically sometimes use words, even the church, like “give your heart to Jesus,” that can kind of find its roots back there in this idea. So Paul is clear that we need to present our bodies, our bodies as an act of worship.

Theologian John Stott puts it great. He says “No worship is pleasing to God which is purely inward, abstract or mystical.” In other words it has to be something physical about it. It must express itself in concrete acts of service performed by our bodies. Paul understood the dilemma we are in within our bodies. He understood that our bodies are simply an expression, and the way our bodies act, are simply an expression of what is going on in our mind, whether that be good or whether that be evil. I think Romans 1 lays that out for us. So when Paul is using the word body in this text what he is really referring to is he is referring to the wholeness of who we are, of our mind, our bodies and our spirits. Having said that, Paul also understands that human sinfulness expresses itself through its body, through our bodies. We have talked about that here before and listen to the words that Paul quotes from the psalmist from Romans 3. He says,
“Their throats are opened
graves;
they use their tongues to
deceive.”
“The venom of vipers is under
their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of
cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed
blood;
ruin and misery mark their
paths,
and the way of peace they have
not known.”
“There is no fear of God
before their eyes.”
So Paul understands the struggle that we are in within our bodies, how we use it to express our sinfulness, but just a couple chapters after that Paul also said that we are to present our bodies as instruments of righteousness. We are supposed to bring righteousness through our bodies. That is a huge statement. I think the sad reality for many of us is we have walked away from the practicality of that teaching. We forget that the language we use reflects our hearts. It is a simple thing to use plain language in our lives. It is a simple decision not to swear and yet I think for many of us that is an area of our lives where we kind of just go with the flow and just get in line with the rest of the world and use the language that the world uses. We throw in a swear word or cuss word simply almost as a verbal exclamation point, a way to emphasize what we are trying to say by throwing in an inappropriate word. My question is how does that reflect Christ? What does it say about our hearts? What does it say about the mercies that we have received?

I came across a quote this week from the church father, Chrysostom, and I think he is speaking on this verse and he says, “How is the body to become a sacrifice? Let the eye look on no evil thing, and it has already become a sacrifice. Let the tongue say nothing filthy, and it has become an offering. Let your hand do nothing evil, and it has become a full burnt offering. But even this is not enough for we must also have good works. The hand must do alms, the mouth must bless those who curse it, and the ears must find time to listen to the reading of the Scriptures.” See, Paul, I think, is stating that physically serving is an expectable sacrifice, that is a way to honor God, that is a way to sacrifice yourself, to demonstrate the mercies that you have received from God. When we think about serving, we have talked a lot about serving here at Faith in this last year of so, haven’t we, and we will continue to do so. But we are going to continue to talk about it, not just because it is a way to get us out beyond the walls and into our community, but hopefully if you begin to put this together you will also see as we go out and we serve the community, it is a way to offer ourselves to God as a sacrifice, using our bodies for good, for instruments of righteousness. That is why I talked about the announcements we have, because it is a way for us to do something righteous for God.

As we think about serving, I think it is important for us to understand that for Faith to be impactable, to make an impact in our community, it is not going to be because of our service. It’s not. It’s not going to be because of what we do, there are lots of organizations, some governmental, some social, some religious, they are all serving. Everyone is on the serving band wagon now. We are not serving just because we are joining the crowd. We have to get beyond that mindset. We are serving and we will make an impact in our community because of the condition of our hearts, i.e. our attitude; i.e. our gratitude, our graciousness when we serve. That attitude is what will be seen by those that we serve alongside of, whether they be of a religious bent, or not. That is why we serve. We are taking the attitude that God has created in us and we are sharing it with the world. As people see the transformation that is taking place in our lives, that heart of gratitude, they will be drawn to the source of that transformation, namely Jesus, and the mercies of God, come through. So transformation begins with sacrificing ourselves to Christ. If you will, another phrase is “we are to die to ourselves,” we are to die to ourselves, sacrifice to Christ.

C. S. Lewis puts it this way. He says “Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.” I love that. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.

Alright, so where are we in this is process? Paul has exhorted us to action, hasn’t he? He has exhorted us to sacrifice all that we are, including, our physical bodies, because of the gratitude that we have because of the mercies we have received from God. Then he concludes simply by saying, “This is worship. This is worship, or adoration, when you do these things you are worshipping God,” Paul is saying. He says that that “worship is to be spiritual.” When he says the word spiritual he is not talking about a style of worship or a way of worship. What he is saying here, really, the word spiritual is to be translated as reasonable or rational. So what Paul is saying here is our worship is only reasonable, it is only rational, it is the only reasonable and rational response to the mercies we have received from God. That is the only thing we should be doing. That is what he is saying about spiritual worship. Because the only reasonable response is worship, it is praise to God.

So the stoic philosopher, Epictetus, put it this way: “If I were a nightingale I would do what is proper to a nightingale. If I were a swan, what is proper to a swan, in fact, I am a rational being, so I must praise God.” Offering our bodies, our minds, and our spiritis to Paul’s way of thinking is the only reasonable response to what we have received from God. So it brings us all the way back to where we started. What is a reasonable response to the gift you have received from God? What is your reasonable response, for the mercies that you have, that you have received?

Lord, thank you for this chance to gather around your word and ask you to bless us, use us in a mighty way that we might be your witnesses in this world. We ask that because of Jesus. Amen.